Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/aproximacio...Coetzee y McCarthy: Aproximaciones a lo inhóspito.Los beneficios de mi proyecto literario cada vez se hacen sentir más de diferentes maneras. Inicialmente solo pensé en lo evidente: leo grandes autores contemporáneos y clásicos con los que estoy seguro de disfrutar y, en la mayoría de los casos, observo los temas que tratan, veo su evolución en temas y estilo, estudio el contexto, etc…Según voy avanzando en lecturas, sin embargo, está aumentando la lista;, he extendido las lecturas más allá de su traducción y, en muchos casos, como el de Joyce Carol Oates, estoy adquiriendo su ingente obra en inglés; de esta manera, en muchos casos voy a poder disfrutar en plenitud de su literatura. Lo que no había pensado hasta ahora era en la posibilidad de relacionarlos, y eso me lleva al post de hoy.Las lecturas de “El guardián del vergel”, ópera prima de Cormac McCarthy, y de “Vida y época de Michael K”, otra de las joyas del premio Nobel sudafricano J. M. Coetzee, han servido para darme cuenta de todo lo que tienen en común en cuanto a temas tratados y qué diferencias de estilo en su prosa a la hora de afrontarlos.En particular me voy a centrar en el reflejo que hacen en su obra, lo que voy a llamar “Lo inhóspito”; ambos autores se caracterizan por mostrarnos la realidad “menos hospitalaria”, aquella que causa inseguridad al ser humano en todas sus vertientes; siendo la primera de ellas, la más evidente, la que tiene que ver con el lugar, con la localización en que ambientan sus obras. Esto se puede observar en los párrafos que voy a poner a continuación, en primer lugar en el caso de Cormac McCarthy y su guardián:“Despertó antes de que empezara a llover. La brisa cada vez más fresca abanicó su cara y el sudor que le perlaba la frente. Se incorporó y se frotó la nuca. Dos sinsontes que hacían girándulas entre las ramas altas de los arces se quedaron quietos; y entonces, como sorprendidas ellas mismas en el calor verde dorado de la tarde, las primeras gotas de lluvia salpicaron oscuras el barro acumulado al pie de la casa. Una sombra plana ondeó sobre el patio, sobre la carretera, y trepó por el talud como si le hubiera entrado prisa; la lluvia arreció, medrando con el viento en la distancia y pintando de un verde plateado, casi amarillo, los árboles de junto al arroyo. El viejo observó la lluvia avanzar por los campos, la hierba que se agitaba, las piedras del camino que se volvían negras y después el lodo en el patio. Oyó bailar los tejemaniles al tiempo que una ráfaga le rociaba la mejilla.”Que contrasta en estilo con la obra de Coetzee:“La luna emergía difuminada entre las nubes cuando, a un kilómetro de la carretera principal, K se paró, ayudo a bajar a su madre, y se adentró en la espesa maleza de Port Jackson para buscar un refugio nocturno. En este submundo de raíces enmarañadas, tierra húmeda y sutiles olores putrefactos, ningún lugar parecía más protegido de los elementos que otro. Regresó junto al camino tiritando”.La belleza de los dos párrafos es muy diferente, McCarthy escoge en esta obra (más adelante lo perfeccionará aún más) un barroquismo, por momentos exagerado, de un lirismo único (qué paradoja que retraté lo inhóspito mediante la exuberancia), no ahorra en adjetivos, en descripciones, en imágenes que nos sirvan para entender la situación y vivirlas sensorialmente (“oyó bailar los tejemaniles al tiempo que una ráfaga le rociaba la mejilla”) como si presenciáramos la escena. Por el contrario, Coetzee aboga por una economía de la descripción, por una aridez que va indisolublemente unida a cada frase que utiliza y que tiene que ver muchísimo con lo que está describiendo, es consonante con la ambientación; a pesar de dicha concreción, no deja de ser bella y en sus metáforas usa “sutil” con “olores putrefactos”, combinación poco habitual que imprime mucho carácter a la imagen; la sequedad del “regresó junto al camino tiritando” es simplemente sobrecogedora con el contexto usado.el-guardian-del-vergel-mccarthy-cormacEl segundo nivel que ambos autores utilizan para definir “lo inhóspito” va unido a las personas, a los personajes que utilizan como representación de dicha cualidad, nuevamente utilizo primero al americano, y a continuación uso un texto del sudafricano:“El viejo se detuvo para bajar por un trecho pizarroso hasta la garganta repleta de árboles partidos. El perro miró hacia abajo, levantó intrigado la vista hacia su amo, estudió una vez más la garganta y se alejó mientras el viejo cogía su bastón y seguía adelante. Uno de sus zapatos se había quedado casi sin suela y ahora renqueaba un poco, apoyándose en el otro zapato a fin de no malgastar el cordel con que la había sujetado.”“Lo primero que advirtió la comadrona de Michael K cuando lo ayudó a salir del vientre de su madre y entrar en el mundo fue su labio leporino. El labio se enroscaba como un caracol, la aleta izquierda de la nariz estaba entreabierta. Le ocultó el niño a la madre durante un instante, abrió la boca diminuta con la punta de los dedos, y dio gracias al ver el paladar completo.”El viejo, guardián observador de toda la trama en la novela de McCarthy, representa la fragilidad mediante la cojera y mediante el propio hecho de ser anciano, lo utiliza como personificación del paisaje; curiosamente, en el caso de Michael K tenemos un marginado desde el propio nacimiento, su labio leporino es una seña de esta identidad “borderline”, es el epítome de “lo inhóspito” desde su primer instante de vida; funcionan bien los dos personajes, pero es indudable que lo marginal de Michael K es mucho más efectivo y consigue el objetivo que subrayaré en el final; además, el hecho de que su apellido no sea mencionado, lo universaliza, en el caso del viejo sí sabemos que se trata de Arthur Ownby, una persona con nombre y apellidos, una particularización.Ambos cumplen a la perfección su papel de inadaptados, de estar fuera de la sociedad vigente, uno es un ermitaño, el otro no para de buscar su lugar en el mundo, como podemos ver nuevamente en estos textos:“El funcionario hizo un fugaz esfuerzo por comprender, luego lo descartó. Lo único que necesitamos, dijo, es cierta información.El viejo le miró. ¿Usted es también policía?, preguntó.No, dijo el funcionario. Represento a la oficina para asistencia social… me han encargado que venga a verle… por si podíamos ayudarle de alguna manera.Pues lo dudo mucho, dijo el viejo. Soy lo que podríamos decir carne de presidio.”“Estaba mejor en las montañas, pensó K. Estaba mejor en la granja, estaba mejor en la carretera. Estaba mejor en Ciudad del Cabo. Pensó en la caseta oscura y calurosa, en los desconocidos amontonados en las literas alrededor, en el aire lleno de burlas. Es como volver a la infancia, pensó: es como una pesadilla.”Uno es “carne de presidio”; el otro vive la pesadilla de no encontrar su sitio desde la infancia; “lo inhóspito” que viven los dos personajes se convierte el reflejo de su falta de adaptación: están fuera de la sociedad.Esta particularización le sirve a los dos autores para, al final, llevarla a la generalización; además de lo catártico que tiene de por sí para los lectores esta visión, el fin último es mostrar la disconformidad ante una sociedad excluyente que no soporta las personalidades que no se adapten a lo que tiene que estar establecido; son estos pobre luchadores, los que se enfrentan al orden inherente, los que no recuerdan que no todo es tan maravilloso como nos quieren hacer entender:“Se han ido ya. Huidos, proscritos en la muerte o el exilio, perdidos, arruinados. Sobre la tierra, sol y viento regresan todavía para quemar o mecer los árboles, los pastos. Ningún avatar, ningún vástago, ningún vestigio queda de estas personas. En boca de la extraña raza que allí mora sus nombres son ahora mito, leyenda, polvo.”“Tu estancia en el campamento no ha sido más que una alegoría, si conoces esta palabra. De manera escandalosa y ultrajante, esta alegoría revelaba (utilizando el lenguaje erudito) hasta que punto un significado puede alojarse en un sistema sin convertirse en parte de el. “La alegoría a la que se refiere Coetzee es, precisamente, lo que acabo de comentar, y se refiere a ese sistema del que también hacía referencia y en el que no encaja de ninguna manera.Dos formas, una más redonda que otra, pero igualmente válidas para reflejar “Lo inhóspito” y hacer que se “nos remuevan las entrañas” y seamos cada vez más conscientes de la realidad que nos rodea.Los textos vienen de la traducción del inglés de Luís Murillo Fort de “El guardián del vergel” de Cormac McCarthy en Debolsillo y de Concha Manella para “Vida y época de Michael K” de John M. Coetzee en Debolsillo.
The Orchard Keeper: Cormac McCarthy's first novel of his Southern quartet First Edition, Random House, New York, New York, 1965Them that's got shall getThem that's not shall loseSo the Bible said and it still is newsMama may have Papa may haveBut God bless the child that's got his ownThat's got his own--Billie Holliday, God Bless the Child, 1941You have to read this book. I rarely say it. I feel so strongly about it, I'll say it again. Read this book. Read it straight through. Then read it more thoroughly, more thoughtfully. See how Cormac McCarthy put this story together. The hill country of Eastern Tennessee has always been different. During the American Civil War, the mountainous areas of Tennessee were a hotbed of Unionism.Set in Red Branch, Tennessee, Cormac McCarthy created a community that portrayed the independence of the residents of that area of the state. Red Branch is located somewhere between Knoxville and Sevierville in Tennessee. The time of the story is between World War I and World War II.The people of Red Branch are a close knit bunch. It's a place of hospitality if you're one of their own. If you're not from around there, you're not likely to be welcome. If you're a member of the Alcohol and Tobacco Unit of the Federal government, don't expect a whole lot of information about who is running whiskey out of the Tennessee Hills.Folks in Red Branch do what comes naturally. Sex is a gift to be engaged in and enjoyed. The young women are just as willing and eager as the young men are to enjoy one another. Young Josh Tipton, a bit player in the overall scheme of things, is humiliated that his young lady insults him by telling him he's the nicest young man that ever needled her. Perhaps he's insulted to be a nice young man. But considering McCarthy's comedic moments, it's more likely Josh's humiliation over the needle size of his pride and joy.A quick read, The Orchard Keeper, at first blush is a simple enough tale. There are three main protagonists, Marion Sylder, a bad boy not above breaking the law by running unbranded whiskey out of the hills in fast cars; Uncle Ather Ownby, who tends a ruined apple orchard, a hermit, content to live alone away from the encroachment of civilization, and young John Rattney, a fatherless boy, who comes to be fostered and mentored by both Sylder and Ownby.John's last memory of his father, Kenneth, is being given an orange drink by his father, purchased for a nickel, before his father left for South Carolina in search of a job. It's the last time John ever sees his father.John's mother reminds him that his father was a hero in the army, returning from service with a platinum plate in his skull. She also tells him that if only his father were there, neither he nor she would want for anything, for his father had always been a good provider. Evidence is to the contrary.Kenneth Rattney was no hero. He was a con man and a thief, always on the lookout for an easy buck. Whether he came by it honestly or not, he didn't care.Kenneth hitches a ride with Marion Sylder, who is coming back home to Red Branch after an absence of five years. Sylder's driving a new black Ford coupe. He's well dressed. Rattney's wrong when he decides Sylder's an easy mark. When Sylder has a flat, Rattney attacks him with a tire iron. Sylder kills him in self defense, disposing of his body by rolling him off the road where the body lands in the old spray pit of the gnarled and ruined orchard tended by Uncle Ather. Sylder has no idea whose body he's rolled off the road.Uncle Ather, walking through his ruined orchard discovers Rattner's body floating in the old spray pit. Ather's learned a long time ago that bringing in the authorities is only going to lead to meddling. He hides the body, piling cut cedar trees over the old pit. Neither does Ather know the identity of the body floating in the pit.Back at the rickety shack John and his mother occupy, John is drawn into the nature of the wilderness that surrounds him. He moves his bed to the enclosed porch of the house, watching the change of the seasons. His mother, for all purposes, a widow, leaves John to his own devises. John does not attend school. No truant officers exist to drag him away from his wandering through the woods that surround him.During his regular walks through the remarkable landscape in which he lives, John meets both Marion Sylder and Uncle Ather. Both become mentors, essentially foster fathers to him. John watches Sylder slide through a curve, plunging into a swift running creek. He pulls him from his car. Sylder realizes the boy saved his life and he returns the favor by seeing the boy share the comfort of his home, supplies him with enough money to increase the string of his traps with which he wishes to earn money for his mother's support, and gives the boy his first dog.Uncle Ather is a fount of folkways and woodlore. He is a natural storyteller, a man seemingly older than the hills he wanders. Ather still remembers when civilization was so distant that "painters," or panthers, regularly roamed the woods, their screams piercing the black night unlit by a distant civilization.However, society is changing. There is no place for characters such as Marion Sylder and Uncle Ather Ownby. Running unbranded, or shall we say, untaxed whiskey, isn't good for Government Revenue. Sheriff Gifford, the symbol of government authority is on the lookout for Sylder. Ather calls the law down on himself when he shoots up a tank put up on one of his beloved mountains by the United States Army.John Rattner remains loyal to both his friends as the law closes in on them. McCarthy makes it clear that both bootlegger and mountain hermit can be fathers of greater influence than a man who merely fertilizes an egg.What first appears to be a relatively simple plot is not as simple as it appears. Just who is the narrator of this tale? Is this an unknown, omniscient narrator, speaking to us in the third person? Or, is this a classic bildungsroman told by an older, wiser John Rattner?McCarthy created a remarkable story with his debut. The language of the hill people is pitch perfect. His prose describing the Tennessee hill country is more poetry in his indelible beauty of a vanishing world captured forever on the page.McCarthy's manuscript landed on the desk of Albert Erskine at Random House. Erskine had been Faulkner's editor. As he read McCarthy's manuscript, I wonder if Erskine at times questioned whether Bill Faulkner ever died. I can see Erskine shaking his head in wonder at the words on the rough manuscript that a new Southern voice had produced.God bless John Rattner, a child that got his own without Mama's help, without Papa's help, but two men who provide help, each in their own way.
What do You think about The Orchard Keeper (2007)?
McCarthy is at a natural disadvantage when an obsessive reader finally works back to his first book. Invariably, McCarthy will be unfairly graded against his own amazing later output. I liked Orchard Keeper. I really did. It was superior in almost every way that matters to most serious writing out there, but it just didn't hold up against other McCarthy novels. If one considers Suttree and Blood Meridian to be his masterpieces (and thus 5 stars), and The Road, No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses to be solid pieces of American literature (all 4 stars), it is unavoidable that the Orchard Keeper rates only three.The great thing about reading this first McCarthy is you can see the germs of all of McCarthy's potential built into it. It contains the strange embryo of all of McCarthy's future greatness: his great mythic prose, amazing archetypal characters, beautifully grand, natural scenes. If you love McCarthy, please don't skip the Orchard Keeper, just don't expect it to blow you down, and chill you to the bone, and blow you away like Blood Meridian or Suttree.
—Darwin8u
I went through a period a while back where I read all of McCarthy's books in one giant rush. It was a sorrowful time for me, and the agonies that McCarthy has studded throughout all his works just seemed as givens; they were the types of heartbreak that I felt were to be expected in life and hardly registered.Today I'm a far better state, happy and content, and these sufferings he portrays are almost too much to bear. The further I got into the story and the more I remembered about this particular book - because most of his Tennessee / southern novels had run together in my mind - the more I dreaded arriving at particular scenes. I'm sure I read this more slowly than I did the first time, trying to put off those encounters.The language, though, would be the other part of the reason I read slowly. During my first encounters with McCarthy I was eager to swallow it all up, take it in in vast gulps, and move on to the next. I deliberately paced myself this time. This book, moreso than anything else I've ever read, really recreates the sound of the language of east Tennessee. It is astonishing. I've bookmarked several passages that are a delight for me to read aloud. Though I grew up in middle Tennessee and today speak without much of an accent McCarthy's word choice and phrases are so polished that it's nearly impossible to recite them out loud without falling into that slow song.I also relished the single-page vignette with which the book opens, and tried to hold that message in my mind's eye as I read through. Though it may seem as though the iron fence has grown up into the tree, appearing to give it strength against the world, we have to remember it is the tree that grew around the metal. Trees and people both subsume their surroundings, they incorporate that which is in their space and does not yield. That hard iron core remains inside, sometimes hidden. It is not the tree's own backbone.
—Kevin
There's no question McCarthy is a brilliant prose writer. There are times when I stop in reading to marvel at his stunning verbal combinations. However the subject matter of this book just didn't appeal to me and I found the density of description overwhelming to the plot and actual characters. I knew exactly what everything looked like, smelled like, moved like, sounded like, etc, but for a good chunk of it i wouldn't have been able to tell you what was actually going on and how it related to anything else. I appreciate the man's talent and am certainly interested to read his other works, but this book left me rather cold.
—Tamara
