Name: I've always maintained that hogs is hogs
Item: Outer Dark
Author: steerpike

Outer Dark →

by Cormac McCarthy

I've always maintained that hogs is hogs

steerpike

Jan 06, 2025

I was trying to read The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison but found it WAY too Br*t*sh for the current mood and had to turn to McCarthy. Outer Dark scratched the ever-present Suttree itch a little, with a steady procession of grotesque yet surprisingly hospitable characters (and of course the beautiful language), but its more brutal and less funny.

Culla leaves his sister Rinthy's incest baby in the woods to die and tells her it died naturally; a tinker finds it and gives it to a wet nurse. Rinthy discovers the lie and sets out to find the baby, and Culla sets out to find her. The siblings each journey from town to town and house to house, looking for work or hospitality and having bizarre encounters.

I know McCarthy is not known for doing much right with gender, but the different ways that Culla and Rinthy were received by strangers and the different perils they encountered felt pretty perceptive on that front. Or maybe the difference between their stories was that Culla is written in a much less literal/naturalistic way, with a bit of myth or fable in how he was constantly received as a sinner (although always accused of the wrong sin), while I found Rinthy to be drawn in a more human and relatable way.

I did love that the most explicitly religious part of the book (and I think the longest conversation) is about Abrahamic pork taboo and immediately precedes a comically massive herd of hogs loosing their minds and running off a cliff:

Yessir. Makes ye wonder some about the bible and about hogs too, don’t it?
Yes, Holme said.
I’ve studied it a good deal and I cain’t come to no conclusions about it one way or the other.
No.
The drover stroked his whiskers and nodded his head. Hogs is a mystery by theyselves, he said. What can a feller know about one? Not a whole lot. I’ve run with hogs since I was just a shirttail and I ain’t never come to no real understandin of em. And I don’t doubt but what other folks has had the same experience. A hog is a hog. Pure and simple. And that’s about all ye can say about him. And smart, don’t think they ain’t. Smart as the devil. And don’t be fooled by one that ain’t got nary clove foot cause he’s devilish too.
I guess hogs is hogs, Holme said.
The drover spat and nodded. That’s what I’ve always maintained, he said.

Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.