The Power of the Past in Cormac McCarthy's 'Wake for Susan'

Photo via Wikimedia user Ammodramus

My adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God, is in theaters today, so I wrote about McCarthy's first published short story, “Wake for Susan,” to show that he has had a fascination with death since the beginning and is the undisputed master of the Southern macabre.

In Cormac McCarthy’s first published short story, “Wake for Susan,” he allows the past to peek through the screen of the present. Some aspects of the past are visible, but others remain just out of reach, creating a sense of mystery. The past feels both monumental and ephemeral. Like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias, there is a sense of great and horrible people having done great deeds and created great edifices that are at the same time memorialized and destroyed and forgotten.

In this story, the past takes over the main narrative. Usually with McCarthy, the past is submerged behind the narrative present. But in “Wake for Susan,” the protagonist—a teenager named Wes—fantasizes about a girl named Susan who died in the century before his. His daydreams take over the narrative in such a way that his reality is often indistinguishable from hers. In his fantasies Wes projects himself as Susan’s lover and, because the fantasies are told as if they were happening in the present, Wes’s real-life activities become indistinguishable from his fantasized activities. There are so many details that it becomes unclear if Wes is draping the actions in the fantasies over actual experiences or if he is making up everything.

This approach allows McCarthy to foreground the creative act of imagination, which gives a simple story more of a punch than it would if it didn’t involve a young man pining after a dead stranger. The protagonist’s creative act of imagining the girl’s life is a metaphor for the role of the storyteller, and for the story itself.

He threw his arms around the unyielding stone and wept for lost Susan, for all the lost Susans, for all the people; so beautiful, so pathetic, so lost and wasted and ungrieved. (p. 6)

McCarthy loves the past like his character, and his approach in this story allows him to tell a simple story of young love and death while also attaining the grandeur of historical epic. The story begins with a series of small episodes that introduce the character of Wes through action, so that we can get to know the protagonist and the way he functions in the world before his fantasy takes over the narrative. It is important that we get to know Wes before we slip into his mind because he grounds the story in his head. Susan’s story is told in great detail, which gives it emotional resonance. It feels palpable.

But in the end, her story is just a fantasy and thus it is important that Wes is established as a real character. We are introduced to him at the end of an unsuccessful Sunday morning squirrel hunt and follow him on his walk home. These acts establish him as a solitary character. Even when his friend is mentioned, he is called “the Ford boy,” which suggests a lack of intimacy and an irregular companionship. This isolation sets up the daydreams that are soon to follow. Then we are shown how his imagination operates. After finding an old-fashioned rifle ball, he starts to wonder who fired it, and at whom. Several things happen here—first he conjectures that it might have been fired by a settler at an Indian, but then discards that idea for the likelier possibility.

It had been intended for game for a table of some later date when the Indians were all gone. Perhaps it had been fired only 30 or 40 years ago. The old muzzle-loaders were used in this part of the country until fairly recently, he knew. (p. 3)

By introducing the Indians and then dropping that possibility as belonging to an era too early to be plausible, McCarthy layers the history of the region. There were once Indians, and then a time when they were gone, and then there came the present of the protagonist. And in this present, we learn that this area was pretty slow to develop as they still used old-fashioned rifles and ammo until recently. The rifle ball provides the first call to the past and with it we experience the way Wes connects to history.

As Wes examined the rifle-ball, the woods became populated with ghosts of lean, rangy frontiersmen with powder-hors and bullet pouches slung from their shoulders and carrying long-barreled, brass-trimmed rifles with brown and gold maple stocks.  (p. 3)

We get the first glimpse of the way that Wes experiences history, which sets up his full leap into the past when he starts to contemplate the grave marker of Susan. The ball also leads Wes to the graveyard.

Wes pocketed the relic and walked quietly through time-haunted woods.

It was probably the discovery of the rifle-ball that prompted him to look for the burial plot.  (p. 3)

This world and this story are already drenched in the obsession with time before it gets to its main section, the fantasy of Susan.

As Wes contemplates the grave marker of Susan, the narrative in the present gradually melts away and the fantasy of the past takes over—but Wes, the creator of the fantasy, is present in both time frames and blurs them together. Wes knows nothing about the actual Susan, so when he pictures her as a blue-eyed and yellow-haired girl, it is as if he is a fiction writer creating. Here, Wes and McCarthy are doing similar actions at the same time. They are both depicting an imaginary person. The grave marker is from 1834, a year that Wes thinks is close enough to emotionally connect to. When Wes compares 1834 to two earlier years he thinks are too distant to feel the humanity that filled them, it is not insignificant that the years are 1215—the year the Magna Carta was drafted—and 1066, the year of the Battle of Hastings. More layers—this time it’s European history dug out underneath the story to give it more depth. In the next paragraph, the fantasy takes over and Wes can only be seen as his imaginary version of himself that courts Susan. But the blending of the real Wes and the imaginary Wes is very powerful. On the next page, it is very difficult to understand which Wes is being written about.

And the boy ambled home and eased wearily to bed and tossed and rolled so that the bed-ropes had to be tightened for the second time in two weeks.

Here the two versions of Wes become one as he lives out in detail what he imagines. The courtship he imagines is very uneventful and if it was told without the frame of Wes’s imagination, it would be a very plain tale. But it is Wes’s deep need to connect to that past and his loneliness and possible inability to connect to living people that makes his creation of a simple courtship so compelling.