Embracing Vocation by Dianne C. Luce;

Author:Dianne C. Luce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Culla and the Blind Man

Early in his construction of Outer Dark, McCarthy was uncertain that Culla would survive. His life is threatened in several scenes, and as late as January 1965, McCarthy drafted the second of two unused scenes in which the triune murder him, or he dreams that they do. If Culla were to die, then ending the novel with Rinthy’s discovery of the bones of her child and the tinker would be appropriate. But having Culla live on with the persistent burden of his sin, the psychological necessity of endless denial, is more in keeping with the central dilemma of the novel. So it was more effective to close with the scene that exemplifies his indeterminate yet fated future, his circling on in a resolution without closure and without redemption. Not until McCarthy was deep into writing his second draft did he invent the scene in which Culla encounters the sightless man and then wanders blindly into the swamp; but McCarthy’s thinking about the child’s half-blinding and Culla’s moral blindness had led naturally to his conception of the blind man, the first of several blind characters in his novels. As he drafted the closing scenes of Outer Dark, he undertook three primary tasks: to develop pertinent dialogue for the two differently blind characters who meet on the road; to create in the blind man a foil not only for Culla but also for the novel’s earlier claimants to religious authority, especially the dreamed faith healer; and to delineate the swamp into which Culla wanders, in which he perpetually wanders, as a correlative of his moral and psychological state of being, his endless, benighted despair after the murder of his son.

The earliest draft describing the swamp is dated March 5, 1965, and is filed in “Rough/First Draft [B]” as superseded work (208/197), as is one page from an early attempt at the dialogue between Culla and the blind man (8). Leaves that represent McCarthy’s subsequent work on the scene are filed in “Early Draft [A]” (242, 244, 252), and a complete, revised version appears in the “Middle Draft” (252–56). The approximately continuous, high pagination of the leaves in the early and middle drafts suggests that McCarthy may have composed them in one sustained work period after he had settled on the rest of the novel’s structure. Among these leaves are alternate versions of Culla’s meeting with the blind man and their ensuing conversation. The first in “Early Draft [A]” begins with a rather prosaic interchange about the weather that quickly becomes freighted with implication. As in the published version, the blind man remarks how good it is to “see” the sun again, “After so long a time,” as if the eclipse of Culla’s opening dream has ended at last (242; OD 239). Here Culla is not startled as he is by the bearded leader’s more obvious reference to his nightmare of the eclipse in “Early Draft [A],” but some of the blind man’s comments in this version faintly reprise the triune’s guilt-inducing stance.

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