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Savage Garden: Edenic Motif and the Paradox of Civilization in Child of God

From the title and outset of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, the text explicitly frames the ensuing chronicle of Lester Ballard within a quasi-religious context. By asking readers to consider Ballard "[a] child of God much like yourself perhaps" (4) and reporting a townsperson's tracing of Lester's heritage "back to Adam" (81), the narration of Lester's descent into animalistic savagery is consistently linked to an Edenic origin of mankind. This Biblical motif is maintained throughout the novel when Ballard repeatedly demonstrates command over the natural elements (103, 139), when he is expelled from civilized housing into a characteristically pre-historic environment of woods and caves (127), and when a Biblical scene literally engulfs the town in an apocalyptic flood that can be understood as a holy judgment like the Genesis story of Noah (164). The irony of Lester's link to a religious subtext, of course, is attributed to the very acts of depraved violence that ultimately expel him from civilization. Gary M. Ciuba rightly regards Ballard's actions as part of an "ancient tradition of sacred violence" (93) rooted in Rene Girard's characterization of primitive religion's "humanizing violence," which protects people from culpability by transforming violence into a supernatural, even heavenly, force (134). In demonstrating Ballard's motivations for "transcendent transgression," Ciuba illustrates a convincing framework for understanding Ballard's violence in a metaphysical realm that contextualizes his depravity as a capacity of "being a brutal godling himself" (94). Ballard, as a child of God, seeks to ascend to godhood through violence.Considering the explicit narration of Lester's story in the novel and Ciuba's analysis reveals two simultaneous movements: civil expulsion linked with violent descent and civil expulsion linked with sacred ascension. "Movement," in this case, can be defined as thematic development tied to narrative progression-a spatial metaphor used to track and understand Lester's increasingly, transcendently violent state. Although seemingly contradictive, the two movements remain appropriate for Lester's story but for reasons other than those given in previous scholarship. Importantly, the novel's Edenic subtext ties Lester's narrative to a sacred origin. In turn, this Biblical connection implies the Girardian transformation of sacred violence, which separates violence from a traditionally "human" source. In other words, Lester's moral or supernatural movement is based on shifting perspectives of paradigm, and the same action that casts him to the bottom of humanity also propels him into godhood. In the effort to grasp the full import of the novel's philosophical and religious implications, each paradigm must be reconciled into a unified reading. The first paradigm present in the novel- McCarthy's cynical vision of Christianity-is supported by the novel's explicit narrative structure and the roles of the town and Sevier County citizens. The second paradigm-Girardian transcendence through violence-is supported by the thematic implication of Lester's narrative, theoretically placing his account into an operation of general religious ideology that deifies abominable violence by attributing it to the realm of supernatural. Conventional readings of Child of God depend on an inferred irony between the two paradigms present in the novel, resulting in a marginalization of McCarthy's explicit religious imagery in favor of Ciuba's Girardian reading of Lester. However, this character-based model of study only recognizes half of the novel's thematic significance and ignores its greater religious commentary.Offered in contrast to Lester's descent into violent depravity and simultaneous return to an Edenic and sacred origin, a progressive and moral civilization is subsequently portrayed in the narration as a movement away from an idyllic sense of this Biblical origin. In a revealing conversation, the Sevier County sheriff responds to his deputy's question about whether he thinks "people was meaner than they are now": "No, he said. …