Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Unless a journal editor is planning a special issue on a particular topic, it can sometimes be difficult to decide which accepted essays should appear in which issue, and what combination of articles would make the most sense—especially for those readers who subscribe to a journal in hard copy, and sit down to page through it in its entirety rather than clicking on individual articles in an online database. But this one was easy. The Fall 2019 issue of The Cormac McCarthy Journal includes a selection of articles that speak to each other in a number of ways, almost as if they had been planned to do so.Dianne Luce heads up this issue with an article about the composition of Child of God, showing how key elements of that novel developed from scenes that McCarthy deleted from Outer Dark. In the mid-1960s, Luce demonstrates, McCarthy was working on different stages of Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree, and Luce uncovers previously unknown details of his writing process during this time. Ultimately, she notes that both Outer Dark and Child of God, like all of his Tennessee novels, reveal an element of social realism, in particular “McCarthy's early concern for those who are victimized by their neighbors, especially by those in societally sanctioned positions of legal or economic power over the lives of others.”Jonathan and Rick Elmore take a different approach to the same subject matter in a pair of articles—the first covering the “always violent logic of inclusion and exclusion” in Outer Dark and the second reading Lester Ballard as an extreme example of a common problem, victimization by large-scale social forces. The Elmores read Rinthy in Outer Dark as a “proto-posthuman” figure, a kind of answer or respite to those social forces, while in his article Elijah Guerra understands Suttree as someone who recognizes life's absurdity—in classic existential fashion—and responds by taking responsibility for his actions and his fate.Finally, Nicholas Monk considers the Gothic, a genre which, in American literature, is most closely related to the South and Southern novels like the ones mentioned above. Monk, however, applies it to McCarthy's representation of the West, and thus draws connections between McCarthy, Paul Bowles, and Don Waters, associations that have not previously been explored in detail.Because this issue is fat with these fortuitously interrelated articles, we will pick back up with our regular book reviews next time.Enjoy, and keep in touch.