Home Is Where the Body's Buried: Place, Space, Homelessness in Child of God and The Crossing

Abstract

Critics as diverse as John Cant, Dianne Luce, Jay Ellis, and Ashley Bourne have noted the role of place, space, and landscape in Cormac McCarthy's novels. His realistic settings become, as Bourne points out in her discussion of the Border Trilogy, “the most striking character[s] in the novels” (109) and form the human characters and their identities in often unexpected and disturbing ways. Whether it is the landscape of New and Old Mexico in the trilogy, or the stinking abjection of the Tennessee River in Suttree, the place has something to say, often violently, and it informs and shapes what the characters do and who they become. Part of that shaping is through a tension between a place that is “‘eventmental’ constantly in flux” as the point where time and space come together, and the struggle for identity, which “longs for stability, a fixed sense of place and self” (Bourne 109). As Lawrence Buell points out in The Environmental Imagination, this shaping becomes a two-way street, for “place is something we are always in the process of finding and always perforce creating in some degree as we find it” (260). Two of McCarthy's novels, Child of God and The Crossing, illustrate that tension between desire and experience perfectly. Lester Ballard and Billy Parham become near mirror images of one another in their homelessness driven by desire for a stable home and inability to create that outcome. While Billy finds people who love him on both sides of the US Border with Mexico, he abandons that place and refuses that love because of the pain and loss associated with the border and his own guilt at being unable to change events. Lester, in contrast, is trapped in Sevier County with people who narrate his life as a monster, while refusing him a place within their community. He becomes a necrophiliac and serial killer because he is unable to achieve the love and community which he desires.