1. On Suttree: Prologue
"No soul shall walk save you."
The novel begins with a warm greeting. From there, we learn the environment where we will spend the following 471 pages.
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree (Vintage International) (pp. 2-3). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
We are in a city. It is early morning in the outer dark. Watertrucks have come to wash the muck away, and that muck includes people. Cats rule the city this time of night. They walk “highshouldered,” meaning they are not concerned by the humans in this darkened world. Finally, the narrator, who has claimed to be our friend, abandons us in the final sentence and also offers a benediction that we are the only one that matters in this story.
Next, the narrator takes us on a tour of this darkened city just before dawn. We walk by a cemetery where “names grow dim with years.” In the distance, we see trolley tracks that lead into pure darkness. We feel the heat coming off the steel through our shoes as it “leaks back the day’s heat.” Weeds and vines threaten civilization here with a more powerful, natural order of operations. The jungle is constantly seeping back into the city.
We fast-forward through the respectable parts of the city, all suffering from “the slow cataclysm of neglect.” The narrator calls this an “Encampment of the damned,” a place where “perhaps...dripping lepers prowl unbelled.” This scene holds danger and mystique but not mystery. A mystery is a difficult or impossible situation to understand or explain. In contrast, mystique is a fascinating aura of mystery, awe, and power that surrounds something or someone. So far, this mystique is being applied to a dark city, now cast in the light of a brass moon. This brass-colored moonlight is the most vital light offered thus far in the prologue, the kind of light where we can begin to examine this environment on a deeper level. We are presented with a city full of buildings “stamped against the night,” described as “like a rampart to a farther world forsaken, old purposes forgot.” We are caught between worlds here, which will prepare us to meet the novel’s protagonist, who is also caught between worlds. However, we are not yet done with the tour. We need to know more about this dark city, wherever it is.
This city has fallen into apathy and disrepair—Tin panes in place of broken glass window frames. A streetlight knocked out with a rock, burning insects to death who cannot resist flying through the hole in the glass to explode in death sparks, falling to the ground while countless others work to get through that same hole and meet the same fate.
Now, we come to a creek mouth, and the nasty stuff from the city will be cataloged. It is a sewer pipe before there were such things in this city. It is described as a “dread waste,” full of “cratewood and condoms and fruitrinds. Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats...” Blown lightbulbs bobbing next to “the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish or stale gray.” This river does not flow freely. The narrator describes it as “a sluggard ooze toward southern seas...”
We see the houseboats and homes of the people living on this nasty river filled with shit and baby corpses. But we do not yet meet them. It’s too early here. The mud is described as “neap,” a tide just after the first or third quarters of the moon when there is the most negligible difference between high and low water. However, before we progress to the entry point of our story with the protagonist, the narrator gives us a small amount of dark history mixed with a less-than-optimistic view of the people we are dealing with here.
Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.
McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree (Vintage International) (p. 4). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Here, we meet the ancestors of these people we are about to meet. Teutons are Germans. Rapacity is excessive greed. The greedy Germans who settled this area in waves were violent and insane together; their brains were stoked, which is done to a fire to keep it burning, stoked by “spoorless analogues of all that was.” Spoors are reproduction units designed by nature to survive in unfavorable biological conditions. Analogues are comparing one thing to another. In this usage, these German settlers in this area had minds collectively driven insane by comparison to all of human history, as it is seen through the myopic lens of the Old Testament, referred to as “their abrogate semitic chapbook.” Abrogate is a compelling term because it formally means evading or repealing. What does the Old Testament repeal? It repeals the Law of Nature and replaces it with the manufactured “Law of God.” This dichotomy between what is natural and what is dreamed up in the parable drove these German Hunters and Trappers insane when they faced the reality of the darkness in this place. Moreover, they were left “mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.” There was no light of salvation in the founding of this place.
The narrator tells us, “We are come to a world within the world.” This scene presents us with a moral estuary, where good mixes with evil to produce a living community on a spectrum of unholiness. We are about to find our seat assignments, and they are not in the comfortable carriages of passing luxury trains, where righteous people look down on those who live where we stand now with the narrator. We are not those righteous people. We are to witness a different story than those people see when they look out into the world from their cushioned points of view.
This setting is still a quiet time of the early morning. “Like a camp before battle,” the narrator tells us. Moreover, now, we are presented with terror. This city is “beset by a thing unknown.” This unknown thing is inside these supposedly protected city walls. We do not know his face or what he does, and the narrator makes a point to tell us, “Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he’s invited in.” The narrator gives away much of the story here, stating that this is not a novel directly dealing with death, meaning we must deal with life amid death. Furthermore, we will not discuss death directly here going forward. So the narrator claims. We shall see.
The narrator closes the prologue by baptizing us in a light Summer morning rain. The river is quiet. We are at a bridge in the river, and our curiosity has mellowed into being wholly present in this moment. The cat becomes a shadow creature, fading into the alleyways and darkened nooks of this city about to come to life. Lightning threatens far off down the river. A storm is coming, but it is still far away. We return to an unmarked, made-by-nature graveyard where “The audience sits webbed in dust.” We are presented with an image of a skull where a spider sleeps in “the gutted sockets of the interlocutor’s skull.” An interlocutor is a person who takes part in a dialogue or conversation. But how can the dead talk? Can they listen?
We are about to be released into the story, but not before we are gently placed on the river boards where “Four-footed shapes go to and fro...” We are given a final warning in this prologue. As scary as these creatures who run in the shadows might seem, “Ruder forms survive.”
Author’s note about this series…
I have no clue where this is going. All I know is that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this novel since I finished it two weeks ago. I listened to it on Audible, reread chapters on Kindle, highlighting hundreds of passages, and took hundreds of notes. There is much to explore. Consider this a book club without a timeline. Periodically, I will publish analyses and appreciations chapter by chapter without a deadline. Eventually, what I have here may become a book. And you can be a part of that by tuning in and subscribing. Please share this Substack with any lover of fiction.
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