“Things Can Always Get Worse”: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the Comitragic Arc of the Mussel-Brailing Interlude on the French Broad River in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree

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Notes

1. Robert Jarrett also acknowledges the influence of Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend upon Suttree (47). In a letter to Peter Greenleaf, McCarthy gives his opinion of Victorian literature: “I have a great admiration for Moby Dick. If I list the writers I haven’t gotten along with (but may in my dotage, who knows?) the list … would include D.H. Lawrence and Proust and Henry James and quite a few English Victorian novelists – but certainly not Hardy” (Crews 289). It is gratifying to learn that, among the great Victorian novelists, McCarthy admires Thomas Hardy, and difficult to imagine that Dickens is not regarded by him as a literary influence worthy of his attention. McCarthy seems to share his literary tastes with the character of homeless Bobby Western in The Passenger (2022) when, sheltering in an old farmhouse in Idaho for the Winter, Bobby brings with him “two boxes of paperback books. Victorian novels that he hadnt read and wouldnt but also a good collection of poetry and a Shakespeare and a Homer and a Bible” (313; emphasis added).

2. Throughout David Copperfield, the Micawbers make the celebrated declaration that “something will turn up.” For example, Mrs. Micawber avers of her husband, “he may be ready, in case of anything turning up” (171); and, again, Mr. Micawber: “Copperfield, … In case of anything turning up (of which I am rather confident), I shall be extremely happy if it should be in my power to improve your prospects” (175).

3. See Shelton and Longley for critical accounts of Suttree’s struggle and eventual reconciliation with the absurdity of life and the insuperable fact that death comes to us all.

4. The traditional pietà of Mary and Jesus is momentous in Suttree’s imagination and an inheritance of his (and McCarthy’s) lapsed Catholicism. The image of the sorrowing mother occurs to Suttree throughout the novel when his mother visits him in the workhouse, “See the mother sorrowing” (61), and again when Suttree witnesses his wife mourning their son as “madonna bereaved, so grief-stunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn” (150) and, at the graveside, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” (153).