Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3
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Caves as Anti-Places: Robert Penn Warren's The Cave and Cormac McCarthy's Child of God / Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher
Abstract: In Robert Penn Warren's poem "Speleology," a young boy turns off his flashlight deep in a cave and knows "darkness and depth and no Time." This poem's powerful imagery of the spatial otherness of caves is the starting point for this article, which argues that analyzing the literary representation of natural subterranean voids requires a careful re-theorisation of the dynamic relations of space and place. The difficult question of how meaning comes to be attached to a particular space, thus transforming it into place, is central to Robert Penn Warren's The Cave and Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, both of which depict male protagonists who retreat underground, albeit for quite different purposes. As Eric Prieto explains, place is a "human relation. There is no set of immanent ontological features adhering to a given site that would allow us to define it as a place." According to the standard definition, a cave is a natural cavity beneath the land large enough to admit a human body, but-as the novels selected for this essay show-caves fascinate and terrify us because they confound human assumptions about our role in assigning meaning to the earth's spaces.
Keywords: Literature; Caves; Place and Space; Geography; Robert Penn Warren; Cormac McCarthy
<1> According to the standard scientific definition, a cave is a natural hollow beneath the surface of the earth that is large enough for humans to enter, but in broader cultural terms caves are rarely understood or depicted as spaces where humans belong or fit. Instead, from the human/aboveground perspective, caves are other spaces, settings within which we can only dwell uncomfortably and temporarily. E. Relph begins Place and Placelessness by insisting on the primary significance of place to human life: "To be human is to live in a world that is filled with places: to be human is to have and to know your place" (1). Yi-Fu Tuan makes a similar claim on the first page of his seminal book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience when he yokes "a sense of place" to the human need for home: "Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted" (3). Relph's and Tuan's books were published within a year of each other-in 1976 and 1977 respectively-and, while others have interrogated some of the nuances of their arguments, their central claims remain current and influential, and continue to warrant further unpacking. For these key figures in late twentieth-century humanistic geography, place is an ontological necessity which merits serious and ongoing theorization. In this paper we look to fictions set partly in deep caves to ask: what can we learn about the concepts of space and place-and, in particular, their relevance and value for literary studies-by thinking about locations beyond what Tuan terms "the lived world"?
<2> It has become a critical commonplace for scholars of space and place to point to the imprecision of these foundational terms and the consequent lack of certainty about their relationship. Phil Hubbard begins his entry "Space/Place" in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas by pointing to the ongoing challenge these terms pose in cultural geography and cognate fields: "Though the concepts of space and place may appear self-explanatory, they have been (and remain) two of the most diffuse, ill-defined and inchoate concepts in the social sciences and humanities" (41). Place, Tim Cresswell writes, "is a word that seems to speak for itself" (1), whereas "[s]pace is a more abstract concept" (8). Cresswell offers "a meaningful location" as "the most straightforward and common definition of place" (7) and, in broad terms, this simple definition holds sway in the theoretical discourse informing geocriticism as it develops and refines its critical vocabulary. How, for instance, does the term "setting" operate in relation to the space-place dyad? Is setting an under-theorised concept in literary studies because, as Creswell writes of place, it too "is a word wrapped in common sense," "a word that seems to speak for itself" (1)?
<3> The distinction and the relationship between "space" and "place" is, fairly obviously, a key question for geocriticism as it seeks to build flexible and resilient theoretical frameworks for analysing the meaning and significance of literary settings. In Robert T. Tally Jr.'s words, "geocriticism attempts to understand the real and fictional spaces that we inhabit, cross through, imagine, survey, modify, celebrate, disparage and on and on in infinite variety" ("Translator's Preface" x). The still-evolving geocritical brief asks more of researchers than the close analysis of settings in literary texts, but this work is clearly one of its primary hermeneutic challenges. This article responds to this challenge by attempting a geocritical analysis of the subterranean settings in Robert Penn Warren's The Cave (1959) and Cormac McCarthy's Child of God (1973) and argues that the baseline terms "space" and "place" are inadequate conceptual tools for thinking about caves-real or imagined.
<4> Tuan's pithy explanation of the relationship between space and place is well known and resonates with both authors' approaches to setting: "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value" (6). Once the caves in these novels are entered and inhabited by humans they cease to be spaces, but to designate them places would be to miss the important subtleties of their authors' fictional (and theoretical) projects. The exploration of the spatial continuum in these novels-with undifferentiated space at one extreme and home at the other-suggests a third term: the caves are anti-places. They are locations that seem to mirror the personal and communal places through which characters traverse and within which they dwell on the surface, but that never become their equivalents. We use the prefix anti- here for a number of reasons: to denote opposition, reversal, rivalry, and difference. Both novels, although to different degrees, depict caves and surface environments in a relation of opposition, most notably with reference to the absence of light. The caves are portrayed as antithetical to the normative places of everyday life; in each novel they attract male central characters that are anachoristic figures in the domestic and social spaces of East Tennessee. Further, the absence of diurnal rhythms deep underground fuels both novels' fascination with the capacity of cave settings to reverse or undo the spatial logics which are the basis of the "lived world." One of the goals of geocriticism is to challenge the assumed supremacy of character over setting in most literary criticism, but, unsurprisingly, achieving this goal is hindered by the lack of a rich and nuanced critical vocabulary to rival that available for analyzing the roles and functions of human actors in fiction. The idea of "anti-place" is therefore a somewhat speculative one, a response to what we perceive as a need for an equivalent spatial term to "anti-hero." The caves in these novels exploit and expose conventions of spatial representation in fiction (and, we would argue, beyond the pages of novels) and thus shed new light on the assumptions which govern the depiction of more mundane settings.
<5> In his recent book, Eric Prieto explains, place is a "human relation. There is no set of immanent ontological features adhering to a given site that would allow us to define it as a place" (xx). This article focuses on the spatial identities of two characters who, unable to find their place in the aboveground world, albeit for different reasons, search for a place in the labyrinths under Tennessee: Jasper Herrick, the "poor cave-crawling hillbilly" (25) from Warren's The Cave, and Lester Ballard, the "misplaced and loveless simian" (21) who retreats underground in McCarthy's Child of God (1973). For James H. Justus, The Cave is both Warren's "most experimental novel" (Introduction viii) and, when judged as a realist novel, a "mimetic failure" (ix) for its depiction of both people and place. The novel is set in 1955 in a fictional East Tennessee town, Johntown, "located somewhere between Knoxville and Chattanooga" (Justus, "Introduction" ix), but, for Justus, the setting is "curiously generalized and only perfunctorily anchored to geography" (x). Justus reads The Cave, which is loosely based on the death of cave explorer Floyd Collins in Sand Cave, Kentucky, in 1924, as a "subterranean drama of the self" (xi) in which setting's main function is symbolic. Warren visited and made notes about Sand Cave in preparation for writing the novel (Justus vii), but the description of place itself, for Justus, remains subordinate to characterization, which, he claims, draws "almost compulsively … on metaphors of inside, within, beneath, underneath, and similar spatial images" (xiv). Child of God, in contrast, is deeply anchored in the geography and history of Sevier County, where McCarthy lived in the 1960s (Luce 172). Dianne C. Luce explains that the caves "which form a locus for much of the significant action of the novel, are verifiable in all their mineral and organic details" (172) and compares the historical records of floods in Sevierville with the plot of the novel to suggest that the novel's main action takes place in 1957. [1] Whilst The Cave may not be deeply anchored in the geography of Tennessee in the way McCarthy's novel clearly is, setting is nevertheless foregrounded throughout the novel, securely locating it in spatial if not strictly geographic terms.
<6> Jay Ellis, in the first chapter of his book No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, offers a brief, but useful, definition of his key terms, space and place:
I will employ the terms [sic.] place in opposition to space to distinguish between constraints on character movement (both indoor and outdoor) and the void of the natural world without human construction. Briefly, a place is a construction of the possibilities of space into a fixed set of circumstances. Place is ontological, space existential. (17)
There are two issues raised by Ellis's approach to space and place as key concepts for literary analysis, which suggest the need for more nuanced ways of accounting for the continuum of spatial possibilities describable as "place." First, to describe space as "the void of the natural world without human construction" is to designate it as utterly abstract and beyond human perception. Space, according to this view is the empty and null zone which exists prior to place, but which can never be apprehended as such. The upshot of this approach is that space is, in itself, unrepresentable from the viewpoint of characters, except as an abstracted and imaginary site of possibility; "space" is thus not a synonym for "setting." Second, for Ellis, place transforms "the possibilities of space into a fixed set of circumstances," but-as dramatized by the novels discussed in this article-place-making does not negate the potential for change Ellis attaches to the concept of space. Not only can a place be reconstructed and re-mapped, but the same "space" can be seen and experienced as multiple, even opposed, "places" by different people, both individually and collectively. Ellis argues that McCarthy's fiction is built on an awareness of the complex dynamics of space and place and points in particular to the frequency with which his novels depict characters constrained by the "gravity of houses" and caught up in "the pull of unnatural graves" (17). He writes that "McCarthy relies more on setting than on plot, or even character" (1); this claim rings as true for Warren, who, as Ellis says of McCarthy, "lavishes words on space and place" (2).
<7> As Justus notes, "Warren was drawn to caves" (vii). His 1978 autobiographical poem "Speleology," recalls his boyhood adventures exploring a cave near his home in the Kentucky karst. According to the poem, he "first found the cave-mouth" when he was six years old and returned every summer to peer in to its "inner dark" and to creep gradually deeper, but was not bold enough to venture into its true depths until he was twelve and "now had me a flashlight." Deep in the cave, the boy "cut off the light" and "Knew darkness and depth and no Time." He crawled further and lay still, "Light out, unmoving […]":
Lulled as by song in a dream, knowing
I dared not move in darkness so absolute.
I thought: This is me. Thought: Me-who am I? Felt
Heart beating as though to a pulse of darkness and earth, and thought
How would it be to be here forever, […] (382)
The physical dimensions of the cave restrict the boy's movement the deeper he goes-the roof becomes "lower and lower"-but it is the absolute darkness that immobilizes him. Laying still deep in the cave, the boy both experiences his body as the container of self ("This is me") and is prompted to question where the coordinates of his self begin and end ("Me-Who am I?"). In a scene of existential reverie, the boy and the cave become almost coextensive phenomena as he feels his "Heart beating as though to a pulse of darkness and earth" (382). E. Relph, in Place and Placelessness, mentions caves as one of a variety of places which can "constitute the basis for the discovery of self" in childhood: "caves or trees or even a corner of the house" exemplify the kinds of "childhood places" which "frequently take on great significance and are remembered with reverence" (11). Relph's inclusion of caves in this short list seems counter-intuitive. Unlike the nooks-and-crannies of childhood houses and gardens, for most of us caves are not part of our everyday environment, but extraordinary settings of wonder and adventure, or fear. The psychological significance and power of the cave in Warren's poem comes not from a sense that it became a "private place" to which he could retreat-the depths of caves resist such domestication-but its status beyond the boundaries of everyday life. Simply, the boy is changed by his encounter with the cave, but he does not belong there.
<8> The lure of the cave continues to exert its pull on Warren's narrator into adulthood. "Years later, past dreams" the poem's narrator/Warren has "lain in darkness and heard the depth of that unending song" (382) and wondered, "What would it be like to be, in the end, part of all" (383). The poem's next and final line presents the narrator's imaginative return to the cave of his boyhood as an existential habit: "And in darkness have even asked: Is this all? What is all?" (383). This poem, like so many other literary representations of subterranean spaces, pictures the cave as a tomb-the boy lies still as a corpse beneath the ground. Importantly, however, the cave is more than a symbolic space in "Speleology." It is a series of hollows carved in limestone by water over millennia where "chambers of darkness rose and stalactites down-stabbed" and cannot be defined or co-opted by the human processes which impose meaning on the spaces of the earth.
<9> To an extent, Warren's poem depicts a process of personal place-making which transforms a cave from undifferentiated "space" into meaningful "place" for one individual, but we argue that these terms are inadequate to the task of analyzing literary (and, indeed, non-literary) representations of caves. Thinking about "cavescapes" reveals blind spots in the lexicon of literary and cultural geography, which, for obvious reasons, has been developed to describe and analyze natural and built environments on the planet's surface.
<10> The aboveground bias in theories of space and place is not surprising (and may even be necessary), but it does merit consideration, not least because turning our attention to caves involves asking what is taken for granted in the definition and use of key spatial concepts across the social sciences and humanities. For instance, Tuan explains that the "organization of human space is uniquely dependent on sight" (16). This means that, as Tim Cresswell writes, "Landscape is an intensely visual idea" (10). The panoramic perspective that "landscape" implies is impossible deep underground, not just because there is no natural light, but because-even with the aid of a flashlight-there is no horizon. From the perspective of phenomenology, the "vocabularies of spatial organization and value have certain common terms," which are "ultimately derived from the structure and value of the human body" (Tuan 37): upright/prone; high/low; front/back; right/left. However, entering deep caves recalibrates perceptions of circumambient space when underground and then invites reflection on experiences of space on the surface. The Norwegian archaeologist Hein Bjartmann Bjerck argues that, in phenomenological terms, caves present us with the "opposite of the living world":" caves are silent and static - the chaotic complexity of movements and sensory impressions in the day life outside is absent" (58-59). For humans, Bjerck writes, "being in a cave is like being dead or unborn." He therefore wonders whether the "most profound embodied experience" of spending time in a cave occurs not underground, but at the moment when "you re-enter life and the light outside: your reset senses are suddenly bombarded by all the ordinary things that filled them and your brain to a degree that borders on invisibility prior to the time spent in the dark void" (59). Warren's The Cave and McCarthy's Child of God show that thinking about caves puts pressure on key concepts for describing and understanding the earth and our place on (or in) it. Both novels reveal the potential of caves to confound assumptions about the roles people play in assigning meaning to the earth's spaces and to approach fuller responses to the question, "Where are we?"
<11> The plot of Warren's The Cave revolves around the fate of Jasper Harrick, the cave-crawler who for the entire novel is trapped underground. Justus refers to him as a "kind of non-character who appears only in flashbacks" (viii). Similarly, Randolph Runyon suggests that he is "the absent center around which the plot unfolds" (45), but it is more apposite to suggest that while he is undoubtedly the absent character around which the plot unfolds, a geocentric reading of the novel favours the cave itself as the space around which the plot of the novel revolves. This is true metaphorically in so much as Jasper's entrapment and death in the cave is at the centre of the novel, but also literally as all the major characters of the novel-Jo-Lea Bingham, Monty Harrick, Jack and Celia Harrick, MacCarland Sumpter, Isaac Sumpter, and Nick Papadoupalous-as well as a number of minor ones are drawn to the cave mouth. Indeed the gathering of Warren's congeries of searchers at the cave mouth is central to the action of the novel, and provides its structural climax (Justus, "The Uses of Gesture" 451). In this novel setting occupies the central position that is normally filled by the protagonist. Further, the working title of the novel, The Man Below, which, as Allen Shepherd notes, "would have better suggested the centrality and mystery of Jasper Harrick's fate" (47), was dropped in favour of The Cave, which better suggests the centrality of spatiality, and recognizes the way cave images shape every aspect of the novel.
<12> Isaac Sumpter, who had hoped to gain from Jasper's discovery of a new cave on land owned by his family, sees new potential for profit in the caver's disappearance and pretends to have found him trapped and alive. Isaac calls the editor of the Nashville Press-Clarion to report that a Korean War veteran is lost in his cave: "There is a guy caught in a cave up here. He is a sort of romantic and colorful guy, half-ass war hero etcetera" (195). The journalist is not persuaded that Jasper's entrapment is a "big" story: "I don't care-and the whole bleeding world waiting for the sunrise does not care-if half the hillbillies in East Tennessee get stuck in caves" (184). The name Sumpter is doubly ironic: sumpter is a now rare word for a pack-animal or beast of burden, and, in caving parlance, a sump is a water-filled section of cave passage, impassable without submergence. Isaac carries food, water, and a heat pad underground but is lying when he tells the press and the community that he has reached the dying boy: "I am the guy went in. I am the guy found him. I am the guy with the face-to-face" (236). Still determined to cast Jasper as a new Floyd Collins (see 195), Isaac makes tape recordings for Nashville radio, speaking into his recorder at the cave mouth, "'A man is in the ground,' he began to speak to the tape':
A man is in the ground. He is a young man. He is a brave man. He has been decorated for valor, in the Korean War. Wounded, he rallied a platoon, and hung to a shell-swept, hell-swept hill-side. This afternoon, he looked into my face, deep underground, trapped in the crawlway of a cave, a stone on his leg, and said, 'This is tougher than Korea. But I'm going to make it,' he said. (236-37)
"A man is in the ground"-Isaac's brief opening sentence is a distillation of one of the key ideas raised by the novel; Jasper's identity is determined by his spatial condition. Setting is the bedrock for character here and throughout the novel.
<13> In keeping with our geocentric reading, Jasper can be seen as an anti-character (hardly an anti-hero), anachoristic or out of place, who seeks to escape the identity imposed on him by his father (perhaps an anti-hero) and a community that persists in casting him as Jack Herrick's son, "a chip off the old block" (14). This explains in part why the deep cave in which he is entombed is never more than an anti-place. Moreover, the reader rarely enters the cave, few characters enter the cave (and only one character actually reaches Jasper), but every major character in the novel, as well as a number of minor ones congregates in the clearing around the cave mouth-what Madison Jones labels "a center-stage in the novel" (54)-a liminal space which, during the course of the novel, is transformed into an anthropomorphized place. Ironically, by getting stuck in the cave, Jasper draws towards him the very community he is trying to escape, and in the process the hitherto undifferentiated space of the cave mouth is transformed into differentiated human place.
<14> The first paragraph of the The Cave, which describes a pair of boots, concludes with a sentence which highlights Jasper's absence in the novel in spatial terms: "But the man was not there" (3). The chapter as a whole introduces the spatial tensions which are central to the novel: between here and there; home and away; inside and outside; open and closed; and, of course, above and below. It goes on to describe a karst landscape, a guitar, and the mouth of a cave:
a longitudinal opening in the rocks, a vestibule, a jutting overhang of mossy limestone, and farther in, another opening, not nearly as big, a couple of feet high, three across. The opening of the vestibule, dark green with moss, fern hanging lacily over it, trefoil to one side, is very pretty. (6)
This early description begins the process of articulating the cave mouth as place. The word "vestibule," which carries with it a metaphor of home, replaces the more abstract "longitudinal opening" with a sense of security, which is reinforced by the words "lacily," "trefoil," and "pretty."
<15> And just as we encounter the cave mouth through anthropomorphic and architectural metaphorics, so the reader is constantly invited to see human bodies and the interiors of houses in the novel through cave metaphorics. Thus, for example, in a passage which recalls the transition through the darkening zones of a cave, Monty imagines Jo-Lea going into her house, "moving into the gloom of the front hall … into the deeper gloom of the back hall and body of the house … into an even more mysterious and shadowy region" (11). There are references to "the dark of the hall" (385) in the Harrick house, the other site which, along with the cave mouth, draws all the major characters of the novel. Similarly, self and cave metaphors are ubiquitous: Jo-Lea "drowned darkly inward into herself" (12); "in that deep, dark, angry secret center of [Nick Pappy's] being tears fell without ceasing" (42); and Monty's chest "seemed as big and deep as a cave" (343). These are, as Richard A. Davidson rightly observes, "the dark inner recesses … that must be explored just as the actual cave in which Jasper is trapped must be explored" (352). In this the novel draws a comparison between the processes of identity formation and place making, not least because both processes (apprehensible only in retrospect) are at once deeply personal and inescapably social and cultural.
<16> Jasper has taken refuge in caves, which for him, as he crawled through them, were transformed from undifferentiated spaces to places of retreat, places where he could breathe. According to his mother, Celia, "That's why he crawled in the ground. To get away from everything" (298). When Celia asked him what lured him underground he answered: "It's not what you'd expect down there … It's not like what above-ground folks would expect … It's a nice temperature down there … It is not summer and it is not winter. There aren't any seasons to bother about down there" (239-40). The incommensurability of human time and geological time Jasper identifies here reinforces our idea of the dark recesses of the cave as anti-place. For most of the characters in the novel, caves are spaces of darkness, separate from the places where they dwell, and with Jasper trapped underground Celia imagines him amongst the eyeless cave creatures: "They hopped on your face in the dark, and, oh God, can you breathe darkness instead of air?" (203). For Celia, the absolute darkness of the cave makes it a space to be feared; but for Jasper, the subterranean passages are transformed into secure, albeit solitary, place. Jasper, alone, could breathe the darkness, because his knowledge of the deep cave, and the value with which he endows it has transformed it, for him, from space to place, while for the other characters in the novel it remains, in Tuan's terms, undifferentiated space.
<17> The human proximity to caves, here as in Warren's poem "Speleology," prompts existential questions about identity. "Who am I?" is a key question that each of the major characters must confront during the course of this novel, and the cave proves to be the key metaphor used by Warren for the exploration of the inner self of his characters. Jasper, quite literally, searches for his identity-in the subterranean karst caverns below East Tennessee. His metaphorical search, plainly manifested in his cave-crawling, leads him away from place into space or what turns out to be anti-place, where he dies. Jasper's quest for self-discovery leads to darkness and silence; it is an anti-bildungsroman, simultaneously an exploration and a burial, through which other characters do achieve growth as they perform their roles in the drama of the trapped caver. Or, as Davison puts it: "Jasper's figurative search is implicit in his cave-crawling. He alone is sacrificed. And it is through his physical entombment and eventual death that others achieve insights into themselves" (356). Thus, as Jasper is trapped in the actual cave, so each of the other major characters is trapped in the dark recesses of the caves of their inner selves. Jasper will not emerge again into the daylight, but others, through his plight, are given that opportunity.
<18> Andre Keller Estes identifies space/place as one of a set of interrelated binaries that are especially relevant to reading MacCarthy's fiction, which, he argues, "shift[s] the emphasis of the narration from people to the environments which surround them" (43). [2] In the opening scene of Child of God the titular character, Lester Ballard, watches from the sidelines as his family property is sold at auction, but he is not the focalizer here or at any point during the novel. In the novel's first paragraph, people approach the auction site "like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun" (5) to stop before "an aged clapboard house that stood in blue shade under the wall of the mountain" (5). The first description of Ballard depicts him as an already displaced figure, a witness to the oddly festive auction, but on its periphery: "To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door" (5). Ballard watches from a distance-as he does on numerous occasions throughout the novel, sometimes through the sights of his rifle-but he is a voyeur without authority. Like Jasper Herrick, Ballard does not fit comfortably in the social economy and geography of East Tennessee, even though the community and environment of Sevierville is ill defined in comparison to Warren's Johntown. Whereas Jasper retreats into caves voluntarily (even happily), Ballard is forcefully rejected and ejected and so is driven first to the outskirts of the community and then underground.
<19> As the auction gets underway, Ballard stands beyond the house at the barn door, "small, unclean, unshaven," his investment in the event indicated by "a constrained truculence" (5). Importantly, Ballard's distance from the narrative viewpoint is signaled by the same sentence that asks readers to consider their own proximity to him. The narrator proposes that this man in the shadows is, "A child of God much like yourself perhaps" (6). Standing in the "laddered light from the barnslats" (6) Ballard is symbolically caged: "he moves along the barn wall, himself fiddlebacked with light, a petty annoyance flickering across the wallward eye" (6). Three perspectives overlap in the phrase "wallward eye"-the abstracted third-person narrator, the people filling up the yard, and the reader-a conflation which positions the reader as both audience to and complicit in Ballard's eviction. When Ballard challenges the auctioneer-"I want you to get your godamn ass off my property" (8)-he is struck in the head with the bit of an axe, after which he "never could hold his head right" (10). Jay Ellis argues that "every subsequent action" (68) of Ballard, from murder to necrophilia to troglodytism, follows from this double "unhousing" (69), which both sees him without a home and leaves him with acquired brain injury. In these terms, Ballard is a disturbing (even sickening) figure of devolution or degeneracy, but the key to understanding his actions is not deciphering his personal motivations, but appreciating the grave consequences of violent social exclusion.
<20> Ballard seeks shelter first in an abandoned two-room cabin, where, through somewhat heavy-handed symbolism, he is compared to a prehistoric cave dweller and his descent into the caves foreshadowed. On his first night in the house, he gathers his meager belongings around him, puts a lamp on the floor in the middle of the "barren room" and sits, "crosslegged" before it, roasting pieces of potato on a coat-hanger (15-16). Later scenes expand on this cruel (or crude) parody of the life of a Stone Age cave dweller. Rejected by the dumpkeeper's daughters-"gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits" (27)-Ballard finds a "lady sleeping under the trees in a white gown" (40) on Frog Mountain and watches to see if she is dead. When she wakes, "slack mouth twisted" and emitting "a sweet ferment of whiskey and rot" (40), the ensuing struggle between the half-drunk, staggering woman armed with a rock and brain-addled Ballard emphasizes the latter's extreme isolation. At a local fair, he wins two bears and a tiger at the shooting gallery before the "pitchman" takes the rifle away from him, hissing, "That's it for you, buddy" (61), effectively banishing him from the social space of the fairground. The stuffed animals "watch from the wall" (64) of his cabin as he eats his cornbread mush, like spoils of the hunt, "their plastic eyes shining in the firelight and their red flannel tongues out" (64). Ballard, crouching alone in his hovel-cum-cave on the fringes of town, is good with a gun, but the townspeople fail to recognize that his decline into degeneracy presages abject violence.
<21> The characterization of Ballard as a regressive figure is reinforced by the strong parallel the text draws between him and the child Billy, a "huge-headed bald and slobbering primate that inhabit[s] the lower reaches" (74) of his neighbour's house. Like Ballard, Billy (the off-rhyme of their names seems deliberate) is an "idiot child" (113) who occupies "the lower reaches," watching those who look down on him through "dull eyes" (74). Ballard's strange alignment with this "gross tottertoy" (85) and his view from beneath, is strengthened by his association with the dump, the quarry, and the turnaround on Frog Mountain, all environments of detritus, rubble, and waste.
<22> Ballard's degeneration gains momentum when he stumbles upon a dead couple in a car, suspended mid-coitus by carbon monoxide poisoning, and drags the woman from the vehicle. He becomes an opportunistic necrophile: "A crazy gymnast laboring over a cold corpse. He poured into that waxen ear everything he'd ever thought of saying to a woman" (84). After he loses his first "dead girlfriend" (Sullivan), Ballard shoots Billy's mother and carries her away into the night, and, as is revealed later in the novel, towards the "constant night" of the dripping caves beneath the mountain (125). Despite the subtle link drawn between the women's bodies and the "damp stone corridors down inside the mountain" (126)-his first victim's "waxen ear" is recalled by the cave walls' "waxed or lacquered" (126) appearance-the caves in this novel are more back passage than they are birth canal. Billy's mother's dismissal of Ballard as "shit crazy" (110)-moments before he murders her-turns out to be more insightful than it first seems.
<23> In the scene immediately following the horrific death of Billy's mother, Ballard is interrogated by the sheriff about the fire that destroyed the abandoned cabin, now identified as "Mr Waldrop's house" (115). The lawman's advice to Ballard is portentous: "you are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in" (115). The "other place" Ballard finds is, of course, the caves:
Here the walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and bloodred mud, had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast. Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints. (126-27)
In the mythology of many and diverse cultures, Tuan writes, "The earth is the human body writ large" (89). Caves are routinely imagined in literature and art as the cavities and inner passages of the human body (Crane and Fletcher). In Child of God, they are the bowels. Later, when Ballard walks outside, his tracks come "from the cave bloodred with cave-mud" (132-33), joining the patterns on the snow already made by the tracks of a fox "intaglio like little mushrooms and berrystains where birds shat crimson mutes upon the snow like blood" (130). Ballard does not emerge from the earth reborn but as human waste; in figurative terms, he is not coated in vernix caseosa, but in excrement.
<24> According to the dark geopoetics of Child of God, the binary hierarchies and structures of power that exclude some people and sustain others follow spatial logics. Ballard fails in his attempt to create his home in caves because place-making cannot be an eccentric process, but must be socially, culturally, and economically endorsed. The caves are thus rendered anti-place and function as a literary device to force readers to take heed of the consequence of failing to attend to the expelled and to the zones of exclusion. When Sevierville floods, Ballard attempts to salvage his belongings-"a crate of odd miscellany" (146)-and wades into the surging creekbed. A log spins "broadside to him": "It came bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome" (146-47). The imagery here explicitly recalls the description of the "darker pool" of Ballard's urine when he relieves himself against the barn wall in the opening scene, a pool "wherein swirls a pale foam with bits of straw" (6). As in this early scene-when the reader is asked to consider that this pathetic figure is "A child of God like yourself perhaps" (6)-the narrator exhorts readers to acknowledge that Ballard's depravity is not his alone: "You could say that he's sustained by his fellow man, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it" (147). Ballard is emblematic of the dispossessed and the disowned, but the reader is continually reminded that this "crazed mountain troll" (143) who "passe[s] beneath" (145) the townsfolk was produced and sustained by them.
<25> After Ballard is captured and imprisoned following a failed attempt to murder John Greer-who shoots the crazed caveman's arm off-he guides a vigilante mob underground and becomes lost after evading his captors. The metaphoric register used to picture the caves in the novel's final pages expands and they become brain hollows and birth canal. Trapped for more than three days in the dark and the damp, Ballard imagines mice nesting in the "lobed caverns where his brains had been" and has "cause to wish for some brute midwife to spald him from his rocky keep" (180). After digging his way to the surface, Ballard returns to the hospital: "His eyes were caved and smoking. I'm supposed to be here, he said" (182).
<26> In the end, Ballard cannot exist elsewhere, and so-with pathetic insight-returns to the only place he can survive. In contrast, in Warren's The Cave Jasper Herrick is trapped in an anti-place, where he cannot survive.
<27> Though it is tempting for the literary scholar to take space and place for granted-to accept that they are components that seem to speak for themselves-the spatial otherness of the subterranean settings in both these novels cannot readily be understood through a straightforward space/place binary. Moreover, our understanding of the two central protagonists, Jasper Harrick and Lester Ballard, is limited by the extent of our understanding of setting in these novels. Thus the term anti-place has been a key concept in our reading of Warren's The Cave and McCarthy's Child of God. It is no longer space, but nor is it humanized place. Importantly, anti-place is not an inflexible neologism, a convenient term for our discussion of these two admittedly unusual novels, but a concept that, by extending our understanding of space and place-"the lived world"-may prove useful to researchers wishing to approach settings (real or imagined) in literary texts from a more nuanced and flexible geocritical perspective.
Notes
[1] See Luce's essay for a detailed discussion of McCarthy's historical and scientific sources for Child of God, especially in relation to the history and geography of Tennessee and the psychology of necrophilia.
[2] The other pairs of terms suggested by Estes are environmental criticism/ecocriticism, machine/garden, nature/culture, biocentrism/anthropocentrism, and wilderness/civilization, all of which would be relevant to a fuller study of the literary representation of caves.
Works Cited
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Crane, Ralph, and Lisa Fletcher. Cave: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion, 2015. Forthcoming.
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