DeCoste applied the Ford Madox Ford inspired "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Professing Darkness would seem, on the face of it, to offer an instance of a text that fails Ford’s test. Engaged in a detailed reading of the final pages of just one of the dozen McCarthy works that my book considers, it seems far too focused a passage to fairly represent the monograph as a whole. It reads as follows:Learn more about Professing Darkness at the LSU Press website.result of his denying his own culpability and his embracing Enlightenment dreams of perfection. Yet even years after this grisly climax, Holme is granted another chance to repent of his crimes against charity and community, but while Frye contends that his travels culminate “in a realization, albeit a weak one, of his own error and a muted attempt to correct it” (“Histories” 8), Outer Dark instead concludes with Holme affirming both his refusal of relationship and the guiltlessness of that choice. His encounter with a blind man offers him a moment in which he may both heed the gospel of forgiveness and perform an atoning altruistic act. “Ragged and serene” (239), this sightless itinerant hails the passing Culla, attempts friendly conversation, and extends concern: “Is they anything you need?” (240). He denies the title of preacher, asking “What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh” (240). He then shares a tale of a failed faith healer and expresses the desire to find that man and relieve him of whatever guilt he may yet feel: “If somebody don’t tell him he never will have no rest” (241). While the blind man offers welcome, models solicitude, and implies that the Incarnation expresses both a duty to succor others and universal access to divine solace, Culla wants none of it. In keeping with his mercenary outlook, he assumes this evangelist’s overtures are those of a salesman and seeks to move on. Doing so, he finds that the road terminates in an impassable swamp, “a landscape of the damned” (242). Returning, he spies the blind man still coming and passes by him without a word, reflecting “did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way” (242). Even here, Holme might be the Samaritan to offer this warning, to recognize as his own the duty to extend the same concern that has been shown him. But having spent the novel betraying—in his lies and rejection of kinship—both word and flesh, Holme once again refuses the call to speak truly or forge a saving fraternity. Seeing in this refusal no sin he is empowered to commit or to forbear, he balks at that recognition of moral responsibility for and before others that is the essence of penitence, and persists in his benighted roving.The bulk of the page thus offers an interpretation of the fate of one Culla Holme, anti-hero of McCarthy’s second published novel, Outer Dark. More specifically, it argues that, even after this novel’s bloody climax (which sees him play passive witness to the murder and cannibalization of the son of his incestuous relationship with sister Rinthy), Holme is afforded a chance at reform in his meeting with the blind preacher. This, I note, he ignores. I then move on, at the foot of the page, to signal that the even more depraved Lester Ballard, necrophiliac and serial-murdering focus of McCarthy’s next novel, receives and successfully seizes upon a similar shot at redemption.
That this penitent’s hope remains open even to so perverse a figure as Culla Holme might well surprise, but the ultimate fate of Lester Ballard enacts even more forcefully Knox’s Catholic notion that no sinner is irredeemable, provided he takes the path of contrition and surrenders an enlightened insistence on his perfect sovereignty. In his lurking in the shadows and retreat to subterranean haunts, Ballard typically flees the scrutiny and judgment of his community.
I say that the test might be judged to fail here, because the claims being dealt with on page 99 are so focused and granular. The larger argument of the book is that Cormac McCarthy’s oft-noted critique of American culture is fuelled by his likewise frequently remarked interest in matters spiritual. The novelty of my study lies, first, in its drawing a clear line between these two currents in the fiction and, second, in its demonstration that the religious concepts that so frame the author’s dissection of American Enlightenment consistently derive from his education and upbringing as a Roman Catholic. Professing Darkness thus makes a case for the centrality to his fiction of such key notions as the sacramental character of creation, humanity’s fallen state, the subsequent need for charitable communion with God and neighbor, and the necessity, and radical availability, of penitential conversion. Page 99 above would seem to address but one of these four ideas as it relates to only part of a single work and with little regard for the study’s concern with Enlightenment thought or American culture.
Nonetheless, this page might also fairly be judged to pass Ford’s test. Certainly, it deals with such dominant themes of the study as sin, charity, communion, and repentance. It offers the reader a representative taste, therefore, of the tone of the work as a whole. Moreover, it fairly introduces the book’s orienting lexicon (Catholic), its methodology (close reading married to a history of ideas) and its approach—thematic, moral, and theological. As such, the browsing reader could use it to make a pretty well-informed decision as to their willingness to undertake a study of the volume as a whole.
--Marshal Zeringue
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