The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy

Review by Daniel Wood — Published on February 7, 2011
Tags: cormac mccarthy, modernism

REVIEWED:
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. Picador. 176pp., $13.95.

Published as Bonus Coverage

Over the last few years, Cormac McCarthy has deservedly achieved widespread recognition as one of America’s preeminent literary novelists. After the piecemeal publication of The Border Trilogy drew critical acclaim and a popular audience throughout the 1990s, a quick succession of more recent triumphs—No Country for Old Men and its superb film adaptation, then The Road, which garnered a Pulitzer Prize, an Oprah endorsement, and another film—have shored up McCarthy’s place as a master of modern prose.

Less appreciated, however, is McCarthy’s work as a dramatist. Having initially written both Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men as screenplays, and having published an earlier screenplay, The Gardener’s Son, as well as a stage play, The Stonemason, McCarthy is no stranger to the dramatic form. Nevertheless, his dramas continue to lurk in the shadows cast by his novels.

To what extent is prose therefore the medium that best allows McCarthy’s particular talents to manifest? To what extent do his skills as an author depend upon setting down words on a page in order to coax out a distinct voice that mediates dialogue, character, and story with its own idiosyncratic ruminations? These questions seem speculative, I admit, but they must be asked because they haunt McCarthy’s latest book from the first page to the very last. That book is The Sunset Limited, a verbatim reproduction of the script for a stage play McCarthy wrote in 2006—verbatim except for the addition of a cryptic subtitle, A Novel in Dramatic Form, with which it distinguishes itself from the stage play by making an issue of its own novelistic capacity for prosaic meditation.

The play was originally staged by the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and New York throughout 2006 and the script was published as a book later that year. Now, with the broadcast of HBO’s film adaptation, the book has been republished in anticipation of a fresh audience. However, even as it remains subtitled A Novel in Dramatic Form, its origins as a work intended strictly for performance have not been airbrushed away in its transference to print.

Opening in “a room in a tenement building in a black ghetto in New York City” occupied by “[a] large black man” and “a middle-aged white man dressed in running pants and athletic shoes,” The Sunset Limited consists entirely of a one-act one-scene conversation between the two men which discloses select aspects of their histories and the fateful circumstances that have brought them together. White is a humanities professor, possibly a professor of literature, overwhelmed by an irremediable depression, perhaps stoked by his insular intellectual musings. He has come to believe that the experience of happiness is “contrary to the human condition” and that the pursuit of happiness is therefore futile. Black, in eponymous contrast to White, is a self-confessed “dumb country nigger from Louisiana” with a sharp tongue, a sharper wit than he gives himself credit for, and a bitterly self-deprecating sense of humor. Now a reformed prisoner living in a neighborhood that White describes as “a moral leper colony,” Black is able to withstand the decay surrounding him thanks to the fiery evangelical convictions that leave him convinced he is watched over by God.

Early on, it becomes clear that the unlikely union between these two men is the outcome of a forestalled suicide attempt in which Black saved White from a subway train. But far from having the avowedly atheistic White suffer a crisis of faith after he falls into the arms of an acolyte of God, The Sunset Limited instead has White yearning more than ever to die, while Black believes that this wayward soul was sent to him by God as a way of investing his own life with new purpose. Black refuses to relinquish his custodianship over White with an insistent fanaticism that White finds repulsive and that only intensifies his urge to end it all.

There is clearly a rich vein of conflict crying out for exploitation, but, unfortunately, McCarthy makes no effort to dramatize it. Rather, he takes it as a starting point for a lengthy conversation in which Black and White each try to persuade the other of the validity of his respective worldview.

Unusually for Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited is, in its entirety, one long and uninterrupted exchange of dialogue. Aside from the odd stage direction (“He spoons coffee from a can into the percolator and plugs the percolator in“) there is no pure prose to be found in its pages. As such, McCarthy labors hard to maintain a rhythm in the exchanges between Black and White by keeping their banter as pithy as possible—only a few brief monologues run longer than two or three lines—as well as by lacing it with taciturn humor. Sometimes, to his credit, the back-and-forth works well:

Black: Not too long ago I had a friend to get run down by a taxicab. Now where do you reckon he was goin? Drunk.

White: I dont know. Where was he going?

Black: Goin after more whiskey. Had plenty at the house. But a drunk is always afraid of runnin out.

White: Was he killed?

Black: I hope so. We buried him.

For the most part, however, McCarthy’s grasp on the dialogue is slack. Occasionally, in pursuit of pithiness, he recycles some of the better dialogue from his novels. In an early exchange in No Country for Old Men, for instance, as the assassin Anton Chigurh toys with the possibility of killing a gas station proprietor, he asks the proprietor how he came to acquire his business. “This was my wife’s father’s place,” the proprietor confesses, to which Chigurh replies in disgust: “You married into it . . . You married into it.” “If that’s the way you want to put it,” the proprietor concedes. “I don’t have some way to put it,” Chigurh retorts. “That’s the way it is.” Now compare that exchange to the words that pass between Black and White after White discusses his refusal to visit his dying father:

Black: Your daddy is layin on his deathbed dyin of cancer. Your mama settin there with him. Holdin his hand. He in all kinds of pain. And they ask you to come see him one last time fore he dies and you tell em no. You aint comin. Please tell me I got some part of this wrong.

White: If that’s the way you want to put it.

Black: Well how would you put it? . . . That’s the way it is.

Often, too, McCarthy’s pursuit of pithiness results in glib remarks that might serve to leaven the tension between White and Black if they didn’t undercut the credibility of both characters:

White: I dont regard my state of mind as some pessimistic view of the world. I regard it as the world itself. Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.

Black: Mm. If I’m understandin you right you sayin that everbody that aint just eat up with the dumb-ass ought to be suicidal.

That’s a street-slang summary of Camus 101 preceded by the existential lament of a middle-aged humanities professor expressed in terms more attributable to a third-year undergrad. Unfortunately, it’s also the beating heart of The Sunset Limited. Despite the rhetorical sophistication of both White and Black, the ideas they express in the course of their conversation are no more intellectually sophisticated than this one; and worse, as their exchanges veer sharply between the flippant and the overzealous, it’s difficult to take seriously their commitment to the ideas they express, even though they are both ostensibly voicing the ideas that animate and give meaning to their lives.

To what extent do McCarthy’s skills as an author depend upon setting down words on a page in order to coax out a distinct voice that mediates dialogue, character, and story with its own ruminations? Almost entirely. More than anything else, The Sunset Limited offers a reminder that the most interesting thing about McCarthy’s novels isn’t what actually happens in them so much as what the consciousness that observes or narrates what happens makes of the events before his eyes.

What is most memorable about Suttree, for instance, is not the quotidian turmoil of the protagonist’s life but the oblique personality that chronicles it: a personality wry yet sympathetic and ultimately more personable than Cornelius Suttree himself. Likewise, in Blood Meridian, the horrific bloodlust of Judge Holden pales beside the chillingly amoral consciousness that catalogues the Judge’s crimes down to their finest details; and, in No Country for Old Men, the narrative tension between the renegade Lewellyn Moss and the assassin Chigurh is less pronounced than the narratorial tension between the voice of the philosophically world-weary Sheriff Bell and the brusque, practical, impatient voice of the narrator who follows the other two men.

In The Sunset Limited, however, McCarthy’s shift to the dramatic form prevents him from bringing in a storytelling voice, and thus he forfeits his greatest asset as an author. Despite the formal ambiguities promised in its subtitle, it amounts only to McCarthy’s original script—printed, bound, and dispatched to a less obscure section of the bookstore than the one it would land in if it announced itself as what it actually is.

This month, HBO will broadcast a film adaptation of The Sunset Limited pitting Samuel L. Jackson as Black against Tommy Lee Jones as White. As was the case with No Country for Old Men and The Road, it’s possible that the adaptation will entice audiences to seek out Cormac McCarthy’s original text. If so, I think that would be a shame. The Sunset Limited is a technically and creatively pedestrian work that falls far short of what readers should expect of a master like McCarthy at this point in his career. Its value resides not in its capacity to offer readers a uniquely engaging literary experience but in its function as an instrument which illuminates, by negation, those aspects of McCarthy’s prose that make his novels so compelling. While McCarthy devotees will find it to be a critically instructive if aesthetically marginal work, my guess is that even they will end up returning to what readers less familiar with McCarthy should turn to before they turn to this: the rest of his impressive oeuvre.

Daniel Wood is a tutor and lecturer in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Published as Bonus Coverage

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