Pragmatic Overtones in Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper

 In Walter Sullivan’s 1965 review of Cormac McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper, Sullivan claims McCarthy’s novel takes shape in “the middle of the agrarian influence” (721). This quote sends up a flare within the McCarthy community of scholars, who continue to debate Sullivan’s claims. Sullivan also acknowledges that McCarthy can be read as an author who has “had enough sense to see in the land a source of human salvation. [McCarthy] is a kind of anachronism who celebrates the traditional values in the traditional way” (721). However, many recent scholars disagree with Sullivan’s claims about the “land as a source of human salvation.” In her book Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, Dianne Luce states that, “[i]t is a mistake either to confuse East Tennessee with the plantation South or to label McCarthy a latter-day Agrarian” (271). In making this comment, she also argues that The Orchard Keeper can be read “in the context of the classic Southern Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition” (271). Certainly, McCarthy’s characters fit into the romantic ideology of the Southern Agrarian tradition, although that is their fault. McCarthy does not sympathize with Southern Agrarian traditions in this novel. Instead he embraces the forces against humankind, such as nature and industry; McCarthy creates a practical environment that highlights the inevitable demise of humankind in the presence of progress whether natural or industrial, while also subverting the romantic ideology of the Southern Agrarian tradition throughout The Orchard Keeper.

First, to investigate the way the The Orchard Keeper refutes the romantic ideology of the Southern Agrarians, the introductory statement of principles in I’ll Take My Stand reveals a disconnected “American or [the] prevailing way” of life (Rubin xix). The prevailing stand of the Southern Agrarians is to fight against the North’s progress and industry’s encroachment within all regions of the South. In his stand John Crowe Ransom asserts, “[i]t is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living” (1). Yes, there is a valid argument that McCarthy’s characters Author Ownby, Marion Sylder, and John Wesley Rattner fit the certain model that Ransom calls “the unreconstructed Southerner,” and it is easy to fall for the idea that these basic assumptions constitute McCarthy’s intentions of the novel, but that would be a complete misreading. The certain way of living that each of these characters possesses allows the reader to sympathize with their eventual demise, but McCarthy is certainly not one of those sympathizers. McCarthy takes a completely different position: not only these characters but also the entire region must face the industrial encroachment.

Appalachia was one of the first areas of the South to undergo expansion. New Deal programs in the area were tested and expanded throughout the region as early as 1929. Dewey W. Grantham points out that Donald Davidson, a Southern Agrarian, considered the Tennessee Valley Authority to be “outsiders” and Davidson also “considered it an attempt by the industrial North to remake the South in its own image” (Grantham 155). The mountain culture in the Tennessee Valley was one of the first Southern regions during the Great Depression to experience New Deal plans. Grantham also notes that “the Tennessee Valley experiment was an inspiration to Roosevelt and other New Dealers” (155). However, government-backed programs like the TVA moved into the area, bringing with them new people and more laws and regulations that the area was not used to. Critic John Cant argues that, “McCarthy’s first novel is a product of the 1960s. The growth of affluence and rapid technological change that followed the end of the Second World War produced cultural, social and political change in all the industrialized societies of the west” (59). It is fitting then, that McCarthy sets this novel in Appalachia in the 1930s and 1940s, for this area of the country had experienced a considerable amount of industrial growth before the Second World War. The Orchard Keeper provides examples for other regions throughout the United States to take heed. Cultures are better preserved when embracing a natural progression as they are less likely to vanish, which is a theme this book explores.

Marion Sylder is the only character in this novel that represents a pragmatic approach to the changing times, but he still has an internal relationship to romantic agrarian notions. When John Wesley speaks with Marion at the jail after he has been arrested, Sylder gives the most practical philosophy of the entire novel. John Wesley wants to seek revenge on Gifford for roughing up Sylder at the scene. Sylder explains the logic of Gifford’s position and then explains his own business in a very progressive way:

It’s a job, It’s what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn’t jest break the law, I made a livin at it. He leaned forward and looked the boy in the face. More money in three hours than a workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it’s harder work? No, because a man who makes a living doin somethin that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford’s been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn’t for Gifford, the law, I wouldn’t of had the job I had blockadin as if it wadn’t for me blockadin, Gifford wouldn’t of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who? (213-214)

The practical philosophy of Sylder illuminates McCarthy’s approach to the reality of the community’s current situation. More industry brings more regulation. Often progress comes with a price. However, in McCarthy-like fashion, he adds a twist that the reader is momentarily confused by. Sylder imagines calling back John Wesley and saying, “That’s not true what I said. It was a damned lie ever word. He’s a rogue and a outlaw hisself and your’re welcome to shoot him, burn him down in his bed, and damn thing, because he’s a traitor to boot and maybe a man steals from greed or murders in anger but he sells his own neighbors out for money and it’s few lie that deep in the pit, that far beyond the pale” (214-215). What McCarthy does is show the romantic passion that exists within the people of the region and the resistance that burns inherently, but not practically. The characters McCarthy creates experience the “old fierce pull of blood” that runs thicker than water. But blood seeps into the earth just as water does when its spread thin enough.

The power of language is not the only force McCarthy uses in the novel. He also creates an ominous environment that is real but at the same time mysterious. The Orchard Keeper creates a menacing environment by personifying both nature and industry throughout the novel. Humankind’s struggle with Industrial progress is the main complication of the novel. Luce states that the “characters both resist and benefit from modern technology: Marion Sylder and John Wesley Rattner travel with ease between the traditional community of Red Branch and the city, and Arthur Ownby, the oldest of the three, lives contentedly in Red Branch but feels the encroachment of modern life the most” (1). Luce is mistaken because she overlooks Ownby’s contentment. Ownby’s struggles are related to his unwillingness to change with a progressive society. One example is the presence of the tank. McCarthy personifies the tank, stating that it is an “Ikon,” a powerful figure that humankind cannot overcome (93). He describes the tank with features of some sinister evil that mankind cannot trust.  Moreover, McCarthy’s use of personification gives this object a larger than life image that dwarfs Uncle Ather in its presence. The narrator implies further, “[t]he great dome stood complacent, huge, seeming older than the very dirt, the rocks, as if it had spawned them of itself and stood surveying the work, clean and coldly gleaming and capable of infinite contempt” (93). With this description, McCarthy gives the reader a sense that the tank has been a part of the land as if it had grown up out of the dirt in which it sits. The tank looms large, daunting and “capable of infinite contempt” in front of the old man. Ownby’s mind spins as he licks the cold metal of the chain link fence surrounding the tank. The personification of the tank creates a force against humankind and encroachment of industrialization as a natural progression. The tank scene is often misinterpreted. It leads readers to assume that McCarthy is sympathizing with humankind. However, McCarthy is highlighting the inevitable demise of Ownby’s way of life. Ownby’s inability to adjust within the crutches of modernization supports the romantic struggles the Southern Agrarians called for. McCarthy subverts those romantic struggles with an untheoretic approach.   

The struggle of Uncle Ather is his mental investment to the land as belonging to humankind, not whether he is a product of the land himself. Through his stoic silence when speaking with the welfare agent, he considered himself as “Brushy bound” (219).  Furthermore, with the welfare agent Ather reveals himself as an “unreconstructed Southerner.” Ransom states that a particular type of character like Uncle Ather is in a certain way an “ikon” to the community. Ransom writes, “[the unreconstructed Southerner] is like some quaint local character of eccentric but fixed principles that is thoroughly and almost pridefully accepted by the village as a rare exhibit in the antique kind” (Ransom 1). Indeed Ather has the unspoken respect from the community of Red Branch. Outside of the law Ather is a legend. John Wesley tells the others about some the people who live throughout the region. He says, “Then they’s  Uncle Ather live up here—nodding ahead of them—he’s purty good old feller. . . He must be ninety or better. He’s older’n Grandaddy Pulliam and Grandaddy Pulliam’s daddy fought in the Civil War” (144-145). Combining both historical and mythological elements to Ather’s story, John Wesley embraces Ather as a revered legend of the area who has suffered for many years in the presence of both nature and industry.

Yet, industry is not the only encroaching force working in McCarthy’s novel that prevails over humankinds’ struggle. Nature also takes its position as an irresistible force throughout the novel. In Wesley K. Berry’s essay, “The Lay of the Land in Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachia” Berry’s claim focuses on the ecological concerns McCarthy may have had while writing this novel. Berry focuses on the critique of industry’s encroachment to the Tennessee Valley region. Berry calls The Orchard Keeper an “ecological critique.” However, Berry points out that “McCarthy’s ‘critique’ is not altogether specific; nowhere in the fiction are mentioned the Tennessee Valley Authority, coal companies, pulpwood pants, or other prominent industries that take advantage of Appalachia’s subterranean and surface resources” (50). What McCarthy does show is the erosion and decay of the land and contabescence of the mountain regions. Berry claims that McCarthy does leave the reader with a sense of hope that humanity can out grow nature. He writes that “elements of hope exist in the fiction that readers may miss—a hope centered not on humanity but on the rebounding health of the damaged nonhuman world” (57). This is exactly what McCarthy was doing with nature and the Green Fly Inn’s collapse.

The Inn’s collapse represents the nonhuman world rebounding, regenerating, and taking back its rightful place as some form of natural progression. McCarthy stages the scene with the Green Fly Inn in various spots throughout the novel. The Green Fly Inn acts as a coffin harboring the inevitable decay of humanity. It is not a typical country roadhouse, but a tomb-like setting for an unknown world preparing humankind’s past for ruin. About the burning down of the Inn, McCarthy writes, “it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet (48) this hoard of glass and mixture of metal is introduced to the reader earlier on when Cabe, the bar’s proprietor, sweeps an evening’s refuse out the back door and into the pit (13). The pit was another resting place for the men who didn’t quite make it in the back door when the balcony collapsed under the shear weight of the men, weather, and termites (13-14). The way McCarthy sets up the scene by using language such as ruin and refuse creates a foreshadowing effect for the reader. The pit becomes the resting place for humankind’s artifacts. He writes, “the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon” (48) that the human refuse becomes; a mere landmark, but not the temple that humankind believes it would become. It will become another element that fuses itself within nature, that may mysteriously reveal itself to some unknown or “strange race” one day.  

McCarthy does not stop at the archeological references; his use a corrosive imagery throughout the novel signifies a natural process of oxidizing and decomposing. When John Wesley returns to Red Branch and the cemetery to view his mother’s headstone in the final section, McCarthy uses vocabulary draw attention to humanity’s submission to the natural world. He emphasizes that, “their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone . . . the stone arrogating to itself in these three short years already a gray and timeless aspect, glazed with lichens and nets of small brown runners, the ring of rusted wire leaning awry against the stained and crumpled rags of foliage” (244 – 245). The power of McCarthy’s use of natural imagery dwarfs humankind’s perspective within a rotating world. The rusting wire in the cemetery wrapped within foliage is a symbolic amalgamate that completes the frame of the novel.

The novel is framed with the struggles of progress. Nature is difficult enough to cut through, “Damned old elum’s bad enough on a saw,” yet, industry, boundaries, and modernization are impossible to sever; “We cain’t cut no more on it” (3). Human salvation is not present in this landscape created by McCarthy. The orchards, the roads, and even the wildlife resist humanity. The wilderness resists through regeneration and extinction. John Wesley is hardly able to trap a mink in an area once flourishing with wildlife and wilderness. This novel is about the damage humankind has done to nature as much as it is about industrial encroachment. The Orchard Keeper could even be read in the context of naturalism. Characters, as much as they want things to be different, have no control on the outcome of their environment. They lack free will. Characters act almost instinctively, reacting to matters irrationally. So with naturalism in mind the characters in this novel promote more than they preserve their existence.

The final paragraph of the novel resonates with practical humankind embracing a futuristic present. McCarthy finishes with, “[t]hey are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legends, dust” (246). McCarthy writes in a way that appears futuristic or transcends human existence. The final paragraph can be read as a lamenting of old traditions as Uncle Ather has finally been tamed, Sylder contained, and John Wesley liberated. However, McCarthy presents language in way that embraces some post apocalyptical existence of a strange race. “No avatar, no scion, no vestige,” no god, no relation, and no presence remain of humankind’s existence. In referencing an earlier analogy in the novel, he emphasizes a past existence that once dwelled in the region before the central characters in the novel. He states, “a darkskinned people, not Mellungeons and not exactly anything else . . . themselves not unlike the victims of some terrible disaster, and stared out across the blighted land with expressions of neither hope nor wonder nor despair” (12). Humanity throughout this novel is not represented in a positive light but as a dreary existence that refutes any relationship to Southern Agrarian ideas.  The orchard and the surrounding area is certainly not the romantic vision the Agrarians had in mind. It is more like a scorched, dead, and galled vision. Full of plague and darkness among the human race, who are in its final frist of existence, with no sense of human salvation present in the landscape.

            With this novel, McCarthy is in no way an anachronistic sympathizer who is celebrating the old way or a passing way of life that Sullivan originally thought. Through McCarthy’s use of imagery and personification of industry’s inevitable encroachment, he sheds any sympathies that follow in Southern Agrarian traditions. Yes, the main characters can be read as anachronistic but not in a positive way that embraces romantic ideas. The characters are resistant to change and fail in the presence of nature and industry, both physically and mentally. The Orchard Keeper is not a document that should be praised as capturing a passing of tradition or as a glorifying critique of the encroaching society. What McCarthy unpacks for the reader is a natural progression of humankind and of technological advancement. Humankind is a product of both nature and industry; industry is a product of humanity, but the resources originate in the land, and humankind’s synthetic creations are products of humanity’s lack of control over nature.

 Works Cited

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2002. 285-312. Print. 

Cant, John. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York:

Routledge, 2008. Print.

Grantham, Dewey W. The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds. Fayetteville: University

of Arkansas, 2001. Print.

Luce, Dianne C. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Columbia: U of

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McCarthy, Cormac. The Orchard Keeper. New York: Vintage International, 1965. Print.

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Agrarian Tradition; By Twelve Southerners. comp. Louis D. Rubin. 1930. New York:

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Rubin, Louis D., comp. “Introduction.” I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian

Tradition; By Twelve Southerners. 1930. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. xi-xxxv. Print.

Sullivan, Walter. “Worlds Past and Future; A Christian and Several from the South.” The

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