The Orchard Keeper – Cormac McCarthy

I originally encountered this work with Dr. Olivia Edenfield, Georgia Southern University, College of Graduate Studies, Fall 2023. These are my scratch notes.

Notes:

Kenneth Rattner

• not actually going to Atlanta – he was on his way to Knoxville
• Did not need the tire pump

Marion Sylder

• born 1913
• from Red Branch
• school > carpenter > blockading

Green Fly Inn

Cab the bartender

Jack the Runner

Dianne Luce’s article, “Landscape of Memory: The Orchard Keeper,” was the main focus of an in-class presentation given by Meagan Bishop. The following are notes from that lecture

• Where Suttree can be seen as urban, and Child of God wilderness, The Orchard Keeper mediates the two spaces
• Blount Count is a liminal space that mediates geography and culture
• Home building techniques and the changes therein illustrate, among other possibilities, the encroachment of the material culture
• Much of the conversion to wilderness was for tourism – not environmental or cultural reasons
• uneasy alliance between nature and material culture
  • Sylder’s cars and brdiges
  • the fence and the tree
  • nature and machinary
• Defending the Orchard – Ownby
  • Ownby’s vision
    • seven-year cycles
    • increased vision but not in regards to helping himself
  • wilderness protection program
  • antinomianism
    • one is religious
    • the other is any sort of rejection of laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious, social norms
  • Rattner’s body – Ownby makes intuitive decision to keep Rattner’s body hidden and unreported
  • Government tank – Thoreau and civil disobedience – don’t have to folllow the law when it works against nature
  • Ownby distinguishes between the acts of the government and the acts of the individual
• Defending the Orchard – Sylder
  • in the whiskey blockading, he has embraced the machine
  • he leaves Ownby alone when he sees him shooting the tank
  • with John Wesley, his antinomianism is restrained and principled
  • Rattner is his alter ego (I disagree)
• Defending the Orchard – John Wesley
  • found family, mentors, friends
  • rejected revenge
  • maturation illustrated when he returns the hawk bounty and leaves town
• Ownby’s lock up – there is no escaping the machine, and nature suffers

The Outer Dark – Michaela Smith

Gnosticism

• Human souls are imprisoned in a material realm.

Southern Gothic.

Difference between crime and evil

Ecocentric view of evil.

Evil in setting

• The tank
• Ratners body

Ratner – not a principled, rebel possibility of vocal distortion