The Sunset Limited

Here in the last few days of "vacation" before returning to begin the new semester, I've been reading a lot, trying to get in as much of what I want to read before I come up against what I have to read. Not to say that I won't enjoy what I read this coming semester--I will; but I still have to read it.

Only a few minutes ago, I read a recent work by one of my favorite authors--Cormac McCarthy. The work is The Sunset Limited, a Novel in Dramatic Form. The picture here is the cover. The two yellow images are the headlights of a train--which is what the Sunset Limited actually is--coming through a tunnel. The story is these two guys talking, with some moving around a little kitchen--making coffee, reading the paper and so on. One guy is black and uneducated, an ex-con who has a good mind and a strong faith in God. The other guy is white, a well-to-do professor of something. How do these two end up together in the black guy's kitchen? Apparently the suicidal professor was about to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of the Sunset Limited when the black guy stopped him. Somehow the black guy gets the professor back to his (the black guy's) apartment, where he tries to convince the professor that God is real and life is worth living.

The descriptive phrase "Novel in Dramatic Form" means what it says. The work is not in narrative form. It's more like a play. It's just dialogue, with some small descriptions of action (stage directions) plugged in here and there. Here's a random example:

White: Tell me something.

Black: Sure.

White: Why are you here? What do you get out of this? You seem like a smart man.

Black: Me? I'm just a dumb country nigger from Lousiana. I done told you. I aint never had the first thought in my head. If it aint in here then I dont know it.

He holds the bible up off the table and lays it down again.

White: Half the time I think you're having fun with me. . . .

In 2006, the work was performed as a two-man play in Chicago and New York.

I'm going to have to think about this one and read it again (and maybe again). I'm just not sure what I think about it. The black man is at times a little preachy, which probably is to be expected. He's living in a crack house or something like that and trying to save some people from themselves. He's got this weary suicidal white man, whom he's also trying to save, in his kitchen. I guess he's got a right to be preachy.

But it's the white professor who bothers me. He seems so much the stereotype of the hyper-educated man whose education has allowed him such a clear view of the world (supposedly) that he has no sense of faith. He claims never to have had one. He thinks the world beyond redemption. In fact, it can't be redeemed because it was never any good in the first place. Like so many, he blames God for this. Near the end of the work, as he is apparently preparing to go out and finish the suicide he was prevented from finishing earlier, he says to the black man, "Your God must have once stood in a dawn of infinite possibility and this is what he's made of it." The professor isn't one of those atheists who probably aren't really atheists at all, who argue and argue, who kick and scream, against a being they supposedly don't believe exists.

The black man seems utterly wasted by the white man's arguments, especially, it seems, the one where the white man doesn't want to go to a heaven where he'd have to see his "mama" again. And in the end, the white leaves the black on his knees and promising a silent God that he'll keep his word for him: "That's all right. That's all right. If you never speak again, you know I'll keep your word. You know I will. You know I'm good for it."

I'm still digesting all the final arguments and the final lines. My gut reaction, however, is that all the white's big arguments are in some sense an eloquent attempt to cover a spiritual weakness, a spiritual laziness. If he truly didn't believe in God, could he have been saved from suicide by the discovery of a passion or by finding a level of faith and a value in his own humanity?

While I admire Cormac McCarthy's art, I have to say after a first reading of The Sunset Limited that Flannary O'Connor handles these questions and crises better than he and that he himself handles them better in his narrative fiction.