by

Though Suttree, The Crossing and Blood Meridian may be the novels that best exemplify the skill of Cormac McCarthy’s skill, but Child of God is a smaller sample that is just as engaging in parts. In it McCarthy tells the tale of a Lester Ballard, a young man who is raised without parents and finds himself isolated from society, which leads to a downward spiral of violence. In the recent wake or the Elliot Rodger killings, the work especially relevant as it speaks to the ways in which social interactions can encourage us to behave in a manner that is contrariwise to our natural inclinations and in turn alienates people and creates combative and confrontational situations. The work is relatively short, but the words are potent and it manages to fluidly incorporate a number of different themes that lend themselves to Hobbesian and ecocritical readings while creating an antiquated rural community that is both foreign and familiar whilst convincingly authentic and relatable, even for somebody who is unfamiliar with an almost antediluvian rural life of Sevier County, Tennessee, where the novel is based. What is perhaps most chilling about the novel is the way in which it calls to mind the idealistic template laid out by Henry David Thoreau in his seminal work Walden, and situates in a contemporary American setting, playing it against realities that Thoreau was likely unfamiliar with.

Throughout the novel, McCarthy seems to set social constructs against natural ones, with nature frequently prevailing and managing to find a synthesis with humanity, even in the crudest situations. In one scene, McCarthy describes Ballard relieving himself over the remains of an outhouse. From out of the dung pile, “weeds sprouted in outsized mutations” and even as Ballard pulls up his overalls, “green flies clambered over his dark lumpy stool” (13). In this passage, the plants and the flies manage to work in concert with the feces, using it as a source of nutrients and demonstrating how nature can make use of almost anything, even human waste: a paradigm of recycling. Humanity, though, is far more antagonistic with nature. Ballard comes across a cat later in the novel: “The cat looked at him without interest. It seemed to think him not too bright. Ballard spat on it and it immediately wiped the spittle from its head with a heavy forepaw and set about washing the spot” (26). Here, Ballard projects his own interpretation onto nature, as the narrative voice states that that cat seemed to think Ballard was not bright. Just as ‘Occidentals’ project an interpretation onto the actions of ‘Orientals’ in Edward Said’s Orientalism, Ballard projects an interpretation onto the natural realm, in this instance a cat. His actions are then dictated by his perception of the cats snobbery and he spits on the cat. The cat, though, simply washes itself and passes the incident of as incidental. A more overt conflict is described later in the novel when one character gets into a ring to fight an ape. The man makes assumptions about the capabilities of the ape without truly knowing or understanding the ape, and so ends up on the losing end of the conflict. Nature seems to easily navigate the human world, but humanity seems unnecessarily at odds with nature.

Despite this antagonistic relationship with nature, the natural realm often illuminates human interactions, serving to inform. This comes through most clearly in McCarthy’s ecological metaphors. In one scene, Ballard stumbles upon a woman lying under a tree, seemingly unconscious. When she opens her eyes, it is described through an ecological metaphor: “They seemed to open downward by the underlids like a bird’s” (41). The woman sees Ballard as a potential threat, and draws her lip “back in a cat’s snarl” (42). These small interactions are framed in nature’s language, offering insight the actions and showing that natural realm serves to better relate these actions than the words or signifiers we have to describe them. Later, when a group of men seek to lynch Ballard and pull a noose around his neck, this too is framed in ecological metaphor, as the noose is described as a “rabbit snare” (182). These ecological metaphors, be it the woman snarling in an antagonist fashion, or a lynch mob hunting Ballard like a rabbit, serve to illuminate the nature of these interactions, not through words that represent concepts, but through words that represent concrete things and concrete actions that take place in nature.

The relationship between language and nature is not always positive, and McCarthy demonstrates how, when human constructs inform language, views of nature can be manipulated. When it comes to acts of violence and flaws in humanity, language can sometimes serve to validate such flaws by framing them as natural. Molière’s character Philinte does this in the play The Misanthrope. When Ballard sees some hounds trying to take down a boar, the ensuing fight is described as a ballet (69), which romanticizes the violence. Here, a human practice is projected onto the natural one, but rather than recognizing the violence as the result of basic survival, Ballard romanticizes the violence by comparing it with art. Later, when Ballard sees two hawks fighting, it is noted that Ballard “did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought” (169). This action, then, validates violence in Ballard’s eyes. In nature, though, violence seldom takes place unless it is necessary for survival. Though nature may validate Ballard’s hunting of squirrels and other animals, it does not validate murders he commits, despite Ballard’s interpretation of natural law.

At the onset of the novel, McCarthy seems to frame the narrative in the carnivalesque as he compares those who are setting up for an auction as arriving “like a caravan of carnival folk” (3). The carnivalesque usually involves a reversal of societal or cultural values, but though Ballard seems out of touch with social convention, the novel seems to suggest that it is nature’s values that are over turned, not human ones. The group of people who are compared to carnival folk, for instance, are present to bid in an auction, and it is land that is being auctioned off. Whilst concepts of property seem congruent with social norms, they are not congruent with nature, as McCarthy explains later in the novel: “At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and there were like them” (127). This is a passage in which Ballard has entered a forest, and is crucial to contextualizing the first scene as it is Ballard’s repossessed home that is being auctioned off. It is the system of property that generates the first major conflict for Ballard and sets him off on his way to a severe mental breakdown, and the concept of property is placed in stark contrast with nature. Ballard’s opposition to societal standards is articulated when in prison for an alleged rape which he did not commit. Ballard speaks to another prisoner and asks the man about his status as a fugitive. The many replies that he is “a fugitive from the ways of this world” (53), suggesting that his conflict is with the social constructs of the human world, which he does not accept. Ballard seems to identify with this as the man is one of only two in the novel that Ballard seems to feel friendship with.

Whilst Ballard’s actions after his psychological deterioration are gruesome, most especially when it comes to dealing with human corpses, the most educated people in the novel perform acts that are perhaps even more gruesome: Ballard “was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old” (195). The context is different, of course. Ballard was committing acts of necrophilia, and these medical students were learning about the human body as part of their education, but the language McCarthy uses for the medical students is more graphic than the language he uses for Ballard. This begs a number of questions. For instance, what is the difference between Ballard and the students? Ballard, who was excommunicated from society, desperately sought the affections of a woman, and fulfilled these desires with a corpse as the women in his community would have nothing to do with him. This is Ballard filling a need, one that most would agree is innate. The medical students likewise have a need to learn, and so mutilate a corpse in a different fashion. One may be seen as being for the greater good, of course, but both are done to satiate personal needs. Ballard, though, has the defense of being psychologically fractured, whereas the medical students are assumed to be at the height of reason given the prestige related to their field of study. I do not believe that McCarthy is suggesting any kind of immorality on the part of the medical students, but he does seem to be challenging the reader to carefully consider the context Ballard’s actions given that we are quick to accept the more graphic dismembering of corpses when done by medical students. Ballard actions are gruesome and indefensible, but the juxtaposition demonstrates how we do not apply the same rules universally to all people.

While there are elements of the novel that suggest Ballard’s eventual crimes may have been foretold in his childhood, the nature vs. nurture debate is not so cut and dry, and there seems to be a strong suggestion that environmental influences helped to shape the person that Ballard would eventually become. Though socially stunted early in the novel, people seem to project malice onto Ballard. When Ballard comes across a young woman who is almost naked under a tree, he observes her as most would, and when she wakes up, he asks her if she is cold. She snarls at him, and is curt, then, “Spying a rock, she lunge[s] and scrabble[s] it up and st[ands] him off with it”, drawing “the rock back menacingly” and heaving it at him. When he slaps her in response, she responds: “I knowed you’d do me thisaway” (42). His act of violence, even if she foresaw it, was not his initial response, but is merely a reaction to her own act of violence. This seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy on her part in that she created the situation she foretold. She later charges Ballard with rape (51), and the sheriff accepts her narrative without even consulting Ballard, locking him up for over a week on a false charge. When Ballard is eventually released after the woman fails to show up to testify, the sheriff does not suggest that Ballard is innocent, but rather hypothesizes what Ballard is going to do next now that he’s raped a woman: “I guess murder is next on the list ain’t it? Or what things is it you’ve done that we ain’t found out yet” (56). . The sheriff then tells Ballard that he better get his “ass on home”, but Ballard notes that there “Ain’t no goddamn thing keepin” him there “cept [the sheriff] going on at the mouth” (56). Like the woman, the sheriff creates an offense on the part of Ballard through his own actions. He keeps Ballard back, and then tells him to go home, as if Ballard had chosen to stay behind. Ballard hasn’t even committed rape, but he does eventually fulfill the sheriff’s prophecy of homicide. If the signs were present early, though, should the social response not have been to address the issue rather than antagonize Ballard and let the issues fester? Had he been treated for his psychological issues, or not ostracized, Ballard may have been able to adjust, but the environmental expectations seemed to push Ballard into the direction he went.

The combination of nature and nurture seems to frame Ballard in a deterministic context. Rather than creating his own identity through choice, as an existentialist might, social and natural forces seem to impel him in a specific direction. The violence in him seems to be something that is innate and rules him, a sentiment that is eloquently articulated when McCarthy writes that he wore his rifle around his neck “like a yoke” (26). The rifle is a necessity for Ballard, but seems to yoke him to a life of violence, as if he is ruled by it and not the other way around. The desire for the social interaction he was denied manifests itself throughout the novel, perhaps most shocking when he first engages in the act of necrophilia. Whilst engaging in necrophilia, McCarthy writes that Ballard “poured into that waxen ear [of the corpse] everything he’d ever thought of saying to a woman” (88). This is the action of a man starved for social interconnectedness. There is an interesting feminist perspective her, in that this act displays the woman as a passive participant, and is literally dead as a patriarch might expect a wife to be socially upon their marriage, but this doesn’t seem to be working toward a feminist reading, but rather one that speaks to how the lack of a social identity corrupts the psychological well-being of a person. Ballard takes to talking to himself, and wearing women’s clothing, which in and of itself is fine, but when the wig you are wearing is made from a human scalp and you dress up corpses in fancy dresses and put lipstick on them, then there might be a problem.

Ballard seems to be the result of a warped experiment set out to prove social learning theory. Ballard is like the rhesus macaque monkeys in Harry Harlow’s famous experiment who, without the socializing experience with a mother, eventually developed bizarre behaviour. This also happened inadvertently when a group of adult and female elephants, were transported via helicopter, with juvenile male elephants, to a reserve. The adult bull elephants were left behind because they were too heavy for the equipment. The juvenile males, without the social guidance of the bull elephants, soon took too killing rhinos, something that had never been documented among elephants. In the Bobo doll experiment, Albert Bandura demonstrated that children likewise learn socially. Without a social context in which to learn, Ballard had no way of learning how to behave properly. His mother abandoned him and his father hanged himself before Ballard was ten, and so, like the elephants who were without the civilizing and normalizing guidance to the adult elephants, Ballard eventually indulged in bazaar behaviour. It is when Ballard sees a child that looks like himself that he seems to have some sort of realization (191). He turns himself in, perhaps because he needs medical treatment, perhaps because he feels remorse, but with a writer who crafts his narratives as carefully as McCarthy, it cannot be assumed that it was strictly coincidence that Ballard turned himself in after seeing a child who was his own mirror image. In creating a tragically deterministic title character, McCarthy encourages the reader to consider the context of Ballard’s life before passing judgement.

The novel calls to mind other social experiments as well, namely the Milgram experiment. When Ballard confronts the auctioneer at the beginning of the novel, the auctioneer defends himself: “I didn’t take your place off of ye. The country did that. I was just hired as auctioneer” (7). The auctioneer refuses to accept responsibility for his part in the usurpation of Ballard’s home and shifts it onto authority figures, much like the participants in the Milgram experiment, who believed they were delivering lethal electric shocks to people but did so under the belief that the authority figure was responsible for their actions, mirroring the behaviour of German soldiers stationed in concentration camps during in WWII. McCarthy returns to this theme later in the novel after a failed lynching of Ballard. The men are unsure as to where they are going and when one man is asked where they should go, he states that he was “just follerin the man in front of” him (186). The men do not invoke their own autonomy, but rather follow a perceived authority figure.

Not all of McCarth’s characters are as morally ambivalent as these men. One character narrates an experience he had indirectly with Ballard. When Ballard had thrown a ball in the wrong direction as a child, he told another child to retrieve it under the threat of violence, which was promptly and brutally delivered when the child failed to obey. The narrator offers his conclusion: “I felt, I felt… I don’t know what it was. We just felt real bad. I never liked Lester Ballard from that day… He never done nothin to me” (18). The narrator tries to speak to how he felt, but cannot frame the words, so he instead states how the group felt, allowing the social setting to take precedence over the individual. His concluding comment is perhaps the most important. He states that he never liked Ballard from that day forward even though Ballard had done nothing to him. This seems to be the antithesis to the narrator in the poem ‘First they came…’, who allows others to be oppressed and does not get involved. During WWII, the Nazi party ostracized a number of groups of people, and many of those in the majority remained loyal to the Nazi regime so long as the regime did nothing against them personally. McCarthy’s character, though, notes that when one person is oppressed, the oppressor should not be accepted by others solely on the basis that he has done them no wrong.

There is also an interesting Hobbesian reading. In one scene, the general store manager speaks to the sheriff after his store was looted during a floor. He postulates that it “Seems like trouble ought to make people closer stead of some tryin to rob others” (161), however, it does the opposite. When an authority figure fails to unite people in fear, humanity reverts back to what Hobbes calls their natural state in which they are at war with all others and seek only to secure the means to their survival, regardless of how that might infringe upon the lives and rights of others. These Hobbesian themes, though, are perhaps better explore in McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark.

One of the most integral elements of the books is the title: Child of God. Though it would be difficult for most to identify with the title character, McCarthy forces the reader to at least try to examine the context of Ballard’s life and come to some kind of understanding. In framing Ballard as a child of god, rather than a monster, he diverts the typical signification usually thrust upon such figures. To vilify is to dismiss, but McCarthy wants the reader to lend the character the same consideration that any child of God would receive. While Ballard’s crimes are very different than the numerous mass killings done by the likes of Elliot Rodger, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza (among others), McCarthy’s presentation remains especially relevant in the context of these crimes. Whilst the media understandably demonizes these men, it dismisses them outright and so throws away a teachable moment. At a time when we can learn about the impact of environmental influences on people with mental illness, the media would rather simply vilify the perpetrator of such crimes and move on. McCarthy’s language will not allow the reader to be so dismissive. The title is draws from a line in the first chapter where McCarthy writes that Ballard is a “Child of God, much like yourself” (4), speaking to the reader, and so could also be suggesting that the vileness we see in Ballard is present in all of us and that we must understand this part of our nature in order to transcend it. The title, though, could also serve to challenge the work of God by suggesting that if one is to give credit to God for all that is good, one must also hold God responsible for all that is bad. Regardless of the intent of the title, it serves to enhance the text within and generate an interesting dialogue about how to frame the heinous actions of the title character.

The work, in part, reads like the antithesis to Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden. In Thoreau’s classic nature journal, he encourages a remediation between humanity and nature, favouring a minimalist, rural life in contrast to an urban one. In his journal, Thoreau lives alone in a cabin on a stretch of land that he gained squatter’s rights to, though he built the cabin himself. Ballard lives in a similar cabin that is not far removed from the one described in Thoreau’s work, but Ballard is not so civilized as Thoreau suggests one living in nature might be. Thoreau suggests that humans might be better off being suckled by wolves than inherent the biases of their human parents, but McCarthy creates a narrative that postulates what kind of maladaptive behaviour such a life might lead to. Ballard’s parents are not present for him growing up, and so he is in a sense raised by nature. Without the civilizing influence of proper child rearing, he is unable to socialize with others, and his biological urges for sexual gratification in the face of his social ineptitude, eventually leads to homicide. Whilst an immersion with nature served Thoreau well, he ultimately proved a tourist in nature; Ballard was a denizen of the natural world, and it did not have such a refining influence on him as it did on Thoreau.

The novel doesn’t provide in-depth character development or dig into motivation. It is almost like a detective novel in that respect as the reader is expected to put together the pieces of the puzzle by hypothesizing as to the motivations of Ballard’s actions in a broader context, but this doesn’t quite seem to fit as I don’t believe there is a finite cause or motivation. What is clear is that regardless of how brutally bizarre Ballard’s actions are, he is a sick man in pain. His crimes only happen because he does not get the help he needs when he is young, and his illness is allowed to fester and is only treated once it impacts the lives of others. Though the second and third act revolve around Ballard’s violent breakdown, McCarthy is not the kind of author who relies on gory details to illicit a response from the reader. The scenes that depict violence are an exercise in minimalism, and most often McCarthy makes the reader aware of the violence after the fact with a piece of evidence that is referenced, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. Though perhaps not his finest work, it is one that demonstrates his superior craft and gives the reader insights into how McCarthy developed his voice in the early stages of his career.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to get updates on my latest post, be sure to follow me on Twitter @LiteraryRambler.

Words I thought I’d look up:

Adipocere: “Adipocere /ˈædɨpɵsɪər/, also known as corpse, grave or mortuary wax, is a wax-like organic substance formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue, such as body fat in corpses. In its formation, putrefaction is replaced by a permanent firm cast of fatty tissues, internal organs and the face” (from Wiki).

Muslin: A cotton fabric.

Formalin: Another word for formaldehyde/methanol.

Meniscus: The curve of a liquid in a container caused by surface tension (from grade five science class; thank you Mr. Burque).

Execration: A fancy word for curse.

Vitriolic: Filled with bitter cynicism and malice.

Imprimatur: An official license by the Roman Catholic Church to print an ecclesiastical or religious book (from Areopagitica; thanks Milton!).

Intaglio: A form of printmaking in which the image is engraved into the surface.

Stanchions: An upright fixture that provides support for an object, like the poles at the movie theatre that hold up the velvet rope used to create organized lines, though they don’t use the velvet rope anymore. 😥

Works Cited:

McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. Vintage Books. New York. 1973. Print.