The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
"The Orchard Keeper" is Cormac McCarthy's debut novel, published in 1965, and it garnered the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel by an American writer. Set in the hilly landscapes of eastern Tennessee during the 1930s and early 1940s, the novel's rich prose intricately weaves the topography into the narrative, emphasizing the profound connection between the characters and their environment. Central to the story are three main characters: Marion Sylder, a bootlegger; John Wesley Rattner, a young boy who traps game illegally; and Arthur Ownsby, an old man who tends to an orchard. Their seemingly unrelated lives intersect through a series of events marked by violence, secrecy, and moral ambiguity, revealing a deeper commentary on humanity's struggle for independence against societal constraints. McCarthy's narrative style is notably disjunctive, utilizing brief and episodic scenes that require the reader to navigate an evolving landscape of memory and experience. The novel ultimately serves as an elegy for a bygone era, illustrating the conflict between natural harmony and societal law, culminating in a sense of defeat as the characters face the inescapable consequences of their actions.
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The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1965
Type of work: Novel
The Work
Upon the publication of The Orchard Keeper, granted the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel by an American writer, McCarthy’s promising literary talents were recognized. The young writer was singled out as a force to be watched and to be reckoned with.
Like a number of McCarthy’s early novels, The Orchard Keeper is set in eastern Tennessee. Its topography is related intimately in stunning prose, creating a remarkable, richly textured linguistic surface to the novel. Setting, for McCarthy, is of paramount importance. In fact, geographic contours seem to precede and form the characters that act within their folds. This stands as a kind of philosophical principle for McCarthy, who places the human dimension of life in perspective, always vigilantly invoking the presence of larger, more powerful, mystical forces that drive and control people’s lives. The hilly region east of Knoxville is perfect for supporting the thematic thrust of the novel. During the time the novel is set, in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, the area was yet outside the jurisdiction of law and beyond the reach of modern civilization. The land itself, and the connection of its tenants to it, represents a cultural value akin to that espoused by southern Agrarian writers such as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and others.
Threatened is humankind’s ability to live independent of society’s conventions and inflexible legal dictates. The novel serves as an elegy to a heroic past in which people lived in harmony with nature and made, individually, their own moral determinations. As McCarthy writes in the last lines of the novel, its characters are among the last of their kind: “They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”
Only gradually does the reader come to know about the three main characters whose lives the novel intertwines: Marion Sylder, a bootlegger; John Wesley Rattner, a young boy who traps game illegally; and Arthur Ownsby, an old, single man who is the orchard keeper. Though these characters have no discernible relation to one another when the reader meets them, they are drawn to one another as the narrative unfolds. Sylder has killed John Wesley’s father, partly in self-defense, without even knowing who the man was. Sylder dumps the body of the dead man into an insecticide spray tank on the old decaying orchard kept by Ownsby. Ownsby finds the body but keeps it a secret, making periodic ritualistic visits to the makeshift grave, watching the body decay. Ownsby knows Sylder only by the car he used to run whiskey past the orchard, and he has no inkling he is responsible for the murder. John Wesley, however, knows both of them. He develops a friendship with the old man and comes to know Sylder after rescuing him from a creek where Sylder lands after driving his car off the road.
All of this is gathered in bits and pieces throughout the novel, for the narrative of The Orchard Keeper is the most disjunctive of any of McCarthy’s novels. The characters themselves are thrifty with their speech; they keep things to themselves. Scenes are short and episodic, with periodic flashbacks triggered by characters’ memories. Because the focus continually shifts, abruptly, without any signs as to with whom and where one is, the reader must continually adjust to new orientations. Plots are arrogant impositions on disconnected events. What McCarthy seems intent on uplifting in this novel is the remarkable random rhythm of human experience.
A sense of defeat lies heavily over the novel’s end. The law, standing in conflict with a harmony of natural and human values, prevails. The old orchard keeper is hunted down, finally arrested for shooting an “X” in a metal tank, which he takes as a gross intrusion in his life, and committed to an asylum. Sylder is picked up by the law, too, for transportation of illegal substances. The boy, John Wesley, leaves the area, returning some years later, in the last episode of the novel, to find his mother’s grave.
Bibliography
Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Lilley, James D., ed. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Owens, Barley. McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.
Wallach, Rick, ed. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times Magazine 19 (April, 1992): 28-31.
Young, Thomas Daniel. Tennessee Writers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.