The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy [1 ed.] 1107644801, 9781107644809, 9781107018150

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T he Ca m b ri dg e C om pa nio n to C orm ac M c Ca rt hy Cormac McCarthy both embodies and redeines the notion of the artist as outsider. His iction draws on recognizable American themes and employs dense philosophical and theological subtexts, challenging readers by depicting the familiar as inscrutably foreign. The essays in this Companion offer a sophisticated yet concise introduction to McCarthy’s dificult and provocative work. The contributors, an international team of McCarthy scholars, analyze some of the best-known and commonly taught novels – Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road – while providing detailed treatments of McCarthy’s work in cinema, including the many adaptations of his novels to ilm. Designed for scholars, teachers, and general readers, and complete with a chronology and bibliography for further reading, this Companion is an essential reference for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of one of America’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. s teve n f rye is Professor of English at California State University, Bakersield, and President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. He is the author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy and Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance, as well as numerous articles on Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, and other novelists of the American romance tradition, American naturalism, and the literature of the American west. A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.

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TH E CA MB RI DGE CO MPANI ON TO

CORMAC McCARTHY

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THE CAMBRIDGE C O M PA N I O N TO

CORMAC McCARTHY ED IT ED BY

STE VE N F RYE California State University, Bakersield

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cambri dge unive rsity press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107644809 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data The Cambridge companion to Cormac McCarthy / [edited by] Steven Frye, California State University, Bakersield. pages cm. – (Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-01815-0 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-64480-9 (paperback) 1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Frye, Steven, editor of compilation. ps3563.c337z624 2009 813′.54–dc23 2012032728 isbn 978-1-107-01815-0 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-64480-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Chronology of McCarthy’s Life and Works

page ix xi xv xvii

Introduct ion 1.

Histories, Novels, Ideas: Cormac McCarthy and the Art of Philosophy St eve n F rye Part I

2. 3.

4. 5.

Inf luence and Inn ovatio n

McCarthy’s Heroes and the Will to Truth L inda Woo dson Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language: McCarthy’s Style P hi ll ip A. Snyder and Delys W. Snyder Part II

7.

15 27

Beginnings i n the Amer ic a n S ou th

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic Lyd ia R. Coop er McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels Bri an E ve nson P art I II

6.

3

41 54

The Move W estwa r d

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels T imot hy P arrish The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War P ie rre L agay ette

67 79

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Contents Part IV

The Nov els

8. Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism Jame s R. Giles 9. Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence Stev en Fry e 10. All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter Nich ol as Monk 11. The Quest for God in The Road All en Jo sephs Part V

95 107 121 133

Them es and Iss ues

12. McCarthy and Literary Naturalism Eri c Carl Li nk 13. McCarthy and Film Stace y Peebles 14. McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity Joh n D udley Selected Bibliography Index

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149 162 175

189 195

FI GURES

9.1 Along with their fellow outlaws, Pike Bishop, Lyle Gorch, and Dutch Engstrom (William Holden, Warren Oates, and Ernest Borgnine) ight General Mapache’s men in the concluding scenes of The Wild Bunch (Warner Brothers, 1969). 13.1 In The Gardener’s Son (PBS, 1976), Robert McEvoy (Brad Dourif) trudges wearily through a doorway and into James Gregg’s ofice, moments before the murder. 13.2 While in the Saltillo prison, Lacey Rawlins and John Grady Cole (Henry Thomas and Matt Damon, center at rear) are up against the wall with other prisoners during a dream sequence in All the Pretty Horses (Columbia Pictures, 2000). 13.3 Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) tries to escape the men pursuing him from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong in No Country for Old Men (Miramax and Paramount Vantage, 2007). 13.4 White (Tommy Lee Jones) and Black (Samuel L. Jackson) are close together but still far apart in The Sunset Limited (HBO Films, 2011).

page 112

165

167

169

172

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CONTRIBUTORS

Lyd ia R . Co op er is Assistant Professor of twentieth- and twenty-irst-century American and Native American literature at Creighton University. Her earlier work on McCarthy appeared in a book, No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy. Her work on McCarthy and on other contemporary American and British writers has appeared in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Studies in American Indian Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Critique, and Papers on Language and Literature. Joh n D udl ey is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of South Dakota. He is the author of A Man’s Game: Masculinity and the Anti-Aesthetics of American Literary Naturalism. He is also the author of numerous articles on American literary naturalism and the literature of the American west, with a particular focus on issues of gender and ethnicity. He is currently working on a study of African-American literature and culture between 1890 and 1928, with an emphasis on the role of music, aesthetics, and material culture in developing notions of racial identity. B ria n Eve nso n is Chair of the Literary Arts Department at Brown University, where he currently holds the Royce Professorship of Excellence in Teaching. He is the author of eleven books of iction, including The Open Curtain, Fugue State, and Immobility, as well as Understanding Robert Coover. He has delivered a number of papers on McCarthy and published work on him in Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy and The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists. Steven F rye is Professor of English at California State University, Bakersield, and President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. He is the author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy and Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance. He is the editor of Critical Insights: The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Critical Insights: The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the associate editor of ALN: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter. He is also the author of an essay “Naturalism and Religion,” published in The Oxford Handbook to xi Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438

CONTRI BUTORS American Literary Naturalism, as well as numerous articles on Herman Melville, Cormac McCarthy, and other novelists of the American romance tradition, literary naturalism, and the literature of the American west. Jame s R . Gil es is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University, where he taught in the Department of English from 1970 to 2007. He is the author of nine books and the coeditor of eight others, including The Spaces of Violence (2006), Violence in the Contemporary American Novel, The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America, and six volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (all coedited with Wanda H. Giles). In addition, he has published more than thirty articles or short stories in various journals. Most recently, he published essays in The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism and A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Al le n Jose ph s is University Research Professor at the University of West Florida, where he has taught since 1969. He is past president of the Hemingway Society and Foundation and of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is the author of eight books and numerous articles on Hemingway, Lorca, Picasso, Mailer, and Cormac McCarthy. His latest book, Ritual and Sacriice in the Corrida: The Saga of César Rincón, has won multiple awards. Currently he is researching a book on the human fascination with the bull, as well as his second book on For Whom the Bell Tolls. P ier re L agayette is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, where he taught graduate seminars on the American west and contemporary American history and literature. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Western America and Asia-Paciic Studies at Paris-Sorbonne and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He is the author of The American West: Reality and Myths, Strategies of Difference in Modern Poetry: Case Studies in Poetic Composition, Major Landmarks in American History, A Short History of American Literature, Contemporary United States: A Bilingual Guide, and Executive Empire: The American Presidency from F. D. Roosevelt to G.W. Bush. E ric Ca rl Li nk is Professor of American Literature and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Memphis. He is the author of several books, including The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, Understanding Philip K. Dick, and Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (coauthored with G. R. Thompson). He is also the founder and editor of the journal ALN: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter and the coeditor (along with Donald Pizer) of the Norton Critical Edition of The Red Badge of Courage, fourth edition. He is the editor of several collections, including Taming the Bicycle: Essays, Stories, and Sketches by Mark Twain and Critical Insights: The Red Badge of Courage. xii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438

CONTRIBUT ORS N ic ho las Monk is Assistant Professor of English and Curriculum Development at the University of Warwick. He is editor of Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy, to which he contributed the introduction and an essay titled “Versions of the Seeleroman: Cormac McCarthy and Leslie Silko.” Other publications on McCarthy include: “‘An Impulse to Action, an Undeined Want’: Modernity, Flight, and Crisis in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian” in Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, Vol. 2; “Career and Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy,” which is forthcoming in Literature Compass; and the entry on Cormac McCarthy in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic, also forthcoming. In 2009, he organized the International Cormac McCarthy Conference at Warwick, and he teaches the MA module Literatures of the American Southwest. Timo th y Pa rrish is Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction, and Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth and, most recently, The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists. He has published widely on contemporary American literature in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Prospects, American Literary History, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. Stace y Pe ebl es is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, as well as Vice President of the Cormac McCarthy Society and editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal. She is the author of Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq. Her research addresses the representation of violence and war in contemporary literature and ilm; she has published in PMLA, The Journal of Film and Video, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and anthologies like Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy and Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. Her next book will cover McCarthy’s work in adaptations for the screen and stage. Delys W. Snyde r directs the Across-the-Curriculum Writing Fellows Program at Brigham Young University, where she teaches composition, grammar, history of the English language, and world civilization. Her interest in stylistics has led her to the study of Cormac McCarthy, and her work includes papers such as “A Discourse Analysis of Class and Gender and the Reigning Female in McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses” and “Origins, Effects, and Frequency of McCarthy’s Neologisms in Blood Meridian.” Phil lip A. Snyd er is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Brigham Young University, where he teaches autobiography, contemporary xiii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438

CONTRI BUTORS literature, and western studies. He recently received the university’s Karl G. Maeser Award for Excellence in Teaching. His recent publications on McCarthy include “Disappearance in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” in Western American Literature and “Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” in The Cormac McCarthy Journal. Li nda Wo od son is Professor of English at The University of Texas, San Antonio, where she teaches courses on the literature of Texas and the Southwest, American literature, and writing studies. She has published articles on McCarthy in The Southern Quarterly and in The Cormac McCarthy Journal, as well as essays in Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road; No Country for Old Men: Novel to Film; Cormac McCarthy: New Directions; Myth, Legend, Dust: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Fiction; and Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. She also has authored, coauthored, and edited articles and books on rhetoric and composition, including Modes of Inquiry: Voices of Scholars Across the Fields of Study, Writing in Three Dimensions, The Writer’s World: An Essay Anthology, From Cases to Composition, and A Handbook of Modern Rhetorical Terms.

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ACKNOWLED GMENTS

The best thing about editing The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy has been the chance to learn. I am grateful to the many scholars who contributed to this project. Friends and colleagues all, they approached their essays with a rare blend of curiosity, commitment, and passion. In reading their work, my understanding of Cormac McCarthy has grown immeasurably. I would like to thank the editorial team at Cambridge University Press, speciically Ray Ryan and Louis Gulino, for their dedicated work in bringing this volume to fruition. I also am particularly grateful to Stacey Peebles, not only for our regular conversations throughout the project, but for her insightful reading of my essay. Thanks also to Eric Carl Link for his steadfast collegiality and friendship. My appreciation as well goes to Dianne C. Luce for her invaluable assistance with the chronology and her encouragement in McCarthy studies over the years. A special thank you to Edwin T. Arnold, who, even though unable to contribute to the collection, has inluenced all the essays in incalculable ways. My gratitude as always to Rick Wallach for his hard work with the Cormac McCarthy Society from its inception until today. I would also like to express my appreciation to Morgan Johnson and Rebecca Iverson, my editorial assistants at California State University, Bakersield. Their tireless efforts with the details of the editorial process were invaluable. Finally, a special thank you to my family: to my parents, Ed and Joann Frye, and my sister Laura Myers, who have supported me for years and beyond measure; to my wife Kristin, for her heart, her mind, and her willingness to make of them a gift; and to my children, Melissa and Thomas, who laugh with sympathy at their father’s passions and obsessions, and in many ways secretly share them.

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C HRO NO LOGY OF McCA RTHY’S LIF E A ND WOR K S

1933

Born Charles Joseph McCarthy in Providence, Rhode Island, July 20, third child and oldest son of Charles Joseph and Gladys McGrail McCarthy.

1937

Moves to Knoxville, Tennessee, with his parents and older sisters, where his father, a Yale-educated lawyer, takes a position as counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). His two younger brothers and younger sister are born in Knoxville. Growing up in Tennessee, McCarthy attends Catholic parochial schools and spends much time in the rural countryside among the people who form the basis of characters in his early southern novels.

1951

Graduates from Catholic High School in Knoxville. Enters the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as a liberal arts major.

1953

Joins the United States Air Force, spending two years in Alaska, where he begins reading intensely.

1957–1960

Returns to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, enrolling in Robert Daniel’s course in iction writing. Based on work produced in this course, he is chosen by the English department for the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing. The university’s literary magazine, The Phoenix, publishes two of his short stories, “Wake for Susan” (1959) and “A Drowning Incident” (1960), under the name of C. J. McCarthy. Begins work on his irst and fourth novels, The Orchard Keeper and Suttree.

1960

Leaves the University of Tennessee without taking a degree. Moves his family to Chicago, Illinois, and continues work on

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CH RONOL OGY OF McCARTHY’S LIFE A ND WO RK s

The Orchard Keeper, while working part time in an auto-parts warehouse. 1961

Marries Lee Holleman, a fellow student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

1962

Son Cullen is born. Completes The Orchard Keeper in April and submits it to Random House in May. Returns with his family to his parents’ home in Vestal, Tennessee, in May. Moves with his family to an old farmhouse outside Sevierville, Tennessee. Begins drafting Outer Dark in December.

1963

Albert Erskine of Random House, William Faulkner’s former editor, becomes McCarthy’s editor. Erskine will serve as McCarthy’s editor for the next twenty years.

1963–1964

Separates from Lee Holleman and moves to Asheville, North Carolina. Moves to New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1964.

1965

“Bounty,” an excerpt from The Orchard Keeper, published in Yale Review. “The Dark Waters,” an excerpt from The Orchard Keeper, published by Sewanee Review. Returns to Vestal, Tennessee, to revise Outer Dark. The Orchard Keeper published by Random House in May. Wins the Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship. In August, travels to Ireland and meets Anne De Lisle, a British singer and ballet dancer, on board the Sylvania.

1965–1966

Settles in Paris, France, to revise Outer Dark and compose Suttree. Conceives Child of God in January 1966.

1966

Marries Anne De Lisle. Wins the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best irst novel by an American. Wins the Rockefeller Foundation grant providing for two years of support and travels through England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, while working to complete Outer Dark. Lives for a year on Ibiza, an island off the coast of Valencia, Spain.

1967

Returns to England in late summer. Arrives in New York on October 17 and drives to Washington, DC, to visit his parents.

1968

Moves to Rockford, Tennessee, with Anne De Lisle by February. Lives in a cheaply rented house. Outer Dark published by Random House.

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CHRO NOLOGY OF McCART HY’S LIFE A N D W OR K s

1969

Wins the Guggenheim Fellowship.

1971

Buys and moves to a small barn in Louisville, Tennessee, which he remodels, learning stonemasonry. In the summer he collaborates with Bill Kidwell on the creation of two large stone mosaics in Maryville, Tennessee. Continues drafting Suttree and Child of God.

1974

Child of God published by Random House in January. Conceives Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Travels to Tucson, Arizona, to begin research for his self-described “Western,” Blood Meridian.

1975–1976

Researches and writes the script of The Gardener’s Son for public television’s Visions series. Participates in the ilming.

1977

Separates from Anne De Lisle. The Gardener’s Son airs on public television, directed by Richard Pearce and starring Brad Dourif. McCarthy appears in a nonspeaking role as a stockholder of a textile mill. Moves to Tucson, Arizona, where he begins a sustained process of drafting Blood Meridian.

1978

Moves to El Paso, Texas.

1979

“Burial,” an excerpt from Suttree, appears in Antaeus. Suttree published by Random House in February. Moves to Nashville, Tennessee, by February and moves to Lexington, Kentucky, in the fall.

1980

Returns to the west in August. Conceives and begins drafting his as yet unpublished novel The Passenger by October. Conceives and begins drafting his screenplay “Cities of the Plain.” “The Scalphunters,” an excerpt from Blood Meridian, published in TriQuarterly in the spring.

1981

By June, returns to Knoxville and settles in a motel to revise Blood Meridian. Wins the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius” Grant. Attends a dinner in Chicago for MacArthur Fellows where he meets and develops a friendship with Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize–winning physicist, director of the MacArthur Foundation, and scholar at the Santa Fe Institute.

1982–1983

Buys a house in El Paso, Texas. xix

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CH RONOL OGY OF McCARTHY’S LIFE A ND WO RK s

1985

Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West published by Random House in the spring.

1986

Completes the stageplay “The Stonemason” in February. Works on “Whales and Men” and probably the screenplay “No Country.” Travels to Argentina with cetologist Roger Payne to participate in whale research. “Instruments of Liberation,” an excerpt from Blood Meridian, published in Homewords: A Book of Tennessee Writers.

1988

Completes a draft of All the Pretty Horses and begins drafting The Crossing. In the spring, he travels to Mexico. Completes a draft of The Crossing and begins Cities of the Plain.

1992

All the Pretty Horses is published by Alfred A. Knopf under the editorship of Gary Fisketjon, who works diligently to increase McCarthy’s public exposure. An excerpt of the novel is published in March in Esquire. The novel wins the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. McCarthy grants his irst public interview to Richard B. Woodward of the New York Times Magazine. Participates in workshop readings of The Stonemason in Washington, DC, in preparation for the play’s production at the Arena Stage. Revises the play, but the production is abandoned.

1993

Cormac McCarthy Society formed at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, at the irst National Cormac McCarthy Conference. McCarthy is awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for All the Pretty Horses. The “Wolf Trapper,” an excerpt from The Crossing, is published in Esquire.

1994

The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts is published by Ecco Press in May. The Crossing is published by Alfred A. Knopf in June.

1995

“The Wolf Hunter,” an excerpt from The Crossing, is published in the January issue of Sports Aield.

1996

The Gardener’s Son: A Screenplay is published by Ecco Press in September.

1997

Receives the Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. Participates in a workshop of The

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CHRO NOLOGY OF McCART HY’S LIFE A N D W OR K s

Stonemason at the McCarter Theatre of Princeton. Revises the play. 1998

Cities of the Plain is published by Alfred A. Knopf in May. All the Pretty Horses ilm production is announced. Marries Jennifer Winkley and buys a house in the Coronado Country Club neighborhood in El Paso, Texas. Son John Francis is born. “The Dogs,” an excerpt from Cities of the Plain, is published in Men’s Journal in May. Another excerpt is published in World and I in October.

1999–2000

Continues work on “The Passenger,” as yet unpublished.

2000

Columbia Pictures releases the ilm adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

2001

Moves with Jennifer Winkley and John Francis to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he becomes a Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. In October, attends a premiere performance of The Stonemason at the Arts Alliance Center at Clear Lake in Houston, Texas.

2003

Sits for photographs for portraitist Andrew Tift.

2004

Andrew Tift completes the portrait. McCarthy spends the summer in Ireland, where he begins the composition of The Road and The Sunset Limited.

2005

No Country for Old Men is published by Alfred A. Knopf in July.

2006

Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are listed by the New York Times Book Review among the best novels of the preceding twenty-ive years. The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form is published by Alfred A. Knopf in January. Participates in readings and dress rehearsals of The Sunset Limited at Steppenwolf Theatre in April and May in preparation for its June performances. The Road is published by Alfred A. Knopf in September. The Sunset Limited premieres in the Steppenwolf’s Garage Theatre in Chicago in May and June and later moves to New York City, where it is performed by the Steppenwolf Company at 59E59 Theatres.

2007

The Sunset Limited is performed at the Galway Arts Festival in July. McCarthy grants his irst and only television interview xxi

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CH RONOL OGY OF McCARTHY’S LIFE A ND WO RK s

to Oprah Winfrey after The Road becomes an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. The Road wins the Pulitzer Prize and the United Kingdom’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for iction. Paramount Pictures ilm adaptation of No Country for Old Men, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, premieres in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The ilm opens commercially in limited release in twenty-eight theaters in the United States on November 9, then moves to wide release and critical acclaim. 2008

Film adaptation of No Country for Old Men wins four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen). McCarthy and his son John Francis attend the Academy Awards ceremony. McCarthy and the Coen brothers win the University of Southern California Scripter Award for the best adapted screenplay of 2007. The Southwestern Writers Collection (SWWC), a part of the Wittliff Collections at the Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, acquires the Cormac McCarthy Papers by January. They are opened to scholars in October. The Albert Erskine Files at the University of Virginia are opened in May. Andrew Tift portrait of McCarthy is acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.

2009

Wins the PEN/Saul Bellow Lifetime Award for his work in the writing of iction. 2929 Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Dimension Films release the ilm adaptation of The Road, directed by John Hillcoat.

2011

The ilm adaptation of The Sunset Limited premieres on HBO Films. It is produced and directed by Tommy Lee Jones and stars Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. Production takes place in New Mexico and McCarthy attends much of the ilming.

2012

HBO releases the ilm version of The Sunset Limited, which includes an audio commentary version in which McCarthy, Jones, and Jackson watch the ilm together and comment on aspects of its production and content. Sells screenplay “The Counselor” to Mark Wechsler and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz. Filming begins in May.

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Introduction

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1 STEV EN FRYE

Histories, Novels, Ideas: Cormac McCarthy and the Art of Philosophy

Cormac McCarthy presents readers with an unconventional challenge. He embodies but redeines the common notion of the artist as outsider. His irst book appeared in 1965, and major critics, reviewers, and artists have admired him from the beginning. But he has never spent much time in a major metropolis and has quite intentionally avoided any identiication with the “art world” as it exists and is conceived in the popular imagination. Instead, he has lived as he has chosen, in homes he built himself and sometimes in the semirural places where his novels are set. He writes with singular attention to his own vision, and only in the last two decades has he risen from relative obscurity. Beginning with his irst novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), he has been recognized by reviewers as a powerful new voice and a legitimate heir to the Faulknerian tradition. However, until the widespread popular reception of All the Pretty Horses (1992), none of his novels sold more than ive thousand copies in hardback. As late as 1980, he survived on meager advances from his publishers and generous fellowships from the William Faulkner Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He refused to promote his works through lectures and book tours, and popularity seemed to matter little to him. In the past twenty years, however, he has gained international attention. In 1981, he received the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. A decade later, he won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses, and in 2007 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. A great admirer of McCarthy’s work, Harold Bloom states: “I yield to no one in my admiration for Blood Meridian. I think there is no greater work by a living American.”1 After years of effort, McCarthy is now considered, along with John Updike, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, as an American author of monumental importance and value. The author of ten novels, two plays, and three screenplays, Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933. He was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father took a prominent position as a 3 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.003

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lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. McCarthy was always active intellectually, although in his childhood he was not a voracious reader. As his novels suggest, however, the curiosity that emerged in youth later found ample satisfaction in an active reading life, initially when he was stationed in Alaska during a tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force. In his irst interview with Richard B. Woodward in The New York Times Magazine, entitled “McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” McCarthy recalls his childhood and schooling: “I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. . . . Name anything, no matter how esoteric, I found it and dabbled in it.”2 In the same interview, McCarthy claimed to own more than seven thousand books. But his interests are by no means purely literary. At MacArthur Foundation reunions he spends his time with such notable igures as Murray Gell-Man (the Nobel Prize–winning physicist) and the whale biologist Roger Payne. Commenting on McCarthy’s range of concerns, Woodward quotes ilm director Richard Pearce: “He has more intellectual interests than anyone I’ve ever met.”3 McCarthy’s intense curiosity is relected in characters whose experiences are grounded in speciic historical moments as wide-ranging as westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the social transformation of the postbellum south, and the psychological and environmental traumas of the nuclear age. These varied interests coalesce in virtually all of McCarthy’s novels. In what many consider his masterpiece, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985), the protagonist is a ictional rendering of Samuel Chamberlain, who in a memoir describes his role in the rapacious settling of the American West. Earlier, in The Orchard Keeper, John Wesley Rattner and Arthur Ownby are displaced as the rural modes of living change under the forces of progress and urbanization in Knoxville, Tennessee. In Cities of the Plain (1998), John Grady Cole and Billy Parham seek identity and place as ranch hands in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the U.S. government is testing atomic weapons after World War II. History and historical change are at the center of his preoccupations, but his characters engage these moments only in the context of the deepest philosophical and religious questions. McCarthy explores a range of philosophical conceptions, and as such he is a “philosophical” novelist in the most profound sense. That is the essential thrust of many of the essays in this volume, all of which explore the idea content of McCarthy’s works with attention to a range of aesthetic and social concerns: genre transformation, narrative form, cinematic technique, mythogenesis, gender, masculinity, and ethnicity, among others. While philosophy in McCarthy’s vision is broader and perhaps more luid than it is conceptualized in an academic context, he has demonstrated a deep interest 4 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.003

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in Western and non-Western philosophical and theological traditions, and as a starting point it is reasonable to consider some of the various philosophical systems that inform his work. McCarthy’s inquiry into philosophy has been life-long and varied. Although he has been reluctant to discuss the books he has read, his novels engage a broad range of philosophical systems both ancient and modern. At times, he works to integrate them in a single novel or play. However, McCarthy encourages readers not to assume that his works simply articulate philosophy in the novel form. In Blood Meridian, perhaps his most overtly philosophical novel, McCarthy’s narrator warns readers that even Judge Holden, who expresses his ideas at length, cannot be contained or characterized by any one system. Still, grasping the thematic importance of McCarthy’s work requires that one understand the philosophical conceptions he engages, which include but are not limited to the ancient Gnosticism of the irst-century Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, Platonism and Neo-Platonism, Nietzschean materialism, and existential Christianity. As a religious movement, Gnosticism was a highly variegated phenomenon that was widespread in the irst and second centuries CE. According to Gnostic thought, human souls are imprisoned in a material realm dominated by archons, lesser and malevolent deities who created man to trap elements of the divine within the physical world. These archons owe their origin to a larger force of evil known as the demiurge. Apprehension of the immaterial cause of the universe, the divine good, which exists outside the material, is achieved only through gnosis, the experience or knowledge of God. Evil, then, is the dominant force in the world. In Suttree (1979), this Gnostic conception appears in the horriic igure of the huntsman at the novel’s conclusion. The huntsman and his tireless hounds are otherworldly and mysterious, existing “[s]omewhere in the gray woods by the river . . . in the brimming corn and in the constellated press of cities.” The hounds are omnipresent, “slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world.”4 They suggest a form of evil that is simultaneously physical and transcendent, and their purpose is to consume or imprison human beings, both body and spirit. This same evil is relected in the murderous triune in Outer Dark (1968), who appear as spectral characters, seemingly not of this world, inexplicably aware of Culla Holme’s past and the fact that he has abandoned his incestuously begotten child. They track him and eventually murder the infant before his eyes. In their elliptical and suggestive conversation with Culla toward the end of the novel, the triune are oddly clairvoyant, as they toy with his guilt and emotional distress. Archon-like, they are an embodied form of evil preoccupied with the state of his soul. In both novels, mysterious igures of 5 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.003

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spiritual import, consistent with Gnosticism, are incarnations of malevolence and brutality. But Gnostic igurations are most fully observable in Blood Meridian through the character of Judge Holden.5 The protagonist, known as the kid, has joined a band of scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton and Judge Holden. The narrator presents Holden as highly intelligent, erudite, and utterly dedicated to a philosophy that deines war as divinely ordained. The judge sees himself as immortal, and other characters concur. After the kid ponders the judge’s ideas, he has a dream in which he sees a mysterious forger who casts a false coin, with the judge standing behind as the forger does his work. An important question emerges in this scene. Who might the judge be in Gnostic conception? On the one hand, he may be one of the lesser archons. But in the kid’s dream, the judge is a monumental and mysterious igure, evocative and horrifying, more so even in the dream than in reality. He presides over what appears to be a primordial act of creation, and from a Gnostic perspective the coins may in fact represent the lesser deities of malevolent intent. In this sense the judge, standing behind and directing the forger, is perhaps the demiurge itself. In McCarthy’s terms: “Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system to divide him back to his origins for he would not go.”6 In either case, through Judge Holden, McCarthy integrates Gnostic philosophy with the speciic historical situation recounted in Chamberlain’s memoir of the American western frontier. In Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, Dianne C. Luce explores the inluence of various systems of thought, including Gnosticism and Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas. She notes that McCarthy’s reading of Plato was established biographically by Garry Wallace in 1992. On a trip to El Paso, Wallace met McCarthy and a professor of philosophy named Irving Brown, and they all discussed Plato extensively. McCarthy’s use of Platonic ideas in his novels emerges from various myths built into Plato’s dialogues, particularly those related to the soul’s journey in a series of incarnations back toward the Truth and Light that exists in the transcendent realm of the Ideal. Neo-Platonic notions appear as McCarthy works with the Narcissus myth expressed by Plotinus. This myth suggests that the pursuit of material beauty and desire involves a failed attempt to capture an ideal of which beautiful forms are mere shadow. This appears in Child of God (1974), as Lester’s voyeurism and necrophilia involve the mistake of Narcissus, who follows desire and drowns in the vortex of the material world. Luce notes the use of Plato’s Giorgias myth in Outer Dark. In this myth of the judgment day, only those imperfect souls capable of cure are permitted puriication in Tartarus. At one point in the novel, Culla Holme 6 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.003

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dreams of a prophet who tells him he will be cured of his guilt and culpability, thus suggesting that his soul may progress toward the Platonic realm of the Ideal. But these ideas appear elsewhere. They are present in Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, all novels that relect the Dantean adaptation of Platonic and Neo-Platonic concepts in The Divine Comedy. In McCarthy’s novels and in Dante’s poems, the world is rendered as a kind of purgatory, in which human beings struggle for a time but do so with the overwhelming sense that material existence shrouds a transcendent mystery. Although McCarthy engages with sympathy philosophies that posit transcendent realms of being, in his iction he also considers worldviews that oppose this idealism. Ancient Gnosticism preserves the divine but forcefully divides human beings from the transcendent as they are imprisoned in bodies ruled by archons and the demiurge. But the later ideas of nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche assert a irm materialism, and although Nietzsche’s thinking cannot be conlated entirely with existentialism or even nihilism, it nevertheless relects similar assumptions. McCarthy is often fascinated with the metaphysical, but he explores philosophical materialism in detail, in his choice of setting, in physical descriptions, and in the monologues of various characters. Nietzsche’s philosophy is complex and varied, but among his many related ideas, Nietzsche posits a material universe in which values are created by human beings and evolve over time as mechanisms that (among other things) help ensure the survival and success of the species. Moral precepts may serve a pragmatic purpose, but they are not derived from the absolute or the divine. When human values no longer effectively sustain individuals or societies, they are abandoned. In the context of this ethical relativism, Nietzsche posits the notion of the Übermensch or, as translated by Thomas Common in 1909, “superman,” and McCarthy makes use of this well-known concept.7 The Nietzschean Übermensch rejects external notions of value and through a process of self-discovery deines morality through the force of will. Judge Holden is in many ways a superman igure. This becomes clear when he claims that “war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will within the larger will. . . . War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.”8 Given that the judge is destructive and malevolent, it may appear that McCarthy is critical of Nietzschean ideas, but he allows the judge to speak at length in a distinct blend of philosophical argument and poetic expression. Readers are forced to consider the legitimacy of his claims regardless of how he chooses to apply them. These same notions of amoral relativism and the will to power are expressed by the captain in All the Pretty Horses, as he encourages John Grady Cole to save 7 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.003

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himself by lying about the stolen horse. They appear as well in the murderous pimp Eduardo’s monologue in Cities of the Plain, when he points to the illusions and adornment of Mexican Catholicism, claiming that the world is “plain indeed,” devoid of God or any system of absolute value. In No Country for Old Men, these relativist ideas emerge in the words and actions of the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh, who denies any responsibility for events in a world governed by the deterministic chance of the coin toss. Again, even though aspects of Nietzschean philosophy appear most often through unsympathetic characters, in the Woodward interview McCarthy claims that “[t]here is no such thing as life without bloodshed. . . . I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way . . . is a really dangerous idea.”9 Regardless of the negative implications of these concepts (which seem more interesting to McCarthy than the positive), they are presented in his iction as potentially accurate descriptions of the world. Although McCarthy considers philosophical perspectives from a number of eras and traditions, he was raised as a Catholic in the American South. In virtually all of his works, nature and the wilderness play a central role. However, his use of nature frequently involves the use of biblical typology, as a wilderness in which individuals and communities undergo a spiritual test. Much like the Israelites who wander in the wilderness for forty years before being delivered to the Promised Land, or Christ who is tempted by Satan for forty days, McCarthy’s characters often ind themselves in a wilderness of spiritual trial and transformation. In Outer Dark, Culla Holme’s journey culminates in a realization, albeit a weak one, of his own error and a muted attempt to correct it. In Blood Meridian, the kid travels through the American west, perpetually tempted to acts of violence, and in the end he resists the judge’s ethic of war. Especially in The Road, the blighted earth is, upon a close and historically grounded reading, without doubt this same typological wilderness. The post-apocalyptic and wasted world has often been misread as simple metaphor, as an existential void in which father and son can only ind meaning in the brief and contingent love that binds them, in a universe devoid of hope or God. Read carefully in the context of the tradition that informs McCarthy, a new and more informed reading emerges. Father and son wander a typological wilderness, vividly reminiscent of the Old and New Testaments, where they ponder the existence of God, the role of goodness and decency, and, similar to Christ, encounter a Satan igure Ely who tempts them to abandon all hope and faith. Clearly, theirs is a spiritual trail preigured in the Bible, and father and son must decide whether human kindness is worth preserving, with the question of God emerging frequently in discussion.

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But McCarthy’s engagement of Christian themes moves well beyond typological motifs. He deals directly with the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and John Macquarrie. McCarthy’s most direct encounter with this theology was in the works of one of his favorite authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who expresses existential Christianity through the character of Alyosha at the conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov. In Kierkegaard’s initial formulation, existential Christianity emphasizes the personal relationship each individual must establish with God. This is a relationship governed by choice rather than social conventions or rituals. People make an independent “leap of faith” to initiate this connection. Further (and especially important for McCarthy), Kierkegaard aggressively reasserts the notion that God should not be seen primarily as an otherworldly being who exists separate from his creation. God is love, quite literally, and in the act of loving, human beings directly experience the divine within. In McCarthy’s work, human interaction is often informed by intimations of the transcendent. Especially in his later novels, sympathetic discussions of God inform the relationships of characters such as John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, as well as Ed Tom Bell and Uncle Ellis. But this existential Christianity is directly expressed in the character of Black in The Sunset Limited, and the play itself is an expression of McCarthy’s own claim that books are made of other books. It is a creative and thinly veiled rearticulation of the debate between Ivan and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, which is one of McCarthy’s favorite novels.10 Though devout and committed to living out the message of Christ, Black acknowledges that he is somewhat unorthodox, and his Christianity inds Christ’s presence literally embodied in the committed relationship of the fellow commuter on the train. This same idea appears at the conclusion of The Road. The boy has emerged in the novel as a messianic igure, unselishly concerned with others in a wasted world. His father has died, but before his death he encourages his son to talk to him when he is gone. After being taken in by a family, the mother encourages the boy to pray, but he has dificulty doing so by speaking to God directly. His prayers resolve themselves in conversations with his father. The woman does not admonish him for this as one might expect from a more conventional Christianity, nor does she encourage him to try again to pray. Instead, she says, “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”11 From her point of view – from the perspective of existential Christianity – speaking to the father who loved the boy unconditionally is a powerful form of prayer, because God was present in the relationship that bound them. In this way, in addition to

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other philosophical and theological perspectives, existential Christianity is a worldview that emerges throughout his works. As the essays in this volume attest, Cormac McCarthy explores a range of themes, philosophical and otherwise, always with a focused attention on what makes the world beautiful, in spite of its brutality, indifference, and violence. His works are imbued with the nuances of language, genre, and an artful reconiguration of tradition. A review of his manuscripts reveals his own careful attention to craft, as single sentences are written, rewritten, placed side by side, and written again until they are all he can make them.12 Those same manuscripts and the notes display an author rooted in the past, with references to histories, travel narratives, philosophers, and other writers. In his work and in the various sources that inform them, Cormac McCarthy emerges as a consummate aesthetic alchemist, combining the raw material of human experience, identiiable history, and philosophy in works that will likely inspire readers and scholars for generations to come. NOTES 1. Peter Josyph. “Tragic Ecstasy: A Conversation about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy Vol. 2, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002), p. 205. 2. Richard B. Woodward, “McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times Magazine (19 April 1992), p. 3. 3. Ibid, p. 2. 4. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 471. 5. See Leo Daugherty, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992), pp. 122–33. 6. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 309. 7. Some later translators take exception to the word “superman,” arguing that it misses certain subtleties in the actual meaning of the German Über, thus preferring “overman.” 8. BM 249. In his notes to the irst draft of the novel, McCarthy records a quote from Heraclitus and indicates that this quote is rewritten and articulated by the judge as his statement on the primacy of war. Thus, Heraclitus is the irst source of this concept. But given the inluence of Nietzsche on twentieth-century philosophy, it is likely that McCarthy’s judge relects Nietzschean concepts as well. See Box 35, Folder 1, Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writer’s Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos. 9. Woodward, p. 4. 10. One might also note on close reading that White’s inal monologue seems to be a deliberate echo of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy in Act III, Scene I of the play. Hamlet embraces the idea of nothingness and sleep, inally to conclude that it is only the fear of death that prevents human beings from suicide. White

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Histories, Novels, Ideas does the same, concluding, “Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next?” In considering the notion of McCarthy as “traditional” writer as T. S. Eliot expresses in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” McCarthy’s monologue darkens Shakespeare considerably. 11. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 286. 12. These manuscripts and notes, as well as correspondence, are contained in the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Wittliff Collections, Southwestern Writers Collection, Alkek Library, University of Texas, San Marcos.

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P a rt I

Inluence and Innovation

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2 LINDA WOOD SON

McCarthy’s Heroes and the Will to Truth

One of the intriguing features of Cormac McCarthy’s later iction is its direct interaction with language theory. Transcending genre, McCarthy often makes present this theory by evoking the words of the theorists themselves. Of genres, the priest in The Crossing tells Billy that the narrator “sets forth the categories into which the listener will wish to it the narrative as he hears it.”1 As Fredric Jameson asserts in his Preface to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, the goal is “again and again to ‘make it new.’”2 The priest in The Crossing speaks to Billy of the same goal: “The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one.”3 With this assertion, the priest echoes Lyotard’s explanation of how a writer creates the new: “the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged . . . by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those roles and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for.”4 In the multilayered iction of dream, journey, philosophy, and multiple narrative viewpoints, often collapsing with authorial consciousness, McCarthy illustrates that, while the thoughts and words of other writers that he includes as homage demonstrate the social nature of language, the unique vision of the writer, as Lyotard suggests, shows that “the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.”5 The Crossing serves, in part, as a linguistic crossing in McCarthy’s works as the later iction moves away from words that create a reality of their own toward more precise language. In The Road, McCarthy envisions the ultimate scene of cultural entropy and yet illustrates the ability of words to evoke that which we can know without language. The Road becomes, in Lyotard’s words, “an event,”6 the performance of truth. The semiotic foundation of much of the Border iction lies in a distrust of what Michel Foucault calls “the will to truth,” a distrust fostered by the 15 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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language of desire and power. Describing the history of Western philosophy since the Sophists in “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault asserts that this history has erased the concept of discourse as action and replaced it with a belief that nature is the source of discourse and that discourse conveys preexisting meaning.7 He labels this belief “the will to truth.”8 The search for an a priori truth in discourse makes it impossible to recognize the languages of desire and power and the need to dominate. As a consequence, even the attempt to utter a truth not governed by desire and power is in itself driven by those desires.9 Foucault further suggests that the production of discourse in a society is “controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed”10 by procedures designed “to avert its powers and dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.”11 As I have suggested elsewhere (see “Deceiving the Will to Truth”12), “[l]ike Kafka’s peasant in Before the Law, who does not open the door and go to the other side to see the law because he was the one who fabricated the law that did not exist, discourse establishes the truth, and therefore the ‘truth’ relects the discourse.”13 Because the references to language theory, especially “the will to truth,” become more direct in the works from Blood Meridian forward, a brief look at the early iction becomes instructive as to the motivation. That the early iction is both informed by and struggles against its southern literary ancestors and the oppressive southern setting has been well explored. Thus, at the end of Suttree, when Suttree leaves behind that setting for an unknown destination, so also does the iction itself enact a shift as if to illustrate the point that Foucault makes about the materiality of a society’s discourse. McCarthy’s iction, beginning with Blood Meridian, leaves what Jay Watson aptly calls, “Faulkner country: the moribund aristocratic heritage, the deep ambivalence about modernity, the death-grip of the Quentin problem.”14 Freed from the grip of this particular discourse, the western iction not only begins to explore how the “will to truth” functions in the characters’ lives and their destinies, but it also interrogates the theory itself. McCarthy begins the creation of this semiotic landscape in Blood Meridian. Like language, the judge is beyond good and evil, and he insists that “[w]ords are things,”15 that “[b]ooks lie,”16 but that God speaks “in stones and trees, the bones of things.”17 The judge’s story of the traveler and the harnessmaker18 is a remarkably candid performance illustrating how little humans are ultimately guided by the concepts of language. A traveler delivers a lecture to the harnessmaker’s family to which the harnessmaker responds by repenting, one of the performative words identiied by J. L. Austin as a word that is the act itself.19 In an illustration of Foucault’s concept of appropriation, the harnessmaker’s son appropriates the traveler’s 16 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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language into an oration of his own. Finally, both harnessmaker and son become killers, demonstrating the power of the drives of the heart to overcome the action of the word and demonstrating the necessity that, as Austin says, the person speaking “should have a certain intention, viz. Here to keep his word.”20 In a further illustration of appropriation, those in the group listening to the judge’s story immediately incorporate that story into their own experiences: “He was no harnessmaker he was a shoemaker and he was cleared of them charges”21; “[h]e never lived in no wilderness place, he had a shop dead in the center of Cumberland Maryland”22; “[t]hat was my brother in that casket and he was a minstrel dancer out of Cincinnati Ohio was shot to death over a woman.”23 Because the characters are called “the judge” and “the kid,” a symbolic reading is compelling. The judge can be seen as Language, Law, the Father, in Freudian/Kristevan terms,24 in his interest in the kid, and, although the kid has studied the judge throughout the novel, he cannot kill him in the desert. Symbolically, if language is the human activity, as Kristeva reminds us throughout her work,25 a human cannot destroy language completely without also destroying the self. As the kid increasingly understands the truth about the judge (knowledge of the failings of the father, which, according to Freud, allows the son to break free of the burden of the father), the kid tries to use language to convey the horror he has witnessed and begins “to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime.”26 He is not understood. Finally, he makes an attempt at living in silence, yet the judge exposes the futility of that attempt: “Was it always your idea that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?”27 Ultimately the judge kills the kid in the jakes after earlier telling him that he could have loved him like a son.28 In All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy illustrates discourse governed by desire or the need to dominate. In attempting to impose his own version of truth on the various discourse communities that John Grady Cole encounters, he becomes a victim of the truths of those communities and is forced to realize the wisdom of the captain’s statement, “[w]e can make the truth here.”29 Following the death of his grandfather, John Grady is faced with the realization that the “country” he knows – that is, the truths of a ranching way of life that he thought would endure – have ended. He had expected to continue to work on his grandfather’s ranch until the time that it would become his. This country, metaphorical and physical, is gone, and he soon learns that it cannot be retrieved in spite of his efforts to appeal to his mother and her lawyer. His father speaks of this irrevocable loss: “We’re like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We dont know what’s goin to show up here come daylight.”30 In dismay, John Grady journeys to San Antonio to 17 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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watch his mother’s play, perhaps hoping to understand her motivation for so readily giving up the only way of life he knows, but after viewing the play, he inds “nothing in it at all.”31 Returning to the ranch John Grady plans with Rawlins to travel to Mexico, and the reader understands that his goal (though clearly not that of Rawlins) is to ind a new “country” that will value the truths he believes he has lost. When his former girlfriend Mary Catherine asks, “Everything’s talk, isnt it?”,32 he replies, “Not everything.”33 This response reveals how ingrained is his belief that values and ideals are permanent, not transitory and not dependent on a discourse community. Several of the characters that John Grady encounters in Mexico attempt to instruct him on the Foucauldian idea that each society controls the production of discourse in which the “languages of desire and power”34 are deeply embedded. Alfonsa, above all, speaks of the distrust of the will to know when she tells him that “there is little that can be truly known.”35 Her puppet show metaphor in which the puppets’ strings are held by a succession of other puppets reinforces Foucault’s concept of “a system of exclusion, a historical, modiiable, and institutionally constraining system.”36 She tries to warn John Grady, “This is another country.”37 Her extensive reading in her father’s library and her studies in France have exposed her to other ideas, other truths. The reality of her existence in a patriarchal Mexico, where the women of her time have little agency, and of her entwinement in the history of the Madero brothers has taught her to value “what is true above what is useful.”38 Her testimonio concerning her relationship to Gustavo Madero and the subsequent fate of the two brothers who had tried to bring the ideas they had encountered in France to Mexico, including a “trust in the basic goodness of humankind,”39 is designed to teach John Grady what she has learned: “What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God – who knows all that can be known – seems powerless to change.”40 When the time comes to protect her niece from the consequences of the truths of that patriarchal country, she exerts the only power given to her, that of money. Finally, she gives John Grady a key to a kind of lasting truth that will reemerge in McCarthy’s later novels, “[t]hat all courage was a form of constancy” and “that the desire was the thing itself.”41 Having courage is described here as another of those performative words, like repenting in the judge’s tale. Another character who tries to impart to John Grady the truth about “truth” is the mozo Luis who describes to John Grady the illusion of knowing truths about human nature.42 Don Hector, too, offers lessons about the dangers of trying to impose one’s set of values and truths on a different country when he also relates the story of the Madero brothers and how 18 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

McCarthy’s Heroes and the Will to Truth

unsuccessful they were in bringing the truths of France to Mexico: “One country is not another country.”43 Some of the harshest warnings about the nature of truth in another country, that is, another discourse community, come to John Grady from the captain who tells him, as I indicated previously, “[w]e can make the truth here.”44 In cruder words than Alfonsa’s, he also speaks of courage as central to living in one’s own country or another: “The world wants to know if you have cojones.”45 That John Grady is either refusing to accept the lessons he is being taught at this point, or not fully understanding them, is shown in his response that repeats his earlier response to Mary Catherine: “The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody’s mouth.”46 However, by the end of the novel there is some evidence that he has understood some of the lessons he has been offered. Exhibiting the courage that Alfonsa and the captain have described, he retrieves the horses and takes them back across the Rio Grande. There he takes responsibility for his perceived role in the loss of his love47 and in the death of Jimmy Blevins,48 and when Rawlins asks him, “Where is your country?”49 he responds, “I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.”50 Billy in The Crossing, like John Grady Cole, is forced to learn some dificult lessons about the truths of another country. Exhibiting the courage that Alfonsa describes, he captures the she-wolf and returns it to its country, only to have to sacriice it himself to save it from a brutal end. The ongoing interrogation of the will to truth in this book centers on the theories of Nietzsche, who also describes language use as the will to know devised by the intellect to detain humans for a moment in existence, a maintaining of the self against the other: Therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most lagrant bellum omni contra omnes [war of each against all]. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the irst step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as ‘truth’ from now on is established.51

Just as John Grady encounters teachers who try to help him see the truth about truth, Billy also encounters such teachers, thus carrying forward the thread of an interrogation of language theory. At the heart of The Crossing is a mock scholastic dialogue, actually a monologue, with the words of the old man given to us by the priest, and in this dialogue the words of the old man under the dome in Caborca often echo the concepts of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” For example, the old man describes the drive to ind “something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must be swallowed 19 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed.”52 In spite of this use of Nietzschean language to expose the impossibility of language use not accompanied by desire, the monologue, nevertheless, ultimately afirms the value of storytelling because “[t]hings separate from their stories have no meaning”53: “The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.”54 The real value of this mock scholastic dialogue, indeed of storytelling itself, is revealed by the priest in his witnessing to the life of the old man: “the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only.”55 Another of Billy’s teachers is the blind man whose eyes have been sucked from his head in the Revolution. The blind man describes to Billy the existence of a Nietzschean world whose light is “in men’s eyes only for the world itself move[s] in eternal darkness and darkness [is] its true nature and true condition.”56 But in that loss of the known and seen world, like the loss of faith in the power of language to describe that world, the blind man asserts that there can be a new beginning, and as if to reinforce the value of witnessing, the value of the other’s story, he urges, “Debemos escuchar” [We ought to listen].57 As a last demonstration in The Crossing of how language works, Billy hears the story of the airplane, a story that has three possible versions. This story is reminiscent of the judge’s harnessmaker story in the way that the various tellers appropriate the story for their own. Although Billy asks for the “true” story, the story is told in yet another version by Quijada. Stylistically, this second book of the Border Trilogy functions as another kind of crossing because the third book of the Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, takes a more traditional form of narrative. (The arcane language and expansive sentence structures of the earlier works from Suttree forward have often been replaced with a more economical style.) In this book, John Grady Cole loses his life because of his failure to acknowledge the truths of this other country, but the familiar telling of a story of star-crossed lovers, though unique, perhaps illustrates the truth of the priest’s assertion that there is only one story to tell. Here, too, John Grady encounters those who try to warn him about the truths of another country, but none more forcibly than his killer, Eduardo. Eduardo understands Cole’s desires and those of others to recreate the country that is lost to them: “They [farmboys] drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name.”58 He speaks directly of another of Foucault’s concepts – that is, that naming is the greatest appropriation of all: “Before I name you completely to myself I will give you 20 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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even yet a last chance to save yourself.”59 Then he adds yet another warning about country: “the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world – he passed the blade back and forth like a shuttle through a loom – your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions.”60 Then, to emphasize the appropriation, Eduardo slices an E into John Grady’s thigh. The Epilogue of Cities of the Plain reafirms the power of storytelling. The fellow traveler that Billy meets is an allegorical igure, the Storyteller. Picking up the thread we have been tracing regarding language, Billy asks the storyteller the central question, “You sure you aint makin all this up.”61 The storyteller’s response concerns the making of narratives and the implicit nature of language as the human activity and hearkens back to the Nietzschean concept of language as a stay against the inevitability of death: It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.62

The power of the story that the storyteller tells Billy about the travelers momentarily evokes in Billy, after a night’s sleep, a waking vision that makes an “ancient spanish mission” out of the dome of a radar tracking station63 and “passing pilgrims” out of rags of plastic wrapping. The storyteller earlier afirms that essence which exists beyond language and to which language can sometimes provide testament: “At the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core are no idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out. Before the irst man spoke and after the last is silenced forever.”64 Unlike the young protagonists of the earlier Border iction, Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men is moving toward the end of his career. Nevertheless, as the title signals, he too has lost his country, or at least he no longer understands it or has the ability to adjust to its changes. Like John Grady, Sheriff Bell seems not to know what happens to one’s country. He is faced with a killer, Chigurh, whose motives for his actions are beyond Sheriff Bell’s imaginings, as if the killer comes in fulillment of John Grady’s father’s words, “We dont know what’s goin to show up here come daylight.”65 Just as John Grady had sought out the judge to help him understand his actions and what has happened to him, Bell seeks out his Uncle Ellis, perhaps for the same reasons. Emphasizing the role of language in deceiving the will 21 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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to truth, Ellis tells Ed Tom, “You sign on for the ride you probably think you got at least some notion of where the ride’s goin. But you might not. Or you might have been lied to.”66 And like Alfonsa, he speaks of courage: “Probably nobody would blame you then. If you quit. But if it’s just that it turned out to be a little roughern what you had in mind. Well. That’s something else.”67 The very title, The Road, alludes to the road of life on which the human journey is distinguished from that of all other journeys only by the complexities of human language, as well as by the capacity for witnessing the history of those journeys made possible through language. The earlier novels have demonstrated that a society can create truths that in turn take on a materiality, and those who try to impose their own understandings on those truths often meet with resistance and failure. At the same time, the novels posit that language is the human activity, and in the Epilogue of The Crossing the value of storytelling is reasserted in its ability to allow others to witness the truths that might be gleaned there. The Road, however, tentatively provides an answer to the question posed earlier as John Grady Cole is saying goodbye to his former girlfriend, and she suggests that everything is talk. His reply, “Not everything”68 is reinforced in The Road. In The Road, the man’s “country,” his values, ideals, and truths have been completely subverted. The potential for the power of language as a stay against death no longer exists as is demonstrated in the minimalism of the prose itself, in the primal repetition of “okay,” and in the man’s remembrance of his favorite day of childhood retrieving irewood with his uncle, a day spent without language: “Neither of them had spoken a word.”69 The narrative reveals to the man “the absolute truth of the world,”70 the inevitability of death, as all human creations designed to serve as a stay against it are dismantled. The words of the narrator signal that the thread of language theory that we have been tracing is coming to an end: “The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.”71 The country surrounding the journey of the man and boy is illed with signiiers with no existing referents: the shopping cart without goods to be purchased, the lute the man makes for the boy that has no meaning for him in a world without music,72 the library with swollen, unreadable books.73 Examples of language without referents are all around, “[t]he sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.”74 The father makes an effort to reestablish for the boy a world in which values and truths are once again conveyed through language, but all of his efforts fail. He tells the boy stories of courage and justice, but the stories describe a kind of courage and justice that no longer exist in the boy’s world.75 Billboards that the two pass advertise goods long since gone.76 The man has encouraged the boy in 22 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

McCarthy’s Heroes and the Will to Truth

studies, but the boy abandons them, including the alphabet.77 The man creates a lamp in order to read to the boy, but the boy is too tired to hear the story.78 The man discovers some old newspapers in a house, but the words of the newspaper refer to a world that no longer exists.79 He asks the boy to tell him a story, but the boy refuses saying that he does not know the kind of stories his father tells him, stories with happy endings.80 Because Ely is the only named character in the narrative, a number of readings of his presence in the text are possible. His relationship to the linguistic landscape is clear, however. Ely, rather than being the usual blind seer or wise prophet, is merely a survivor, and the details he shares about his survival are lies. Instead of a message of hope, he offers a dark prediction: “Things will be better when everybody’s gone.”81 His very words echo a distrust of language: “I dont want anybody talking about me”82 and “I think in times like these the less said the better.”83 Yet for all the dissolution of language that The Road exhibits, the novel serves as an ongoing argument for the power of iction, the power of storytelling, which was begun in the Epilogue of Cities of the Plain, because the story itself continues to illustrate the possibility of words that perform truths. Just as the language of the book moves away from the complexities and metaphors of earlier works that create a level of reality of their own to a substantive language close to the human struggle of the man and the boy, so also does the dialogue between the man and the boy withdraw to a language that does something: communicating their needs for food, safety, and shelter, their fears, their health, and their well-being. “Okay” becomes suficient for a response. At times the boy even stops talking altogether.84 In this world, with language taken closer to its primal uses, the man and boy continually illustrate the truth of Alfonsa’s assertion in All the Pretty Horses that courage is a performative noun: “that the desire was the thing itself.”85 Near the end, the boy asks the man what is the bravest thing the man has ever done, and the man replies, “Getting up this morning.”86 When the boy expresses a desire to give up, the man emphasizes the importance of courage at the center of life’s journeys: “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying.”87 It is that kind of courage that the boy performs, enacts, at the end when he goes into the road alone and waits for the approaching stranger.88 Throughout the later iction, as we have observed, McCarthy illustrates the will to truth at the core of most human interaction and the need to understand that language is accompanied by desire and power. He demonstrates the truth of Foucault’s assertion that the discourse of a society can have an “awesome materiality,” capable of destroying the hopes of any hero who fails to recognize the differences between one “country” and another. Ultimately, however, the tracing of language and language theory through 23 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

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the works arrives in The Road at a similar place to Hawthorne’s distinction between “fact” and “iction” in “The Custom House” Introductory to The Scarlet Letter. Whereas fact conveys a limited truth, iction opens the way for multiple meanings, commodious enough to accommodate courage to move to the future. NOTES 1. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 155. 2. Fredric Jameson, “Preface,” Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. ix. 3. TC 155. 4. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 81. 5. Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 277. 6. Lyotard, p. 81. 7. Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discourse. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert Sawyer (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 218–19. 8. Ibid, p. 219. 9. Ibid, p. 219. 10. Ibid, p. 216. 11. Ibid, p. 216. 12. Linda Townley Woodson, “Deceiving the Will to Truth,” Sacred Violence, Vol. 2, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002), pp. 51–52. 13. Foucault, p. 216. 14. Jay Watson, “Lighting out of Civil Rights Territory: Suttree, the Quentin Problem, and the Historical Unconscious,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 4 (2005), pp. 82–83. 15. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 85. 16. BM 116. 17. Ibid, p. 116. 18. Ibid, pp. 142–47. 19. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 79. 20. Ibid, p. 11. 21. BM 145. 22. Ibid, p. 145. 23. Ibid, p. 145. 24. For a fuller reading of Blood Meridian from a Kristevan perspective, see my essay “Leaving the Dark Night of the Lie: A Kristevan Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction,” ed. James D. Lilley, Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), pp. 267–84. 25. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 26. Ibid, p. 305. 24 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.005

McCarthy’s Heroes and the Will to Truth 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Ibid, p. 328. Ibid, p. 306. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 168. ATPH 25–26. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, p. 28. Foucault, p. 219. ATPH 238. Foucault, p. 216–17. ATPH 136. Ibid, p. 240. Ibid, p. 237. Ibid, p. 239. Ibid, p. 235. Ibid, p. 111. Ibid, p. 145. Ibid, p. 168. Ibid, p. 193. Ibid, p. 168. Ibid, p. 291. Ibid, p. 293. Ibid, p. 299. Ibid, p. 299. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks from the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 81. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 153. TC 142. Ibid, p. 142. Ibid, p. 158. Ibid, p. 283. Ibid, p. 292. COTP 249. Ibid, p. 250. Ibid, p. 253. Ibid, p. 277. Ibid, p. 287. Ibid, p. 289. Ibid, p. 281. ATPH 26. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 265. NCFOM 265. ATPH 28. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 12. TR 110. Ibid, p. 75. 25

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Linda W oodson 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Ibid, p. 134. Ibid, p. 158. Ibid, p. 75. Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, p. 108. Ibid, p. 206. Ibid, p. 8. Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, p. 226. Ibid, p. 145. Ibid, p. 144. Ibid, p. 145. Ibid, pp. 219–20. ATPH 235. TR 229. Ibid, p. 116. Ibid, p. 237.

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3 P HILL IP A. SNYDER AND DELYS W. SNY D ER

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language: McCarthy’s Style

Le style est l’homme même.1 Compte de Buffon

Whether or not, in these postmodern, late-capitalist times, we can still entertain Buffon’s famous declaration that a writer’s style represents the writer himself, one thing remains clear: Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated style, present from the very beginning of his career, represents the primary evidence that proclaims that his writing belongs to one oeuvre. In fact, the appellation “McCarthy,” especially when used in critical contexts such as this one, represents, not the individual human being, but a trope, a igure of language, a site for what Michel Foucault in his seminal 1969 lecture “What Is an Author?” calls the “author-function.” According to Foucault, this author-function operates to regulate texts within a society’s systems of discourse, especially in economic and legal terms, and can produce, instead of a singular authority of origin corresponding to a real person, a multiplicity of selves in a transdiscursive manner, some of which may be the productions and not the producers of those very texts. Hence, we may say that his writing produced McCarthy (author-function) as much as McCarthy (real person) produced his writing. Further, in “The Death of the Author,” a 1968 companion essay to Foucault’s, Roland Barthes argues that the production of a text depends primarily on the reader rather than on the author because writing always works as a performance in the present. “The reader,” writes Barthes, “is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed . . . ; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. . . . [The reader] is simply someone who holds together in a single ield all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”2 In this sense, we may designate a Barthesian reader-function (which Barthes terms the “writerly”) to accompany Foucault’s author-function, both of which are essential elements in the production and circulation of texts in contemporary national and global contexts.3 27 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

Phill ip A. Snyder and De lys W . S ny d er

Foucault and Barthes – philosophers writing in the late 1960s at the juncture of structuralism’s move toward poststructuralism (a moment which also parallels the rise of the term “postmodernism” in critical discourse) – both focus their groundbreaking reconstruction of the author and the reader, along with all that it entails for textual studies, on the nature of language. For them, building on Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion that the link between the signiied and the signiier in a linguistic sign is arbitrary, language represents a nonmimetic medium, one that marks the absence of its subject and author rather than their presence.4 As Barthes observes, “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, . . . where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body [person] writing.”5 Foucault adds the following: “In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”6 So, in analyzing McCarthy’s style, our purpose cannot be to trace its meaning and signiicance back to some authoritative origin in its author – such projects must be left to Oprah Winfrey and the few others who have managed to conduct interviews with the reclusive McCarthy, who resists reentering his texts anyway by consistently declining to make any deinitive interpretive commentary on them. Instead, our purpose must center on how his language works to create his particular “style” within the historical and theoretical contexts of modernism and postmodernism. As readers, representatives of that generic reader destination for which McCarthy’s writing is intended, we share the responsibility of holding his texts together by reproducing them ourselves. Contexts: Modernism and Postmodernism Virtually every critical commentary on modernism and postmodernism – both of which revolve around notions of language and style – begins with the observation that, while these terms are notoriously dificult to pin down precisely, they are also most productively conceived and discussed together because of their ongoing dialogic relationship. This conception/discussion begins with the acknowledgement that modernism and postmodernism, like any literary period or movement, are largely scholarly constructions, as Brian McHale argues: “These are all literary-historical ictions, discursive artifacts constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively by literary historians.”7 McHale adds that it follows obviously that there would be multiple versions of these literary-historical periods in circulation. Further, modernism and postmodernism as theoretical constructs – that is, as literary modes of expression imagined outside historical frameworks – also 28 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language

circulate in multiple versions which can be used to describe and analyze literary discourse that predates these twentieth- and twenty-irst-century movements. For example, one can analyze Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel Tristram Shandy according to its postmodern elements. In short, we must perforce deal with modernism and postmodernism in the plural sense, in terms of modernisms and postmodernisms, and, were it not outside the scope of this discussion, also consider other nonliterary art forms – painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and so forth – and their impact. Nevertheless, recognizing the inherent limitations of any deinitions/descriptions, we can lay out some working paradigms, starting with a general historical description of literary modernism: The modernist movement . . . may be described broadly as follows: lourishing during the time between World War I and II, although many characteristics of modernism were certainly present before 1914 and after 1945; involving an international group of writers from Great Britain and Europe, as well as America, who interacted with one another; relecting the sociopolitical climate of the time, including the rise of technology, science, socialism, feminism, civil rights, psychoanalysis, sexual freedom, and so forth; questioning traditional modes of literary expression and transmission and shifting its locus away from the center more toward the margins; experimenting with new aesthetic theories and stylistic practices that tend to privilege fragmentation and eschew coherence; redeining, while reafirming, the cultural role of the alienated, yet socially engaged, artist.8

The last few items in this description focusing on experimental literary aesthetics relect the inluence of the avant-garde, the cutting edge of artistic expression, and anticipate the depiction of the postmodern as an extension of the modern, particularly its rejection of realism, verisimilitude, coherence, and language’s mimetic power to comprehend the world. Jeremy Hawthorn, relecting the inluence of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition,9 suggests that postmodernism, as a pervasive “condition,” may have an even broader application to its contemporary historical and philosophical milieu than modernism has had to its own, more irmly established one: Postmodernism, then, can be used today in a number of different ways: (i) to refer to the non-realist and non-traditional literature and art of the postSecond World War period; (ii) to refer to literature and art which takes certain modernist characteristics to an extreme stage; and (iii) to refer to aspects of a more general human condition in the “late capitalist” world of the post 1950s which have an all-embracing effect on life, culture, ideology and art, as well as (in some but not all usages) to a generally welcoming, celebrative attitude toward these aspects.10 29 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

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In emphasizing postmodernism’s historical and theoretical inheritance from modernism, Hawthorn’s description here reinforces their inherently dialogic relationship, almost as if the postmodern also contains the modern. In The Postmodern Explained, Lyotard describes the postmodern as “that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations.”11 He adds that these new postmodern presentations must be those which overlow established paradigms of aesthetic judgment, modern and otherwise, and that which work “without rules . . . in order to establish rules for what will have been made.”12 In other words, these experimental postmodern presentations must be written, paradoxically, ahead of themselves in some future aesthetic sense, one that might even surpass the conines of the avant-garde, a decidedly modernist proposition. Accordingly, most commentaries identify as postmodern those writers whose literary texts present themselves in this manner. In McHale’s irst chapter of Postmodernist Fiction, for example, he lists the following writers as exemplars of the shift from the modern to the postmodern: Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Carlos Fuentes, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. McCarthy does not belong with this group of writers because his writing does not explicitly display itself as experimental in Lyotard’s sense. Neither does he belong entirely with the exemplars of Anglo-American modernism – T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and the rest – because his career began during the sixties, clearly outside of high modernism’s historical heyday. Like many contemporary writers, McCarthy develops his thematics and stylistics from an array of literary practices and traditions, including romanticism and realism as well as modernism and postmodernism. In The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, David Holloway makes a complex and convincing argument that McCarthy might best be considered a “late modernist” in the context of Frederick Jameson’s postmodern “late capitalist” critique13 as set against the broad background of contemporary literary theory’s reimagining of textuality, which includes a reiguring of such notions as authorship, language, sign systems, representation, existential phenomena, cultural discourse, and so forth: I argue, in effect, that [McCarthy’s] novels might stand as a series of experiments, or a laying of the ground, for modernism’s revival – not for some nostalgic return to a lost set of aesthetic conventions or codes, but for a kind of cultural representation that might retain what has been strategically valuable

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Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language and egalitarian in the so-called “postmodern” praxis, while simultaneously scrutinizing and repudiating that praxis for its more reactionary political contents.14

In other words, Holloway analyzes McCarthy’s iction, from the early southern novels through the Border Trilogy, in Marxian terms to reveal the dynamics of this revival project, especially its opening up to question and critique the ideological and historical foundations of certain “postmodern” practices, and to outline McCarthy’s “late modern” experimentation as displayed in his writing as well as in the various critical commentaries which have interrogated it. The inherently dialogic nature of Holloway’s project relects postmodern discourse’s preoccupation with ethics as a critical two-part movement: (1) the revealing and displacing of hegemonic power without (2) replacing that power by asserting some privileged metacritical position. Further, in his careful attention to the close reading of McCarthy’s texts, Holloway reafirms and exempliies the responsibility of postmodern readers, as articulated by Jacques Derrida, to complete the contract between the sender and receiver of a given text by countersigning the sender’s signature: A text is signed only much later by the other. . . . This is how a text always comes about. . . . [W]e are constantly obliged to make the gesture that consists in honoring, so to speak, the other’s signature. In terms of this context, the gesture consists in hearing, while we speak and as acutely as possible, [the sender’s] voice. . . . To hear and understand it, one must also produce it, because, like his voice, [the sender’s] signature awaits its own form, its own event. This event is entrusted to us.15

In some ways, then, the question may not be so much whether McCarthy is a postmodern writer, but, instead, whether we can be ethical postmodern readers as we take up our responsibility to countersign McCarthy’s signature by simultaneously hearing and speaking his voice in an event of textual production – remembering that we hear and speak that voice primarily through his style. Stylistics: Syntax and Diction The most astute of McCarthy’s many careful readers may be his translators, textual countersigners par excellence, because they must be so inely attuned to his stylistic voice in translating his every word, phrase, and sentence. François Hirsch, one of his French translators, adds that they must also share his love of language: “I would like to make it very clear that translating Cormac McCarthy would not be even thinkable without being 31 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

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in love with language, with words, with their color, their dark, mesmerizing power. Why? The answer is simple. Because Cormac is poetry. Epic, lyrical, whatever you call it, it is Poetry.”16 This love of language may indeed be the most pervasive inluence on McCarthy’s “stylistics,” which Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short deine generally as “the study of language as used in literary texts, with the aim of relating it to its artistic functions.”17 For example, in establishing and foreshadowing central McCarthy motifs and themes, the irst line of his irst novel, The Orchard Keeper, illustrates this connection between language and its artistic functions: For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky.18

Syntactically, this is a complex sentence, with an adverbial phrase of time (“for some time now”), a subject (“the road”), a passive past perfect verb (“had been deserted”), a compound adjectival phrase (“white and scorching yet”) modifying “road,” and a subordinate clause (“though the sun was already reddening the western sky”). Of a total of twenty-two words, seventeen have only one syllable (77%), two have two syllables (9%), and the remaining three have three syllables (14%). With the exception of “deserted,” which is of Latin origin, and “reddening,” which is an Early Modern English combination of “red” and “en” from the seventeenth century, all the other words are Anglo-Saxon. By using single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words in a complex syntactic structure, McCarthy creates a sentence built with the most basic materials in the English language but one which also embodies linguistic complexities that relate to key thematic issues. For example, the sentence’s tripartite division alludes to past time (“for some time . . . the road had been deserted”), present time (“now . . . white and scorching yet”), and future time (“though the sun was already reddening the western sky”), a temporal combination which occurs throughout McCarthy’s writing as if to emphasize the timelessness of his descriptive prose. Further, the sentence’s dominant motifs – the road, the deserted landscape in which the hitchhiker Kenneth Rattner will appear in the sentence following, and the sunset – all allude to later McCarthy texts, passages, and themes: The Road; Blood Meridian; The Sunset Limited; the ending to All the Pretty Horses with John Grady riding off into the sunset, as well as numerous other sunset scenes; itinerant loners out on the road; hot and barren landscapes; contrasting light and dark imagery; and so forth. McCarthy’s stylistic and thematic vision clearly begins with this opening to his very irst novel, in which the ordinary is cobbled together to produce the extraordinary – a whole of his work contained within one portentous sentence. 32 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language

Most McCarthy scholars have made general stylistic observations on his work in connection with other issues under investigation, while a smaller number have done more detailed analyses of his style, but, in one way or another, two stylistic elements have emerged as foundational: syntax that varies in length and complexity according to narrative and thematic contexts and diction that appropriates and creates words from multiple sources.19 Because McCarthy builds his larger narratives on his sentence-level and word-level stylistics, our paying careful attention to their operations can yield productive insights into the more global issues playing out in his writing. 20 This interrogation of the microcosmic elements of McCarthy’s style to reveal the macrocosmic must begin with the famous “optical democracy” passage from Blood Meridian, which has functioned as a kind of critical gloss for his descriptive writing in general, which tends to privilege coordination rather than subordination in laying out textual landscapes to avoid hierarchical relationships among their component parts: In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.21

Here McCarthy lists everything the eye can see, giving each detail equal weight, cataloguing “nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass,” using only the coordinating conjunction “nor” to emphasize a holistic apprehension of the entire phenomenological scene item-by-item. “A man and a rock” become a democratic compound subject as McCarthy makes humans and natural objects equal both optically and syntactically. Thus, his lists also function according to a “linguistic democracy.” Suttree, for example, opens with a long epigraph addressing “Dear friend” – a doppelgänger for his readers – which takes that friend on an introductory night journey through Knoxville replete with characteristic McCarthy descriptive catalogues: Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick. A steamshovel reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Cross here. By frograils and ishplates where engines cough like lions in the dark of the yard. To a darker town, past lamps stoned blind, past smoking oblique shacks and china dogs and painted tires where dirty lowers grow. Down pavings rent with ruin, the slow cataclysm of neglect, the wires that belly pole to pole across the constellations hung with kitestring, with bolos composed of hobbled bottles or the toys of the smaller children. Encampment of the damned.22 33 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

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Although the only complete sentence in this passage is the imperative, “Cross here,” McCarthy gives the impression of sentences by collecting a series of fragments composed of noun phrases and prepositional phrases, modiied by adjectival phrases and clauses, and by marking these fragments with periods. These fragments, like the phenomena they represent, share equal descriptive billing. Holloway explains that by circumventing “the notion of syntactic structure as that which elaborates or encodes meaning,” McCarthy creates “a language that simply accumulates impressions of nature, piling more of the same . . . until the language itself seems to acquire a living presence that matches – rather than mediates – the solidity of the narrated scene.”23 In other words, McCarthy aspires to a style that embodies the phenomenological solidity of the signiied within the signiier without the anxiety of attempting to bridge the representational gap between them – so his words can function like things. Even McCarthy’s basic narrative style – simple sentences strung together with “and” to form a lengthy sentence – has the qualities of a list, as does the following passage from The Crossing describing wolves on the hunt: They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner ire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire.24

This passage, one long compound sentence composed of ive main clauses, lacks commas, which makes each clause equal within the sentence. Further, the compound verbs reinforce the passage’s compound structure. As Béatrice Trotignon observes, the lack of hierarchy in McCarthy’s coordination does not privilege any of the listed items: “There is an inner subjective perception but no evaluation is offered.”25 McCarthy often lists noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and even main clauses without imposing hierarchical relationships among them. His minimal use of punctuation, especially the lack of quotation marks to set dialogue apart from narrative, also adds to this leveling effect. All these stylistic moves relect a postmodern anti-hegemonic sensibility. At times, however, he leaves his simpler narrative style, what Nancy Kreml calls his unmarked style, to create sentences that stand out in a marked way. When his descriptions turn philosophical, poetical, or lyrical, the syntax changes and becomes more complex, as in the following sentence from the end of All the Pretty Horses: There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacriicial torment.26 34 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language

The style of this passage, featuring subordination (“because . . .”) and metaphor (“like . . .”), contrasts with previous sentences, giving it prominence. Kreml comments that the more marked style “require[s] more effort and slow[s] down the reader’s processing of thought, thus making these passages doubly noticeable and more dificult to skim past. . . . The length and complexity of the sentences literally, almost physically, constrain the reader to ind meaning.”27 Rhetorical dialogue, spoken by powerful characters such as the Dueña Alfonsa from All the Pretty Horses or Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, and philosophical discourse, spoken by such sages as the Mormon ex-priest in The Crossing, also share these features of McCarthy’s marked style. This marked style empowers the narrator or speaker with a certain hegemonic authority over the discourse, although counter-discourse and the transitory nature of language itself tend to undercut that power as well, underscoring the necessity of close reading to unpack the subtleties of these exchanges. McCarthy’s diction also requires our best efforts to reproduce his meaning. He ills out his word-hoard by appropriating words from local dialects, different languages, specialty terms, and archaic language. As Kenneth Lincoln observes, McCarthy’s words have the credibility of knowable working objects. Tap them and they ring true. . . . He knows all the registers of storytelling, from truncated plain talk to unpunctuated ruminative rap, nighthawk cattle songs to country-western ballads to Mexican folk corridos, inventive cursing to low poker humor, sexual come-ons to scatological broken lyrics. . . . His is not parlor, academic, or clerical diction, but a working register of common idioms.28

According to his translators, who needed his help to understand his vast vocabulary, McCarthy draws his words from many sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, Black’s Law Dictionary, and warfare handbooks of the nineteenth century.29 He uses Spanish and other languages with no translation other than the context and specialty and archaic words with no explanation. As a result, Kreml argues that readers must “draw heavily on memory, inference, or dictionary. . . . The words themselves, like the syntax, constrain the reader to spend more time and effort on interpreting the text and thereby to feel the weight of meaning more heavily.”30 In addition, McCarthy’s diction contributes to Holloway’s notion of the “living presence” texture of McCarthy’s style, whether it be the untranslated Spanish, such as “huérfano” from The Crossing; the accurate regional term, such as “stob” from Suttree; or the exact archaic word, such as “haruspices” in Child of God.31 Occurring in the midst of a reported conversation between Billy Parham and an old man, one of McCarthy’s standard 35 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

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prophetic sages, “huérfano” stands out as the only Spanish word in the passage, its translation not being given until later when Billy denies being an orphan, to which denial the old man reafirms his initial assessment, underscoring the true gravity of the term for Billy, who learns later that his parents are, indeed, dead. Describing Suttree’s tying up his skiff to a “stob,” a southern term for a short straight piece of wood, lends regional authenticity to the novel’s Knoxville setting. Using “haruspices,” soothsayers or prophets who examine the entrails of sacriiced animals to determine the will of the gods, in reference to the medical students who dissect Lester Ballard’s body, opens up again the mystery of his monstrous necrophilia set against his nonironic status as a child of God. All these terms function as a kind of hypertext, opening up McCarthy’s text to expanded interpretive possibilities for readers who pursue the necessary thought and research.32 Further, the archaic words, much like the geological strata, fossils, and petroglyphs in McCarthy’s descriptive passages, embed the past within the present, giving the impression of language’s timeless immanence in his texts. McCarthy’s writing provides ample evidence of his immense vocabulary, including many words of his own creation, such as in Blood Meridian. He makes new compounds by combining already existing words, such as “rawhidecovered”; he creates new words from already existing morphemes, such as “bepopulate” or “enhearsed”; he makes nouns into verbs, such as “skylight”; he blends parts of two words to make a new word, such as “scurvid” from “scurvy” and “rabid”; and he outrightly coins new words, such as “sleared” or “awap.” 33 This word-creation enhances his status as postmodern artistic bricoleur, one who cobbles together his texts from the multiple and varied language resources available to him, and distinguishes him as a rival to Shakespeare in introducing new words to English. In their concordance, for example, Christopher Forbis, Wes Morgan, and John Sepich report that McCarthy uses 30,069 different words in all of his novels, with 13,384 occurring only once.34 According to one of his Spanish translators, Michael Scott Doyle, reading McCarthy requires a fundamental rethinking of language, a “re-Englishing.”35 In The Road, representing the unplugged, stripped-down acoustic version of his style, McCarthy interrogates the very meaning of language in a world full of empty signiiers – that is, a world with names for a multitude of things which no longer exist outside of memory and books – a world on the literal verge of the posthuman, never mind the postmodern. McCarthy’s stylistic range and virtuosity – from the rich rococo of Suttree to the austere restraint of The Road – creates a unique signature among contemporary writers, which careful readers countersign by reproducing 36 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language

McCarthy’s texts themselves in a writerly postmodern Barthesian move. Happily, his writing always rewards our most diligent efforts. NOTES 1. Compte de Buffon, “Discours sur le Style: Discours prononcé à l’Academie Française par M. de Buffon le Jour de Sa Réception le 25 Aout 1753,” (Texte de l’édition de l’Abbé J. Pierre Librarie), http://pedagogie.ac-toulouse.fr/ philosophie/textes/buffondiscourssurlestyle.htm 2. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: The Noonday Press, 1977), p. 148. 3. See Roland Barthes, SZ, trans. Richard Miller, pref. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 3–16. According to Barthes, “the writerly text is ourselves writing” (p. 5). 4. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, revised edition (London: Peter Owen, 1974). 5. Barthes, “Death,” p. 142. 6. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 142. For discussions of disappearance in McCarthy, see Dianne C. Luce, “The Vanishing World of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 161–97 and Phillip A. Snyder, “Disappearance in Blood Meridian,” Western American Literature 44.2 (Summer 2009), pp. 127–39. 7. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 4. 8. Phillip A. Snyder, “Modernism,” Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Steven R. Serain and Alfred Bendixen (New York: Continuum, 1999), p. 778. 9. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 10. Jeremy Hawthorn, “Modernism and Postmodernism,” A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 110. 11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 15. 12. Ibid, 15. 13. See Fredrick Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Simply put, Jameson explores the global capitalist economy, with an emphasis on its power of commodiication, and traces its effects on architecture and art, which relect a postmodern relocation of the repositories of such traditional notions as individuality, knowledge, emotion, and spatial relationships. 14. David Holloway, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 4. 15. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, eds. Claude Levesque and Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 51. Here Derrida makes speciic reference to Nietzsche, which we have replaced with [the sender] to keep the application more generic in this discussion. 37 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.006

Phill ip A. Snyder and De lys W . S ny d er 16. François Hirsch. “I ind it very hard to talk about translations and about translating,” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, ed. Christine Chollier (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003), p. 203. See also commentary by translators Isabelle Reinharez (pp. 213–18) and Guillemette Belleteste (pp. 219–25) in this same volume (Chollier). 17. Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, second ed. (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2007), p. 13. 18. TOK 7. 19. For linguistic analyses of McCarthy’s style, see Arthur Bingham, “Syntactic Complexity and Iconicity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Language and Literature 20 (1995), pp. 19–33; Nancy Kreml, “Implicatures of Styleswitching in the Narrative Voice of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses,” Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties, ed. Carol Myers-Scotton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 41–61 and “Stylistic Variation and Cognitive Constraint in All the Pretty Horses,” Sacred Violence: Vol. 2, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002), pp. 37–49; Béatrice Trotignon, “McCarthy’s Use of the Present Tense in Blood Meridian,” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/ Territoires Inconnus, ed. Christine Chollier (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003), pp. 191–202. 20. Of course, these larger narration issues – such as narrative divisions, framing epigraphs and epilogues, multiple points of view, effaced narrators, revolving modes of discourse, consistent thematic motifs, and so forth – also constitute McCarthy’s style but lie outside the limits of this discussion. 21. BM 258–59. 22. S 3. 23. Holloway, p. 155. 24. TC 4. 25. Trotignon, p. 193. 26. ATPH 302. 27. Kreml, “Implicatures,” p. 46. 28. Kenneth Lincoln, Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 26. 29. Reinharez, p. 216; Hirsch, pp. 209, 206. 30. Kreml, “Implicatures,” p. 48. 31. TC 134; S 11; COG 194. 32. The idea of archaic vocabulary, particularly the example of “haruspices,” functioning to permit multiple interpretative possibilities in a kind of hypertext was introduced by Steven Frye in Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 49. 33. BM 120, 256, 118, 159, 101, 65, 28. 34. Christopher Forbis, Wesley G. Morgan, and John Sepich, Words Cormac McCarthy Uses in His Novels, http://www.johnsepich.com/cormac_mccarthy/ index.html 35. Michael Scott Doyle, “‘A whole new style seemed to be seeking expression here’: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark in Spanish,” Translation Review 72 (2006), p. 9.

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P a rt II

Beginnings in the American South

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4 LYDI A R. COOPER

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic

Cormac McCarthy’s fourth Appalachian novel, Suttree (1979), opens with a vivid description of Knoxville’s slums, the McAnally Flats, as a gothic “darker town,” a shadow-Knoxville illed with “carnival . . . shapes” that move dreamlike in the dark with “spectral eyes.”1 By the end of the novel, these slums face imminent destruction, but when Cornelius Suttree’s friend, J-Bone, tells him that construction crews are already tearing through the lats, Suttree thinks that there is still “another McAnally, good to last a thousand years.”2 This “other” McAnally is a dream-vision that transforms the slum’s poverty-ridden members into Promethean heroes who storm the gates of heaven to carry off “the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets.”3 Suttree’s “gothic” vision at the end of the novel thus answers the irst scene by setting free the hideous physical and spiritual aspects of Knoxville to roam among the “higher world of form.”4 These bookend scenes of Knoxville’s slums, in all their mystical squalor, represent how the southern gothic elements in all of McCarthy’s Appalachian novels function: the aesthetic emphasis on the visual draws attention to the spiritual signiicance lying beyond the physical realm. Like other iction in the American southern gothic genre, these novels combine a horror-drenched and heavily allegorical aesthetic style with historically rooted commentary on social ills, such as issues of race, class, urbanization, and industrialization, to bring into focus repressed social anxieties. One element of the gothic aesthetic, the grotesque, forms a particularly important part of these Appalachian novels. The grotesque, often used to illuminate notions of evil and the abject, transforms ordinary objects into something bizarre – otherworldly, transcendent, demoniac – to reveal the sublimated and the mysterious. This essay will analyze McCarthy’s four Appalachian novels within the context of the American southern gothic tradition, with a speciic focus on the novels’ use of the grotesque, which foregrounds psychological and aesthetic depictions of human evil to confront readers with horrors from which they would otherwise avert their eyes. 41 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

Lydia R. Cooper

The Appalachian novels employ prominent igurative patterns of the “southern grotesque” in the form of obscene and sometimes comic exaggeration, often of physical deformity or sexual deviance.5 In these novels, an image is made grotesque to function as a visual catalyst for the apprehension of uncomfortable, perhaps even terrifying, realities. For instance, a car coming up the road in The Orchard Keeper (1965) is “grotesque like something seen through bad glass.”6 Here, an ordinary scene of a man hitchhiking is given ominous resonance by that adjective “grotesque,” an aesthetic underscoring that is explained later when the seemingly mundane man by the road is revealed to be a psychopath and an allegorical personiication of human degeneracy. McCarthy’s depictions of the abstract concept of evil through absurdly exaggerated, deformed, or physically disgusting images suggests that evil exists, not as an opposition to good, but as a pervasive, inescapable reality, as decay and rot in the physical world, and as deformity and moral corruption in humans.7 Kenneth Lincoln suggests that the power of these novels lies in their ability to force readers to “witness atrocity without moralizing.”8 An examination of gothic and grotesque images in each of the Appalachian novels, then, requires readers to imaginatively engage with evil without the mitigation of sense-making aesthetic descriptions making evil something opposable, something absolutely “other.” The Orchard Keeper The Orchard Keeper depicts the conlict between encroaching industrialization and a rural community whose yearly patterns of hunting and trapping provide subsistence without the postindustrial urban world’s commitment to material gain. The young protagonist, John Wesley Rattner, learns his ethical orientation from the “heroes” of his rural community, antigovernment moonshine runner Marion Sylder and the eponymous antidevelopment orchard keeper, Arthur Ownby. At the end of the novel, the boy departs his eastern Tennessee community and enters the “world of America at war, the era of the atomic bomb . . . when the progressive order of modern America is exposed as a monstrous will to thrive at any expense to humanity and nature.”9 Not simply an elegy to the lost Scots-Irish mountain folk driven out of their haunts by logging and the land development instigated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1920s–30s,10 this novel obsessively examines physical and metaphysical evil. Evil in this novel is irst given concrete form in the person of Kenneth Rattner, foreshadowing such later avatars of darkness as Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men 42 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic

(2005), but that form becomes increasingly insubstantial as the narrative progresses. Rattner is murdered near the beginning of the novel, his execution “like squeezing a boil.”11 His body is buried in a chemical pit, then burned, and when it is inally dug up, only a powdery ash is found.12 But Rattner’s disappearing body seems to have infected the local community with “lesser” forms of cruelty, like Constable Gifford’s assistant Legwater with his ixation on killing dogs. The Orchard Keeper, in other words, is not a novel about the erosion of morals or civilized behavior with the onslaught of civilization, but a novel that illuminates how the patina of social laws (embodied, perhaps, by the law-abiding yet fundamentally evil Legwater and Constable Gifford) cover over the more insidious forms of evil that infect everything from individuals to the ecological balance of the natural world. The novel opens with a short scene that provides a visual example of the main narrative’s assertion about the nature of evil. This italicized prologue describes an old tree being cut down. The loggers stop their sawing when they realize that a “mangled fragment of fence” is embedded through the tree’s very lesh, the tree having grown around the iron.13 A graphic image of the infection of industrialization in the natural world, this scene also suggests the permeation of corruption rampant in humans as well as the natural world. The corroded metal in the heart of the tree becomes emblematic of the fundamental horror in The Orchard Keeper: the young protagonist’s growing recognition of his own complicity in the destructive forces of evil represented by human civilization. So, when John Wesley goes to Knoxville to get bounty money for killing a hawk, he sees the glass and steel city, undergoing boom development in the early 1940s, as “gargoyled” and grotesque, a city that has been, not built, but “perpetrated” on its natural environs.14 The evil embodied earlier in the novel by Rattner, a man who is violent and egocentric and who acts without any of the normal constraints on behavior imposed through social conventions or personal conscience, symbolically fuses with the matter of human civilization, pictured as rampant urban construction that devours the natural world and legal systems that perpetuate acts of cruelty in the name of civic order. While the grotesque in McCarthy’s iction provides visual, external evidence of internal corruption, it often simultaneously reveals characters’ otherwise hidden moral inclinations, inclinations which rarely go so far as to become actions. For example, in an image of decay at the end of the novel that mirrors the decay in the novel’s prologue, John Wesley sits in a cemetery relecting on the dead who are “sheathed in the earth’s crust.” He imagines ancient kings and heroes, Tut and Agamemnon, who have disintegrated and become disembodied ideals that are now no more than “myth.”15 There 43 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

Lydia R. Cooper

are glimpses of heroic behavior throughout the novel – such as when John Wesley leaps into a river to rescue his hound dog and when he attempts to repay the bounty he earned for killing a hawk16 – but they are few and relatively insigniicant in comparison to the larger narrative events. It is only in this image of decay that their substantive presence throughout the novel is felt; the capacity for courage and moral behavior, like evil, infuses living humans through the particulate matter of these decayed heroes. Because both good and evil are human potentialities, the novel suggests that a sensitive conscience is necessary in order for an individual to recognize evil and counteract it with acts that defend the dignity and autonomy of the natural world and other humans. In The Orchard Keeper, the idea of “conscience” is represented by circumcision. The biblical practice of circumcision is a grotesque act that represents the individual’s spiritual sensitivity to moral behaviors.17 At one point Arthur Ownby marks an illegal moonshine still in the woods by shooting an “X” into the side of the barrel with twelve “circumcised” shotgun shells.18 The term used to describe Ownby’s scoring of the shells is signiicant because it illuminates the scene’s importance within the larger narrative. Ownby’s “X” draws attention to the still and, more importantly, to the murdered corpse. In so doing he precipitates the boy’s collision with a father igure (Sylder) and with himself, both of whom will act as the shapers of the boy’s emergent moral center. The “circumcised” shotgun shells, in other words, symbolically spark a series of events that awaken the characters’ as well as readers’ reception of the novel’s ethical arguments. The link between conscience and a grotesque biblical image of mutilation relects a common characteristic of the southern grotesque, where physical deformity externalizes emotional distress or moral ambivalence.19 In this novel, that which is deformed is more sensitive, and so deformity suggests the need for a sharp conscience in a morally corrupt world. For example, Sylder has a deformed toe and that appendage is “particularly sensitive.”20 And in what is perhaps the novel’s most poignant depiction of deformity, Ownby’s decrepit three-legged hound dog, Scout, becomes a mutilated symbol representing the contrast between ethical and unethical behavior. When Ownby is arrested, the police leave the dog behind. Ownby, being driven away in the squad car, looks back at the dog “standing there like some atavistic symbol or brute herald of all questions ever pressed upon humanity and beyond understanding.”21 This sudden imaginative light, from the image of the dog to an examination of a collective subconscious recognition of evil and ethics, underscores the connection between imagination and conscience. In his interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy suggests that he believes in a Jungian universal “subconscious” which existed “before language.”22 This 44 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic

mystical prelinguistic knowledge is linked in the novels to a sort of universal ethics, in which the ability to parse acts that are “right” from those that are “wrong” is a common human potentiality and obligation. Thus, in this scene in The Orchard Keeper, the insubstantial idea of “conscience” is made into a physical image, a deformed hound dog whose presence marks the stark difference between those behaviors motivated by a care for the human and nonhuman other (personiied by Ownby) and those which are not (personiied by the police). The grotesque image startles readers into a greater sensitivity to that image’s deeper signiicance and so acts as a literary circumcision, sensitizing the conscience and creating the possibility for ethical choice. Outer Dark Deformity is even more pervasive in Outer Dark (1968), exempliied by the mutilated, incest-begotten child at the heart of the “twisted nativity” story.23 In one of the most emblematic scenes in this dark tale, Culla Holme, having abandoned his just-born son in the woods, stands with “shadow pooled at his feet,” a “dark stain” all around him.24 Dianne C. Luce suggests that the shadow represents “that archetypal dark side of the self deriving from the collective unconscious that complements yet is not acknowledged by the ego.”25 This novel, then, is about the “shadow” aspects of human life, the urges and instincts that the ego cannot acknowledge. Expressed primarily through the incest taboo, the child becomes the manifestation of this Jungian concept of the psychic “shadow.” Culla irst attempts to bury the child, metaphorically hiding it from others and from his consciousness in the womblike moist and moss-covered ground, but he fails to effectively bury the child. He then lees through anthropomorphized woods while a lightning storm “bequeath[s] him . . . an embryonic bird’s irst issured vision of the world.”26 The image of the world cracking to life like an eggshell splitting suggests Culla’s attempt at a psychological rebirth from his incest-stained past. But the unburied child is rescued by a tinker, and Culla must chase the duo through the mountains to ind his child, a search not motivated by desire but by Culla’s need to cathartically acknowledge and then deny, through repression or rejection, the commission of a psychological prohibition. At the end of the novel, a “grim triune” of wild men succeed in inding and killing the child, but the child’s death functions antithetically to catharsis. The leader of the band vocalizes the crime – in the face of Culla’s denials, the bearded man insists that Culla “got this thing here in [his sister’s] belly [his] own self.”27 He then has one of his men slice the child’s throat, and the third, mute member of the band drinks the child’s blood.28 Culla protests but does 45 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

Lydia R. Cooper

nothing, his failure to act foreshadowed by his dreams of failed healings that commence the novel.29 Thus, Culla is made to face his own taboo act, incest, but because he witnesses the child’s murder and cannibalism without acting, he becomes complicit in the commission of the most heinous taboo in human communities. Afterward, Culla is even more eclipsed by darkness; even at noon he is haunted by his shadow, a “dark parody of his progress,”30 and he wanders incessantly as though “they wasn’t a home nowhere” for him.31 The three wild men, then, do not punish Culla for his crime, nor do they permit him to escape the eternal haunt of his act. Rather than acting as judges and juries, they act merely as intensiiers of evil. Not every character in the novel, however, participates allegorically in the exempliication and perpetuation of evil. Rinthy, doll-like and wraithlike,32 is an almost-insubstantial character, yet she provides the sole source of light, metaphorically and literally, in the novel. On a literal level, Rinthy is “more associated with light than is Culla,”33 often being shown haloed, spot-lit, or generally illuminated by a direct light source.34 Her search for her son suggests why the light follows her, out of all the characters in the novel. Seeking the taboo-child out of love, Rinthy’s desire transforms the incest-begotten child from an allegorical symbol of abjection into a little boy, his mother’s lost “chap.”35 And her constantly leaking breasts suggest that she is a manifestation of nurture in a world deprived of any other consolation. Rinthy ultimately provides the only possible antidote to abjection in the novel. If Culla’s inarticulate failures provide any lesson at all, it is the impossibility of fending off the human stain. In the world of the novel, all living creatures are made grotesque, exiled from the warmth of human companionship that would be a “home” to them. But Rinthy, through her brief yet compassionate encounters with the strangers along her journey, experiences a “frail agony of grace” in this damned, dark world.36 Child of God McCarthy’s next novel, Child of God (1973), drives its audience into an even more intimate and horrifying encounter with human evil. Child of God makes explicit use of carnivalesque and grotesque imagery to draw attention to the concept of evil and, paradoxically, the necessity of empathy in the face of evil. In the novel’s opening scene, the narrator describes an auction held to sell off Lester Ballard’s ancestral property. The auction’s audience members, arriving at Ballard’s family property to witness the sale, are likened to a “carnival,”37 and Ballard, squatting to talk to a friend, is “like [a] constipated gargoyl[e].”38 Throughout the novel, the narrator emphasizes all things bizarre, scatological, and deformed. But these grotesque images 46 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic

hold a horrifying and oddly numinous message. Mass murderer and necrophile Lester Ballard, the “child of God” who, the narrator tells readers, is “much like” them, forces the novel’s audience to contend with the dissonance between his attributes as a character and his titular epithet.39 Even though the narrator insists that Ballard is a relection of ordinary humans, he is consistently described with dehumanizing exaggeration, as when the narrator calls him a “misplaced and loveless simian shape.”40 So, on the one hand, Ballard is a “child of God” like all people, while on the other hand he is described as a bestial caricature of a hominoid. Wolfgang Iser claims that in the dynamic reading process, in which the reader participates in creating a text’s meaning, what is left unsaid in a text “bring[s] into play [readers’] own faculty for establishing connections – for illing in the gaps left by the text itself.”41 Iser’s description of how the reader “ills in the gaps” left by a text suggests the effect of the narrator’s malicious characterizations of Ballard. Because the narrator excoriates Ballard while commanding the audience to empathize with him, the narrator implies that empathy is not necessarily equivalent to sympathy. Ballard is a recognizable personiication of evil, but while the audience is encouraged to despise that evil, they are never permitted to view evil, in the form of Ballard, as something entirely “other,” entirely different from themselves. This complicated call for empathy sheds light on the problematic symbolism of the grotesque in this novel. Perhaps one of the most traditionally gothic elements in the novel is the cave system in the eastern Tennessee Appalachians into which Ballard crawls and which ultimately entomb his moldering victims. In gothic iction, caves often house monsters and their monstrosities, psychological manifestations of horror and hysteria (linked, as they are, to wombs). In Child of God, the association of caves with the maternal womb is made explicit,42 and what is birthed from these caves is pure horror. Although many critics ind Gnostic and Platonic resonances in the cave imagery,43 that imagery also employs traditional Roman Catholic symbolism. Ballard is “born again” from the womblike caves, like Christ arising from the dead from a stone-capped burial cave.44 Ballard’s other exploits evoke similarly messianic narratives, his necrophiliac encounters described as grisly plays on Christ’s miracles in the gospels. In an attempt to hide his irst victim from hunters, for example, Ballard hoists the girl’s corpse to the attic of his home with a rope through a “small square hole” in the attic loor. The cadaver’s ascent becomes a parody of resurrection: the body “pause[s], dangling” before it “beg[ins] to rise again.”45 And Ballard’s caves are catacombs “where dead people lay like saints” and bats in their light from his presence are “souls rising from hades.”46 In these scenes, Ballard’s heinous crimes make saints and martyrs of his victims and permit Ballard to 47 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

Lydia R. Cooper

imaginatively lift souls up from the pit like Christ winnowing hell. Ballard is also given symbols of biblical authority. His way to the caves is marked with “two stones” in a ield, stones that are “great tablets on which was writ only a tale of vanished seas.”47 The ancient inscriptions on these stone tablets are natural-world laws, in contrast to the biblical commands on Moses’s stone tablets,48 but they suggest Ballard’s prophetic role as a present-day demotic, and demonic, Christ. When Ballard is leeing the law, his crimes discovered, he falls into a river but does not drown. The narrator instructs readers to “[s]ee him” because Ballard is “sustained by his fellow men.” This sustenance, the narrator claims, takes the form of the human desire to possess “wrong blood” as part of a collective genetic history. The narrator rhetorically asks, if this is not so, “[h]ow then is he borne up?”49 The implication is disturbing. If evil is that which is “other,” that which is not oneself, then how is evil not able to be excised, to be shut off from human society and locked away? The reader is encouraged to recognize what is at stake here: as much as he is allegorical, Ballard is also real. The novel is rife with case-speciic details that suggest Ballard is perhaps based to some extent on James Blevins, the “Lookout Mountain Voyeur,” and Ed Gein, the Wisconsin necrophile.50 Furthermore, the physical landscape, riven with symbolically signiicant caves, is also based on actual physical geographic locations.51 The fact that Ballard is perhaps based on real people, and that Ballard is spatially and geographically located in the real world, suggests the answer to that rhetorical question about how Ballard’s evil is sustained. In the orthodox Christian tradition, Jesus is the divine everyman who unites in his person all spiritual virtues and all human attributes to demonstrate a pattern for righteous behavior to other humans. The parodic descriptions in this novel present Ballard as an evil everyman who unites in his person the most extreme forms of avarice, prejudice, and carnal desire with the image of God. There can be no salvation, the novel suggests, from evil, but only from blindness to it, whether the evil be in the external world or staring back from the mirror. Suttree McCarthy’s inal Appalachian novel, and his most autobiographical work, Suttree traces the wanderings of Cornelius Suttree around the McAnally Flats of Knoxville from 1951–1955. If Child of God is about the worst crimes of which human beings are capable, Suttree provides a contrast through its depictions of the best qualities of which human beings are capable, such as friendship, mercy, and forgiveness. These transcendent attributes, however, are subverted by dark gothic artiice, suggesting the impossibility of 48 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic

recognizing the one without the other. At one point Suttree thinks that his stillborn twin brother may exist somewhere “in the limbo of the Christless righteous,” but he himself is “in a terrestrial hell.”52 However, Suttree’s hellacious material world is not merely a Gnostic depiction of the fundamental darkness of the sublunary realm. Instead, the novel shows the misshapen wastrels of this world able to create acts of kindness and companionship within the very “slaverous” jaws of their spiritual opacity.53 Suttree’s hellish descriptions, then, relect the medieval use of the grotesque in which images celebrating the carnal – the sexual and scatological – exist within and alongside the spiritual narrative “without disrupting the organic unity of the story.”54 This medieval aesthetic explains the problematically profaned sacred imagery in the novel: Suttree is not interested in parsing the hideous from the holy, but in inding the holy within the hideous.55 A direct contradiction to the orthodox conception of hell as the only space devoid of the presence of God or of grace, Suttree’s “terrestrial hell” is populated with his friends, the economically oppressed and the socially marginalized (former prison inmates, gay prostitutes, and so forth) whom he calls a “fellowship of the doomed.”56 The idea of companionship is consistently afiliated with gothic images that emphasize decay, corruption, and ugliness while simultaneously evoking sacred imagery. For example, when Suttree and his friends get in a bar ight, they stagger around bleeding and defending each other “like the damned in off the plains of Gomorrah,”57 an image that compares the men to the victims of the quintessential “ire and brimstone” biblical story.58 But the group is earlier described using sacred, even Christological numerology: Suttree is surrounded by his faithful crew of “twelve or more” drunks.59 Like the twelve apostles and Christ, these men practice impromptu salvations of each other and of strangers throughout their cyclical and inebriated wanderings, healing the sick and granting signiicance, if not life, to the dead.60 Finally, when Suttree’s mentally deicient protégé, Harrogate, tries to blow up a bank and explodes the limestone tunnel around him, Suttree, Christ-like, descends into the depths to seek out Harrogate. After three days and nights, “[o]n the fourth day[Suttree] f[inds] footprints in a patch of gray loam.”61 Suttree’s descent into the pit to resurrect the malodorous and malicious boy is certainly a profane messianic image, and his salvation is likewise problematic; Harrogate is arrested and sent to prison shortly after his rescue. The insubstantial healings and resurrections practiced in the novel are absurd and transitory, but they are nevertheless transcendent. Suttree’s gothic and grotesque imagery suggest that pity and mercy are qualities that lourish within a squalid reality. At one point, Suttree goes to Market Street and sees the poverty-stricken inhabitants as a “lazaret 49 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

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of comestibles and lora and maimed humanity,” their “eyes rheumed and vacuous.”62 The conlation of material goods, the natural world, and human beings, all subjected to grotesque deformity and decay, suggests that those who embody vice the most blatantly are perhaps most capable of recognizing goodness when they see it. This view of the world runs counter to the oficial narrative of civilized life. Suttree’s successful father, for example, writes him a letter in which he claims that the world is run by civically responsible, afluent people, that outside of the courts, business, and government is nothing “but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”63 These “rheumed and vacuous” eyes on Market Street may be incapable of seeing the physical realm clearly, but the symbolic cataracts that transform the streets of Knoxville into a freak show simultaneously reveal an essential truth about the human condition, a truth to which Suttree’s father, with his ability to distinguish between power and failure, is blind. At one point, Suttree looks at grotesque statuary in a Catholic church and realizes that “[i]n the sculptor’s art there always remains something unsaid, something waiting,” and that “unsaid” thing is a terrifying “kingdom of fear.”64 The novel’s project, then, is to paint this “unsaid” realm because only in that which is unsaid, in the fear arising from recognizing oneself in the face of the “helpless and the impotent,” is genuine companionship possible. Recognizing the parts of human nature that are psychologically scarring, then, permits the possibility of authentic relationships with others, an illusory but signiicant experience of “home” in otherwise achingly lonely ictional worlds. In Suttree’s preface, the narrator instructs readers to recognize that they are “strangers in everyland.”65 If the reader has any doubt of this, the novel’s transmogriication of the real city66 into a mystical hellscape makes this realization inescapable. The reader’s estrangement from the historically accurate world of the novel demonstrates the importance of defamiliarization in McCarthy’s Appalachian novels. In these novels, the sacred story is incomplete without the scatological and the profane. Holiness and horror coexist. There is furthermore no simplistic antidote to human evil, only the profound realization of its existence. At the same time, however, realizing that all individuals are alienated, lonely, and corrupted by this pernicious reality permits the reader to experience the elusive grace found in empathy, in creating bonds of understanding and compassion, however impermanent. No one in McCarthy’s Appalachian novels, from the corpse-rapist to the child-victim, is beyond the simple dignity of being empathetic subjects. Through grotesque images emerging from the southern gothic tradition that make familiar people and places strange, McCarthy’s novels gesture toward the only familiar thing left: the humanity in the face of the most hideous other. 50 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (New York: Vintage International, 1979), pp. 3–4. Ibid, p. 463. Ibid, p. 458. Ibid, p. 464. For a deinition of the grotesque in gothic art, and the southern grotesque more speciically, see Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein, (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1968) and Anthony Di Renzo, American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993). Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper (New York: Vintage International, 1993), p. 7. S 464. Kenneth Lincoln, Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 22. Dianne C. Luce, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 60. TOK 246. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, pp. 45, 158, 239. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 81. Ibid, p. 244. Ibid, pp. 124, 233. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, Oxford World Classics, eds. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). Ex. 4: 25–27 introduces the ritual of circumcision, and Deut. 30:6 and Jer. 4:4 symbolically connect the physical ritual to a moral conscience sensitive to divine laws. TOK 94, 97. See Steven Frye, Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 14. TOK 161. Ibid, p. 205. Cormac McCarthy, Interview with Oprah Winfrey, “The Exclusive Interview Begins,” Oprah’s Book Club, July, 2007. Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” The New York Times Magazine (19 April 1992), p. 31. Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (New York: Vintage International, 1968), p. 13. Luce, p. 76. OD 17. OD 129, 233. Ibid, p. 236. Ibid, pp. 3–4 Ibid, p. 242. Ibid, p. 240. Ibid, pp. 210, 237.

51 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.008

Lydia R. Cooper 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

Luce, pp. 79–80. E.g., OD 30, 59, 97. OD 115. Ibid, p. 237. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (New York: Vintage International, 1993), p. 3. See Steven Frye’s discussion of the carnivalesque in his essay “Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence” in this volume. See also Maxime Lachaud, “Carnivalesque Rituals and the Theological Grotesque in the Southern Novels of Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy,” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, ed. Christine Chollier (Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003), pp. 61–71. OD 46. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 20. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History 3.2 (Winter, 1972): p. 285. Ballard crawls through the cave tunnel for the irst time, emerging “slick with red mud,” and later, trapped in the caves, he has “cause to wish for some brute midwife.” COG 107, 189. Luce, p. 157. See, for example, John 3:3. COG, 94, 95. This description evokes two gospel stories, irst Christ’s resurrection of a young girl (Matthew 9:18–26, Mark 5:21–43, and Luke 8:40–56), and second, a story in which a paralytic man’s friends lower him through a square hole in the roof so that Christ can heal the paralytic (Luke 5:17–26). COG, 135, 141. Ibid, p. 128. Exodus 31:18. COG 156. Luce, p. 138. Luce says, “Thomas Barr’s 1961 geological survey . . . describes virtually every feature of the cave formations . . . in Lester’s underground world,” p. 156. S 14. Ibid, p. 471. Di Renzo, p. 78. Di Renzo, p. 9. Steven Frye, in Understanding Cormac McCarthy, further explains how Suttree “seeks to contain elaborate systems of contraries while exploring if not reconciling the essential contradictions of a world deined by love and violence, predation and healing, body and spirit, and isolation and human connection,” p. 65. S 23. Ibid, p. 187. Genesis 19:24. S 184. Ibid, pp. 451, 422. The signiicance of this latter act, Suttree’s mourning for a dead ragpicker, is underscored later by Suttree’s aunt, who tells him that she has gone crazy because she “does not know what people’s lives are for,” S 433. Ibid, p. 276.

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McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 14. Ibid, p. 253. Ibid, p. 4. Luce claims that “[v]irtually every street name, business, and building mentioned in the novel actually existed in the 1940s and 1950s,” p. 194.

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5 BRIA N EV ENSON

McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels

Though McCarthy is a novelist rather than a philosopher in a conventional sense, his novels nonetheless show a highly developed sense of the parameters of many of the issues that Western philosophy has traditionally focused on. These include, but are hardly limited to, the nature of selfhood and subjectivity, the relation of self to other, the nature and possibility of evil, the place and use of ethics in a seemingly chaotic and malignant world, and the relation of violence to ontology. McCarthy shows a genuine interest in philosophical traditions that have come before him, including knowledge of relatively obscure Christian philosophers such as Jacob Boehme, as well as Platonism, Neo-Platonism, absurdism, and existential humanism. But he approaches these traditions as would a novelist. In other words, McCarthy is less interested in proving a philosophical argument than in allowing philosophical ideas to communicate and circulate in a way that makes them subject to considerations of narrative progression and development. McCarthy’s approach to iction seems at least partially iltered through existentialism and absurdism, and from here to reach back to earlier traditions. Among other things, he manages to synthesize existentialism’s sense of alienation and confusion in a seemingly meaningless world with earlier Gnostic ideas of the world having been formed not by God but by an imperfect and perhaps evil demiurge.1 Like Albert Camus’ absurdist characters, McCarthy’s characters seem prone to seek out value and meaning in life but also are nearly powerless to ind any lasting value, though at least some of his characters do manage to come to a form of acceptance of their struggle. McCarthy’s approach, as well as his view of previous philosophical traditions, can be seen partly as a reaction to twentieth-century attempts to rethink the ground of Western philosophy. Because of a series of shifts in thought that begin with empiricism (Hume in particular) and reach full bloom in twentieth-century poststructuralism, the ground that had for centuries seemed solid and acceptable as a given began to seem to philosophers far from stable. This led to a rethinking of the world that admitted a 54 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels

measure of epistemological uncertainty that previous theories had hitherto managed to exclude, disallow, or repress. If a sense of larger community and an illusion of universality have been provided by Western rationality’s seeming ability to validate a discourse independent of individual bodies and minds, what happens when we begin to think in terms of individual bodies and minds – particularly the individual bodies and minds of outsiders as so many of McCarthy’s characters prove to be? In an environment in which many of the once seemingly solid “facts” about human nature are seriously called into question, in which universals collapse, and in which a premium is put on “difference,” McCarthy’s novels implicitly ask: What remains to connect individuals to one another? How can we maintain or retain a sense of humanity and community with others while faced with the challenges posed to Western thought and rationality? Depending on when he’s writing, McCarthy’s work posits different answers to these challenges. His pre-Border Trilogy work tends to be more interested in depicting both the dilemma and his character’s problematic attempts to ignore or circumvent it than in depicting a character’s thoughtfulness, concern, or anxiety about it. His characters in these early books are less engaged in relection and indeed are often conveyed in a way that suggests for them very little sense of an interior life. In Blood Meridian, for instance, the last book before the Border Trilogy, the characters routinely engage in mindless violence, a violence that calls on them to “empty their heart into the common.”2 Their participation in violence at once causes them to lose themselves and to band together in a very rough and makeshift community of destruction, a community that any time the necessity for violence fades either threatens to dissolve or to direct its violence inward, toward its own members. With the possible exception of the kid (who Judge Holden indicates “alone reserved in [his] soul some corner of clemency for the heathen,”3 and who thus might be said to possess a sort of proto-conscience), the characters do not have consciences, and as a result their consciousness is much more lexible and tentative, and it is very hard for them to see others as subjects. It is a community that is built on death, but not on the acknowledgment of the identiication with the dying, and in that sense there is no attempt to see oneself in the others that surround one, or to empathize. In the Border Trilogy, however, McCarthy’s characters become more concerned about their place in the world and about their responsibility toward others. Here, there is an acknowledgment of the severity of death and the empathy his main characters feel for others. In All the Pretty Horses, for instance, John Grady Cole does have a real conscience, and as a result has a different type of consciousness of what it means to be human. A long time 55 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

Brian Evenson

after having killed a cuchillero in self-defense while in prison, John Grady is still troubled, unable to come to grips with the murder. When he tells his story to a judge and the judge asks “Why does it bother you?” his response is “I dont know. I dont know that he’s supposed to be dead.”4 John Grady clings to a sense that there is a reason for things to be the way they are. Right and wrong are issues here in a way they are not in the earlier books. When ighting the cuchillero, even after being wounded, John Grady seems desperate to meet his eyes, searching for a sign of human recognition and connection. This struggle for recognition, and John Grady’s inability to ind it (when the cuchillero’s eyes begin “watching his eyes” John Grady senses that it is not to share a moment of recognition but “so that they could see if death were coming”)5 can be read as a response to Sartrean existentialism’s treatment of self and other in Being and Nothingness, the way in which the gaze of another can threaten to reduce one to an object and petrify one’s being in a inished state rather than acknowledging one as a subject.6 In All the Pretty Horses there is resistance to this reduction, at least on the side of John Grady, an attempt to see oneself in the other’s gaze such as we ind in post-Sartrean philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Alphonso Lingis. Lingis for instance suggests that by means of our response to the other as a presence and an expressive surface we take “the others as equivalent to and interchangeable with oneself.” By doing so, we accept “the other’s presence as a position that one could oneself occupy.” 7 By doing so with someone vastly different from ourselves we put ourselves “wholly in the place of the death that gapes open for the other,”8 something that John Grady has managed to do with the cuchillero. This is why he remains thoughtfully haunted by the man long after his death: he has acknowledged his own humanity in the other man. This acknowledgment might be compared to how in McCarthy’s irst novel, The Orchard Keeper, Marion Sylder, also ighting in self-defense, characterizes Rattner, the man who is attempting to kill him and whom he ultimately kills. Strangling Rattner, Sylder depersonalizes him by describing the act as being “[l]ike squeezing a boil.” When he loosens his hold enough for Rattner to speak and beg him “Jesus Christ, just turn me loose,” Sylder feels no empathy. And when they irst fall into the stranglehold they are compared to resting lovers (signiicantly enough, one of Sartre’s major tropes for the struggle of consciousnesses to apprehend themselves mutually as subjects)9 Rattner is quickly reduced to nonhuman garbage for Sylder, his neck compared to “a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter.”10 For Sylder, Rattner is no longer another human subject, no longer even human: he has become little more than trash. Sylder has no remorse or regret about 56 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels

the killing because he is either unable or simply refuses to see himself in Rattner’s position. There is not a straightforward development in McCarthy’s work from Sylder’s position to John Grady’s. Instead, there is a kind of vacillation over the dilemma of the relationship of self to other throughout, with McCarthy trying to ind a balance, but inding the question deserving of repeated rephrasing and inquiry. Even after the Border Trilogy, we ind McCarthy, in No Country for Old Men, seeming to question the eficacy of John Grady’s philosophy as a way of surviving in the twenty-irst century. In that novel, he offers a tension between Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Anton Chigurh, with Bell’s view closer to John Grady’s and Chigurh’s more like that found in Blood Meridian. Although Chigurh seems to think himself an instrument of chance and exhibits no regret about the trail of murders he leaves in his wake, Bell himself acknowledges his own philosophy’s inadequacy to make sense of the contemporary world. Each man has come to a sort of acceptance of the world, however, though Bell’s is a thoughtful and informed one and Chigurh’s is a simple unthinking turning of himself over to the complex determinism of the coin toss. McCarthy’s other Tennessee novels (Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree) are less extreme in their approach to the problem than is the novel that follows them, Blood Meridian. For that reason, they present perhaps the most interesting case in terms of thinking about McCarthy’s relation to philosophy in that they have a searching luidity and lexibility to their philosophizing that Blood Meridian or All the Pretty Horses does not. These books are between modes, and as such they illustrate more fully McCarthy’s struggle with particular philosophical problems, particularly those focusing on the relation of self to other. Most extreme of these three books is Outer Dark. Of the three, it is closest to Blood Meridian, and its depiction of the violent actions of the “grim triune,” consisting of a self-proclaimed minister and his two companions (one a mute, the other named Harmon), rivals the violence in the latter novel. Whereas in Blood Meridian Glanton’s gang are the central igures of the novel, in Outer Dark the grim triune is secondary, something for the main characters, brother and sister Culla and Rinthy Holme, to cross paths with, albeit repeatedly. The incestuous brother and sister have had a child that Culla has told Rinthy died at birth and which he has abandoned in the woods. When, regretting his decision, he traces his way back to where he left the child, he inds it gone. When his sister discovers his deception and betrayal, the community of two that they have formed together on the margin of society collapses. Both travel separate roads, and once their communal connection has been lost it will not be reestablished. 57 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

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Meanwhile, the triune shuttles back and forth across the landscape of the story, engaged in pillage and murder. They don’t seem exactly human, are “like revenants that reoccur in lands laid waste with fever: spectral and palpable as stone,”11 and they are never explained. Instead, they seem palpable embodiments of evil, as if they have sprung from Culla’s subconscious, as if brought into existence by the act of evil he plans toward his child. With the majority of the violence of the novel conducted by this group rather than the main characters, they seem more of a limit point, a pure evil for Culla to measure his own acts of emotional and actual violence against, and in that sense the problem explored here is less an ontological problem (i.e., one of the relation of self to other) than a question of ethics (the question of the nature of evil and how one’s acts either are or are not evil). William Spencer argues on the other hand that the triune is a “parodic trinity,” and suggests that the movement of the novel is from seeing evil as an external force to something that is a “tendency within human beings, perhaps even the essence of human beings.”12 There is a certain amount of truth in this, and Spencer is observant enough to notice that even the typography of the novel encourages such a reading. One might go even further than Spencer and read McCarthy’s novel Gnostically, as depicting the material world itself, and those within it, as essentially evil. I, however, would argue that McCarthy deliberately leaves the exploration of this ethical question of evil truncated. Although he allows Culla to meet the grim triune and see them kill and begin to eat his child, he cuts away from the scene before either showing how Culla participates in the act or how he manages to escape with his life. Instead, McCarthy offers a severe lacuna and leaps forward in time, to “later years” where Culla continues to wander in a “constant dark,”13 without making it clear how he might have extricated himself from an exceedingly dificult encounter. So, an ethical inquiry is cut short by an epistemological gap. For Vereen Bell, McCarthy’s Outer Dark is “brutally nihilistic.”14 This relentless nihilism, Bell suggests, ends up contexting the “homeless wandering” of the characters as “a metaphor for everyone’s state.”15 Once Culla and Rinthy’s makeshift community dissolves, they seem unable to settle down into another or even to ind what they are looking for. More than any other novel Outer Dark presents its characters as placeless and in motion, and unable to ind rest. Despite being a laconic cowboy, John Grady is able to at least partly articulate his dilemma, but Culla never is, and apart from a dream at the novel’s beginning, we are allowed almost no access to his interior consciousness that would let us convincingly do it. For indeed, at the heart of McCarthy’s early books (and within No Country for Old Men as well – and 58 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels

perhaps even more so) lies a philosophical problem that is also a narrative problem as well. The resistance to depict what a character is thinking or feeling is on the one hand a philosophical problem and a question of epistemology: how can I, as a subject, really know what someone other than myself is thinking or feeling? On the other hand it is a narrative problem: the third person, particularly in its so-called omniscient mode, is a convention that claims to depict the thoughts and consciousness of “people” other than the narrator. McCarthy’s work implicitly recognizes that there is technically no such thing as third person: there is always an I (the narrator) uttering the word “he”; even if he does not reveal himself by saying “I”.16 McCarthy chooses not to accept this convention unexamined, and though his novels are all written in third person, they generally make a choice not to allow the narrator access to much of a character’s interior life. As a result in many of his early novels the characters almost seem not to have an interior life at all, seem all surface, their exchanges and interactions fairly oblique. By the Border Trilogy, however, McCarthy has igured out a way to give a sense of an interior life without claiming to reveal an unrevealable interiority. He does this not by giving vast access to his character’s consciousness – most of what we learn about them is still external, though there are a few moments, such as the knife ight John Grady goes through, where we are granted a grudging window in. Instead, he allows the characters to articulate to others verbally what they are thinking, as John Grady does when he expresses his doubts and reservations to a judge. McCarthy’s simultaneous insistence on using the third person, but his reluctance to attribute it to a source, can lead to some curious but interesting moments. The inal paragraph of The Road, for instance, abandons both the characters that it has followed and the restraint of the narration as a whole to offer a paean to a lost pre-disaster life. Because McCarthy shifts the feel of the narration away from what we have been used to with this narrator, this moving passage can be read as the words and opinions of the author. It can also be read, however, as the words of the narrator – though why he would suddenly shift his mode is hard to say. In addition, it can also be read as a continuation of the words of the woman speaking to the boy in the previous paragraph, which concludes the plotted novel. But McCarthy’s deliberate refusal to indicate the narrative level (character speech or narration or authorial comment?) by not offering the markers that would indicate it (i.e., she said, “I”, etc.), allows the novel to end in a space where the separation between the world within the book, the narrative utterance that creates this world, and the author’s commentary in the real world, is deliberately blurred. 59 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

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In addition, with the exception of Child of God, the few times that a narrator is leshed out and allowed to speak in irst person, as Sheriff Bell does in the interchapter sections of No Country for Old Men, their speech is honest and straightforward. They express doubts and reservations themselves, but the truth of what they are saying is not meant to be doubted. The same is true of the signiicant speeches of his main characters in the Border Trilogy: we take them at their word, what they say is an honest expression of themselves. More than any contemporary novelist, McCarthy shies away from unreliable narrative, and it is this that gives his work, despite the sparseness of the interior life of his characters, a sense of humanistic fullness. Even Child of God, which alternates between third person narration and irst person accounts about necrophiliac Lester Ballard from townsfolk, has irst person accounts that read less as unreliable narration meant to complicate the narrative or cause us to question it, and more as irst-person journalistic accounts. The complications of McCarthy’s narratives never, in fact, pivot on the unreliability of the books’ primary narrators. Child of God is, along with The Road, the most stripped back of McCarthy’s novels. It doesn’t have the Faulknerian plumpness of Suttree or the linguistic verve of Blood Meridian; instead, the story is told directly and simply, and the language is spare. In the primary chapters, the main character Lester Ballard, a man inhabiting the fringes of civilization, begins to drift farther and farther away from it. Eventually chance brings him into contact with the dead body of a woman with which he chooses to have intercourse. By book’s end, he has a whole collection of corpses, and ire has forced him away from living in a rundown house to hiding in a cave, retreating even further from civilization until, starving and deranged, he turns himself in and lives out the end of his life in the state asylum for the insane. Philosophically central to the story is the question of whether Lester Ballard is or is not like “us.” Says the third person narrator early in the novel, his narration perhaps focalized through the perspective of a member of the town or perhaps an expression of his hidden “I”, Ballard is “A child of God much like yourself perhaps.”17 This seems a simple statement of identiication, something that might be seen as a step on the path to what Alphonso Lingis sees as full identiication with an Other who is different from you. The novel, however, goes on to explore and complicate this claim, either by ironizing it or reducing it to a trite cliché. The townspeople offer ample speculation for why Ballard is the way he is, without either they or the book arriving at much of a conclusion. Near the end of the book, he is dissected, the subject that he once was being reduced irst to a dead body and then to bits and pieces and inally “scraped from the table into a plastic bag,”18 with nobody any closer to an answer for why Ballard was the way 60 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels

he was. McCarthy offers nothing that would allow us to categorize Lester Ballard and ile him and his crimes neatly away. In fact, the book points to the failure of both epistemology and science to offer answers, and suggests that human nature exceeds either logical or rational explanation. Ballard’s interest in having congress with corpses might be considered philosophically as well, and can even be read as a parody of Sartre’s trope of the lovers. For Sartre, when you enter into a love relationship you want to possess the other person. Not as a body, not as an object, but wholly and fully, as a subject. The frustration of love is that every time you think you have possessed the other person fully, you realize that you have only had their body. This is coupled with the notion that if you are to be an object yourself for your lover – something perhaps unavoidable – then you feel you should be not only an object but the object, their whole world.19 Lester Ballard at irst simply tries to sidestep this dilemma by having sex with a dead body. A dead body is not a subject and so can be possessed only physically. And yet, as it turns out, the dilemma cannot be so easily sidestepped. We want to have the illusion of possessing our lover fully whether she is alive or not, and because we cannot possess another consciousness fully anyway, the illusion of wholly possessing a body without a consciousness, a dead body, poses a similar problem to that of possessing a living body. The only difference is that a dead body is less responsive and decays quicker. So Ballard inds himself buying clothes for his dead lover, as he might well do for a living lover. He speaks to her like he might to a living girl, though crudely (“You been wantin it” he tells her before having sex with her corpse).20 When he loses this girlfriend in a ire, he moves to a cave that he begins to ill with bodies, though whether he sees these all as additional lovers or is simply trying to assemble a community of the dead for himself, McCarthy doesn’t say. Similarly, if we cannot know what is truly going on inside another person’s head, a brutal extension of existential thought might suggest that we are no more likely to get farther with the living than we are with the dead. Or it might even be argued, as Dianne C. Luce does, that “McCarthy employs elements of Platonic myth to deine the metaphysical dimensions of McCarthy’s trials and crimes,” though she cautions “we cannot equate McCarthy’s philosophy with Plato’s any more than we can label him a Gnostic.”21 She goes on to speak of Lester’s position in the hospital near the end of the novel as reminiscent of the situation described in Plato’s cave allegory as he tries to understand the way the hospital room’s shadows work by moving his hand and seeing if the shadow appears.22 In addition, there’s a kind of willful blindness in Lester Ballard trying to create a society for himself within the cave, by pretending that the dead are not dead, which can 61 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

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be equated with the world of reality and the world of illusion that the cave allegory suggests. But Lester’s departure from this cave, if we are to follow Luce’s reading, leads Ballard merely to another cave, an imperfect copy of a reality, rather than to the world of reality, suggesting an absurd (in Camus’s sense of the word) repetition or a trap in the place of transcendence. This might be seen as simply afirming what Plato suggests – the cave allegory is, after all, just that: an allegory meant to be a representation of life on earth, and so as long as Ballard is alive he will be in the cave. It might, however, also be read in more Gnostic terms: if, as Gnostic philosophy suggests, the world is not directly created by God but by a demiurge who may in fact be evil (and is at the very least unperfected), then the allegory takes on more sinister overtones, with Ballard potentially a pawn or puppet in his (and by extension McCarthy’s) hands. The central character of Suttree is Cornelius Suttree, a man who has given up a life of privilege to inhabit a houseboat on the Tennessee River. As in Child of God, McCarthy focuses not on the center of the community but on its edges. He is concerned here with outcasts and misits and dropouts, though here none of them are quite as warped or as damaged as Lester Ballard (though there is an unburied corpse here as well – of Suttree’s friend Leonard’s father, who his family pretended to keep alive so as to collect social security – and though there is a moment too when Suttree has a conversation with another corpse). As a kind of adopted member of this community, Suttree inds himself a consultant for the others. Among this marginal community is Gene Harrogate, who Suttree meets in a prison workhouse. Naïve and bumbling on the one hand, Harrogate has a natural inclination toward criminality on the other. Saving Harrogate becomes a sort of pet project for Suttree, despite his own better judgment. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Suttree seems at times a double-barreled response, both to another river novel, Huckleberry Finn, and to the Kerouacian road novel. It is full of both comic moments and lyrical passages, and is the most overtly Faulknerian of all of McCarthy’s novels. These inluences are more overt than the philosophical perspectives that inform the novel, and they are more formative too, though the inluence of absurdist and existential philosophy are clearly there, as well as direct mention of “Gnostic workmen.”23 Luce has argued at length, and quite perspicaciously, for the inluence of Camus and his absurdism on McCarthy’s teleplay The Gardener’s Son and on Suttree,24 though she is not the irst to point out the connection. The connection is certainly there, yet stylistically, tonally, and in terms of individual details, the two writers are profoundly different. In the place of Camus’ “ecriture blanche” and narrative sparseness, McCarthy’s novel offers lush sentences and a very different use of narrative space. In 62 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels

the place of a murder committed by the main character and the struggle for individual meaning that ends up culminating in an acceptance of the absurdity of existence, Suttree offers black comedy, rootlessness, and drunkenness. In fact, it is as if McCarthy has taken absurd philosophy and rendered it American. But this, of course, leads to a different kind of alienation, one in which we might detect the roots of hippy and beat culture. It is this use of Camus-esque absurdity, as much as any potential knowledge on McCarthy’s part of the Beats, that gives this novel an afinity to the Kerouacian road novel. After discussing the relation of McCarthy to Camus, absurdism, and existentialism, and giving a survey of the scholarship written on this connection, Luce goes on to suggest that “McCarthy synthesizes Platonic, Gnostic, Christian, and existentialist images and concepts to inform Suttree’s anguished alienation from the world and his inal transcendence.”25 Although I would disagree with the idea of there being any inal transcendence in the novel – the ending can equally be read as Suttree simply moving on laterally, wandering to the next situation, the next episode – Luce’s reading of the role of philosophy in the novel can be applied more broadly to his work as a whole. It is not that McCarthy is interested in developing a coherent philosophical statement or in expounding any single philosophy, but instead that he has a toolbox of philosophical ideas that he allows his characters to apply to the problems of living within an imperfect world. From broader philosophical issues that intrigue philosophers of many stripes – the relationship of self to others, for instance – to speciic notions of the world promulgated by speciic philosophical and philosophico-religious schools, McCarthy is interested in thinking not abstractly, but in how philosophies come to inform individual situations of an embodied consciousness within an imperfect world. NOTES 1. Cf. Leo Daugherty “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Dianne C. Luce and Edwin T. Arnold, eds., Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993), pp. 157–72. Also Dianne C. Luce, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011). 2. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 307. 3. Ibid, p. 299. 4. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 291. 5. Ibid, p. 200. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes, trans. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), p. 350. 63 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.009

Brian Evenson 7. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 164. 8. Ibid, p. 157. 9. Sartre, p. 478. 10. Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 38–40. 11. Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 231. 12. William Spencer, “Cormac McCarthy’s Unholy Trinity: Biblical Parody in Outer Dark,” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, Eds. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995), pp. 49–60, p. 73. 13. Ibid, p. 239. 14. Vereen M. Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 34. 15. Ibid, p. 35. 16. Cf. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 17. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 4. 18. Ibid, p. 194. 19. Sartre, p. 479. 20. COG 104. 21. Luce, p. 160. 22. COG 174. 23. Cf. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 464. 24. Luce, pp. 176–202. See also William Prather, “Absurd Reasoning in an Existential World: A Consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” Rick Wallach and Wade Hall, eds., Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy (El Paso, TX: Texas Western Press, 1995), pp. 103–14; and Frank W. Shelton, “Suttree and Suicide” Southern Quarterly 29 (1990): pp. 71–83. 25. Luce, p. 202.

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P art I II

The Move Westward

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6 T IMOT HY PA RRISH

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels

The publication of Blood Meridian in 1985 marked a decisive turn in the career of Cormac McCarthy. Prior to Blood Meridian, McCarthy had established himself among a handful of devoted readers as a southern writer with a remarkable gift for language, a writer of dark and violent novels whose work had often been compared with that of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. With Blood Meridian McCarthy’s iction left behind its southern trappings and, in the famous phrase of Huck Finn, lit out for the territory. When his next novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992), became a surprise bestseller, McCarthy was no longer obscure and no longer a southern writer. All the Pretty Horses was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), collectively known as the Border Trilogy. No Country for Old Men (2005), a contemporary Western with cars rather than horses, relects on the previous four novels and arguably sums up the themes irst advanced in Blood Meridian. Although McCarthy can be called a writer of Westerns, his work confronts the essential questions that emerge from having been born human, questions of the utmost philosophical and theological importance, and does so in prose language that aspires to the status of poetry. Turning to the Western gave McCarthy a stage for expanding the scope of his aesthetic vision and a space vast enough to enact the extraordinary originality of his prose. Along with portraying Americans pursuing their destinies on a mythic American western landscape, McCarthy compresses into his cowboy stories an engagement with Western literature, philosophy, and theology that reaches practically to the origins of European thought. Books come from other books, McCarthy once noted, and in McCarthy’s western novels one encounters traces of Homer, the Greek tragedians, the King James Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, not to mention Lucretius, St. Augustine, Charles Darwin, and Nietzsche. His Westerns are loosely in the picaresque tradition like Don Quixote or Huckleberry Finn and at times they are dialogues not unlike what Plato composed. Although the astute reader can identify these 67 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

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and other inluences, McCarthy writes as if these previous writers matter only because their existence is necessary to the story he is telling. That is, McCarthy’s novels assume that history in both its broadest and most minute sense informs the actions of his characters, but the precise knowledge of that history is never as important as the characters’ immediate perception of their own individual fates, usually experienced in moments of shattering violence. Indisputably American in style and theme, McCarthy’s western novels are inally too broad in scope to be reduced merely to American history. In fact, one of his most important achievements is to inhabit the Western form to interrogate what happened when the Europeans discovered and invaded the New World. Following Willa Cather and in many ways aligning with magical realists Gabriel García Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, McCarthy’s works explore the transformation of the New World not by the conquest of the Indians but through the antagonistic collaboration of the Indians and the Europeans. From this battle, one inevitably inds something older than Shelley’s Ozymandias: the violence of encounter, perhaps the only truth humans can know. In this context, McCarthy’s Westerns imply a history that goes back at least to the Renaissance (the Judge has the Renaissance motto, Et Arcadia Ego, carved into his rile) and actually beyond that because these books continually summon the pre-Conquest histories of the indigenous peoples of the American continents. An early scene in All the Pretty Horses alerts the reader to the sense that John Grady Cole’s story is a continuation of one begun before his birth. His grandfather has just died and Cole knows he will not inherit the family ranch. He has been denied his inheritance, his patrimony. After the funeral, he rides west from the house along the “Comanche road” toward the sinking “blood red” into “Kiowa country.” He knows this “ancient road” well and the feeling he experiences along it is a religious one: he communes with “a dream of the past” and hears a “low chant” of “nation and ghost of a nation passing in soft chorale across that mineral waste” who are “lost to all history.” These past Indian tribes are perhaps not quite lost to history because their meaning resides in the “war which was their life” and a sense of being that was true “because it was pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.”1 Cole has become like the Indians in that his time has passed before he could inhabit it. His life too will be short and redeemed only in the sense that it will be staked and eventually lost through his willingness to risk his blood in warlike confrontation with others. The modern American world in which he dies will not understand the meaning of his life’s sacriice, just as the Indian nations whose ghosts pass before Cole are unremembered except insofar as they live on through the doomed Cole. His death recycles 68 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels

and replays the death of the Indians before him. In a sense, they lead him toward his end. In one form or another, these nameless Indian warriors “singing softly in blood” and “rattling past with their stone-age tools of war” haunt and shape the action of McCarthy’s western novels. They represent both the ungraspable past and the destiny toward which McCarthy’s characters inexorably head. “Americans” are neither new nor exceptional and the continent being inhabited has seen versions of them before. In Blood Meridian, the judge suggests that death is an agency and the drama that McCarthy’s Westerns enact is the one in which Americans are inevitably being turned into ghosts, like the Indians they imagine they have displaced. In perhaps the most memorable scene in the novel, a group of American soldiers led by the aptly named Captain White are slaughtered by a band of Comanches. An almost parodic representation of Manifest Destiny, White tells the kid that there is no “question that ultimately Sonora will become United States territory” and that the Mexicans are “a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves.”2 White exempliies the American arrogance that the land was ours before we were the land’s, as Robert Frost wrote in “The Gift Outright.” Although the United States in time would extend its empire to the Paciic Ocean, Captain White will never know it. White’s gruesome death at the hand of Comanches foreshadows the end of the American empire before it has truly begun. Thus, a few pages after declaring the United States policy toward indigenous peoples, White encounters the “legion of horribles,” “mongol hordes,” who kill him and his men. This is no isolated slaughter, though, and to heighten its symbolic signiicance McCarthy situates White’s demise in the context of Don Quixote. Camped out where “death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape,” White’s men see “clouds of dust” on the horizon that they determine to be a herd of cattle, mules and horses.”3 In Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote came upon clouds of dust raised by armies of sheep which his fancy turned into armies of many nations. In this scene, however, the clouds of dust bring actual warriors adorned with vestments of generations slain. Their attack on White’s brigade conjures the remnants of the Europeans’ time in the New World: they are bedecked with pieces of uniform, cavalry jackets, the armor of a Spanish conquistador, and even a “bloodstained weddingveil.”4 On one level, these “legions of horribles” are death personiied and White’s complacent innocence concerning his own “Americaness” cannot withstand their force. On a deeper level, the “bloodstained weddingveil” commemorates not the conquest of the New World by the Europeans’ descendants but the collision and bloody union between two worldviews, one Ancient and the other Modern. Portraying 69 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

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this historical encounter as the collision of historical epochs is what constitutes the originality of McCarthy’s western novels. As the Spanish populated the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their ships often carried two books: the Bible and Don Quixote. With the Bible they brought God and Jesus to the heathen and with Don Quixote they brought a conception of selfhood unprecedented in human history. Cervantes’ novel established the template for the modern, post-Renaissance Western individual: an identity created through self-invention rather than according to the logic of one’s social or family place. When the Spanish arrived in the New World, armed with swords and Bibles and Don Quixote, they encountered “aborigines” or primitives to conquer or convert to their worldview. In the United States, as opposed to Latin America, the prevailing sense has been that “history” arrived and moved west with the “conquerors” while the Indians were effaced from the continent. McCarthy’s iction suggests otherwise and his characters’ stories must be understood as inversions of these previous lives that Americans wrongly understand themselves to have displaced. The judge makes this point when he and his men are gathered around the ruins of the Anasazi and he says that their works “stand in judgement on the later races.” They are “the dead fathers” and “their spirit is entombed in the stone.”5 Blood Meridian suggests that nothing Americans will do (or have done) can surpass what has already passed. McCarthy’s Westerns make no presumption to tell the stories of the dead – indeed a primary obligation seems to be to note that these people existed and their oblivion is not yet total. Blood Meridian is careful to acknowledge the diversity of past Indian experience – from warrior tribes to agricultural ones – and that they shared no point of commonality other than that they lived on the American continent before the Europeans arrived. McCarthy cannot tell the Indians’ story as Homer did the stories of the Achaeans and Trojans. You cannot know or understand what the world of the Indians was before the Europeans arrived. Yet, their existence cannot be – or still is not – eradicated, and the actions of his heroes, doomed as they are, at best replicate what has gone on before. It is important to note that McCarthy does not quite oppose the Europeans against the Indians, as would happen in a conventional Western. To be sure, the judge and his gang kill Indians (as well as Mexicans and Americans) and their violent misdeeds transgress against the warrior culture whose passing John Grady Cole laments. In the encounter between White’s men and the Comanches, however, both sides have been transformed prior to their meeting. The Indians are draped in the garb of Euro-American history and after killing White’s men they sodomize them, again suggesting a 70 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels

kind of marriage in this case, the past with the future. In the New World of European “discovery” those calling themselves “Americans” may carry European history with them and look to a speciically European past to deine their heritage, but the truth is that Americans also inherit the history of landscape that they inhabit and all that happened there. These novels continually invoke the “bloodred sun,” always coloring the landscape of the characters’ consistently bloody fates as if the sun were the screen against which the ilm of continental American history were forever being shown. Blood Meridian is most explicitly concerned with connecting the American present and future to the Indian or Ancient past, but this theme is evident in the other western novels. In the moments before No Country for Old Men’s Moss risks his life and carries off the briefcase of drug money, he notices stones that “were etched with pictographs perhaps a thousand years old.”6 This etching made by long dead men frames the gathering of freshly dead that Moss next comes upon and whose recent adventure he is about to enter. In Blood Meridian the kid tries to repent for his violence by promising to take an old Indian woman to safety. He identiies himself as an American and calls her “abuelita,” or grandmother, but he cannot help her because she is a fossil clothed in rags and her blessing is beyond his reach. By contrast, Billy Parham’s maternal abuelita is Mexican and John Grady Cole’s journey in All the Pretty Horses ends when the woman he knows as “Abuela,” in a sense his last living relative, is buried.7 Unlike the kid, these two characters are honorable and traditionally heroic. Their quests kill rather than redeem them but this fate reinforces their afinity with their Indian forebears. These Westerns are not revisionist histories in the way that term is normally understood. They accept violence as a condition of being alive and they are not simply (and easily) critiquing a cartoonish version of an exceptionalist American history. While Blood Meridian speaks of the “vast abhorrence of the judge,” the judge’s words praising the civilization of the Anasazi are not demeaned by his revolting actions.8 John Grady Cole admires the Comanche and the Kiowa for having been warriors and does not resent the fact that some of his forebears were killed by them. Blood Meridian’s opening declares that “not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his heart is not another kind of clay.”9 In other words, the aim of the novel is not to castigate men for their violent acts but to portray those acts as precisely as possible and to see if they mean anything other than the primal surge of power experienced during their expression. The judge, the most violent character in American literature, is also the most learned and civilized. The scalphunters are hired to kill Indians by the agents of civilization. They are the shock troops of Euro-American civilization and 71 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

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the novel clearly establishes a correlation between the necessity of violence and the building of civilization. Conventional Westerns generally have a clear and simplistic moral framework: good guys versus bad guys. McCarthy’s Westerns are not so simple and recall ilms such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) or Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) that it within the tradition of revisionist Westerns that Richard Slotkin describes in Gunighter Nation (1992). In these novels, deining what is a moral act is less important than telling the story in which characters’ acts and destinies become known in relation to the countless acts and destinies that have preceded them. Repeatedly “good” characters commit acts that violate either their own moral code or the codes of those with whom they come in contact. When Cole courted Alejandra, he transgressed against his host’s hospitality, as he did when he lied about his role in the Blevins matter. Consequently, he goes to jail where he is forced to kill a man to survive. Upon release, he takes Blevins’ horse and Blevins’ murderer captive and attempts to return both to justice in the United States. The murderer goes free, though, and the horse is judged to belong to John Grady. Nor does he believe that he did right to kill another to survive. Despite risking his life repeatedly to do what he thinks is right, Cole in the end cannot ind “justice” for his actions. Yet, the narrative does not exempt Cole from his transgressions against his Mexican hosts. McCarthy’s world is a place of ambiguity and one almost never knows what the effect of one’s actions will be. This claim is made repeatedly in McCarthy’s novels, often by unsavory characters. In The Crossing, a character tells Billy that “every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence.”10 Moss does not know that his destiny is determined by the dead men he inds; Cole does not know when he meets Jimmy Blevins that Blevins’ fate will name his own; the kid, with his “taste for mindless violence,”11 does not know that the man he sees running off Revered Green in the irst chapter of the novel holds the key to his own fate. Near the end of the novel the kid will try to resist the judge, but by then it is too late. His pitiful and unconvincing repudiation of the judge cannot prevent the judge later from killing him. As with Cole, the kid’s death clariies the meaning of his life: a collaborator whose will was only strong enough to throw him in with bad and vicious companions. If an individual does not know the meaning of ones actions or where those acts lead, then one cannot easily assess the morality of those acts. Nor can one ever truly claim to be in control of one’s destiny – a point that Chigurh repeatedly makes in No Country to those whom he is about to kill. In an important exchange with Dueña Alfonsa, Cole is told that he should 72 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels

not try to justify his actions after the fact. “We weep over what might have been,” she says, “but there is no might have been” and “there never was”: there is only “what is so.”12 By this logic, Billy Parham must accept that his attempts to save the wolf, protect his brother, and support John Grady Cole all failed. In each case, the assertion of his individual will only culminated in his carrying the body to whom he had made promises home to be buried: one’s will can only be realized as a form of clay and the kid, Cole, and Moss must die to enact this lesson. In these novels, seemingly good characters suffer and seemingly evil characters thrive. In fact, the characters who seem to have the most control over their destinies are the ones whom the reader is most likely to label as “evil.” It is probably a mistake, however, to insist that the terms “good” and “evil” help to structure our understanding of the novels. Just as McCarthy complicates what is meant by “American” history, so does he challenge the notion that good and evil are necessarily opposed. In that same conversation with Cole, Dueña Alfonsa relates a parable concerning the coin whose maker must irst determine which side is heads and which is tails. If we understand the coin to be the arbiter of people’s decisions, then from that original random decision so many acts are decided that might have been decided otherwise. How then to separate “good” from “evil” when they are always mutually constitutive possibilities? In No Country for Old Men, McCarthy twice portrays versions of this coin parable. Chigurh uses a coin toss to determine whether someone lives or dies. In the irst instance, the person wants to know what is being bet before he calls the coin. Without knowing what is at stake, he reasons, he cannot call the coin. Chigurh replies that one’s life is at stake with every choice being made and the coin toss is merely an expression of that unchangeable fact. Chigurh refuses to call the coin for the man because he insists that, regardless of what happens, the man’s fate is his to make. The question that this episode raises is to what extent either of the players is responsible for what happens. Since the man called the coin correctly, Chigurh did not need to act and we cannot know what was truly put to the test. At the end of the novel Chigurh gives Moss’s wife the same choice. At irst she refuses. She insists that whether Chigurh kills her or not is a choice that Chigurh is making, not how she calls the coin. She accuses Chigurh of pretending to be God. Chigurh, however, suggests there is a context broader than the immediate one that seems to be determining her fate. “There is a reason for everything,” he says.13 His point is that both of them exist in a complex chain of cause and effect that has brought each of them to this moment. As he told the gas station attendant, the coin being lipped left the coinmaker’s hand in 1958 and traveled twenty-two years through countless 73 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

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exchanges, independent of Chigurh, before arriving with Chigurh to enact this moment. The same is true of Carla and Chigurh themselves. Most of the time we do not know the effects of our actions – even when we think we do, we do not. In this instance, Carla knows exactly what the consequence of one of her acts will be. To call the coin and decide her fate is terrifying. She wants to believe that God will decide her fate, not Chigurh, but his argument is that her fate is always being decided and this is but another instance of that inevitable process. “Anything can be an instrument,” as he elsewhere remarks, and one day “there is an accounting.”14 In Carla’s case, Chigurh is the instrument of another’s fate who happens to be present at her inal accounting. Chigurh tells Carla what Alfonsa told Cole: there is no might have been and there never was. Thus, when Carla calls heads and the coin comes up tails, Chigurh suggests that it is for the best. To ask him to contradict the coin toss is to ask him to “second say” the world, which is futile. Carla’s last act before being killed is to say that she understands Chigurh’s point. One can dismiss Chigurh’s actions as those of a homicidal maniac but that does not deny the possibility that in her last moments Carla has accepted her destiny as the only possible one allowed her. She had believed that Moss was fated to be her husband so it is logical that she should believe that Chigurh is her only possible end. From this perspective, her death is not only necessary but also the means by which she understands the collective meaning of her life’s innumerable choices. In The Crossing, a character similarly notes of one man that what “was given him to help him make his way in the world has also power to blind him where his true path lies.”15 In her last moments, Carla’s blindness falls away as she awakens into death. In All the Pretty Horses, the criminal who runs the prison observes that “there can be in a man some evil” but the origins of the evil are not in the man. “Where did he get it?” One can dismiss Chigurh or the judge as evil but that position does not account for where the evil they enact comes from. More importantly, to label a person or an act as evil does not eradicate the existence of “evil” in the world. If we say that Chigurh is a maniac, that does not change the fact that his actions are part of the chain of events by which the world is recreated daily. In fact – and this may be McCarthy’s most disquieting moral – whatever happens in the world, be it called good or evil, is necessary for telling the story of the world in all of its possibilities and incarnations and it is precisely this “story of the world” that McCarthy’s iction portrays. McCarthy’s Westerns thus include or imply the entire history of humans on this planet: one eon overlaps with another on a stage of cosmic emptiness. At stake in these novels is not simply boys who run away from home, 74 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels

or boys’ love of horses, or a man’s greed for treasure, but the articulation and possession of the story being told. To Carla Jean, Chigurh presents himself as merely an instrument in a story greater than either of them, but he can also be seen as the ordering agent who inalizes the fates of the characters. He does not make the world, but he is the force through which the human world is continually made, un-made, and made again. In Blood Meridian, the judge explicitly tries to assume the role of world-maker (a role that can, in fact, only belong to McCarthy). The judge collects and takes notes on fossils to include within a book that he is keeping. His seemingly far-fetched goal is to compress the material artifacts of the world into a book that only he can write. Thus, as he makes his way across the western territory of the United States, he copies what he inds and then he destroys it so no one after him can see what he has seen. More than the power conferred by knowledge the judge seeks to possess whatever power makes knowledge possible. In the “native nuggets” that he uncovers, the judge “purported to read news of the earth’s origins.”16 That the judge presumes to claim for his own knowledge the ordering of the world accounts for his acts of seeming evil. As the master of the world, he can do anything. He can micturate on a rock, and from the combination of his own waste with the rock create gunpowder with which to kill others. He can quote ancient laws and he can claim to possess the secrets of the earth. He can carry in one hand a parasol made of animal bone and rile in the other while he literally promenades across the desert killing everything that crosses his way. In Blood Meridian, nothing stops him – not civilization, nature, nor the kid who sets himself up against the judge at the end of the book. The judge’s actions, inally, order the stories of the other characters, even more comprehensively than Chigurh does in No Country for Old Men. The judge’s power is limited only by his recognition that he did not make the world he explores and presumes to name. Arguably, he is usurping the power of the Creator; through his acts of destruction he assumes a knowledge that is unique and lays claim to possessing the origin of the world he explores. In one telling scene, the judge highlights the implications of his discoveries. He tells his companions that he is not merely collecting natural specimens but ordering them into a history that connects the origins of things to the judge’s apprehension of them. He discerns the pattern of life, or creation, embedded in his discoveries and speculates on the “eons” that have passed to create the artifact whose order he has just destroyed by turning to dust. His audience, ignorant of science and subject to their primitive belief in the Bible, challenges the judge’s hubris to presume to know what they think only God can be presumed to know. They “quote him scripture” and express their doubt about his claims that the world is older than the Bible 75 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

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suggests. When the judge remarks that books inevitably lie, his interlocutors insist that “God don’t lie.”17 For his part, the judge agrees and even conirms their point by picking up part of a rock and announcing that God “speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.”18 In attempting to confront the question of how God speaks, the judge and the other scalphunters commit acts which one might call unspeakable in their atrocity if McCarthy did not render these acts with a poetic force unsurpassed in all of American iction. Just as the judge blithely destroys the unique artifacts of natural history that cross his path as he ventures westward, so does he destroy virtually every living human (Indian, Mexican, or American) that gets in the way of his solipsistic pursuit of knowledge. “They would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river,” runs a typical sentence in the book, “and slaughter them every soul.”19 Why these people were slaughtered, what was lost or gained by their murder, neither the judge nor the novel’s narrative directly contemplates. One of the killers notes in passing that “them sons of bitches aint botherin nobody.”20 The tribe’s peacefulness, however, is no security against the judge and his group’s will to power. In Blood Meridian, as well as the other novels being considered, it often seems that the only knowledge that matters is the difference that separates the living and the dead and the only way to truly experience the power of this knowledge is through killing someone else. If in the beginning God had the power to create life from nothingness, then the judge’s power resides in his ability to create death, or the semblance of nothingness, from life. In Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence noted that the typical hero implied by much of American iction is a cold, stoical killer. Lawrence was thinking of James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, but the judge and the band of men known as the “scalphunters,” Chigurh, and even the knightly John Grady Cole are of a piece with Lawrence’s observation. Moreover, whether one kills without remorse as the judge and Chigurh do or from a sense of justice as John Grady Cole does, the western novels invariably assume that the act of killing (or death) is likely the moment where one’s character and destiny is revealed. In this respect, violence in McCarthy’s iction is a necessary condition of knowing and the means through which the characters confront the facts of God’s existence and their place within a universe that may or may not be ordered according to God’s will. When the judge examines the pattern of a fossil, he hopes to discern the logic left by the world that he encounters. God has spoken in the rock, the judge implies, but the rock can only attest to God’s having once spoken, nothing more. The men cannot refute this point, but their invocation of the 76 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels

Bible as the ultimate authority attests to their sense that while the judge may be able to discern evidence of God’s presence in what he encounters, they do not think he can supplant God’s presence through his knowledge, however vast. For the judge, God, perhaps once present, is now absent as the judge’s own actions seem to conirm. None of his countless acts of murder or blasphemy are arrested by God or any other force. Of the group that travels with him, he is the only survivor, one who is it enough to dance happily when last seen by the reader. One may be tempted to interpret the judge as a ictional incarnation of evil. The problem with such an interpretation is that it either demands that readers ind a “good” character to oppose to the judge, or, failing to ind such a character, encourages one to view McCarthy’s iction as nihilistic and his stunningly beautiful use of language to be merely the gloriication of violence for its own sake. In The Crossing, a character says that one must remember that “what the dead have quit is itself no world but only the picture of the world in men’s hearts.” This means that “the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it.”21 Elsewhere it is suggested “of the telling there is no end” even if beyond this all that can be understood is that everything becomes dust.22 The views may seem to cancel each other out but in McCarthy’s western iction they are complementary and mutually necessary. At issue is how the world is known and ordered and further how this ordering is made manifest through either works of God or humans. Such a vast perspective places McCarthy’s Westerns beyond good and evil, as well as the fables of national destiny, even if such questions are parts of the total story that McCarthy relates. The judge asserts that “whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being to the uttermost edge of the world.” 23 Like the Judge, McCarthy also writes his version of the book of the world. Unlike the judge, McCarthy’s Westerns point to what cannot be told and what cannot be won through human agency and exhibit a sense of modesty despite their grandeur. The judge, like Chigurh, is but a component of the narrative McCarthy tells but his actions are essential to the narrative’s unfolding and the novel cannot imagine a world in which the judge would play no part. The deepest truth McCarthy portrays is, as one character attests, that “this world” which “seems to us a thing of stone and lower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale.” Finally, “all in it is a tale” and thus “everything is necessary” even to the least little thing.24 With their lyrical, scrupulous attention to the natural world and human’s actions on the everlasting, always changing landscape, McCarthy’s Westerns endure as a version of the tale of the world in which a single individual’s destiny is invariably embedded in other destinies, 77 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.011

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known and unknown, in a seemingly endless chain that may itself be only a dream. NOTES 1. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 5. 2. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 34. 3. Ibid, p. 48. 4. Ibid, p. 52. 5. Ibid, p. 146. 6. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 11. 7. ATPH 300. 8. BM 243. 9. Ibid, pp. 4–5. 10. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 147. 11. BM 3. 12. ATPH 239–40. 13. NCFOM 256. 14. Ibid, p. 57. 15. TC 293. 16. BM 116. 17. BM 116. 18. Ibid, p. 116. 19. BM 173. 20. Ibid, p. 173. 21. TC 413. 22. Ibid, p. 413. 23. BM 141. 24. TC 143.

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7 PI ERRE LAG AYETT E

The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War

Violence is commonplace in McCarthy’s iction. Many forms of cruelty and deviation, from the ordinary to the most extravagant, are represented. War scenes, however, insofar as they explicitly involve the protagonists in recognizable historical conlicts, are not part of the tales told in the Border Trilogy or even in The Road, even though the latter comes closest to describing a world we assume to have been ravaged by a major, possibly man-made, conlagration. Otherwise, wars are mostly and merely reported, a vague rumor that comes to life only through remembrances of personal actions, as with Dueña Alfonsa’s memories of her involvement in Francisco Madero’s revolution in All the Pretty Horses,1 or when Billy Parham, in The Crossing, rides back into the United States from Mexico, having left a gravely wounded Boyd behind, to ind himself caught in the reality of World War II. “Hell ire, boy. This country’s at war,” the border guard insists, as an encouragement to enlist and ight.2 Not only will Billy fail to join the army but this is as close as McCarthy gets to the historical events associated with that war. Europe is far away, a mere cultural token of high social standing for the Maderos who studied there, and it was a sanctuary for Alfonsa herself, when the Mexican revolution broke out. It is a place preserved from war, not a military theater of operations. The war in the Paciic is only obliquely referred to in the Winslow, Arizona bar where Billy confronts a drunken soldier and a barman who seems to fear a Japanese invasion. To the soldier’s acrimonious remark, “Uniform don’t mean nothing to him,” the barman replies, “I’ll bet it’d mean something if it had that risin sun on the collar and they was comin down Second Street about ten abreast.”3 For want of deeper involvement of the protagonists in international conlicts, war, then, remains a decor, a symbol of the innumerable tensions and confrontations that, as McCarthy himself maintains, are part of human life and the world’s. To establish a visible link between McCarthy’s iction and the Cold War might consequently appear as a true challenge, especially if we want to avoid overstretched readings of his texts. There are, however, 79 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

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reasons to believe that McCarthy has not been entirely insensitive to the course of world history, despite the remoteness of the environments in which his narratives take place. Vince Brewton has clearly demonstrated that some clear and discernible correlation exists between McCarthy’s work and the cultural periods that inspired them and led to their publication. Brewton uses this “cultural equation” to convincingly discuss the imprint left by the Vietnam experience on McCarthy’s iction.4 Vietnam, however, should be considered, more widely, as part of a larger conlict, one that never acknowledged itself as a true confrontation yet offered all the characteristics of a “real” war: the Cold War. Curiously, Vietnam by implication consolidates the oxymoronic nature of the phrase “Cold War” itself. The term indeed is a misnomer: in the forty-ive years that separate Hiroshima from the fall of the Berlin Wall, several “hot” wars – Korea, Vietnam, Dominica, Afghanistan, Angola, Panama, among them – came to contradict the assumed “coldness” of international relations. This must lead any careful observer to reconsider the whole epoch, not just in military terms but in relation to more subtle and covert battles fought over ideologies, symbols, and myths. Both the Border Trilogy and The Road were written in the post-Cold War period, which means that all possible correspondences between the iction and the time of writing are informed by retrospection and perspicacity. With the Border Trilogy, published between 1992 and 1998, McCarthy must also have been inluenced by the resurgence of democratic idealism and liberalism of the Clinton years, and on hindsight perceived the vanity of wild anticommunism, the arms race, and the rhetoric of American supremacy which colored world politics for more than four decades. In the same way as the French Revolution had brought a “quasi-war” with France in 1798–1800, Stalin’s and the Soviet Union’s strategies of communist expansion brought a “quasi-war” between the two “blocs,” East and West, that assumed many shapes other than direct military ighting. Truly, the term “Cold War” is a sort of conceptual ragbag into which most of the historical events that marked the half-century following World War II could be conveniently thrown. During the Cold War, armed aggressions or military interventions were never excluded, on condition they would not lead the world to World War III. The Cold War, then, was essentially a war of words, a contest between two entrenched and radically opposite ideologies that sporadically materialized into local military scufles or ominous diplomatic tensions. Martin J. Medhurst, in his Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor and Ideology defends this view: While the weapons of a hot war are guns, bombs, missiles, and the like, Cold War weapons are words, images, symbolic actions, and, on occasion, physical

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The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War actions undertaken by covert means. For the most part, however, Cold War is a matter of symbolic action, action intended to forward the accomplishment of strategic goals – social, political, economic, military, or diplomatic.5

Fundamentally, the Cold War was to history what a tale is to literature, a system of words, symbols, and images that describe not the reality of war but a iction that served American or Soviet geopolitical purposes and hegemonic aspirations. What the historian or the politician tells about a supposedly nonexistent war is no different from what the writer imagines as a “real” war told by ictional characters. In The Crossing, all is telling, says the church caretaker in Huisachepic. “For this world,” he maintains, “which seems to us a thing of stone and lower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale.”6 This deinition applies equally to the Cold War and to McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and The Road. The Cold War thrived on propaganda, speeches, pamphlets, reports, slogans, campaigns, information or disinformation, so that in some way, the discourse of war prevailed over the practice of war, constructing a conlict that was essentially rhetorical and used such themes as enticement and deterrence, patriotism and companionship, treason, supremacy or freedom, all of which can be traced through McCarthy’s recent iction. This discourse of war, at least on the American side, sought to defend universal human values while at the same time establishing the conditions of United States supremacy over the whole planet. In the words of nineteenth-century strategist Carl Von Clausewitz, “war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”7 Yet this compelling force may work at higher levels than that of battle grounds. Clausewitz saw war not just as military action but as a political and social phenomenon involving individuals as well as nations. Therefore, war need not rest exclusively on the existence or performance of armies, and, because it claims to avoid direct confrontation, the Cold War extends the scope and signiicance of war to incorporate strategies of coercion that involve the entire social body and determine the standards of interpersonal or international relationships. Thus considered, war is not absent from McCarthy’s western novels. Structurally, his narratives offer conventional patterns of opposition which endanger the stability of the protagonists’ world and establish an atmosphere of constant struggle: United States versus Mexico, landed gentry versus indentured servants, men versus women, and so on. In turn, these patterns of opposition induce a Manichean vision of the world that pits virtuous men against villains (a tradition in the Western genre) and culminates with the “good guy”/“bad guy” dichotomy in The Road, which sounds like

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an echo of the “evil empire” rhetoric, the hawkish policies of the Reagan years, and the last somersaults of the Cold War. Combat troops need not be used. Confrontations abound in the Border Trilogy, even though they may be described indirectly to the reader as reports, hearsay, tales, or personal recollections. At a national level, one example could be the expected takeover of Mac’s ranch by the army in Cities of the Plain, an indication of the growing militarism in the country congruent with the Cold War policies of building up American military power in the face of Communist threats. This government move is an apt metaphor for the rapacious and imperialistic instinct of a militarized superpower whose decisions cannot or should not be opposed. “Folks will piss and moan about it,” warns Mr. Johnson, “But they don’t have a choice.”8 It is also an indication that times are changing for western ranchers, that a “new world order” (to adopt George Bush’s slogan of 1991) is underway and that to resist that change is pointless. All wars, including the Cold War, have coerced peoples into submission or exile and westerners like John Grady Cole must move on to survive, caught up as they are in the meshes of conlicts which, for all their remoteness, reach the ranch only through the kitchen radio.9 The army’s takeover of Mac’s property, which metonymically recalls other coups or covert operations (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua) engineered by the military as part of Cold War containment strategies, send John Grady into a long-lasting vagrancy whose depth even the impressive historical shortcut managed by McCarthy in the Epilogue cannot assuage. For the cowboy, this new nomadism signals a change of worlds, a homelessness which challenges his very identity and entices him to reconstruct the sense of community that had vanished with the ranch. In The Crossing, Billy Parham is similarly encouraged to join the army, not out of patriotic conviction or love of ighting, but to fully recover his national identity. “I’m an American. . . if I dont look like it,”10 are his irst words on crossing the border back from Mexico. It is a national identity that he had nearly lost in his Mexican peregrinations, along with the familiar presence of his brother Boyd. This emotional quest for companionship cannot suit military goals: not only is Billy’s heart (the accepted locus of sentiment) unit for service, he himself appears inappropriate in a world that war has fundamentally changed. He is “a thing wholly alien in that landscape. Something from an older time.”11 This change of worlds mirrors the reordering that took place after World War II. To a world scene that privileged free exchanges and democratic values, the Cold War substituted divisions and exclusions, hermetic borders and exacerbated nationalisms. On the surface, McCarthy’s west seems to be immune from such adjustments. The porous Mexican border preserves some 82 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War

degree of freedom and congeniality between neighboring communities, and the continuity of natural landscapes, plains, deserts, and mountains, works to contradict political or administrative separation. But Mexican-American relations, for all their apparent peacefulness, thinly veil some implacable antagonisms which can be solved only by deadly violence. Blevin’s execution in All the Pretty Horses is only one example of the ways in which Mexicans carry out expeditious justice. The neighbor has suddenly turned into an enemy. Principles of law and moral values have suddenly been lost. Mexico becomes a riddle, “the strange land” under “the strange sky, an “unknown country”12 where tyranny rules and poor and presumably innocent people are arbitrarily detained, like the old man Orlando in the Encantada prison who “didn’t know what crime he was accused of” and inds himself in a catch-22 whereby he will be free when he signs some papers he cannot read.13 In this world where fundamental human values have been lost, truth and justice are trampled down and become ickle concepts. During his crossexamination of the captives the captain warns that truths in Encantada and Saltillo might not be the same: You have the opportunity to tell the truth here. Here. In three days you will go to Saltillo and then you will no have this opportunity. It will be gone. Then the truth will be in other hands. You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it. But when you leave here it will be too late. Too late for truth.14

As a parodic microcosm of modern society, the Encantada prison brings out the worst in human behaviors: presented as a “small walled village,”15 it offers a sort of primitive version of capitalism where “barter and exchange” serve only to reinforce “status and position.” And respect is commanded only by a man’s “readiness to kill.”16 This prison has more to tell than just being the locus of exacerbated violence and depravity. It points to the excesses of egalitarianism, and if we care to consider this “egalitarian absolute” which rules the place as a mask for communism, we are brought back to a true Cold War scene where the need to supersede the other leads to radical and lethal oppositions. As with the Cold War, the struggle for power leaves no other choice than to dominate or disappear. Summarized in the words of John Grady: “they either got to kill us or let us be. There ain’t no middle ground.”17 These no-compromise situations have one advantage: they simplify the world and allow us to identify our enemies. Dueña Alfonsa says no less to John Grady: “I think we should know who our enemies are. I’ve known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people.”18 The Road will expand on this theme by ininitely increasing the potentialities of the heroes’ meeting predators along the way and presenting human relationships 83 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

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bared to essentials. Here there are no longer hemispheric zones of inluence nor a profusion of tales standing for the ideological discourses of Cold War expansionism. The Road, as McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey, is “a pretty simple story.” The prime concern is survival, while the travelers’ destination is unknown. Their enemies lurk everywhere, unidentiiable. And they are no longer even sure of being “good guys” ighting evil in a simple, bipolar universe.19 Their experience questions not only the consequences of the Cold War but the very way Americans regard themselves as the only true defenders of right and virtue. Thus McCarthy’s iction is crowded with villains and the Border Trilogy makes no exception. Neither does The Road where each encounter may turn into deadly confrontation. One character, though, seems to personify Cold War rogues better than many others, one who stands for the perfect enemy: Eduardo, the pimp in Cities of the Plain. The time period is the post-World War II era, with complex changes in the West that John Grady himself is unable to assess and explain to Billy while they look over a bunch of cattle: “This country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everything. I don’t think people even know it yet.” “How did the war change it,” asks Billy. John Grady’s answer is dispassionate and inal: “It just did. It aint the same no more. It never will be.”20 The transition to the Cold War was indeed complicated and beyond the understanding of ordinary people. Geopolitical or ideological affairs were beyond the reach of the common man. Only those who, in Yalta or Potsdam, shared the spoils of war could hope to master the future. For the rest of the world, it was business as usual. This is what the next immediate scene hints as it brings us instantly to Eduardo’s ofice, a luxurious place by postwar Mexican standards. Eduardo practices a form of capitalism which, for all its perversions, is not fundamentally different from what the “northern neighbor” has been doing for the past century. The money he counts is the product of the shameless exploitation of dependent employees, poor girls no better off in their own walled-in brothel than the inmates at the Encantada prison. Magdalena, the girl who for most of her life was treated as a consumer good, is part of Eduardo’s assets and he will not let her go easily. On the surface, the story of John Grady and Magdalena may look like any other tragically impossible love affair. On closer reading, however, it may be read as the story of some Cold War crisis where two worlds (interestingly, the last time John Grady sees her is at the “Dos Mundos,” meaning “two worlds”) clash over a question of property, inluence, and domination. Whatever the motives, the confrontation is bound to go to the end and leave the two enemies to ight over a nonexistent possession, because the girl is already dead. This story of mutual hatred goes through different stages where negotiation is not excluded, especially the 84 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War

one conducted by Billy, which is a failure, yet conirms the immoral character of Eduardo’s trade. “You think I am a whiteslaver,” he tells Billy.21 Like Cold War threats, Eduardo’s presence is constantly ominous. Magdalena fears him and John Grady knows he cannot be circumvented. While hardly ever visible (he rarely shows up in person) the pimp is a nefarious presence that looms over the protagonists: “Somewhere out there in the world was Eduardo.”22 On a larger plane, the clash involves two individual and national cultures: Mexico is described as “another world”23 and America as a “leprous paradise,”24 and the differences cannot be resolved by peaceful means. The only inal alternative is the elimination of the enemy. John Grady plainly states it: “I come to kill you or be killed.”25 Beyond the personal feud the basic problem is the survival of nations and cultures. In a strange imperialist rhetorical outburst, Eduardo warns John Grady: “Your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and your pale empire.”26 Both “empires” end up in mutual destruction, so that the world is ready for the post-apocalyptic scenery, “barren, silent, godless,”27 which opens The Road. Yet the lesson of this whole story is that enemies are closer to us than we think. This was one of the Cold War’s most persistent fantasies, the reason behind the creation and efforts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (or HUAC) that brought about the anticommunist hysteria of the Joseph McCarthy era. Such is the meaning of the blind maestro’s “padrino” story which says that friendships are leeting while enmities endure. The maestro’s words sound particularly relevant to the power struggle between the two blocs: “our enemies,” he declares, “seem always with us.” The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever.28

John Grady’s falling in love and trying to rescue Magdalena is thus not just a private story. It involves symbols that relate it to history itself, much as do several of the adventitious tales that are scattered through The Border Trilogy. One of them is the airplane story in The Crossing, which relates the particularly unexpected encounter between Billy Parham, who is bringing back Boyd’s bones to the United States to be decently buried, and an odd party of Durango gypsies on a mission to carry back the carcass of a wrecked plane to its pilot’s father. Like other chance meetings to be found in the Border Trilogy and The Road, this one has a visible narrative function. Here the gypsies will heal Billy’s horse, gravely wounded in a previous face-off with bandoleros on the road. In addition to being the agents of Billy’s safe return 85 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

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to his country, the gypsies are parodically replaying a scene that symbolically relates to the Cold War. One can hardly escape a feeling of déjà vu when looking at this wreckage, namely the famous U-2 spy plane incident of May 1960 that dramatically increased the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Looking at the airplane the gypsies are dragging along, “disassembled and the wings tied down with ropes alongside the fuselage,”29 we are tempted to recall the triumphant display of the downed American U-2 by the Soviets and of its captured pilot Francis Gary Powers. This campesino version of the accident and rescue of the plane’s remains parallels Billy’s return of his brother’s body to their native land in the north but it also gives McCarthy an opportunity to discuss the question of historical truth and identity. The gypsy claims there are “tres historias,” three stories all related to the Pancho Villa revolution of 1915. At Billy’s request to hear “the true history”30 the gypsy observes that there may have been two planes and whichever was rescued and moved back to the United States was uncertain. Is identity, then, some quality we bestow on things or human beings or a quality that immanently rests with the thing itself? “Men,” says the gypsy, “assume the truth of a thing to reside in that thing without regard to the opinions of those beholding it.”31 But they are wrong. This is what history is about: giving meaning to objects that otherwise have none. In the gypsy’s words, “[o]ne could even say that what endows a thing with signiicance is solely the history in which it has participated.”32 Which of the two planes was the one really expected by the pilot’s father? The answer could have poisoned the whole retrieval operation because the possibility of a choice was left open. In fact, some higher power decided that it would not be so because the other plane was lost on a similar rescue attempt in the haphazard lood of the local Rio Papigochic. This second catastrophic story shows that the same causes may produce opposite effects, regardless of human agency. What the gypsy and McCarthy are questioning here is the teleological character of history. They suggest that man’s belief in his management of destiny is an illusion. “God,” maintains the narrator, “will not permit that we shall know what is to come.”33 And trying to read God’s will in human events would turn the historian into a magician or a “sorcerer.” This odd plane story tells us that there are many facets to the historical object, that historical “truth” is a myth and if it is not entirely a fabrication at least it is an ideological construction meant to explain and justify past events, give them direction, and possibly serve as a blueprint for the future. But the Papigochic tale demonstrates that history cannot account for the unexpected. The lood that thwarts the gypsies’ attempt to bring back the second plane equally thwarts the historian’s endeavor to weave it into his explanations and expose its purpose. “For the world (is) made new each 86 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War

day.”34 McCarthy’s criticism of history thus includes a irm denial of certitudes and refuses the kind of ideology – particularly popular throughout the Soviet bloc during the Cold War – which forecasts the ultimate establishment of a communist order in the world. “The Cold War,” writes Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “could have been avoided only if the Soviet Union had not been possessed by convictions both of the infallibility of the communist word and of the inevitability of a communist world.”35 The “war of words” that characterizes the Cold War implies a permanent struggle with truth and a distortion of it through a multitude of stories: propaganda loves the production of explanations. In the case of the U-2 plane and Francis Gary Powers, the United States government, NASA, the State Department, the president himself, and inally the Soviets, came up with a series of different accounts of the incident in which truth was carefully drowned. Similarly, no one will ever entirely control the chain of events that supports the gypsy’s tale. Historical truth like the gypsy himself is “wandering” and lies essentially in the act of telling rather than in the contents of the tale: “ultimadamente, la verdad no puede quedar en ningùn otro lugar sino en el habla,”36 which translated means, “ultimately, the truth cannot be anywhere else but in speech.” “World wanderers:”37 this is the term used to describe gypsies, enviously, for they enjoy a freedom that Americans lost with the end of the historical “frontier.” The presence or absence of borderlines which supports the system of nations and reinforces the notion of territorial property is crucial to the understanding of movement in the Border Trilogy and The Road. The question of borders is implicit in the uselessness of maps, which are codiied and supposedly reliable representations of space. John Grady’s “oilcompany roadmap” in All the Pretty Horses shows only a blank beyond the Mexican border: “There were roads and rivers and towns on the American side of the map as far south as the Rio Grande and beyond that all was white.”38 Even though Rawlins’s own map seems more informative, it fails to erase the two cowboys’ fantasy that Mexico is a perfectly free place where pre-frontier conditions can still be found. This partakes of a world vision which excludes hermetically sealed borders of the kind which were established during the Cold War period, in contravention to the idealistic, universalist views of Americans who believed World War II was a war of liberation, won over the apostles of alienation. In fact, the Cold War signiied the end of heroic universalism. The Soviet Union conducted an expansive policy that paved the way for the creation of two spheres of inluence, a move radicalized by the United States’ own assumption that communism was evil and, instead of promoting the freedom of the masses, was a system one should be liberated from. The Truman doctrine says no less; neither do Kennedy’s or 87 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

Pi erre Lagayette

Reagan’s versions of containment. Borders turned into DMZs or walls consecrated the advent of a dichotomous world, one symbolized in the Border Trilogy by Mexico and the United States. As revolutionary nations, both countries share a desire for liberty, which makes them mutually attractive. Mexicans and Americans, however, do not cross borders for the same reasons. If we adopt the deinitions given by Deleuze and Guattari in their essay A Thousand Plateaus39 we ind McCarthy’s Mexicans to be “migrants” while his Americans are “nomads.”40 John Grady’s pastoral dream in All the Pretty Horses, or Billy’s and Boyd’s nostalgia for the free range, the days when “you could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a crossfence,”41 leads them to wander into Mexico only to ind there not a geographic extension of their desires but a real nation with different social codes and usages. “You think,” says the hacendado to Billy, at the local fair, “that this country is some country you can come here and do what you like.”42 This is not an inquiry but an assessment. When the nomadic American pleads for his innocence, “I was just passing through . . . Queriamos pasar, no màs,” the natural question proceeds immediately, “Pasar o traspasar?”;43 this involves the implicit recognition of national identities. Nomadism is for deserts, where political divisions hardly apply. Mexico is no longer a blank map and to cross into this country requires at least an ethical leap. There are moral lessons to be learned beyond borders: that you cannot just covet a girl above your own condition, that you cannot just drive animals freely back and forth across the frontier, that you cannot dispossess a man from what he believes is his property. In the latter case, such a lesson will be John Grady’s ultimate stage of experimenting with borders and he will die for the transgression. Borderlines are not just spatial divisions, they separate two historical universes that irremediably cement the linearity of time. There are repeated indications, in the Border Trilogy, that the succession of events escapes human manipulation. The Revolution sealed the personal fate of Dueña Alfonsa in an almost predetermined way. Such is also the case for Magdalena who, on her way to her inal rendezvous, says premonitory good-byes to the world around. Beyond human agency, catastrophic events also direct the low of time. In The Crossing, the Bavispe church will never be reconstructed and the blind man who lost his eyes in Durango will never recover his sight. The meaning of this linear course of history becomes clearer in The Road, where nearly all familiarity with the “ancient” world has vanished. Conditions have appeared that force humankind to rewrite their own history. The Cold War implied similar revisions: it came into existence concomitantly with the advent of the nuclear age; and once the bomb had been tested, international relations would never again be the same. Historian C. Vann Woodward, in

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The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War

his volume The Future of the Past, discusses the radical break provided by atomic armament in the post-World War II period: Historic changes in weapons, tactics, and strategy between one war and the next, or even one century or one era and the next in the past, become trivial in importance by comparison with the gulf between the pre-atomic and the nuclear age of strategic bombing. . . . The fact is that many of the precepts, principles, and values derived from past experience in wars can be tragically misleading in the new age. . . . Traditions that associate the new type of war with honor, valor, and glory are no longer quite relevant.44

The story Billy hears in the Epilogue of Cities of the Plain conirms the vanity of historical explanations: what we consider world changes are but ripples on the river of time. Choice is illusory, “for there is no otherwise”45 as the narrator declares. And as much as the Cold War protagonists found themselves caught in the nets of nuclear power, the dreamer in the narrated tale sees “a terrible darkness coming,”46 of the kind that precisely opens The Road. The encampment envisioned in the dream throws the narrator and his fantastic scenery back to “primitive” times, with “huts of skin” and “antique arms.” Walking “through all that desolation and all that abandonment”47 paves the way for the opening pages of The Road. The world, here, has suffered a terrible conlagration and one is led to wonder, despite the desolate coldness of the landscape, whether the journey of father and son does not illustrate the ultimate failure of the Cold War. There are no more borders to deine territories or nations; only the thin line of the road materializes a delusive security. The atomic age and the Cold War signiied the end of security for the United States, but the dismantlement of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not dispel nuclear risks altogether nor threats on United States’ security. The Road tells the story of two human beings trying to adjust to an environment from which all the usual markers – geographical, temporal, and social – have been erased. Ironically, McCarthy paints a tragically parodic version of the post-Cold War world that seems at once remindful of some past and a weird hinting that we, like the world, must never stop moving, the difference being that we never know what direction this world is taking. To the “immappable world of our journey” mentioned at the end of Cities of the Plain48 the protagonists of The Road oppose their desperate peregrinations for which no “oil company roadmap” is of any help. The lesson, whether it applies to McCarthy’s iction, to the Cold War, or to any other war, is a lesson in blindness and progress. Advance one must, however painful the movement, for, as the father tells the son, “you don’t know what might be down the road.”49 It may be the return of freedom to peoples who suffered under superpower hegemony or international terrorism of the 89 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

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kind engendered by the end of the Cold War and its exacerbated nationalisms, or, in McCarthy’s darkest version, a potential nuclear holocaust after the balance between arch-enemies has been broken. But, for all the gloom displayed in The Road, there is always an obvious prevalence of simple strategies to make for a perpetual extension of our wanderings through an alien universe. Moving on is vital, whatever the costs, despite dangers coming from all sides and the unpredictable future. Whatever defense is left lies in the formidable power of love, a sort of ultimate safety embodied by two humans linked by the tightest of bonds: father and child, “each the other’s world entire.”50 NOTES 1. Cormac McCarthy, The Border Trilogy (London: Pan, Macmillan, 2002), pp. 234–43. 2. Ibid, p. 646. 3. Ibid, p. 662. 4. Vince Brewton, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy,” Southern Literary Journal 37.1 (Fall 2004), pp. 121–43. For another discussion of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy in the context of the Cold War, see Susan E. Hawkins, “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia,” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, ed. Christine Chollier (Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003), 95–103. 5. Martin J. Medhurst, Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor and Ideology (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), p. 19. 6. BT 451 7. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (London: Wildside Press, 2009), p. 135. 8. BT 805. 9. Ibid, p. 804. 10. Ibid, p. 646. 11. Ibid, p. 647. 12. Ibid, p. 180. 13. Ibid, p. 173. 14. Ibid, p. 171. 15. Ibid, p. 185. 16. Ibid, p. 185. 17. Ibid, p. 185. 18. Ibid, p. 185. 19. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 77. Signiicantly the child needs constant reassurance about their righteousness. One among many examples: “Are we still the good guys? He said. Yes. We’re still the good guys. And we always will be. Yes. We always will be. Okay.” 20. BT 821. 21. Ibid, p. 878. 22. Ibid, p. 967. 23. Ibid, p. 963. 90 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.012

The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid, p. 994. Ibid, p. 993. Ibid, p. 998. TR 4. BT 937. Ibid, p. 715 Ibid, p. 718. Ibid, p. 719. Ibid, p. 720. Ibid, p. 721 Ibid, p. 725. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 193. BT 726. Ibid, p. 724. Ibid, p. 35. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 351–423. See Brian Evenson, “McCarthy’s Wanderers: Nomadology, Violence, and Open Country.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995), 41–48. BT 309. Ibid, p. 427. Ibid, p. 427. C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 89. BT 1031. Ibid, p. 1032 Ibid, p. 1033 Ibid, p. 1034. TR 278. Ibid, p. 6.

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P art I V

The Novels

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8 JA MES R. GILES

Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism

As evidenced by Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy has been inluenced by Herman Melville; and, to a strong degree, he writes out of the tradition of literary romanticism, especially nineteenth-century American romanticism as practiced by Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.1 In the 1950s, Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase made the inluential argument that this tradition dominates the development of the American novel; and, while in the late nineteenth century literary realism and naturalism emerged, Trilling’s and Chase’s argument retains a strong degree of validity.2 One dominant form of early-nineteenth-century American iction is the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological romance often realized in the high gothic mode. Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe are acknowledged masters of this form of iction, which has been discussed as a genre apart from the novel, especially the realistic novel of social concern and conlict. In The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, Eric Carl Link explores the “romance” tradition as the genre encounters the aesthetics of realism, naturalism, and, more importantly, the scientiic and philosophical insights of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Link argues that what emerged in the works of Jack London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser is a blend of the romantic aesthetic with naturalist concepts of biological and social determinism, atavism, and the plot of decline. This essay examines Cormac McCarthy’s early novel Outer Dark as a gothic romance that incorporates ideas and motifs of literary naturalism. In Understanding Cormac McCarthy, Steven Frye has placed the novel in the tradition of “the southern gothic as deined by Ellen Glasgow and further reined by Tennessee Williams.”3 And as Frye and numerous other critics and reviewers have noted, the inluence of William Faulkner (who also wrote out of a conluence of the traditions of romanticism and naturalism) is also clear in Outer Dark. 95 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

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A short, contained novel, Outer Dark especially recalls the gothic romances of Hawthorne and Poe. It represents, to some degree, a contemporary revision of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Haunted by the temptation of sin, Hawthorne’s protagonist lees into a darkened forest to escape his innocent young wife, Faith, only to encounter such intense manifestations of sin and evil that his own faith and innocence are irrevocably shattered. Typically, Hawthorne, at the end, leaves the reader uncertain about whether the gothic events in the forest took place in reality or in Young Goodman Brown’s dreaming. By contrast, sin has entered the world of Outer Dark before the novel opens, and much of the narrative recounts the doomed attempt of the male protagonist, Culla Holme, to lee from its very real consequences. Like Hawthorne, McCarthy makes effective use of the dream device in Outer Dark. The novel opens with Culla being forcefully awakened from a dream by his sister, Rinthy. In the dream, Culla inds himself surrounded by “a delegation of human ruin,” asking a “prophet” whether he can be “cured.” The prophet responds that perhaps he can be cured, but then “the sun buckled and dark fell like a shout,” and the rest of the “beggared multitude” abruptly turns on him.4 The reader soon discovers the speciic sin for which Culla is seeking a cure: he has committed incest with Rinthy and impregnated her. Whereas Young Goodman Brown is merely tempted by the idea of some unnamed sin, Culla and Rinthy have violated one of the most universal of taboos. In both cases, however, the penalty is the loss of their innocence. Ironically, at the end of the novel and after a series of horriic incidents, Culla, the much greater sinner, receives a promise of redemption from an actual prophet. In Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, Dianne C. Luce argues that “[Culla’s dream] establishes the subsequent experience of the novel as a kind of dream” and that it occurs in a “dreamscape.”5 Such a reading would heighten the parallel to Hawthorne and an interpretation of Outer Dark as a gothic romance, while mitigating its relationship to literary naturalism. This essay assumes, however, that, after Culla is awakened from his nightmare, the novel enters a realm of external reality, although the text’s extreme emphasis on the grotesque and the recurrent imagery of darkness establish it as an almost surreal realm. The bulk of the text describes a dual quest undertaken separately by Culla and Rinthy. Their quests begin after a series of events that serve to intensify Culla’s guilt. After Rinthy gives birth, the result of their incestuous act, Culla tells Rinthy that the newborn child is dead and that he is going to bury it. He then takes the infant into a “swampy forest,”6 where he leaves it to die. Instead, the baby is discovered and kidnapped by a tinker who has earlier tried to sell Culla some crude pornographic drawings. 96 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism

Throughout the novel, Rinthy receives much less condemnation than Culla. There seem to be three reasons for this. Whatever the circumstances of his incestuous act with Rinthy, Culla’s abandoning the child in the forest is a deliberate action, not the result of passion but of a cowardly fear of discovery. Such cowardice will characterize Culla throughout the text. It is worth noting that, when asked where he comes from, he answers “down on the Chicken River.”7 One suspects this is an allusion to the traditional reference to a cowardly person as “chicken.” He, for instance, refuses to call a midwife to assist in the child’s birth. Moreover, there are hints in the text that Culla forced intercourse on Rinthy. At one point, she says to a storekeeper, “I hate for you to know what all else he done.”8 Most importantly, Rinthy’s quest is undertaken to ind her baby; while Culla, ostensibly seeking to ind his sister, is desperately attempting to escape his guilt. Though Rinthy’s quest is depicted in a more afirmative manner than Culla’s, both are characterized by dark and ominous symbolism and encounters with the grotesque. While common aspects of the gothic romance, such symbolism and emphasis on the grotesque are also related to the naturalistic overtones of Outer Dark. In this context, it is useful to recall some comments from one of the classic American practitioners of literary naturalism, Frank Norris. In his 1896 essay, “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” Norris asserts that “naturalism is a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism. . . . [Zola’s] great, terrible dramas . . . [happen to] the lower – almost the lowest – classes, those who have been thrust or wrenched from the ranks who are falling by the wayside.”9 As the prophet of a new and then controversial literary movement, Norris seems to be deliberately clearing a broad path for naturalistic writers. It is signiicant, however, that he links romanticism and naturalism as literary modes that explore heightened, extraordinary external and internal experiences of “lower – almost the lowest – classes.”10 Norris’s formula can easily be applied to Outer Dark and indeed to most of McCarthy’s work. From a socioeconomic perspective, Culla and Rinthy most deinitely come from the lowest class. As in his novel Child of God, McCarthy depicts in Outer Dark central characters who inhabit a profoundly impoverished and isolated landscape. The Appalachia of these two novels seems to exist virtually outside any known space and time. As in the iction of Norris and the classic naturalists, a form of determinism underlies Outer Dark. Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, McCarthy can hardly repeat the largely uncomplicated biological determinism of Norris’s McTeague (1899) or the economic determinism of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893, 1896) or even of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Instead, he combines a number of external and internal forces into a multilayered determinism.11 97 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

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In her Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985), June Howard describes Hubert Selby’s 1964 novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, as being representative of a “latter-day naturalism.”12 A multilayered determinism informs the northern urban texts of Selby and Richard Price, among others, as well as a group of novelists including Harry Crews, Larry Brown, William Gay, and Tom Franklin, who depict the contemporary rural and small-town American south and who can be seen as the inheritors of Cormac McCarthy’s ictional legacy. As is typical of the texts of both the contemporary northern urban and rural southern groups of writers, the determinism in Outer Dark, as well as in Child of God, is rooted in psychological, social, and economic forces. Paradoxically, while more complex and subtle than the biological and economic forces that overwhelm McTeague and Maggie Johnson, it is not as total in its controlling power. Neither Culla nor Rinthy are ultimately destroyed, although their child is, and in the most grotesque of ways. As in most McCarthy, violence is pervasive in these two Appalachian novels and becomes a key aspect of the determinism in both. Culla’s dream that opens the novel signals the psychological dimension of Outer Dark’s determinism. It is perhaps useful here to reference Donald Pizer’s argument in Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism. Pizer argues for a Freudian, as well as a Marxist, inluence on twentieth-century American literary naturalism: “the [1930s American] novelists found a moving representation of the theme inherent in Marxism and Freudianism that life placed tragic limitations on individual freedom, growth, and happiness.”13 Freud’s theories concerning sexuality and guilt are emphasized more overtly in the characterization of Culla than in that of Rinthy. He is hounded by guilt throughout the novel; and, throughout his quest, he encounters individuals who seem to possess some mysterious knowledge of his sin with Rinthy and who make more or less direct references to it. In an early scene, he applies for work with a “squire” who abruptly asks, “where are you runnin from?”14 and then says, “I hope you’ve not got a family. It’s a sacred thing, a family. A sacred obligation. Afore God.”15 Of course, Culla can hardly acknowledge the family that he does have. Consciously, he is seeking Rinthy, but subconsciously, he is in light from his guilt and the family that he has destroyed. He has violated in the most fundamental way his obligations to Rinthy and to their child. Culla has said nothing to prompt the squire’s comments, but he can only hear them as conirmations of his guilt. Later in the novel, he asks for a drink of water from an old snake hunter who responds, “wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink.”16 In an ironic subsequent scene, Culla is coerced by another “squire” into pleading guilty for a petty crime that he in fact did not commit. The guilty plea for a minor 98 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism

transgression of which he is innocent is an inadequate substitution for a confession of his sins against Rinthy and their baby. When questioned by the squire, Culla says, “I don’t igure I done nothing wrong.”17 This avowal of innocence is legitimate in the speciic context of the legal charges against him; but Culla is in this position because he is attempting to lee from a guilt that pervades his very being. Nevertheless, this scene provides a foreshadowing of Culla’s ultimate redemption. After pronouncing sentence on Culla, the squire makes a more important judgment of him: “I don’t believe you’re no bad feller, Holme . . . I don’t believe you’re no lucky feller neither.”18 Inwardly, Culla believes, but will not acknowledge, that he is the worst kind of fellow. The next judgment of Culla occurs in a scene that mingles horror with black comedy and echoes a passage from the New Testament book of Mark. McCarthy’s protagonist encounters a family of drovers attempting to drive a herd of hogs along a narrow cliff road above a river. After stepping aside to give the drovers and their herd room, Culla engages in some wildly comic conversation with one of them about the nature of hogs only to witness the drover being driven by the stampeding herd off the cliff and into the river, where he drowns. For no reason, the remaining drovers begin to blame Culla for the death of their brother when “a parson or what looked like one” appears and asks the drovers not to hang Culla or throw him off the cliff. The probably counterfeit parson subsequently pronounces his judgment on McCarthy’s protagonist: “I guess a feller mires up so deep in sin after a while he don’t want to hear nothing about grace and salvation.”19 These seemingly random encounters with strangers who judge Culla and who seem to possess some preternatural or even supernatural knowledge of his sin can certainly be read to support a reading of Outer Dark as a gothic romance. The landscape through which Culla travels seems at times to exist entirely within his consciousness, to be a recreation of the dark forest which Young Goodman Brown explores. Because Culla is leeing through this landscape in an attempt to escape his guilt, it can also be related to the internal, psychological dimension of the novel’s determinism. Environmental determinism is the central aspect of determinism’s external dimension. As seen in Culla’s encounters with the two squires, a rigid caste system deines the socioeconomic structure of Appalachia. Given that McCarthy deliberately keeps the setting of the novel ambiguous, thereby giving it a certain universal and mythic quality, it would be dificult to argue for a social protest reading of Outer Dark. Still, the complete power that the two squires hold over Culla (and one assumes everyone who is as impoverished as he) suggests a largely elided Marxist dimension in the text. 99 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

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In their interview, the irst squire looks at Culla “as he would anything for sale.”20 He reduces Culla to a commodity, and an inexpensive one at that, just as one suspects he does to virtually everyone with whom he comes in contact. After Culla spends an entire day chopping up a fallen tree with an ax, the squire pays him ifty cents and offers him dinner. In this transaction, Culla is completely at the mercy of the squire. The second squire arbitrarily decides what to charge Culla with and what sentence to give him. After the sentencing, Culla briely continues to plead his innocence, only to have the squire respond, “you done been sentenced. I give ye pretty light for a stranger anyways.”21 While this squire does not precisely treat Culla as a commodity, he does demonstrate his arbitrary power over him. Poverty is not the only aspect of the environmental determinism that controls Culla and to a lesser degree Rinthy as well. Isolation, lack of any education, and religious indifference are also central elements of it. The novel’s opening establishes the profound isolation in which the two exist. The tinker seems to be their irst visitor in some time, and he kidnaps the baby that Culla has abandoned. Truly, no one in the novel seems to know either of them; they encounter only strangers during their separate travels, although the strangers whom Rinthy meets demonstrate some kindness and generosity. Still, Rinthy is more troubled than Culla by their isolation. Early in the novel, after Culla tells Rinthy not to “take in no strangers” while he is away from their cabin, she answers, “they ain’t a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me.”22 Apparently, her response is meant to include Culla in her world of strangers. Later, when asked if she lives “toward town,” she confesses that she doesn’t know “where town’s at.”23 Moreover, it is not only their immediate surroundings of which both characters are ignorant. When the tinker asks Culla if he can “cipher,” he answers “naw. Not good,”24 and the scene with the second squire establishes that he is illiterate, as is Rinthy. The reader learns very little about their background except that they have only lived in the Chicken River area for about four months. Culla tells the irst squire that he has only lived near Chicken River for a short time but, when pressed about where he originally came from, will only answer “downstate.”25 He does tell the second squire that he came from Johnson County, to which the squire responds, “what did they run you off for down thataway.”26 Appropriately, Rinthy gives the most succinct summary of their alienation and isolation. She says at one point, “I was raised hard,”27 and later, “we never had nuthin nor nobody.”28 The isolation in which Culla and Rinthy are trapped and their lack of any formal education and even a rudimentary knowledge of the environment 100 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism

that surrounds them will prohibit them from escaping the desperate poverty in which they are irrevocably trapped. Moreover, their condition seems to be just slightly worse than that of the people they encounter on their travels with the exception of the two squires. The world in which Outer Dark is set is impoverished in more ways than one. It also is largely bereft of any redeeming spirituality. Organized religion fares as badly in this novel as it usually does in McCarthy’s iction. Protestant fundamentalism is seemingly the only faith that exists in the world of the novel, and, rather than redemptive, it is harshly judgmental (McCarthy’s view of southern religious fundamentalism is reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s). Rinthy gives birth on a Sunday; and, when Culla goes to a store to get some food for her, he is denied entrance. A voice from “an upper window” of the store calls down at him, “we still christians. You’ll have to come back a weekday.”29 Later when Rinthy comes upon a grotesque old woman whom McCarthy describes as a “stooped and hooded anthropoid”30 carrying a hoe for protection against snakes, the woman immediately asserts that she has not been “a-hoein.”31 The woman then clariies her assertion, “I don’t hold with breakin the Sabbath and don’t care to associate with them that does,” and then challenges Rinthy, “I don’t believe you been saved have ye.”32 In the context of McCarthy’s novel, it is not surprising that this grotesque appearing old woman, in contrast to the storekeeper from whom Culla seeks help, feeds Rinthy. One feels that she does so in spite of and not because of her religion. Perhaps the novel’s most memorable representative of Protestant fundamentalism is the parson who judges Culla after the drover is driven off the cliff during the hog stampede. After almost getting Culla either hanged or thrown off the cliff, the alleged parson claims to have saved a blind man once “who wanted to curse God for his afliction.”33 In the novel’s conclusion, Culla twice encounters a blind man who tells of once being brought before a preacher who “wanted to cure everybody.” The blind man, who represents the only genuine voice of faith in the novel, then says, “it may be he weren’t no true preacher.”34 The reader cannot know for certain that the blind man is referring to the parson from the earlier scene, but that seems a likely inference. The blind man asks Culla if he needs anything and, after Culla asks what he is selling, says, “I ain’t sellin nothing. I’m at the Lord’s work. He don’t need your money.”35 He then clariies that he is not a preacher: “what is they to preach. It’s all plain enough. Word and lesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.”36 Neither, one assumes, does Cormac McCarthy. Rather than a redemptive force, Protestant fundamentalism functions in Outer Dark as one aspect of the novel’s multilayered determinism. 101 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

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A savage violence that pervades the landscape through which Rinthy and, especially, Culla travel is also central to Outer Dark’s determinism. In one scene, the tinker and the woman to whom he takes the kidnapped baby are described as moving in “shadows so foreshortened they seemed sprung and frenzied with a violence in which their creators moved with dreamy disconcern.”37 Violence so pervades the landscape of Outer Dark that its human inhabitants usually move through it without consciously noticing the violence that envelopes them. There are two references in the text to a meanness that seems inherent in the world of Outer Dark. The old snake hunter tells Culla that “they’s lots of meanness in these parts and I ain’t the least of it.”38 In fact, he is a very small part of it. The tinker tells Rinthy that “I been rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to another”39 and pronounces judgment on humanity: “I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.”40 Of course, the most important practitioners of violence in Outer Dark are “the grim triune.” Like Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, these three savage murderers exist in some dimension simultaneously inside and outside physical space. Their crimes are so brutal, so random and unmotivated that they seem to be, at least on one level, agents of an unknowable supernatural force; and most critics have viewed them from transcendental, even mythic, perspectives. For instance, Georg Guillemin, in The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, reading the novel as allegorical, interprets the leader of the triune as Culla’s paranoid vision of evil: “Culla’s projection of everything evil onto this igure deines . . . [him] as an evil archetype. As such, he is not simply like Satan, but one of his avatars.”41 William C. Spencer also discusses the triune from an allegorical, Old Testament perspective: “this terrible trio, this unholy trinity, parodies the theological concept of a triune God.”42 Dianne C. Luce, in contrast, reads the novel from the perspective of Gnosticism and thus views the triune as “manifestations of a uniied and rich conception of the demiurge and its world-ruling heimarmene.”43 The structure of Outer Dark emphasizes the complexity of the triune. Initially, they appear only in italicized sections separate from the main narrative of the text, the irst of which opens the novel. While the reader of course cannot know their identity when they irst appear, McCarthy introduces them with some ominous symbolism. They ride onto a bluff “in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge.” After eating “whatever it was they had with them,” they sleep, awaken “with the irst light,” eat breakfast “until the bearded one rose . . . and closed the other two in a foul white plume of smoke.”44 They seem to appear on the bluff out 102 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

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of nowhere, accompanied by shadows and smoke. Even the unnamed food they eat will take on ominous overtones. The murderous violence that they embody is only implicit in this opening scene, but it becomes more overt with each of their subsequent appearances. In the second, they ride through the “open doors” of the irst squire’s barn and “almost instantly out the other side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook . . . unaltered in gait demeanor or speed, parodic igures transposed live and intact and violent out of a violent proletarian mural.”45 “Parodic” is a curious word here. McCarthy perhaps uses it to signal that the triune parody the idealistic depictions of urban and rural workers commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression (they are, after all, stealing from a repressive landowner), but the timelessness of the narrative makes it impossible to assume that for certain. To the degree that such an assumption is valid, one can see them as embodiments of what the novel has described as the “meanness” of the human beings who inhabit it. They next appear simultaneously within the main narrative of the novel and in an accompanying italicized section. In the main narrative, the irst squire discovers after Culla’s departure that his itinerant woodchopper has stolen his boots and sets out on a wagon to retrieve them, only to be overtaken by the triune who, after an abrupt shift into an italicized section, murder him with a brushhook stolen from his barn. One might initially assume that some form of proletarian revenge is implied here, but it becomes increasingly clear in the novel that they kill at random and for no comprehensible reason and that they hardly have Culla’s well-being in mind. The trio is not physically present in the novel’s fourth italicized passage, but they have passed through the space described leaving their grim work behind them. A group of men discover a murdered man in a wagon and the corpses of “two iterant millhands” hanging from a tree “in a ield on the edge of [a] village.”46 When Culla is assumed to be guilty of the murders, another aspect of the triune’s relationship to the central narrative becomes clear. They follow or precede Culla wherever he goes until, in two climactic scenes, he inally encounters them. That the trio exists both outside and inside the main narrative signals their role as being simultaneously human and beyond human – in fact, beyond human comprehension. Their crimes increasingly demonstrate this duality. At one point, they rob some graves, stealing the clothing from the dead and arranging the nude bodies in sexually suggestive positions. In response to this atrocity, a man says, “I hate knowin they is such people.”47 But, as in his characterization of the necrophiliac murderer Lester Ballard in Child of God, one of McCarthy’s aims as a novelist is to attempt to comprehend 103 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

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human beings who commit unthinkable acts. This purpose constitutes one of the naturalistic ingredients in his iction. Culla’s two meetings with the triune demonstrate their role as his ultimate judges. He irst comes upon them after almost drowning in the wreck of a ferry boat. The leader welcomes them to their ire. After giving Culla some unidentiiable meat to eat and specifying that he never gave a name to one of his companions, the leader demands that Culla surrender the boots that he stole from the irst squire in exchange for the “mismatched, cracked . . . and crudely mended” pair belonging to the unnamed one. During this encounter, the leader abruptly says, “I guess you’d like to know [my name], wouldn’t ye?”48; but when Culla answers yes, he refuses to reveal it, commenting, “I expect they’s lots would like to know that.”49 In fact, none of the victims of their murderous rampage knew the names of their killers. After this discussion of names, the leader’s apparent knowledge of Culla’s past is revealed when he abruptly asks Culla why he ran his sister off. In their subsequent encounter, the triune leader’s knowledge of Culla’s past actions is again evident. When Culla comes upon the three, he sees his child: “it had a healed burn all down one side of it and the skin was papery and wrinkled like an old man’s.”50 The child also has only one eye. Culla tries to deny any knowledge of the child, but the leader says, “I igure you got this thing in her belly your own self.”51 This scene culminates in one of the most unthinkable moments in all of McCarthy’s iction. The leader holds up the infant and slits its throat and gives it to the mute member of the triune, who proceeds to drink the blood looding from the child’s throat. While Culla escapes ultimate punishment for his sins, the unnamed child is grotesquely sacriiced in his place. The nature of the unnamed meat that Culla was forced to eat in his irst meeting with the three now seems clear; cannibalism is added to the novel’s litany of horrors. With their supernatural knowledge of Culla’s past, the triune leader can be said to incorporate all the other judges of McCarthy’s protagonist. That the trio have both supernatural and human dimensions makes it impossible to view them solely as embodiments of the novel’s multilayered determinism, but their acts of random violence and their vaguely proletarian origins point to the validity of such a reading as being one level of their complex identity. In addition to determinism, one other characteristic of naturalism is evident in the novel. Rinthy and especially Culla are consistently viewed through what June Howard, in Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, describes as a “spectator” point of view common to literary naturalism.52 Except in Culla’s opening dream sequence, McCarthy permits the reader no entrance into either character’s consciousness. Instead, they are 104 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism

observed, and often harshly, by those they encounter. Even the nonhuman world becomes a spectator in the novel – at one point, while leeing from a mob, Culla is “regarded . . . with bland placidity” by a herd of cows.53 Certainly, Outer Dark is, on one level, a gothic romance, but the multilayered determinism that underlies the text and is central to McCarthy’s narrative purpose makes it a memorable example of romantic naturalism. Though they avoid the horriic fate of their illegitimate child, Culla’s and Rinthy’s lives are severely proscribed by their extreme poverty, their lack of education, and the violence that pervades the landscape through which they move, in keeping with the spectator perspective common to naturalism. Moreover, they are observed by human, nonhuman, and often harshly judgmental strangers throughout their travels. NOTES 1. George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2. G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link, Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1999). 3. Steven Frye, Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009). 4. Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 5–6. 5. Dianne C. Luce, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 62. 6. OD 16. 7. Ibid, p. 46. 8. Ibid, p. 56 9. Frank Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” 1896, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Nina Baym. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), pp. 911–13. 10. Ibid, p. 912. 11. Donald Pizer, Frank Norris: Novels and Essays (New York: The Library of America), p. 1108. 12. June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p.166. 13. Donald Pizer, Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 13. 14. OD 46. 15. Ibid, p. 47. 16. Ibid, p. 117. 17. Ibid, p. 201. 18. Ibid, p. 206. 19. Ibid, p. 225. 20. Ibid, p. 42. 21. Ibid, p. 106. 105 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.014

Jam es R. Gil es 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 58. Ibid, p. 8. Ibid, p. 46. Ibid, p. 201. Ibid, p. 60. Ibid, p. 155. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 108. Ibid, p. 109. Ibid, p. 109. Ibid, p. 226. Ibid, p. 241. Ibid, p. 240. Ibid, p. 240. Ibid, p. 23. Ibid, p. 119. Ibid, p. 193. Ibid, p. 192. Georg Guillemin, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), pp. 61–62. William C. Spencer, “Cormac McCarthy’s Unholy Trinity: Biblical Parody in Outer Dark,” Sacred Violence, Vol. 1, ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002), p. 83. Dianne C. Luce, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 88. OD 89. Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, p. 88. Ibid, p. 174. Ibid, p. 175. Ibid, p. 231. Ibid, p. 233. Howard, pp. 125–27. OD 89.

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9 STEV EN FRYE

Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence

In the notes that appear with the irst draft manuscript of Blood Meridian, McCarthy includes a quote from the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535–475 BCE): “War is the father of us all and out [sic] king. War discloses who is godlike and who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a free man.” McCarthy then writes: “Let the judge quote this in part and without crediting source.”1 In the inal novel, these words become, “war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will. . . . War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”2 In Blood Meridian, this preoccupation with the more brutal aspects of the human experience has led to a complicated reaction on the part of readers, reviewers, and scholars. Although Blood Meridian has emerged as perhaps McCarthy’s masterpiece, the novel’s astounding reception was slow in coming, selling poorly even among the sophisticated readers who had been previously drawn to McCarthy’s canon. There is nothing peculiar in this. The initial reviews were relatively scant and at best ambivalent. Not surprisingly, critics were disturbed by the staggering portrayal of violence. In The New York Times, Caryn James acknowledged the extraordinary quality of McCarthy’s prose but struggled with his choice of material, writing that McCarthy has “a passionate voice given equally to ugliness and lyricism.”3 In the Sewanee Review, Walter Sullivan struck a similar note in the form of a question: “What do we make of this phenomenon, a mind that dwells unremittingly on evil and a prose that conveys those thoughts with the tongue of an angel?”4 What is interesting about these responses is the immediate acknowledgment of McCarthy’s artistry. While both reviewers were tepid in their overall judgment, both equally concede a vexing irony that they cannot rest with comfortably: Cormac McCarthy writes a novel of incomparable beauty derived from the raw matter of incomparable horror. A gloss on the poetics of Blood Meridian might be drawn from McCarthy himself in words taken from All the Pretty Horses: “the 107 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Ste ven Frye

world’s heart beat [s] at some terrible cost” and “the blood of multitudes” is “exacted for the vision of a single lower.”5 Although many scenes in Blood Meridian are minimalist in style and journalistic in quality, the most memorable and disturbing are poetic. They are layered with an overt artistry drawing on aesthetic motifs common to the novel, and understanding the role of representation, the generative transformation of violence into beauty, is critical to comprehending McCarthy’s philosophical and ethical purpose as an author. Modern readers are often skeptical of the classical and neoclassical dictum that authors must write with a moral imperative. Philosophers and critics ranging from Aristotle to Horace, from Samuel Johnson to Alexander Pope, have argued that literature should possess a moral content and be directed toward an ethical mission. Modern aesthetic values, however, tend to question these assertions for various reasons, grounded in the concern that literature not function at the bidding of particular ideological systems. But Blood Meridian invites us to consider the ethical content inherent in any artwork that genuinely engages the world. Perhaps if literature is powerful and moving enough, a personal transformation in the reading process functions at the deepest psychological level. If we entertain this notion, perhaps we must (channeling Melville in Moby-Dick) drag McCarthy to the bar. Might we not echo Samuel Johnson in his admonition of Shakespeare and say that McCarthy writes without a moral purpose? And is it not reasonable to expect that his selection of material invites or even demands an ethical vision? He is the “creator” of the world that is Blood Meridian, and in doing so he chooses to select the worst features from our collective experience. As many critics have noted, his work is imbued with avarice, greed, and indiscriminate bloodletting, and the novel lacks any narrative voice that contains or comments on reality as McCarthy represents it. Moral and ethical questions lie at the heart of a novel that seems on the surface deaf to them. In the Woodward interview, McCarthy’s now famous quote does little to help in this regard. He argues that, “[t]here is no such thing as life without bloodshed. . . . I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are aflicted with this notion are the irst ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”6 This is a deceptively elliptical statement. On the one hand, it can be easily taken as a conirmation of McCarthy’s naturalist leanings. Barkley Owens argues that McCarthy’s “thesis” is that “mindless, atavistic violence is the true nature of mankind, a genetic heritage in common with apes and wolves.”7 Owens’ point is well taken but (as argued by Eric Carl Link and James R. Giles in this volume) naturalism is qualiied by McCarthy’s 108 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence

romantic leanings. On the most basic level, McCarthy’s comment is an argument against the Enlightenment conception of human perfectibility, and it implies realism rather than defeatism, arguably preserving the possibility of right-minded human action in the world. Vince Brewton locates the violence in McCarthy’s novels in a contemporaneous context, reading them in part as a gloss on the modern moment, an age in which the neoconservative politics of the modern era emerge in part from latent justiications of the Vietnam War, as well as the Reaganite and post-Reaganite reactionary nationalism that culminated in the First Gulf War.8 The novel is frequently considered as a revisionist account of the American western myth, and although mythic versions of the American west engage more than the political sphere, the violence itself becomes the “evidence” so to speak of another story, perhaps the true story, underlying the most pernicious popular myths of the Western and the archetypal American hero narrative. These readings begin to imply a moral vision that might seem otherwise absent, but they are only partially suficient because they tend to focus attention on the novel’s social themes, without engaging the dense philosophical and religious portent forced on the reader in the igure of Judge Holden, the ex-priest Tobin, and the unnamed kid. Although McCarthy’s interest in violence may be in part political, it is in a deeper sense ontological, as the Heraclitus reference suggests. In dealing with the violent content of American literature in general, James R. Giles sees violence as a peculiarly if not distinctly American phenomenon, and echoing the concerns of other critics suggests that it relects the realities of conquest and nation-building. In exploring the question in quasi-political terms, however, Giles examines the literary representation of violence by acknowledging the malleability of the word’s meaning, because it can be applied to physical acts, language use, and internalized emotion.9 What seems common to any deinition of violence is excess, violence in the end emerging as a response to any attempt at linguistic, symbolic, social, or epistemological containment. In his consideration of Blood Meridian, Vince Brewton echoes this in distinguishing between formal violence (duals, wars conducted in accordance with rules) and informal violence, which involves the aggressive transgression of boundaries. Although McCarthy takes as raw material the political world of the nineteenth century, his rendering of it is marked not only by the excess of the violence itself, but by the excess inherent in language and genre, the overt alchemy of the artist, the troubling transformation of blood into beauty. In this manner, McCarthy, with his own distinct vision, relects the sensibilities of his romantic and pre-romantic forbears. In the broadest possible sense, he is informed by the Burkean sublime, that concept of the beautiful (Edmund Burke redeines “beauty” in terms of the picturesque), that blends the merely pleasing with the pain-pleasure 109 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

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response we expect from the highest tragedies, that transport of emotion Edgar Allan Poe called “Supernal Beauty.”10 Certainly, Burke and Poe might shudder at Blood Meridian, more so because it may arguably represent the logical outcome of their aesthetic claims. But McCarthy’s embodiment of the sublime appears in his reconceptualization of American mythology and his overt use of the carnivalesque, both aesthetic strategies predicated on excess, and all intended in one degree or another to be imbued with moral vision, however obscure and ambiguous.11 History, Myth, and McCarthy’s “Western” In Blood Meridian, perhaps the most obvious sphere of artistic reconceptualization is mythology, and it is in the transformation of violence into myth, however vexing that myth may be, that McCarthy’s poetics of violence operates most clearly. Critics from the beginning have addressed the notion of Blood Meridian as a “revisionist” Western. In letters and in the margins of his manuscripts, McCarthy himself refers to the work-in-progress as his “Western,” and in doing so he is aware that he is working with (if not within) a genre that is mythologically constituted. Although these myths have historically appeared in novels of various kinds, in the modern era they are more commonly represented in ilm. There are literally hundreds of examples of ilms that constitute the myth in broadly nationalistic terms, but many featuring John Wayne are notable, particularly Rio Bravo (1959), The Alamo (1960), and True Grit (1969). Like anyone who grew up watching American cinema in the twentieth century, McCarthy is conscious of the mythological patterns of Western ilms, and the igurations of characters like John Joel Glanton, Judge Holden, and the kid clearly undermine the celebratory mythic conceptions of westward expansion. But again the philosophical portent of the novel suggests a deeper preoccupation, and letters and notes contained in his various manuscripts indicate that he cannot be easily pinned down politically. McCarthy is genuinely skeptical of utopian “liberalism,” perhaps relecting the same doubt as to the outcome of social reform that appeared in Hawthorne and Melville a hundred or more years before. But establishing the novel in deliberate and problematic relation to genre speaks directly to his awareness of the artiice of myth, its inherent excess, its transformative aesthetic properties, and the integral relationship of the artistic sphere to the question of human ethical consciousness. Considering the poetics of Blood Meridian in terms of the transformation of history into myth, it is important to chart the various sources McCarthy employs, both historical and aesthetic. As is frequently noted, the primary source for the characters in the novel is the memoir of Samuel Chamberlain 110 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence

entitled My Confessions: The Recollections of a Rogue. This narrative gives an account of the disturbing exploits of the Glanton Gang and provides colorful portraits of characters such as John Joel Glanton and Judge Holden, complete with drawn images. Although it was based on the Chamberlain narrative, McCarthy’s self-proclaimed “Western” was published in 1985 and conceived and written in stops and starts for many years previous. It emerges in the wake of a remarkable shift in Western ilms, a change leading to many Westerns that are remarkably different in form and thematic content than they had been before. Emphasizing the role of contemporary myth in relecting the ideological conlicts of a given historical moment, Richard Slotkin links a noticeable transformation in the Western to the deep social crises that occurred as a result of the Vietnam War.12 In the early 1970s as the war was coming to its tragic conclusion, a new “alternative” Western briely emerged. Anticipated certainly by the “spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone, this genre took on a number of forms, all of which contradict in various ways the assumed moral stature of the American hero and demonstrate a willingness to confront violence more directly.13 Two ilms establish, in part, the cinema aesthetic that informs Blood Meridian: Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue (1970). Both ilms were tremendously inluential, thus informing the transformation of the genre that McCarthy would have observed in many ilms and later would enact in the novel. They are formally innovative and ideologically subversive, representing a crisis in American self-perception that characterized the era. More particularly, as Richard Slotkin argues, they are deliberately allegorical and suggestive, both investigating the mythically rendered violence of the American hero in the context of the Vietnam War and, in the case of Soldier Blue, of one event in particular, the My Lai Massacre. In its shocking rendering of brutality, Blood Meridian displays a remarkable similarity to both ilms. Though it is impossible to determine McCarthy’s conscious intentions, it is reasonable to assume that the popularity and inluence of these revisionist Westerns made its way, directly or indirectly, into McCarthy’s “Western.” A skilled and studied ilmmaker, Peckinpah was open in saying that The Wild Bunch was in part an allegory for the violence in Vietnam, which was being witnessed in more vivid detail than any previous conlict because of television. He was speciically interested in how the camera image might be employed to capture a sense of actuality that moves beyond mimetic representation to the psychological sphere. The Wild Bunch was only the second ilm after Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to use slow motion for a violent sequence. Penn said he wanted the ending sequence to echo the public’s awareness of the Vietnam War and the Kennedy Assassination. 111 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

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Figure 9.1 Along with their fellow outlaws, Pike Bishop, Lyle Gorch, and Dutch Engstrom, (William Holden, Warren Oates, and Ernest Borgnine) ight General Mapache’s men in the concluding scenes of The Wild Bunch (Warner Brothers, 1969).

The inal battle scene in The Wild Bunch is particularly notable in its distinctive aesthetic technique and its allegorical implications. The bunch has decided to rescue a friend from a village where a corrupt Mexican general and his army reside. As the battle ensues, quick close-up shots blend with wide-angle images of the soldiers and the townspeople ighting the bunch. Normal motion combines with slow motion, the latter usually when someone is being shot or falling. There is virtually no sound but gunire. Peckinpah’s expressed purpose was to create images to relect the intense subjective experience of the participant. The visual portrayal of violence is presented to heighten the viewer’s sense of its horror (Figure 9.1). In Blood Meridian the penultimate scene in the novel that concludes the action of the narrative is the Yuma massacre, and it displays a remarkable similarity to the sequence in Peckinpah’s ilm. Consider the following paragraph: They swarmed up the hill toward the fortiications where the Americans lay sleeping and some were mounted and some afoot and all of them armed with bows and clubs and their faces blackened or pale with fard and their hair bound up in clay. The irst quarters they entered were Lincoln’s. When they emerged a few minutes later one of them carried the doctor’s dripping head by the hair and others were dragging behind them the doctor’s dog, bound at the muzzle, jerking and bucking across the dry clay of the concourse. They entered a wickiup of willowpoles and canvas and slew Gun and Wilson and Henderson Smith each in turn as they reared up drunkenly and they moved on among the rude half walls in total silence glistening with paint and grease and blood among the bands of light where the risen sun now touched the higher ground.14 112 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence

Of course, it is impossible to translate the medium of ilm to prose directly, but an indirect use of a cinematic aesthetic can be seen. Departing from his frequent use of ornate language, anachronism, metaphor, and stylistic complexity, McCarthy describes the Yuma massacre almost entirely in visual terms, using parallel construction to mimic the shifts from shot to cinematic shot. He deliberately paces the rhythm of sentences with the repeated use of “and” as well as single syllable words. Like the ilm, the scene is lyrical and poetic, visually striking yet terse and quickly paced. The Yuma “swarm” with the same sense of animal chaos as the army and villagers attack the bunch in Peckinpah’s ilm. There is a shift from the group as a whole in wide-angle to particular individuals, as they enter the village “armed with bows and clubs and their faces blackened or pale.” As the battle in The Wild Bunch moves from broad exterior to interior shots, the carnage itself becomes intensely personal and individuated, and it is there that the violence is most vivid and intense. This can be seen as the Yuma emerge with the doctor’s head. The image of the dog “jerking and bucking” is particularly evocative, especially considering the opening scene in The Wild Bunch in which the camera moves beyond a group of children watching to a swarm of red ants attacking a scorpion. As in Peckinpah’s scene, McCarthy’s visual montage blends group movement and individual movement as the language pace is slowed by modiiers in the same manner as the ilm, in which slow motion is employed particularly when people are killed. The Yuma’s victims “rear up drunkenly” before being murdered, and the attackers themselves are absorbed in a panapoly of the visual, moving along “the rude half walls,” “glistening,” illuminated by the “risen sun.” What marks this scene as cinematic is not the simple use of visual images, it is the precise combination of verbal pacing, interspersed wide-angle visuals, focused facial images, and the use of color and light. The passage and other similar ones seem to suggest the same process of abandoning objective modes of visual representation in favor of a subjective perception that remains utterly predicated on sight and the perception of movement. The inluence of cinematic technique is further evidenced in McCarthy’s departure from his more typical style, which is dependent on objectively rendered thought, ornate and frequently subordinated language, and the use of multiple senses. Whether the inluence of cinematic technique is direct or indirect, the purpose of both Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is to heighten the reader/ viewer’s sense of the reality of violence, not through an objective realism but by a subjectively rendered aesthetic transformation that captures a deeper, more compelling, and more disturbing sense of the real. This method is akin to the expressionist aesthetic that informed many artistic forms in the twentieth century, including painting, literature, and ilm. 113 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

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While The Wild Bunch displays a set of formal cinematic devices that seem to inform the aesthetics of Blood Meridian, Soldier Blue establishes a link between the historical past and present, and its inal scene portraying the Sand Creek Massacre refers directly to My Lai, a tragic incident that took place on March 16, 1968 and was committed by an infantry company of the American Division, resulting in the near obliteration of an entire village. The event was covered up while under investigation, but the story broke in articles and photographs published by The New York Times and Life Magazine. In Life, photographer Ronald Haeberle captured the event in a series of graphic images precisely organized to mimic the language of cinema. Although there are captions, the images transition from one to another without the intervention of a narrative voice, and the vivid horror of the event is presented in a highly organized visual narrative. The Life photographs were widely seen, dramatically heightening antiwar sentiments and contributing to the crisis of national identity that persisted through the following decade and beyond. The Sand Creek Massacre as represented in Soldier Blue involves images precisely orchestrated to imitate the Life images of My Lai, and virtually any viewer at the time would have noticed the comparison immediately. The allegory of American atrocities across two centuries was widely perceived, and a similar trajectory can be noted in the representation of massacre in Blood Meridian. The massacre in Soldier Blue is less remarkable for its formal thematic innovations than for its willingness to directly represent the most shocking acts of brutality. Soldiers murder children and rape and mutilate women directly in front of the camera’s eye, and, at the end, decapitated heads are displayed to the commanding oficer. In terms of the choice of material, there is a remarkable similarity to scenes in Blood Meridian. One example is the Slaughter of the Gilenos in chapter 12: When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses’ hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.15

The scene continues in the same manner, with vivid images of carnage. Again, the style is terse, intensely visual, void of ornate language, and the narrative trajectory from attack to the aftermath in lamentation parallels directly the Sand Creek scene in Soldier Blue. On the one hand, the passage seems to lack artiice, but the images are so strikingly similar to cinematic renderings that, given the popularity of ilm, it is dificult to avoid the comparison. The transformation of the raw matter of history into art appears in McCarthy’s careful imagistic focus, in terms like “bloody spew” and especially the tragic 114 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence

pictographic rendering of a woman who “ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton’s warhorse.”16 The realism of the scene read closely is qualiied by a cinematic method that links image to action, with simple and common verbs like “moving,” “shrieking,” “hacked,” and “running,” selected not to call attention to the acts themselves, but to heighten the reader’s focus on visual movement. What is so forceful about the scene in Blood Meridian is what is equally disturbing about the massacre in Soldier Blue and also the photographs of My Lai – that is, the orchestrated and deceptively selective presentation of images made more vivid for the lack of commentary. This aesthetic choice forces the event to reside in the subjective consciousness of the observer. The ethical implications of the atrocity are given greater clarity for lack of narrative commentary, which, typical of cinema, heightens the excesses of violence through the omission of a qualifying human consciousness. Readers and reviewers occasionally comment on this lack of narrative voice in Blood Meridian as evidence of an impoverished moral vision. But the opposite is true. Through aesthetic rather than polemical means, this cinematic method, poetically rendered, makes ethical considerations unavoidable. Carnival, Comedy, and Containment Thus, the boundaries commonly transgressed in Blood Meridian are boundaries of sensibility and aesthetics, emphasizing an excess that captures a deeper sense of historical and ethical concerns. This also appears clearly in McCarthy’s use of the carnivalesque.17 The term owes itself to the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and His World (1968), Bakhtin explores the relationship of certain modern narrative motifs and descriptions to the carnival, a festival tradition linked particularly to the “Feast of Fools” held on the irst of January on the occasion of the Feast of Circumcision. As a brief interlude that is ultimately consumed in the narrative of the Church year, the carnival permitted the momentary suspension of conventional hierarchies, even a burlesque parody of the sacred, and centered on the celebratory transgression of social and ethical norms. In literature, carnivalesque imagery is employed directly and indirectly to explore the peculiar conluence of the perverse and the creative, in an ironic blending of otherwise discordant elements. With its roots in the Church, transgression is not divorced from moral grounding but is instead a central feature of a series of celebrations that are themselves, through their narrative form, aesthetic in nature and moral in purpose. The creativity of carnival is evoked and ultimately contained within the broader narrative of the religious celebration. 115 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

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Bakhtin links the carnivalesque as he identiies it in the Middle Ages to the Menippean satire, in which the planes of Heaven, Earth, and Underworld are explored, with the Underworld itself associated with a similar inversion of hierarchical relationships. The ambiguity created in the later use of the carnivalesque is what, in Bakhtin’s terms, leads to the development of the polyphonic novel, which by its very structure allows for the release of multiple voices, many of them subversive and, in the case of Blood Meridian, morally, intellectually, and physically perverse and violent. Bakhtin’s reading of the carnival tradition places great emphasis on the subversive element, as transgressive behavior is admitted for a time rather than suppressed, and the adaptation of this aesthetic in the novel leads to its inherent polyvalence. McCarthy certainly retains this diversity of voices as well as perhaps a subversive element. But he evokes more fully the original medieval conception, because Blood Meridian is a framed genre-driven narrative that calls attention to its own identity as art, functioning to simultaneously contain and release the human impulse to violence. McCarthy’s use of the carnivalesque does not function to celebrate transgression but to orchestrate its expulsion and purging, primarily because the events demand an ethical response, and their very representation in carnival form call attention to that demand. McCarthy’s direct use of the carnivalesque can be traced to some of his earliest works and appears fully rendered in Child of God. At the conclusion of the novel, after he has become the incarnation of perversion itself, Lester Ballard becomes a carnival igure, but this scene is preigured earlier in the novel as he encounters a carnival directly, where ireworks explode “like a huge and dark Medusa” and a young girl appears in disturbing and clownish makeup: “with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide.” Her festival transgression of normative boundaries is imagistically rendered as “her hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitchlight of some medieval fun fare.”18 McCarthy’s awareness of the history of the carnivalesque seems obvious, as well as its association with religious celebration and a peculiar form of contained and aesthetically constituted transgression of normative behavior. This pattern becomes central in Blood Meridian, and although it is not always associated with carnival scenes, his portrayal of violence retains the image patterns of the carnivalesque, particularly in the surreal and dreamlike quality that attends his scenes of unmitigated carnage. One example is his now famous description of an attack of Comanches. After the kid has joined an army troop, they encounter the natives in the desert, and one of the most horriic scenes of bloodletting follows. The event is nightmarish, and although the violence is vividly rendered it is highly aestheticized, surreal in its grotesque blending of images, often centered on dress: 116 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence A legion of horribles . . . half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk inery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil.19

While the dreamlike quality of the scene as a whole creates the impression of a realm beyond the real, McCarthy derives the situation and the details of events from an actual and veriiable history. As S. C. Gwynne notes in his account of Comanche history centered on the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, attacks of this sort occurred on many occasions and were by no means atypical of the manner in which the Comanche waged war.20 The process by which this history is transformed is all the more fascinating because, in McCarthy’s rendering, it retains its accuracy. The transformation of blood into beauty involves little if any falsiication, and a kind of aesthetic alchemy heightens our sense of the real. The costume motif is central to the carnivalesque, and the use of discordant elements (animal skins, cavalry jackets, and the bloodstained weddingveil) involve a jarring blend of the comic and the horriic, culminating in an ecstatic festival of the absurd that reaches its height in a joyous celebration of murder and evisceration. Echoing in the background is the “brimstone land of christian reckoning,”21 which suggests not necessarily the literal existence of hell itself but at least a moral sphere, a realm of reckoning that exists in a strange counterpoint to the present festival of suffering. Carnivalesque imagery is clearly presented as the horseman’s faces appear “gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns” and “funhouse igures” with “nightmare faces.”22 The scene is fraught with inescapable moral content and is by no means devoid of pathos and sympathy, as the victims appear “dumb and without understanding” and “pale through the masks of dust.”23 In history, the events must be taken unvarnished, but through the carnivalesque the excess of festival is imbued with the absurd. McCarthy forces an encounter with events at once historical and incomprehensible. As Burke notes in his discussion of the sublime, there is a critical difference between actual and aesthetic experience, and a distinction must be made between the raw material of nature, objects and scenes such as rugged mountain peaks, storm tossed seas, and – by extension – Comanche attacks, and the experience of those things when represented in art. It is precisely the aesthetic rendering of danger itself that allows for the combination of pleasure and horror that is central to the sublime. Not only does McCarthy use the carnivalesque to orchestrate this response, he heightens our awareness of the reality of moral transgression, which was precisely the purpose of the carnival from its inception. 117 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

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In his consideration of the carnivalesque element in folktales, Bakhtin notes that they tend not to end in death, which imposes an absolute order, but with a banquet that implies the potential of rebirth. McCarthy plays on this notion at the conclusion of Blood Meridian, as the novel itself ends not with the kid’s death but with the carnival scene and the judge’s dance. On a makeshift stage is a iddler and a group of dancers, as well as prostitutes dressed in the incongruous clothing indicative of the carnival motif: men’s drawers, hats, pantaloons, and cavalry jackets. The judge enters, enacting the very dance that he has previously suggested is the outward expression of the world’s inherent order. He dances nimbly with grace and skill, but his own size and appearance makes his very perfection a perversity. The image by no means afirms a generative rebirth implied in folktale, as the carnival scene retains its emphasis on transgression and violence. But the event is contained within the narrative frame of the epilogue, a inal image that is mysterious to say the least. McCarthy’s marginalia in the irst draft of the epilogue notes: “This is also a burial scene.”24 He clariies the basic image but points to the fact that it is much more. Whether the epilogue is an allusion to Promethean deiance or an oblique image of the divine, it presents a different version of community than that which appears on the stage. As a traveler uses an implement to strike ire from a “rock which God has put there,” a community of wanderers conirm “the veriication of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it.”25 Not unlike the festival tradition of the medieval period, the carnivalesque imagery in Blood Meridian is formally contained by the epilogue, a narrative frame that afirms an oblique order, however mysterious. In that context, McCarthy points to both the pressing relevance of the moral sphere and the imperative to truth. For all the pervasive violence of the novel, one of the most evocative pieces of dialogue takes place between the kid and ex-priest Tobin. This brief conversation perhaps functions as a cornerstone in the thematic architecture of Blood Meridian. The ex-priest enigmatically evokes a sense of mystery and the transcendent: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the ire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life.26

Ultimately, it is impossible to precisely deine the nature of this voice, but one can argue that, in spite of the horror and isolation of the world, the voice implies a mysterious essence that imbues the world with meaning. This possibility is reinforced in the penultimate moment in the novel with the kid’s failed but nevertheless heroic resistance to the judge’s call, emerging 118 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

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from the “lawed place in the fabric of . . . [his] heart” that leads him to “reserve in . . . [his] soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”27 Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that the voice speaks from within the human soul as well as from a world of objective experience. It deines and articulates in mystery language the principle of order, community, and moral vision evoked in the epilogue following the judge’s dance, echoing perhaps a sense of future possibility in which the judge does not wholly reign. Still, McCarthy refuses to evade the realities of the world as he sees them, the realities of violence and conlict so powerfully expressed in the igure of Judge Holden. Through art self-consciously and poetically rendered, history is never lost but heightened, and the beauty of a single lower never obscures the blood that moistens the soil from which it grows. NOTES 1. This source only became apparent after McCarthy arranged to have his papers archived in the Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, at Texas State University, San Marcos, thus allowing scholars to discover many of his initial thoughts early in the artistic process. The Heraclitus reference is a signiicant discovery, revealing perhaps a central, though by no means the only, conception that undergirds Judge Holden’s worldview. In my own Understanding Cormac McCarthy, in a discussion of Suttree, I note the inluence of Heraclitus in what became known in the twentieth century as “panentheist,” theology. Panentheism conceives God as a being that both comprises the universe itself and in equal measure transcends the physical realm. Given McCarthy’s citation of Heraclitus, it now appears that this panentheist cosmology may have greater implications in McCarthy’s works than previously understood. The speciic reference is found in Box 35, Folder 1 of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos. 2. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 249. 3. Caryn James, “Is Everybody Dead Around Here,” The New York Times Book Review (April 1989), p. 3. 4. Walter Sullivan, “About Any Kind of Meanness You Can Name,” Sewanee Review 93 (Fall 1985), p. 652. 5. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 282. 6. Richard B. Woodward, “McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” The New York Times Magazine (April 19, 1992), p. 30. 7. Barkley Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), p. 4. 8. Vince Brewton, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy,” The Southern Literary Journal 37 (Fall 2004), p. 2. 9. James Giles, The Spaces of Violence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), p. 1. 119 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.015

Ste ven Frye 10. See Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Poetic Principle” (1850). 11. Edwin T. Arnold is one of the irst to make afirmative arguments for moral vision in McCarthy’s work. See “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables,” Southern Quarterly 30 (Summer 1992), pp. 31–50. 12. Richard Slotkin, Gunighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 13. It is interesting to note that the violence in other ilms of the period, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy (1972, 1974, and 1990) and Apocalypse Now (1979), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) emerge precisely in the wake of the antiwar movement. Violence in ilm and other media seems, perhaps, to relect a deep and collective concern with the reality of violence in contemporary history. It is in this context that the moral machinery of Blood Meridian appears in the portrayal of violence itself. 14. BM 274. 15. Ibid, p. 156. 16. Ibid, p. 56. 17. See also Maxime Lachaud, “Carnivalesque Rituals and the Theological Grotesque in the Southern Novels of Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy,” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, ed. Christine Chollier (Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003), pp. 229–39. 18. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 65. 19. BM 52. 20. S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (New York: Scribner, 2011). 21. BM 53. 22. Ibid, pp. 53–54. 23. BM 53. 24. The Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, North Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 35, Folder 2. 25. BM 337. 26. BM 124. 27. BM 299.

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10 NICHOLA S MONK

All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter

Near the conclusion of Cities of the Plain, the inal volume in the Border Trilogy, John Grady Cole, the hero of All the Pretty Horses, encounters the pimp Eduardo in a knife ight that will end in their deaths. Eduardo has killed the prostitute whom John Grady loves and has tried to protect. As they ight, Eduardo expresses himself in the eloquent and portentous manner characteristic of McCarthy’s villains. He claims that, beneath Mexico’s “world of adornment,” there lies something “very plain indeed.”1 Eduardo ascribes to America, by contrast, the character of a world that “totters upon a labyrinth of questions,”2 a society that cannot tolerate the status quo. Eduardo ends this verbal exchange by claiming: “We will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire.”3 In the face of Eduardo’s double onslaught, John Grady says little. In opposition to Eduardo’s suave and amoral villainy in which elegance overlays a simple, brutal, will, John Grady’s silence, stoicism, and courage seem overdetermined by a nexus of values derived – consciously and unconsciously – from a United States that, as Eduardo implies, is young, complex, possessed of a conlicted imperial history, and is perhaps less self-conident than it might at irst appear. To read the exchange, therefore, as a simple juxtaposition of values in which the heroism of John Grady, representing the United States, is matched with the villainy of Eduardo for Mexico, would be to underestimate the sophistication of McCarthy’s insight into the nature of the relationship between the two countries. Eduardo and John Grady arrive where they are only after the Border Trilogy’s long and thorough exploration of relative values that begins with John Grady and Lacey Rawlins’ journey into Mexico, their encounter with corrupt authorities – in which they ight and narrowly escape death in prison – and their attempts to try to understand the meaning of their experience. What might seem at irst glance to be clear divisions are rendered increasingly complex as All the Pretty Horses develops, and as the trilogy progresses. Don Héctor, for example, the father of Alejandra, the young woman John Grady courts, and Hacendado of La Purísima, offers a model 121 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan Mexico that at once embraces modernity, but remains simultaneously wedded to tradition, and Dueña Alfonsa, Alejandra’s aunt, refuses to allow John Grady to continue his relationship with Alejandra. In explaining herself, she discusses the fragility of female virtue in Mexico, justifying her argument by claiming: “This is another country.”4 She recounts the history of modern Mexico, her own intimate relationship with the ill-fated Madero brothers, one of whom, Francisco, became president but was later assassinated. Her story is one of disillusionment and stoicism founded on the speciics of Mexican history and culture, but it is also fashioned by a European education, the tenets of which are determined by that continent’s Enlightenment. It is important, also, to recognize the subtlety with which McCarthy addresses the United States side of the equation. McCarthy provides John Grady with what initially seem to be relatively straightforward reasons for his journey to Mexico. John Grady is clearly leeing from domestic strife, but McCarthy wants his reader to understand that John Grady is also in light from a modern, technologically frenzied, eco-destructive United States – the “real” world – to the romantic “unreality” of Mexico which, in turn, engenders from John Grady’s fantasy a darker, brutal, reality of its own. McCarthy succeeds in combining conscious responses to events at a deeply personal level in his characters, with unconscious reactions to seemingly immutable forces that transcend individual choice. This is evident in the approach of the novel to a speciically North American version of modernity, in which John Grady and Lacey Rawlins are unconsciously steeped, but it is visible, also, in the leeting, but signiicant, entry of Native Americans into the narrative at key moments – a matter to which I will return later. The conlicts that emerge in the journeys of McCarthy’s characters, and in the broader encounter between his versions of Mexico and the United States, are seen in the context of geography, nationality, ethnicity, a permeable border, and pressing and differing historical necessities. John Grady and Lacey Rawlins cross and re-cross a highly porous boundary which fails to form a meaningful interruption to the contiguous grandeur of the landscapes of the southwest as, characteristically in McCarthy’s iction, physical geography trumps political geography. In this way, McCarthy creates a zone between the United States and Mexico that is not clearly delimited. The result, in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian, is a “third space” that is both and neither country simultaneously. As Mark A. Eaton suggests, “McCarthy represents the US/Mexico border as a ‘contact zone’ in the sense that Mary Louise Pratt has deined the term, a place ‘where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.’”5 The border in 122 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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All the Pretty Horses lacks the vigorously policed and demarcated barriers of the late twenty-irst century that allow the legitimate movement of capital and goods, and proscribe the movement of labor south to north, but both iterations of the border – in their differing ways – leave many individuals stranded and stateless in a no-man’s land that is both physical and of the mind. The unpoliced, provisional, and wild borderland of the Trilogy becomes an area in which any one jurisdiction is undermined by illicit entry, and cannot be absolute, creating both immediacy and a form of contact that is to a large extent unregulated. The “third space” of McCarthy’s borders is truly a “contact zone,” therefore, in the sense intended by Pratt, and it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that many of the most signiicant encounters in the novels occur in this space. These encounters take many forms, some of them symbolic. Dianne C. Luce writes of an incident in Cities of the Plain, for example, in which the truck in which Billy and his companions are traveling strikes an owl, spread-eagling it across the windshield: “the dead owl is an image of the natural world cruciied at the hands of man, the truck and the fence manifestations of the imposition of his mechanized world on the world of nature.”6 The crossings into Mexico are, in part, an attempt on the part of McCarthy’s protagonists to escape from the hegemonic reality of the modern America that Luce describes, which is never identiied speciically as such by McCarthy but occurs frequently in symbolic tableaux: the image of John Grady’s horses forced off the blacktop, as semis roar past, at the end of All the Pretty Horses, is perhaps the novel’s most vivid representation of both the implacability of this hegemony and McCarthy’s ability to encapsulate it in a single vivid picture. John Grady and Rawlins, naturally however, can only address this hegemony obliquely: “they” have created, with modern fencing, a country unit for horses, for example,7 or, “there aint shit down there,”8 which is Rawlins’ reaction to an unmapped Mexico, lying as yet beyond the reach of modernity. Most tellingly of all, one of the last things John Grady hears his father say is that “the country would never be the same.”9 Modern economic realities and continuing mechanization, leading to the increasing industrialization of agriculture, are making the practice of small-scale ranching in the southwestern United States impossible, and destroying the culture it creates, so McCarthy’s heroes head south, still largely unsure of their reasons for doing so, to an older culture in which it appears that modernity has not yet subsumed the alternatives. As Eduardo the pimp makes transparently clear to John Grady in Cities of the Plain, he (Eduardo) is keenly aware of this southward movement, and possesses a clear opinion concerning that which motivates it: “[the farmboys] drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now 123 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name. Being farmboys of course the irst place they look is the whorehouse.”10 Eduardo is partly right about the locus of John Grady’s desire, but the “thing” he refers to is more than simple lust; it is more like romance – in its broadest sense. John Grady’s nebulous longings for a world uncontaminated by a “leprous” modernity are manifested in his willingness to plunge into affairs of the heart with women symbolic of an older order, in a country that represents much of what the United States has lost. In all McCarthy’s iction, these romantic interludes possess an otherworldly, quasi-spiritual quality that tends to reinforce the notion that romance is, at least partially, detached from the real world: The last time [John Grady] saw [Alejandra] before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect . . . the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware . . . until the rain caught her up and shrouded her igure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky yet a dream withal.11

Alejandra embodies John Grady’s desires – sexual and otherwise – and is the antithesis of the realities he seeks to leave behind. The elevated quality of the language, here, could scarcely be more different from the exchange at John Grady’s parting, for example, from Mary Catherine Barnett amid the commerce of San Angelo, which is irmly within the idiom of quotidian reality. Unfortunately for John Grady, as his immersion in the premodern “unreality” of La Purísima reaches its completion in the encounter with Alejandra in the lake, Don Héctor intervenes, as does Alejandra’s aunt, the Dueña Alfonsa, who is a complex mix of Eurocentric modernity and a deeply conservative Mexican culture in which the honor of its women is paramount. The aunt’s conservatism is evident in her conclusion that her father was a “libertine of the most dangerous sort,” after his decision to send her to school in Europe, resulting in her return to Mexico with a collection of revolutionary ideas. These alien ideas fuelled the revolutionary spirit of the Maderos and their followers – of whom the aunt was among the most ardent. But for the Dueña Alfonsa, revolution based on ideas imported from Europe leads only to disaster: “The political tragedy in Spain was rehearsed in full dress twenty years earlier on Mexican soil.”12 The Maderos are murdered and dictatorship restored. Along with the tenets of the Enlightenment – progress, belief in the rational, the elevation of the individual, a move toward democracy – the aunt also imports a belief in the redemptive power of romantic love, which allows her to embark on a doomed affair with Gustavo Madero, the brother of the future president, 124 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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Francisco. She has been, like John Grady, a believer in what she now perceives as “myths” and “illusions”: “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality.”13 John Grady at irst gains her sympathy, but realism is swift to intervene: “You will see that those things which disposed me in your favor were the very things which led me to decide against you in the end.”14 Mexico, in the form of the Dueña Alfonsa, rejects John Grady as an interloper who represents a United States founded in the climate of eighteenth-century intellectual endeavor, born of the sister revolution to that of France, and a product of the dangerous contradictions between romance and rationality the aunt identiies as central to modern European thought. The rational is also problematic for Don Héctor, the Hacendado, for whom it is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters, but reason’s very consciousness. His quotation from Cervantes, “Beware Gentle Knight there is no greater monster than reason,”15 is a signiicant one, as it recalls a pre-Enlightenment Spanish philosophy that is at least partly responsible for the construction of modern Mexico, and in which Dueña Alfonsa perceives, bitterly, certain persistent characteristics: “In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.”16 Don Héctor goes on to say that, “I think we dont believe people can be improved by reason. That seems a very French idea.”17 The complexities and ironies here are intriguing, and are best embodied, perhaps, in the story of Armando’s brother, Antonio, who travels to Kentucky in a 1941 latbed truck to collect a champion stallion, a journey that takes two months and during which Antonio is jailed twice, yet returns successfully with the horse, bills of sale, change, and the truck, all intact. The Hacendado does not so much as inquire after his health. Modernity and feudalism intertwine in this tale as the contemporary realities of motorized vehicular transport across national borders mingle with a Quixotic journey, conducted partly for the purposes of obtaining something beautiful, and reproducing that beauty. Ultimately, Don Héctor’s response to the imported modernity represented by John Grady Cole is to revert to the ancient codes and practices that deine Mexico, or a version of Mexico that stands in opposition to post-Enlightenment Europe. Don Héctor’s Mexico is overlayed with a patina of modernity, but beneath it lies the grain of an older, darker, culture whose structures are feudal, whose justice is arbitrary, and whose identity is profoundly enmeshed with the land: “the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed 125 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise,”18 remarks a vaquero with whom John Grady and Rawlins work at La Purísima. For John Grady, La Purísima offers all that he has sought in his escape from the United States, but John Grady is of his country, and in the face of Alejandra’s evident desire, he has neither the patience nor the maturity to postpone his gratiication, in spite of the warnings of the Dueña Alfonsa. John Grady’s tragedy is that he and Don Héctor are close in their attitude to modernity – “[b]ut there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man”19 – but John Grady crosses an ancient boundary and, for this, he must be expelled from the premodern paradise of La Purísima. John Grady brings with him, as a United States’ citizen subject to the hegemony of that country, the seeds of his own downfall. Ultimately, he is rejected by the aunt, by Don Héctor, by Alejandra, and, worst of all, by the Mexico of his imagination that has momentarily moved, in sharp focus, from dream to reality. All the Pretty Horses does, however, offer the reader many different Mexicans and many different Mexicos, from the irst Mexican John Grady and Rawlins meet, who has never actually been to the country of his origin,20 to their early encounters with the girl selling cactus juice, the traditionally hospitable family, the townsmen of Encantada who take Blevins’ horse, the wax makers, the shepherds, the zacateros collecting chino grass, and the migrant traders with fur, candelilla, and goathide. Further into Mexico, working for the wealthy, cultured family that own La Purísima, there are committed artisans and elderly vaqueros who recall Huerta and Poririo Diaz, as well as wild young men and beautiful young girls who attend dances amid the scent of tequila and cologne. Later, there are brutal guards, killers, gang-members, corrupt oficials, and vicious and amoral authority igures, as well as admiring young girls, respectful farmworkers, and the thoughtful children to whom John Grady tells his story before his inal encounter with Alejandra at Torréon. Later still there are the Hombres del pals – men of the road – who release the egregious Mexican Captain, but leave John Grady unmolested. Finally and most signiicantly, however, comes the migrant Mexican servant John Grady calls “Abuela” (grandmother) who looked after his family for ifty years, and for whom he sheds his inal tears in the novel. That McCarthy chose Abuela’s grave as the site of the last “Mexican” encounter of All the Pretty Horses is surely signiicant – why not place the meeting with Rawlins there, or the interaction with the sympathetic judge, or the dinner with the “real” Jimmy Blevins? The answer, I think, is that McCarthy wants his reader to understand that John Grady is now a creature of the “contact zone,” the “third space” of the border itself. John Grady 126 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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mourns for a Mexican on United States soil in the neutral zone of the graveyard. This sense of liminality is borne out, of course, in John Grady’s inal exchange with Rawlins: Where is your country? [Rawlins] said. I don’t know, said John Grady. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what happens to country. Rawlins didn’t answer.21

John Grady Cole, having once belonged to the United States, belonged briely in Mexico, but was removed, and is now a part of neither country; he has become psychologically and emotionally stateless. For Daniel Cooper Alarcón, “In [John Grady’s] comment is the novel’s most interesting irony. It is suggestive of the familiar story of the American male who leaves ‘civilization’ behind to seek a different way of life in the ‘wilderness’ but unwittingly becomes an agent of colonization, transforming his wilderness refuge into the very thing he sought to escape.”22 I disagree with Cooper Alarcón, however, that John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins are avatars or agents of colonialism. Their effects are minimal; they are changed far more than they change – to the point of apparent naturalization in the case of Rawlins and death in that of Blevins. In terms of colonization, it is the relationship of the Hacendado’s family with the wider culture of Europe that poses a greater risk on this count. John Grady attempts to leave civilization behind, but it is he who is changed, not Mexico. John Grady is not, and can never be, Mexican, but neither is he amenable to reconstruction by the United States, of which he is a citizen. Indeed, the border itself may be the only place where it is now possible for John Grady to exist: borders are set up to deine the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half breed, the half dead – in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the conines of the “normal.”23

Anzaldúa is, of course, referring to Mexicans heading north, but she could just as easily be referring to the ragged, wounded, proscribed, and outlaw Anglo, John Grady, returning to a country in which he belongs no more than he belongs in Mexico. And, of course, John Grady remains a creature of the border, to the end of the trilogy, and to his death in Cities of the Plain. It is notable, however, that the further into Mexico McCarthy’s wanderers penetrate, 127 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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the more the cultures of the north and south conlict. Beyond the contact zone, ethnic encounter seems increasingly to become a matter of opposition and the reinstating of borders, rather than hybridization. At this point it might be possible to accept Peter Carr’s argument that, while All the Pretty Horses seems to blur and question the United States/Mexico border by engaging with the culture of “the other,” what it really does is to reinscribe and reinforce this border by doing little to challenge “political and social prejudices and caricatures that preserve . . . frontiers.”24 Assumptions are made on the part of both Americans and Mexicans concerning the nature of each other’s countries. For Pérez, in the jail at Saltillo, there is “always a rich relative”25 back home to bail out Americans in trouble in Mexico, and for Rawlins, one of the virtues of the horses rounded up from the countryside around La Purísima is that “They aint had no Mexican to try and break em.”26 Perceptions of Mexico and the United States begin to simplify and separate out into reductive assumptions according to received understandings of the respective countries, often emanating from Mexicans who have never visited the United States and United States citizens who have never visited Mexico. Closer to the contact zone, however, difference is less clearly demarcated. Supporting this argument is the way McCarthy’s uses Spanish in the Border Trilogy. Isabel Soto writes of The Crossing: “in McCarthy’s The Crossing Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other. The result is a wholly other discourse deined by, or constitutive of, the United States-Mexican border, or ‘contact zone.’ Furthermore, that this frontier discourse spreads beyond either side of the border is suggestive perhaps of a growing mestizo hegemony. Geography, as ever, shapes human experience.”27 Soto’s argument, and she writes from the perspective of a native speaker of Spanish, is that McCarthy’s use of the language is like nothing that exists previously, that it is deliberately constructed to represent “the border”: “Thus the unfamiliar or defamiliarized Spanish articulated in The Crossing is generated by crossing or transgressing various thresholds, linguistic and/or rhetorical.”28 The Spanish McCarthy uses, in its very hybridity, its mongrel phrasing, and its nonconformity, asserts a third linguistic space between English and Spanish. Such a space is “paratactic”: “While the border imposes a hierarchical, subordinate relationship between the two sides, McCarthy substitutes a paratactic relationship. That is, he recognizes both sides of the resulting juxtaposition – Mexico and the United States, American and Mexican – as a mutually constitutive pair.”29 This parataxis determines the nature of the contact zone that All the Pretty Horses and the other novels of the Border Trilogy feature as their principal setting, and in doing so suggests that McCarthy’s iction does more than merely recreate and re-instantiate accepted boundaries and differences. 128 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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For McCarthy, such boundaries lack permanence in the true sense anyway. The novels never fail to imply that the immensity of geological time must eventually wear away the scars and blemishes of human interference. Modernity and civilization and the encounters that occur within these dispensations are but the most leeting of scratches, healed in geological milliseconds. This, in part, is McCarthy’s response to the notion of progress: all human progress, in the vast reaches of geological time, is merely progress toward oblivion. Sitting on a rock above the Bavispe River, for example, Billy Parham notices “old pictographs of men and animals and suns and moons as well as other representations that seemed to have no referent in the world.”30 The signiicance of the signs and symbols by which this particular culture explained itself to itself, and to others, have been erased by time. And below him, Billy contemplates the “clawed open” terrain, “north and south, canyon and range, sierra and barranca, all of it waiting like a dream for the world to come to be, to pass.”31 The narrative marks the ephemerality of human cultures, but the reader is left ignorant of Billy’s response – emotional or intellectual. McCarthy exposes his marginalized heroes to evidence of this leeting temporality, but rarely do they internalize it consciously. Instead, it is the older civilizations of the southwest to whom McCarthy gives stewardship of this insight as, signiicantly, McCarthy begins the novel with the Comanche, and ends it with “Indians.” Ethnic encounter in All the Pretty Horses is topped and tailed by a leeting contact with those descended from the earlier inhabitants of the region – albeit that the encounter is one of the imagination in the former instance. The novel begins with the Native American nations that once inhabited the area that now constitutes the borderlands, nations that could not have conceived of the arbitrary separation of a United States and a Mexico yet to come, and with shifting borders of their own creation. All that remains of their culture and civilization, however, is a faint path discerned by John Grady at the western edge of the ranch that is visible in the long shadows and “rose and canted light”32 of dusk. The path is: a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life . . . the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.33

In a moment that, similarly, marks transition, but this time at the end of the novel, McCarthy describes a group of “Indians” observing John Grady as he rides out of their camp: “The Indians stood watching him. . . . They 129 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

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had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all they needed to know. They stood and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.”34 It is almost as if the landscape absorbs John Grady rather than his absence being the result of the time it takes him to disappear. The implication is that, for many Native American cultures, the white man is profoundly impermanent – as, by extension, is a post-Enlightenment civilization founded on technology and consumerism. Contacts with Native Americans in the novels serve, thereby, as direct reminders of the evanescent nature of capitalist modernity, and humanity more broadly, within the billions of years of the life of earth. For John Grady, however, the more immediately recognizable tableau is the solitary bull rolling in bloodred dust in the light of a bloodred sunset, “like an animal in sacriicial torment.”35 The bull is emblematic of the disappearance of wilderness, small-scale ranching, and a peripatetic existence at the hands of a burgeoning modernity that will sacriice whatever is necessary to achieve its ends. John Grady is not yet ready, perhaps, to accept the lessons to be learned from the older cultures of the border, unable, still, to escape from his own particular and only partially understood longings and desires. And these cultures are the remnants, of course, of the original disputants of the shifting borders of the southwest: no strangers to bloodshed and war, either, in pursuit of their aims, and for whom violent death was an everyday occurrence. For McCarthy, therefore, the borderlands of this region create seemingly endless iterations of a contact zone that involves, not only the United States and Mexico, but Native American peoples, colonial inluence, and a vast, only partially understood and disputed history, through which we hear the faint echoes of more ancient struggles. The common feature that unites all, however, is blood. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to imagine, therefore, that as the red dust creeps up the legs and lanks of John Grady’s horse and begins to cover the rider himself, it symbolizes his possession by McCarthy’s violent and provisional border, which John Grady is destined to roam – exchanging blood for blood – until his own untimely and violent death marks, both in the context of McCarthy’s iction, and of the United States/Mexico border after the 1950s, the advent of a new dispensation: “the world to come.”36 NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 253. Ibid, p. 253. Ibid, p. 253. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 136.

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All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter 5. Mark A. Eaton, “Dis(Re)Membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (2003), p. 174. 6. Dianne C. Luce, “The Vanishing World of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” eds. Edwin Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 196. The parallel continues in McCarthy’s recent novel, No Country for Old Men (New York: Knopf, 2005) in which Sheriff Bell discovers a dead red-tailed hawk by the side of the road: “Driving out 90 towards the turnoff at Dryden he came across a hawk dead in the road. He saw the feathers move in the wind. He pulled over and got out and walked back and squatted on his bootheels and looked at it. He raised one wing and let it fall again. Cold yellow eye dead to the blue above them” (p. 44). The incident takes place following scenes in which Bell and his men have just discovered a dead body in the trunk of a car, murdered using a weapon unfamiliar to the oficers. Indeed, the entire focus in the passage immediately preceding Bell’s encounter with the hawk is on the modern: trucks, mysterious guns, cars, helicopters. The threat to the world that is posed by modernity is discussed at greater length in Shaviro and in Monk. 7. ATPH 31. 8. Ibid, p. 34. 9. Ibid, p. 25. 10. COTP 249. 11. ATPH 131–32. 12. Ibid, p. 230. 13. Ibid, p. 238. 14. Ibid, p. 231. 15. ATPH 146. McCarthy uses the quotation twice. The irst occasion is in the unpublished play “Whales and Men” (held in the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, p. 59). The quotation in “Whales and Men” is given by McCarthy to a character, Guy, who is horriied by what he perceives as the impending ecological destruction of the planet – “the empty sea will relect back to us our empty souls” (p. 129). Guy is revolted by the human capacity for instrumental reason irrespective of “secondary” consequences. Guy compares an abandoned whaling station to what remains of the concentration camp at Dachau – both of which he has seen – and despairs that “our works cannot save us” (p. 115). 16. ATPH 230. 17. Ibid, p. 146. 18. Ibid, p. 226. 19. Ibid, p. 127. 20. Ibid, p. 34. 21. Ibid, p. 299. 22. Alarcón, D. Cooper, “All the Pretty Mexicos: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Representations,” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, ed. J. D. Lilley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), p. 149. 23. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), p. 3. 131 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.016

Nichol as Monk 24. Peter Carr, “‘Re-Borderisation’ in the South-Western Novels of Ana Castillo and Cormac McCarthy,” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 12 (2007), pp. 23–24. 25. ATPH 192. 26. Ibid, p. 99. 27. Isobel Soto, “The Border Paradigm,” Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing,” Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands, eds. J. Benito, and A. M. Manzanas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), p. 58. Soto adds, usefully, that “[Louise] Pratt’s observation that languages of the ‘contact zone’ are ‘commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure’ (p. 6) is instructive here.” “The Border Paradigm,” p. 61. 28. Ibid, p. 61. 29. Mark A. Eaton, “Dis(Re)Membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (2003), p. 167. 30. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 135. 31. Ibid, p. 135. 32. ATPH 5. 33. Ibid, p. 5. 34. Ibid, p. 301. 35. Ibid, p. 302. 36. Ibid, p. 302.

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11 A LLEN J OSEPHS

The Quest for God in The Road

Yo no soy un hombre del camino. But the gypsy only smiled and waved one hand. He said that the way of the road was the rule for all upon it. He said that on the road there were no special cases. – The Crossing1 Sometimes it’s good to pray. I don’t think you have to have a clear idea of who or what God is to pray. You could even be quite doubtful about the whole business.2 – Cormac McCarthy to Oprah Winfrey

Virtually all of Cormac McCarthy’s fragmentary, often picaresque, novels are road or trail novels involving walking, riding, driving, rowing, or some combination thereof, and all of his characters are indeed hombres del camino or men of the road. At the end of No Country for Old Men, the sheriff sees his father in a dream riding the trail in the snow: “I seen he was carryin the ire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was ixin to make a ire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.” Father and son, carrying the ire, in all that dark and all that cold3: Which novel are we in? We are in all of them – they are all one long variously fabled story – and we have come to the end of the road. What is there? What is at the end of The Road, at the end of “[t]he immappable world of our journey,”4 to purloin a phrase from Cities of the Plain? The science-iction writer John Clute cuts through the critical clutter: “The central riddle of The Road is God.” I could not agree more, but I cannot quite agree with his inal opinion: “It is a story I for one ind it impossible to think of as being redeemed by a Christ. It is a story about the end of the world in which the world ends.”5 In other words, Clute’s answer to my question is – nothing, there’s nothing at the end of the road. Such a statement – “in 133 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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which the world ends” – strikes me as too categorical for The Road or for McCarthy’s work as a whole, of which The Road, presaged over and again from The Orchard Keeper onward, is both a logical continuation and a kind of termination. I believe, with Edwin T. Arnold, that McCarthy’s work is grounded in moral choice.6 Clute’s statement – you remove the Christ-igure and you are left with virtually nothing – leaves little room for choice. But I think the novel, in its own contradictory and ambivalent way, does. How then do we go about searching for the relative evidence for and against God in The Road, as the father and son make their harrowed way through the post-apocalyptic chaos McCarthy so bleakly paints? We look directly at the text, at what McCarthy intentionally did or did not write. What and where is the textual evidence working against God? What and where is the evidence working for God? And how do they stack up? And inally, what do early drafts of the novel in the Cormac McCarthy Papers suggest about McCarthy’s original intentions? In the earliest of these drafts, with the working title “The Grail,” the father thinks of himself as neither believing nor disbelieving in God, then goes on to say that the idea that God had “looked upon his work” and then “despaired of it,” abandoning man, did not seem “unlikely.”7 So it is clear from the very beginning that ambivalence about God was to form a central theme of The Road. In the published novel’s second fragment we can begin to accumulate the evidence against God. There is a simple description of the setting as “Barren, silent, godless.”8 A few pages later a single snowlake sifts down: “He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.”9 It is the boy who catches the snowlake but the narrator’s simile is hardly of the boy’s imagining. Sometimes McCarthy reverses the religious reference for negative effect, as in this un-writing of Genesis by the man: “The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. [. . .] The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.”10 Subtract the idiom and you subtract the referent – the un-reiication of God. Beyond the pervasive horror and starkness and gloom that never cease, probably the most unimpeachable godlessness comes in this descriptive prose poem: “He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.”11 If there is a god out there somewhere, he is not very evident. The narrator or the man – it is often hard to distinguish between them – laments this state of affairs as irremediable: “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”12 Relentless, intestate, implacable, blind, crushing, 134 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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hunted, trembling – is there a more ferocious description anywhere of our borrowed world? If that hyper-McCarthy prose poem is the most negative ponderation on God, the most intriguing is surely the father and son’s encounter with the old man who calls himself Ely. Their conversation treats survival, death, and God, but it raises more questions than it answers. Ely, whether factual or some perverse nom de guerre, is the only person in the novel endowed with any sort of proper name. Why? What – beyond urging the critics to hustle – is the signiicance of the name? Some of the criticism takes Ely to allude to Elijah, a connection I fail to see except on the most supericial level. The wise old biblical prophet, other than caricature or intentional reversal, he is not; even less is he Melville’s Elijah from Chapter 19 of Moby-Dick – and I don’t understand any link beyond some weird possible version of Elijah’s sharing of the Passover meal, a limsy tie, for what it is worth, seen also by Phillip A. Snyder in the context of hospitality.13 What about Ely itself? I mean E-L-Y, but pronounced Eel-ee (possibly derived from eels), the city on the River Great Ouse in Cambridgeshire, the cathedral of which is called the Ship of Fens, popularly believed to be built on Cromwell’s Rock, on a meteorite that may have helped put the dinosaurs out of business (Ely Ghosts).14 Most readers tend to think that the unspeciied catastrophe in the novel is man-made, but if so, why does McCarthy deliberately fail to say so, either in the novel or in subsequent interviews? What if it is God-made or, perhaps worse, a catastrophic accident? McCarthy remarked somewhat facetiously in a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal: “I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them,” as if they were privy to information beyond his ken. “But it could be anything – volcanic activity or it could be a nuclear war. It’s not really important.”15 One critic who wants to keep the question open is Jay Ellis, who does not decide between “nuclear winter, or the calamitous climate change sped up by a comet strike.”16 McCarthy’s interview, even given his well-known propensity for hermetic or enigmatic pronouncements, only strengthens the possibility that the catastrophe was not necessarily man-made, a possibility that in turn strengthens the idea of no God or an absent God. If we accept McCarthy’s ingenuousness or ingeniousness, we also have to accept the somewhat outrageous notion that the only direct proper name of a person in the novel coincides, at least in the popular mind, with a great physical disaster, which did to the dinosaurs what the current disaster in the novel is doing to man. And then we must ask if it is also coincidental that this character Ely, the only one with a name (if that is in fact 135 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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his name), is the one to tell us: “There is no God,” an utterly un-Elijah-like judgment that he promptly reiterates: “There is no God and we are his prophets[?]”17 And why does he look like “a starved and threadbare buddha”18 and talk like the prophet Mohammed? That sort of multi-religious palimpsest is clearly contrived, but to what end? Are we meant to believe Ely? Maybe he is just crazy, or maybe he is right and crazy, or maybe he is trying to tell us in his own crazy Nietzschean way that God is so utterly removed from us as to be dead, an idea Jay Ellis lirts with when he writes of: “[. . .] the larger philosophy we keep determining in these novels – including McCarthy’s sense of god as a kind of absent parent no longer able, or willing, to do anything,”19 a sense that echoes tangentially Leo Daugherty’s Gnostic reading of Blood Meridian.20 The disaster may not be caused by man, but the episode with Ely can only reinforce a case against any God other than a totally absent one, no matter how eccentric or contrived Ely himself may be. And his pronouncement – a brilliantly succinct Nietzschean-Islamic oxymoron – may be the ultimate expression of atheistically existential angst. Another of those prose poems occurs in a kind of lashback or memory: “Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”21 The passage sounds like certain descriptions from Suttree and something like the irst chapter of Ecclesiastes. The key word, for my purposes, is “unremarked,” a word which seems to indicate a nonexistent or uncaring God. The passage echoes one from early in the novel: “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air.”22 These passages point convincingly to nothingness and doubtless are among the major reasons the novel has been labeled nihilistic or godless. There is also a brief fragment that would seem to deny any afterlife: “Do you think your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”23 This denial seems to issue straight from the man as does a subsequent passage of the same type: “I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.”24 Who are “they,” we are forced to ask, ghosts, spirits, angels, archons, aeons, gods? There is no answer and all that is clear is the quandary itself, yet the very nature of the question, at once rhetorical and pointed, seems to signal some T. S. Eliot-like turning, however bleakly. Is it some spark of divinity – the 136 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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“thing that even death cannot undo” – that “they” must see in order not to turn away? The textual case for God, or more speciically a Christ-like igure in the boy, dificult to imagine without some a priori God, however aloof, comprises more evidence than the negative case, and I think more convincingly. We can understand much of the material by stringing it together, almost without explication, beginning with this passage, which is the irst description we hear of the boy: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke,”25 a passage that seems to allow a laconically twofold interpretation, while clearly alluding to the Logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and to the “Word [. . .] made lesh” of John 1:1 and 14. Shortly after they emerge from the mountains, the father, having left their camp, observes: “When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was.”26 Except for being unaccountable, this phenomenon – whatever it describes – is wholly unremarked in the narrative or in the criticism, but it foreshadows much of what follows. That literal foreshadowing, while easily slipping by unnoticed here early in the novel, cannot be anything other than explicit and intentional, as we will see with complete clarity. And the light continues to allude to the irst chapter of John. Some twenty pages later, as the father washes the road rat’s gore from his son’s hair, comes another direct inkling of the boy’s role: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”27 Messiah, of course, means anointed one and while this passage does not proclaim a messiah, it does plant a seed of implication, especially when on the next page we read that the man “sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god.”28 In an early draft the wording was stronger and the chalice was where “a god was housed” and will again “be housed.”29 Then in time the boy himself begins to make pronouncements. First he says that nothing bad will happen to them, “Because we’re carrying the ire,”30 when there is no ire and they are about to sleep in a car with only suit coats piled on for warmth. This igurative ire will become a central motif for the boy’s sacred nature, which the father will continue to assert, as when he asks Ely: “What if I said he’s a god?”31 a role the boy will eventually take for himself. In an early version of this scene with Ely, the father asserts three times that he thinks the boy is “a god.”32 137 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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When later the boy replies to his father, saying that he is the one “who has to worry about everything,” saying, “Yes I am . . . I am the one,”33 he is echoing Jesus in a number of instances – I am the way, the truth and the light (John 14:6); I am the door of the sheep (John 10:7); I am the good shepherd (John 10:11); I am the light of the world (John 8:12); I am the alpha and the omega (Revelation 1:8), to mention a few of the most obvious. Sufice it to say the proclamation “I am,” particularly as avatar, is among the strongest phrases in the Old and New Testaments, the latter inevitably an echo of God’s pronouncement to Moses: “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Not only does the boy offer to take responsibility, he offers to do so in unmistakably religious language, with none of the equivocation or contradiction so evident in Ely’s negative discourse. The boy, born after the disaster, has been raised, we must assume, without church or scripture, and his scriptural echoes must therefore issue forth from narrative design or divine inspiration. They cannot be – not in a Cormac McCarthy novel – inadvertent echoes or unintentional allusions. It is also revealing to note that McCarthy added the phrase “I am the one.” In the original draft the boy merely says: “Yes I am.”34 Later the boy asks: “Is it real? The ire?” and the man answers: “It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”35 This ire motif, pervasive in McCarthy’s work, appearing in novels such as Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men, was evident from the earliest typescript, “The Grail,” in which the father tells the boy that he has the ire inside him and that, in a phrase later crossed through, “It’s very strong.”36 Is that the igurative ire of civilization? I think it means – textually, in this novel – less something vaguely Promethean than the literal belief in or presence of God or at the very least some entrapped divine spark of the Gnostics. My reading stems not from any innate desire to interpret the text that way. Instead, it seems on textual evidence alone the weightier of two intentionally conlicting possible readings or discourses, set out as though the narrator himself were engaged in some mono-dialogical debate meant to be attended and adjudged by the reader, the very process we are engaged in. Alongside the ire motif runs a continuing light motif – when there is in this darkest of worlds no source of light – that only reinforces the sacred nature of the boy: “There was light all about him” and “when he moved the light moved with him.”37 The man is compelled to comment: “There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today”38 an inference, by the father at least, that the boy incarnates some second coming.39 My reading here is borne out by a remarkable passage I discovered in the all-important Box 91 of the Cormac McCarthy Papers housed in the Wittliff Collections, a part of the Southwestern Writers Collection in the 138 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

The Quest for God in The Road

Alkek Library at Texas State University, San Marcos. It is a longer, more detailed version of the same passage. The boy again has light all about him. But the light does not fall on him – for there is no source of light – but issues from him in a “constant and slow emanation” that spreads from him and from his hand, and “even from” what he touches. The father whispers “Oh blessed child” and goes on to make the comment about all the prophets being so honored here today.40 Evidently in editing, McCarthy wanted a more subtle rendition of the boy’s blessedness, just as he apparently wanted to tone down the title from “The Grail” to The Road, but the combination of the grail and the blessed child in the early drafts clearly conveys McCarthy’s sense of the boy’s role in unmistakably Christ-like iconography. The fact that he cut it does not mean he changed his mind. It is a Hemingwayesque burying of the all too obvious – the famous iceberg technique – to strengthen the power of the passage. Finally, there are two poignant words that I believe strengthen the textual case for God. The irst is salitter: a word used almost exclusively by Jacob Boehme (or commentary on him, as by Hegel), the Lutheran mystic clearly familiar to McCarthy, to judge nowhere beyond the two citations, one used as epigraph and the other reversed as subtitle, for Blood Meridian. Salitter – there could be a dissertation on this usage, as well as a study on the meaning of ire and light as God and Christ in Jacob Boehme and Cormac McCarthy – means divine essence, the stuff of God (not unlike the Tao or Brahman, or in quantum physics the matrix of Max Planck, or even the so-called god-particle of recent physics): “He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth.”41 John Clute properly underlines the vital importance of this sole word, acknowledging God’s presence but believing that “the Christ igure must somehow be seen – be felt – to transcend the drying of the divine out of the earth.”42 I agree, at least to the point that Clute has put his inger in the wound. The central question would seem to be precisely that: Does the Christ-like igure of the boy transcend – or reverse or compensate for – such an absence or withdrawal? It is reasonable to argue, as Clute does, that the answer is no. But what are we to make of this passage, giving us the second poignant word, just before the father dies: “he [the man] would raise his weeping eyes and see him [the boy] standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle”?43 Tabernacle: In general terms, a place of worship. For the Old Testament Hebrews a tent for the Ark of the Covenant. For Catholics the receptacle for the Eucharist, the Host, the body of Christ. Is the father delirious or divinatory: “from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle”? If the father is in some mortal delirium – there is nothing in the text to so indicate – then 139 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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Clute is still in cogent territory. But regardless, why tabernacle, why the singularly most ecumenical term imaginable to express the essence of God? And what if the man is seeing into the future, or what if the boy does indeed glow? What if McCarthy is not making a reasonable or cogent argument? The last thing the father says is: “Goodness will ind the little boy. It always has. It will again.”44 While the father is referring to the little boy his son had seen, it is very clear he is at once transferring that sentiment to his own son. The father dies, the boy stays with him for the emblematic three days and then as if on cue or as if preordained or as if popped from a machine, Parka-man “hove into view.”45 To say that Parka-man is a deus ex machina is as obvious as it is correct, and that is precisely the point. His woman, who welcomes the boy, doesn’t talk to him of civilization, she talks to him about God and tells him that “the breath of God was his breath.”46 If McCarthy didn’t want us to read it the way I just have, why did he write it that way? Why say goodness will ind the boy and have goodness ind the boy? Why drag out a deliberate and undisguised deus ex machina – no one could seriously argue that McCarthy was unaware of the fact – if what you want to do is deny any sort of deus? And it is not just goodness that inds the boy but a new and this time caring mother, the mother that does not exist for the long list of road warriors that inhabit all of McCarthy’s novels, the mother absent or defective in every single one of them, including most especially this one, and not just goodness but warm caring affectionate understanding maternal goodness – quite the opposite of the mother who has abandoned the boy – the only such maternal goodness, all one short paragraph of it, in virtually all of McCarthy’s work. If the message according to Clute is meant to be nothing more than the withdrawal of whatever Gnostic substance there is out there, why have as the subject of the last paragraph of the plotted novel a mother who is not only all of the foregoing, but also a mother who understands how to explain the unexplainable without attempting to force any belief on the boy? What is at the end of The Road? What textually, with no need to adduce scientiic opinion from the ironically named Santa Fe Institute? Stabat mater, not yet dolorosa. And that mother who is there, standing there, not yet grieving, means that the pistol-packing, ire-carrying boy, the light-bearing boy, the golden chalice and glowing tabernacle of an anointed boy who honors all the prophets and whom goodness has found is who and what we have. He and she – mother and child reunion – are the inal image of the plotted novel. It is not just that the novel’s “literary passion deies the very emptiness that it proclaims,” as John Cant has written.47 No, it is much more. It is that the rhetorical cloud of melancholy and pessimism and doom that informs 140 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

The Quest for God in The Road

the novel from the opening dream onward and that indeed pervades most, if not all, of McCarthy’s work, has lifted. The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.48

Here I am reafirming Jay Ellis’s optimistic reading of “[t]he ending [that] provides us for the irst time in a McCarthy novel with a full family,”49 but I want to go a step beyond that assertion and nail my reading in a text that is pure McCarthy: “She would talk to him sometimes about God.” That sentence describes an intentionally and pointedly repeated action, not the indeinite future of “[s]he would talk to him sometime about God,” but “She would talk to him sometimes about God,”50 and that single letter “s,” showing us a continued and continuing action, opens us to the only remotely happy ending in all of McCarthy’s work, scented as it is with the boy’s breath that is the breath of God. Could it be the gypsy of my epigraph from The Crossing needs to make an exception? I think McCarthy is telling us – inally – that there is a special case on the road. You could no doubt attribute the change to McCarthy’s son John about whom he has spoken glowingly and to whom he dedicated The Road – and who appears once in “The Grail” under his own name51 – but the biographical argument isn’t necessary. The evidence is in the text.

Epilogue or Coda I have dealt with what I call the plotted novel – but there is still that stunning and cryptic last paragraph. It is distinct in tone and voice and time and perspective from the novel, raising more questions than it answers, serving as the novel’s undesignated epilogue or coda. Is the narrator addressing the reader directly when he says: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their ins wimpled softly in the low. They smelled of moss in your hand”?52 Or is that second-person pronoun directed at the narrator himself, as a rhetorical question? Or is there an intentional conlation of narrator and reader and even ghosts? The man who remembered the trout in the early mountain section of the novel is dead. But you, the reader, cannot help associating the trout here with those remembered trout. They are as iconic as Hemingway’s trout, or more so, as 141 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

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they are intentionally evocative, both early in the novel and intensely so now in this echoing vision of them, shared in the foreground between the complicit narrator and the willing reader and in the background with Hemingway and the deceased father. Native brook trout (technically a char, salvelinus fontinalis) are as perfect a species as exists in nature, yet they are delicate and susceptible to the effects of any kind of pollution. McCarthy uses them to stand for all the particular natural miracles that have been destroyed by whatever cataclysm has occurred: “Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.”53 These miracle trout of becoming are at once real (the light wavy markings on the brook trout’s dorsal area are called vermiculations) and intricately evolved, and they return us to once – what is now, from the current point of view of this narrator-after-the-fact, in illo tempore – to our as yet undestroyed world where the brookies still wimple and swim, while not releasing us from the recorded destruction in the novel: “Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” We are returned, briely and ever so hypothetically, to the irreversibly fragile pristine mountain setting – a thing which could not be put back – of the sacred trout for the ultimate, possibly guilt-laden, possibly not, nostalgic and mystical pronouncement: “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”54 In the deep mountain hollows and coves where the trout once lived, emblematic of the entire natural world, all of nature was older than man and all of it, everything, hummed with the essence of life. It is no coincidence that the inal word of the novel is “mystery.” Much of Cormac McCarthy’s work hums with mystery, and at the end of The Road, or more precisely at the end of the epilogue or coda of The Road, we are left with exactly that – with mystery – because McCarthy knows, as Federico García Lorca said, that “Only mystery makes us live. Only mystery.”55 Dianne C. Luce believes that in this paragraph “the transcendental leap of McCarthy’s language moves into the realm of the Sublime.” And she writes most ittingly: “The place represented here is not just a lovely microcosm, but a realm of being, an awareness of the mystery and plenitude of the natural world and of our blessed and transient place within it, lost, guided, illuminated.”56 Read this exquisite epilogue or coda of The Road as agnostic or Gnostic; call it deist or pantheist or naturalist (in the theological sense). Or call it Christian – the trout, whatever else it is, is a ish, one of the most obvious and unmistakable of Christian symbols. Perhaps we can best read these inal words as McCarthy’s ultimate poetic commentary on his own creation, on his own version of what seems a kind of Christian existentialism. Regardless 142 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

The Quest for God in The Road

of how we conceive of God – even as transcendent or removed or absent – the divine becomes immanent in the love between the father and the boy. As Steven Frye writes: “This theology inds God [. . .] in a father and son and the stubborn will that binds them, as well as in a family that rescues a child who is not their own.”57 Such a reading favors the imbedded tapestry of Judeo-Christian iconography, yet does not exclude the philosophical latitude of Gnosticism and agnosticism, or the tangled contradictions of faith and reason and doubt. As in Christian existentialism, there are no easy answers in this novel, only dificult questions and the need for what Janet Maslin called in her review, “an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever.”58 McCarthy claimed the message is simple. He told Oprah Winfrey in an uncharacteristic moment of candor and teleological reticence: “Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad. And we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don’t know who to be grateful to, but you should be thankful for what you have.”59 No matter how you read it, The Road – polished and muscular and torsional – lies beyond the constraints of any particular category, imbued with its own inextinguishable sense of mystery. In the face of the unbearable bleakness and desolation and despair of the novel, that very mystery – the mystery of love, incarnate, emanating from the boy – gives us an exemplar and it shines a ray of hope in all that cold and all that dark.60 NOTES 1. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 414. 2. Interview with Oprah Winfrey. Oprah’s Book Club. (July 2007) January 14, 2012. http://www.oprah.com. 3. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 309. 4. Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 228. 5. John Clute, “The End of the Road,” Science Fiction Weekly 497 (October 30, 2006). 6. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, revised edition (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). 7. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 1. 8. TR 4. 9. Ibid, p. 16. 10. Ibid, pp. 88–89. 11. Ibid, p. 130. 12. Ibid, p. 130. 13. Philip A. Snyder, “Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (Autumn 2008), p. 81. 14. Ely Ghosts. December 15, 2009. http://internet.ge.ms/aj/meteorite.html 143 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

Al len Josephs 15. John Jurgensen, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy” (interview with Cormac McCarthy), The Wall Street Journal (November 20, 2009). 16. Jay Ellis, “Another Sense of Ending: The Keynote Address to the Knoxville Conference,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (Autumn 2008), p. 28. David Kushner in his Rolling Stone interview noted McCarthy’s interest in the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (December 27, 2007). 17. TR 170. 18. Ibid, p. 168. 19. Ellis, p. 35. 20. Leo Daugherty, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992), pp. 122–33. 21. TR 181. 22. Ibid, p. 11. 23. Ibid, p. 196. 24. Ibid, p. 210. 25. Ibid, p. 5. 26. Ibid, p. 48. 27. Ibid, p. 74. 28. Ibid, p. 75. 29. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 1. 30. TR 83. 31. Ibid, p. 172. 32. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 1. 33. TR 259. 34. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 1. 35. TR 278–79. 36. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 1. 37. TR 277. 38. Ibid, p. 277. 39. In Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 169, Steven Frye notes that the clock time the apocalyptic event takes place in The Road is 1:17 and that this is most likely a reference to Revelation 1:17, when Christ appears in the second coming. 40. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 2. 41. TR 261. 42. See Clute “The End of the Road.” 43. Ibid, p. 273. 44. Ibid, p. 281. 45. Ibid, p. 281. 46. Ibid, p. 286. 47. John Cant. “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy, new edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), pp. 183–200. 48. TR 286. 144 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.017

The Quest for God in The Road 49. Ellis, p. 37. 50. TR 286. 51. Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos, Box 91, File 1. 52. TR 286–87. 53. Ibid, pp. 286–87. 54. Ibid, pp. 286–87. 55. Federico García Lorca, Obras Completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo 3 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1986), Vol. 3, p. 86. 56. Dianne C. Luce, “The Painterly Eye: Waterscapes in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings, ed. Nicholas Monk (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 84. 57. Frye, p. 177. 58. Janet Maslin, “The Road through Hell, Paved with Desperation, The New York Times (September 2006). 59. Interview with Oprah Winfrey. http://www.oprah.com. 60. Parts of this essay appeared in different form in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 74. No. 3. My thanks to the editors for the opportunity to use them here.

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P a rt V

Themes and Issues

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12 ERIC CARL LINK

McCarthy and Literary Naturalism

With apologies to Plato and all other idealistic philosophers who have made claims for the mystical or supernatural genesis of artistic production, it seems that in the twenty-irst century materialist – even Marxist inlected – explanations are the more likely. Nowadays one may, without much fear of rebuttal, take as axiomatic the assertion that the value (artistic or otherwise) one ascribes to a particular text is the result of a network of cultural codes and pressures that serve as a roadmap for the distribution of value in an economy of power. The artist does not channel mystic energies: the artist is a craftsperson whose participation in the process of artistic production is the result of environmental conditioning, biological predispositions commonly romanticized as talent and inspiration, and simple dedication and hard work. Explaining away the artist through environmental and biological reductionism – and accounting for the artistic work as a by-product of power relations in a complex economy of value – may be intellectually honest – maybe. But to those of us operating within – not outside – this economy of value, it can be dificult to hold a novel like Moby-Dick or Blood Meridian and say, with a straight face, that there isn’t something special going on in these works. To begin an essay on Cormac McCarthy’s relationship to American literary naturalism by rehearsing a gray-haired philosophical argument may seem unnecessary; yet, this conlict between the subjective and individual perception of the mystic in nature and the modern reconsideration of the relationship between humans and the natural world is one of the ties that bind this classic philosophical argument to the works of the American literary naturalists, and it is one of the ways in which Cormac McCarthy can be said to join in common cause with the American literary naturalists before him. To be sure, there is a conlict between the optical democracy found in nature and the occasional lashes of ire that spring from the struck rock, lashes that cast weird shadows in the outer darkness, that are 149 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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borne like sacred jewels within the human breast as one wanders down post-apocalyptic roads. In the hands of Cormac McCarthy, even this conlict doubles back on itself with hints of the mystic, sublime, and uncanny that lash forth like Melville’s intuitive truth, even from the recognition of the kindred nature of rocks and humans. Setting aside for a moment the larger philosophical problems stemming from the conlict between idealistic and materialistic conceptions of the artist, the more common experience of most participants in the cultural economy of values that deines our daily experience is that some texts seem to draw their value from external association, and some seem (however rightly or wrongly) to make a claim for value inherently. Moby-Dick, for instance, compels our attention. Whatever one might wish to say about the novel as a result of its participation in the American romance tradition, as a product of the world view called romanticism, as a response to American culture, or even as a response to the historical account of the Essex – these all seem secondary to the compelling interest the novel itself seems to generate, largely because of the manner in which it engages a set of perennially interesting philosophical questions. Like Moby-Dick, works like Blood Meridian, Outer Dark, The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy seem compelling in and of themselves. Anything we have to say about them as a function of association is secondary. He is a southern novelist. A western novelist. An author of the grotesque, the perverse, the extreme. He is also – to one degree or another – a contemporary literary naturalist. The point of this prelude is merely to argue that to examine the works of McCarthy as participating in the tradition of American literary naturalism is to provide one more lens through which to view his works, and is probably no more or less enlightening than treatments of McCarthy as a southern novelist, or as a western novelist. Literary naturalism is not the mystic key to unlock Blood Meridian any more than the gothic is the key to unlock Moby-Dick. But, our perspectives on both texts and authors is broadened through such examination; and in what follows, the aim is to suggest some ways in which it makes sense to call McCarthy a contemporary literary naturalist, and to offer some thoughts on how our understanding of McCarthy and his canon is broadened through this association. McCarthy as Literary Naturalist American literary naturalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries manifested itself in – and is largely deined by – that group of texts and authors who engaged at the thematic level post-Darwinian reconsiderations 150 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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of the relationship between humans and their environment. This reconsideration had broad inluence and repercussion throughout the literature of the era, and – as an aesthetic category – has become associated with philosophical questions regarding human agency and will, the coercive pressures of environment and heredity, the socio-economic barriers inhibiting individual effort and desire, and class victimization, among a host of related issues. As exhibited in the works of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and others, when the human will is circumscribed and the American Dream shifts from the enterprising optimism of Benjamin Franklin to a mixture of post-reconstruction-era cynicism and, later, Depression-era hopelessness, maintaining an optimistic commitment to a Horatio Alger-esque belief in the indomitable human drive and spirit becomes a challenge. Add to this psychological and emotional position a post-Darwinian awareness of the limitations of the human animal and the coercive nature of natural laws, and the picture grows grim indeed. To be sure, in works such as Crane’s Maggie, Norris’s McTeague, and London’s Martin Eden, the American literary naturalists painted some very grim pictures.1 At the heart of American literary naturalism is a version of the same dynamic tension that drives so much of American literature: the discrepancy between human ideals and the evidence of actual experience in the natural world. It is the classic conlict of vision and experience, of the hopes for progress toward some robust epiphany or uncompromising achievement, and the inhibiting factors of actual integration in the natural world. In the case of American literary naturalism, this tension expresses itself primarily in the conlict between human ambition and the counter pressures of one’s economic, biological, and sociological environments. Realism, modernism, post-modernism all can, and do, deal with what William Dean Howells called the “wolish problems” of life, and all of these aesthetic movements in American letters deal with the core tension of vision and experience. What distinguishes literary naturalism in the late nineteenth century is its basis in the scientiic and philosophical revolutions of the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on post-Darwinian concepts of the mechanisms that drive biological and social evolution. The question of what happens to literary naturalism after the emergence of literary modernism remains something of an open question. In one sense, literary naturalism is rooted in a particular era because of the peculiar intellectual, historical, and social forces that pressed upon authors in the years between The Origin of Species (1859) and World War I. But, the energies contained within literary naturalism in America seem to remain inluential, at least among certain authors, right to the present moment. In his essay on 151 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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“Contemporary American Literary Naturalism” in The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism, Donald Pizer suggests two explanations for the enduring inluence of literary naturalism in America. The irst is what he refers to as the “dynamic adaptability” of literary naturalism. American authors, notes Pizer, have refused to be boxed into a “school” and have instead pursued their explorations of dificult socio-economic circumstances in America in terms of both “economic and social deprivation and of the malaise of spirit arising out of such deprivation.”2 “Naturalism,” Pizer notes, “has been in America a literature in which the writer depicts man under pressure to survive because of the baleful interaction between his own limitations and the crushing conditions of life and in which the writer also proffers, through his symbolism, an interpretive model of all life.”3 This narrative strategy, in which there is a thematic interplay between the strivings of individual characters and an overarching explanatory theory of life, means that literary naturalism has proven well-suited to the task of confronting the vision/experience dialectic at the center of the American experience itself, with its “particular social reality and intellectual preoccupations.”4 There is no small wonder in the fact that metaphorically – like one of the core principles of biological evolution which forms the intellectual epicenter of literary naturalism as a whole – one of the strengths of American literary naturalism has been its ability to adapt (or, to be adapted by the literary artist) to new conditions. A second explanation for the continued inluence of literary naturalism in contemporary American literature, according to Pizer, is that it allows for full expression of the “modern residue of the tragic impulse.”5 Naturalism, argues Pizer, has “always been the literature of failure,” but, in America, literary naturalism is not the literature of resignation and defeat: there is the persistent counter-pressure of expectation. Pizer writes: “The naturalist is not a neutral recorder of futility and fallibility in all their phases. Underlying his iction is a powerful remnant of the sense that life has meaning and dignity – if not freedom – despite its frequent collapse into chaos and death.”6 Therefore, the “naturalist will dramatize the pathos of the waste of human potential in the lives of those feeling temperaments . . . who lack the cunning and strength to overcome the structured visions and expectations of their limited worlds.”7 It is not dificult to think of characters like the kid in Blood Meridian in this context. Or Culla Holme in Outer Dark. Or the father in The Road. Even the strivings of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham in The Crossing participate to one degree or another in this basic tension, although their epistemological engagement with the external world is arguably more nuanced or complicated than these other characters who face severe limitations in their ability to 152 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

McCarthy and Literary Naturalism

intellectually frame their own experiences within the natural world. In No Country for Old Men, the harmonic convergence of Ed Tom Bell, Llewellyn Moss, and Anton Chigurh take this fundamental conlict and layer it with philosophical questions about the nature of uncertainly, making it one of McCarthy’s more intense explorations of the complicated ways humans deal with this tension between vision and experience, between aspiration and inevitability. These two factors – the dynamic adaptability of literary naturalism and the lingering residue of the tragic impulse in the American experience – help explain why American literary naturalism has remained inluential and viable throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-irst century. What has changed, of course, is the particular set of cultural conditions that gave rise to the “classic” American literary naturalism of the late nineteenth century. And, as alluded to previously, herein rests one of the central issues confronting any critic who wishes to argue for the continued relevance of literary naturalism – and the explanatory power of literary naturalism as an interpretive category – when the conditions under which it came into existence and lourished have changed. In one approach to this issue, Paul Civello has argued in American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformations that literary naturalism in the twentieth century changes in response to new scientiic paradigms. As Civello notes, the shift from Newtonian physics to the Heisenberg/Einstein/Quantum theories of the twentieth century means that the scientiic model of the nineteenth century (with discrete parts interacting according to natural laws in a causal chain with the observer separate from the observation) no longer holds. Under this model of literary naturalism, what one is really observing is the way in which authorial responses to the evolving sense of the relationship between human and the natural world have changed, from the post-Darwinian implications of the late nineteenth century through the modernist and post-modernist cosmologies of Hemingway and DeLillo.8 Civello is right, of course: theories of the relationship of the human to his or her environment have evolved over the course of the past hundred and ifty years, but when one talks of the postmodern vision of this relationship, then, in a sense by deinition, one is really not talking about literary naturalism any more – at least, as conventionally understood. The kinds of shifts discussed by Civello certainly provide context for understanding the works of Cormac McCarthy, but in a context slightly different from the question of McCarthy’s relationship to American literary naturalism. Another approach to the question of the persistence of American literary naturalism into the present moment can be seen in Donald Pizer’s essay “Is Naturalism Dead,” where he writes: 153 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

E ric Carl Link We no longer have a iction in which a slum is an allegorical equivalent of an environment which “shapes lives regardless” or in which parental alcoholic degeneracy produces children whose “foul stream of hereditary evil” leads to a life of violent crime. But we do have . . . a iction which, like that of the naturalists of the 1890s, desires to render the circumstances of American life which severely condition and determine the fate of most Americans. . . . [and one sees in this iction] a deep vein of naturalistic assumption that man is not only inseparable from the material, social, and intellectual world in which he lives but is deeply and often irrevocably limited in his actions and beliefs by that world. These works also reveal a tendency to place the ictional dramatization of this assumption within the traditional naturalistic contexts of mediocre and unfulilled lives, alcoholism, crime, and violence.9

So there is a sense in which American literary naturalism is both rooted in a particular historical moment, and a sense in which American literary naturalism is the name given to a set of preoccupations that persist – albeit in ever changing ways – to this very moment, and our appreciation of this contemporary literary naturalism is contextualized in ways described by both Civello and Pizer – both through the shifting theoretical perspectives on the relationship between humans and the external world, and as a persistent mixture of themes and conventions that place the texts themselves into conversation with a tradition rooted in the literature of the American 1890s. It is no doubt stating the obvious to say that if any contemporary author can be said to write, in Pizer’s terms, about mediocre and unfulilled lives, alcoholism, crime, and violence, surely Cormac McCarthy is one. What are the features or conventions of the new or contemporary literary naturalism of which Cormac McCarthy is a – perhaps the – prime example? Some of these features include the use of primitive, wild, or stripped-down environments and landscapes in which the mannerisms of polite and cultured civilization are brushed aside and the elements of human nature more directly tied to the natural world itself are highlighted, as in Blood Meridian. One also inds characters who seem to have a limited inner life, who have dificulty expressing themselves, and who express themselves through interaction with the natural world rather than through inner relection, as illustrated through numerous characters in McCarthy’s iction, such as Lester Ballard in Child of God. One also inds an emphasis on the animal nature of humankind – as in the cannibalistic post-apocalyptic denizens in The Road – and the use of animal symbolism and imagery as analogues of the human condition – as seen, for instance, in the wolf imagery in The Crossing.10 One also inds that there is a tension between the seemingly materialistic view of nature informing the novels, and the mystical shimmer that radiates through McCarthy’s natural world in ways reminiscent of Edmund Burke’s sublime 154 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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or Rudolf Otto’s numinous.11 There are other features, as well. The introduction of non-genre science-iction elements as in The Road, the use of symbols reminiscent of the American romance tradition (McCarthy’s south is a mythic and symbolic south; his west an even more mythic and symbolic west), the reliance on episodes of violence as stark reminders of the brutal core at the center of natural relationships, the use of non-Aristotelian plots of decline – these features bridge the gap between the literary naturalism of the late nineteenth century and the contemporary literary naturalism of Cormac McCarthy. The explorations of the perverse and grotesque within the human animal can be found in both Frank Norris’s McTeague and Child of God, in Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and Outer Dark. One can ind the uncomfortable and epistemologically unsettling layering of the brutish and the darkly divine in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills as well as in Outer Dark’s triune and Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden. Even Lester Ballard is a child of God, after all. In 1901 Frank Norris noted that the province of the naturalistic romance could be found in the “wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.”12 A itting abstract, perhaps, for the career of Cormac McCarthy.13 To be sure, the unforgiving violence and the deadpan presentation of extreme human conditions establishes the work of Cormac McCarthy as naturalistic in ways not matched by other contemporary literary naturalists like Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, or even of Joyce Carol Oates, whose them is a clear and explicit attempt to wield the narrative strategies established by Theodore Dreiser and others of the 1890s. Cosmic Irony and the Literature of Frustration A pervasive and persistent cosmic irony is one of the deining features of American literature broadly, and is particularly evident in the works of the American literary naturalists, who routinely pit the ambitions of an individual against the indifferent natural world. Stephen Crane penned the lyric of the age when he wrote “A man said to the universe: / ‘Sir, I exist!’ / ‘However,’ replied the universe, / ‘The fact has not created in me / ‘A sense of obligation.”14 One might even think of Judge Holden’s quest to become “suzerain of the earth” as a kind of war waged against a physical – and metaphysical – landscape whose indifference and lack of obligation are its chief characteristics.15 Thus is born the literature of frustration: American literary naturalism is not the literature of despair or resignation – although it has its moments, as in Hurstwood’s ultimate fate at the end of Theodore Dreiser’s 155 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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Sister Carrie; instead, it is the literature in which the ambitions of individuals are routinely circumscribed by the coercive pressures of environmental, biological, economic, and social forces. “If I am going to be drowned,” ask the tired rowers of Crane’s open boat, “why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”16 This lack of understanding – it is only after the Oiler’s death after their return to the shore that the men in the open boat gain the capacity to be “interpreters” – is emblematic of the epistemological uncertainties that give shape and signiicance to the cosmic irony and frustration in literary naturalism. The logic behind the literature of frustration is straightforward: if one is prevented from ascending to a throne – despite one’s desire, despite the exertions of the human will – then there must be some reason for the slight. The quest for an explanation for the apparent cosmic slight took a great leap forward in the late nineteenth century when the implications of Darwinian theory pushed beyond the scientiic community and entered public discourse. Concepts such as atavism, degeneration, adaptation, social Darwinism, biological reductionism, and economic and social determinism, provided a grim explanation for the mismatch between human aspiration and the human condition. More so in America, for American exceptionalism is the ever-ready counterpoint for American literary naturalism: if there is no throne to ascend to, if there is no cultural coding that instills in the individual the thought that he or she can be great, if we are not a land of esquires with legitimate claims to knighthood, then what are we? We are children of God, like Lester Ballard. We are men and women wandering in the outer darkness where the road ends not in salvation but in a swamp, as it does for Culla Holme. We are blind and should be warned how the road terminates, a recognition that enters Culla’s mind in the last line of the novel as he ponders whether to help the blind man. Perhaps, like the father and son in The Road, we carry the ire within our breasts – but perhaps this is just the story we tell our children to save them from despair. Drill deep into the naturalistic city novels of the 1890s and one inds the foundation stones of American exceptionalism as laid by John Winthrop who with a single sentence built a “City on a Hill.” Celestial cities must be populated with celestial citizens, and Ben Franklin made of his life a living example of enlightenment perfection, detailing in his Autobiography a twelve-step program for human perfectibility. Yes, he chose to be a “speckled axe” rather than bring his program of human perfection to completion, but who could argue with his fame, wealth, and wit? A few illegitimate children might be forgiven Ben under such circumstances. Raskolnikov kills a 156 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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lowly pawnbroker; Ben has kids out of wedlock. No problem for supermen. Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf is a large piece of yeast, feeding on the lesser yeast. The judge dances at the end of Blood Meridian with nimble feet and he says that he will never die. And who could argue with the judge? – the kid showed clemency to the heathen and wound up dead in an outhouse, having suffered such abuse in his inal moments that even Cormac McCarthy – who shies away from nothing – won’t or can’t describe it. The glorious pathways to apotheosis set forth by Winthrop, Franklin, Emerson, and others presuppose a basic universal harmony, a certain order – moral, structural, or both – to the cosmos. Transferring this cosmic optimism to the American experience allowed for a vision of America as a truly exceptional place, and evidence of America’s destiny was manifest in the opportunities and successes of its people. Cormac McCarthy, as with the other American literary naturalists, directly challenged this optimism. The idealistic visions of these American philosophers stands in direct contrast to human experience, where uncertainty, decay, immorality, and violence dominate the landscape. In an interview conducted with Richard B. Woodward in The New York Times Magazine in 1992, Cormac McCarthy noted: There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed, . . . I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those aflicted with this notion are the irst ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.17

Violence is the explicit manifestation of the conlict inherent in natural systems, and it is a counterpoint to cosmic optimism. It is the embarrassing cousin of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism; it deines McCarthy’s America and ills the novels of the American literary naturalists. Donald Pizer noted that among contemporary literary naturalists the “naturalistic occasion is still that of a closed social and moral world and of a igure seeking some way out. Usually not succeeding, but nevertheless seeking.”18 In this manner, the cosmic irony which deines the human condition is layered with the frustration arising from the epistemological crisis of the individual who seeks but does not ind. Literary naturalism is littered with inarticulate characters who cannot comprehend the forces coercing them: Norris’s McTeague, Crane’s Fleming and Maggie, even London’s Wolf Larsen, who is better educated than most but still cannot come to terms with the crushing cosmic irony that envelopes him in sensory deprivation and death at the end of The Sea-Wolf. McCarthy’s protagonists from beginning to end – John Wesley Rattner, Culla Holme, Lester Ballard, Cornelius Suttree, the kid, John Grady Cole, and the rest – are the descendants of this 157 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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pantheon. They struggle to come to terms with the conlicting forces and philosophies that shape their actions and beliefs. They seek understanding, but more often than not are left in a moral and intellectual swamp, unable to comprehend or to adequately articulate the nature of their condition or circumstance. Children of God The road (nor The Road) does not necessarily end in nihilism (a frequent charge against the literary naturalists and against Cormac McCarthy). A grim world is not always a meaningless world, and the pessimism so often charged against the literary naturalists is not often a particularly nuanced view of their intermingling of ideas and incident. The cosmic irony that deines the literature of frustration is not a simple thing, and the literary naturalists posed questions about the human condition more often than they drew conclusions. Consider this passage from Child of God: [Lester Ballard] came up lailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?19

There is so much going on in this one passage that only a fraction of it can be discussed here. McCarthy’s point of view in this passage is alone worthy of serious explication, for he uses an objective third-person point of view – as did so many of the literary naturalists before him, for the questions raised by the literary naturalists rarely translated well in the irst-person, which too often suggests the existence of a rich interior life. But, McCarthy conjoins this third-person point of view with direct reader address, making of the reader both a co-observer of the action and kin to Lester Ballard himself. Literary realists stress what makes individuals unique: literary naturalism focuses on the natural laws and conditions that bind us in common cause. Horrifying it is to think of oneself bound to such as Lester Ballard. If the universe was a moral place, why wouldn’t the waters drag him down? With what would we push him beneath the water from our position on the shore? Stephen Crane asked a similar question, and hinted at an answer, in “The Blue Hotel”: 158 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

McCarthy and Literary Naturalism [The Swede] might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, ire-smote, ice-locked, diseasestricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it.20

If ever a human being warranted comparison to a lice, it is Lester Ballard. McCarthy and Crane suggest that we are similar children of God, and it is merely through our conceit that we do not die. We are coxcombs, one and all. We envision the world as a pathway to untold glories, but this vision is undercut by our experience of the violence and depravity of a space-lost bulb. This grim vision, as noted previously, does not always have to degenerate into nihilism. Hurstwood falls but Carrie rises. Carrie is driven by the same forces of coercion that lead to Hurstwood’s undoing, but the lesson of Ames at the end of Sister Carrie is that even within that matrix of forces there is room for one human to do something of value for a fellow traveler. The kid’s sin, according to the judge, is that he showed clemency to the heathen. At the end of The Road, the father dies, but the son carries the ire within. There is room for small gifts in the relentless economy of the natural world. McCarthy and Melville shared a vision of God – or, at least, they explored a similar portrait of God in a few of their works. He is the Weaver God, whose foot works the treadle of the loom of time on which chance, free will, and necessity are woven into the fabric of the natural world. “The weaver-god, he weaves,” notes Ishmael in Melville’s Moby-Dick, “and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice.”21 McCarthy would sound this same chord in The Crossing when he writes: “Who can dream of God . . . [w]eaving the world. In his hands it lowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping.”22 We ind the prophets of this Weaver God throughout the iction of Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy and the literary naturalists of the late nineteenth century, with Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men as the high priest, doling out salvation and damnation with the lip of a coin. One cannot deine the thematic concerns of the American literary naturalists with one sentence, nor, indeed, with many. But within the tapestry of their themes one can identify a particular strong thread, and it is the 159 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

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exploration of how to account for the human condition when seen as an amalgam of Melville’s chance, freewill, and necessity. The literary naturalists of the late nineteenth century took this thread and explored it in terms of post-Darwinian biological theories and other scientiic and philosophical principles that seemed to raise challenging questions about human agency and value. A century later, McCarthy carries this ire within his own works. Thus, literary naturalism serves as a valuable lens through which to read the works of Cormac McCarthy. Literary naturalism suggests a set of themes and ideas that can help provide context to McCarthy’s novels and provide for them an interpretive framework. Literary naturalism also helps place Cormac McCarthy within a certain kind of literary tradition in America, a tradition that simultaneously suggests the inluence of this tradition on McCarthy himself and the pervasion power of this tradition among authors of the twentieth and twenty-irst centuries. NOTES 1. For more on the deinition of American literary naturalism in the late nineteenth century, see Eric Carl Link “Deining American Literary Naturalism,” The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 71–91. See also Donald Pizer, “Late Nineteenth-Century American Naturalism,” Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 9–30. 2. Donald Pizer, “Contemporary American Literary Naturalism,” The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. 167–86. Quote on page 168. 3. Ibid, p. 168. 4. Ibid, p. 168. 5. Ibid, p. 169. 6. Ibid, p. 169. 7. Ibid, p. 169. 8. Paul Civello, American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 9. Donald Pizer, American Literary Naturalism: Recent and Uncollected Essays (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2002), pp. 26–27. For additional discussion of the persistence of literary naturalism throughout the twentieth century, see Philip Gerber, “Whither Naturalism?” Twisted from the Ordinary, ed. Mary E. Papke (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003) pp. 367–89. Gerber points out that naturalism has lingered throughout the twentieth century because the chords struck by the irst wave in the 1890s continue to resonate – in particular, the struggle for survival, the inluence of heredity and environment on individual lives, and the reformist response to aggressive Big Business capitalism. 10. For an extended discussion of this imagery, see Steven Frye “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘world in its making’: Romantic Naturalism in The Crossing,” Studies in American Naturalism 2.1 (Summer 2007), pp. 46–65. 160 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.019

McCarthy and Literary Naturalism 11. See Frye “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘world in its making’” for an extended discussion of how this tension informs the romantic naturalism of The Crossing. 12. Frank Norris, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901); reprinted in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964). Quoted material can be found on page 78. 13. To date, the two most extensive and compelling treatments of Cormac McCarthy as an American literary naturalist are Steven Frye’s “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘world in its making’” and James R. Giles “Teaching the Contemporary Naturalism of Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark,” ALN: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter 1.1, pp. 2–7. See also Giles’s treatment of Outer Dark as naturalist text in this volume. 14. Stephen Crane, “A man said to the universe,” Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1335. 15. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 198. 16. Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 885–909. Quoted material is on page 901. 17. Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times Magazine (April 19, 1992). 18. Donald Pizer, “Contemporary American Literary Naturalism,” p. 185. 19. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 156. 20. Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel,” Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 799–828. Quoted material is on page 822. 21. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 374. 22. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 149. For a much more comprehensive treatment of the Weaver God in Melville and McCarthy, see Steven Frye, Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 114–32.

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13 STACEY PEEBLES

McCarthy and Film

In July 1963, Lawrence Bensky, an editor at Random House, had been working with new author Cormac McCarthy on his irst book, The Orchard Keeper. He wrote to Albert Erskine, also at Random House, to announce McCarthy’s completion of the manuscript. “This is a writer of real talent with an unlimited future,” he added. In the upper right corner of the letter, Erskine made a small note before iling the letter: “Film.”1 Although The Orchard Keeper was not ultimately adapted for ilm (despite later interest from and negotiations with production companies), Erskine’s note indicates a very early awareness of cinematic possibilities. McCarthy may have even had some interest in being in front of the camera; in 1964, he illed out an author’s questionnaire for Random House, and noted that he had held “all kinds of odd jobs” in addition to writing, everything from “dishwashing to motionpicture acting.”2 During the next decade, McCarthy wrote The Gardener’s Son, his irst screenplay, and appeared in the ilm briely as one of a group of businessmen touring a factory – perhaps fulilling a desire initiated by that earlier “odd job.” Since that time, McCarthy has written a number of works for the stage and screen, and three of his novels have been adapted by others for ilm, solidifying an already strong relationship between the author and cinema. In the case of each of the ive existing ilms – The Gardener’s Son, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, and The Sunset Limited – the challenges and potential of adapting stories for a new medium is relected in the stories themselves, which follow characters who are adapting and attempting to translate themselves into new environments. Those environments include a newly industrialized world, Mexico, the drug trade, a post-apocalyptic world, and, inally, a simple kitchen table across which two characters try to understand the other’s very different views of life and death. Evaluating ilms based on literature has always been a vexed business, and more so when the literature in question is widely known and appreciated. As Robert Stam and other critics have noted, the language used to 162 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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describe how successfully books are made into ilms is often moralistic, and more speciically, invokes the specter of sexual wrongdoing. Adaptations that aren’t up to par are said to be “unfaithful,” to “betray” their source text, and, in particularly egregious instances, to be outright “violations” or even “perversions.” “The notion of ‘idelity’ is essentialist in relation to both media involved,” Stam observes. He continues: [I]t assumes that a novel ‘contains’ an extractable ‘essence,’ a kind of ‘heart of the artichoke’ hidden ‘underneath’ the surface details of style. . . . But in fact there is no such transferable core: a single novelistic text comprises a series of verbal signals that can generate a plethora of possible readings, including even readings of the narrative itself. . . . The question of idelity ignores the wider question: Fidelity to what?3

And so the serious viewer should avoid such knee-jerk assumptions and look with clear eyes. As André Bazin put it, all a successful adaptation requires “is for the ilmmakers to have enough visual imagination to create the cinematic equivalent of the original, and for the critics to have the eyes to see it.”4 But prejudices can be hard to shake off. After all, as Jim Welsh has said, “who among us would not forgive the general reader, innocent of cinema studies theory, for having actually read the novel, or for having thought independently about what it might ‘mean,’ and for drawing such a conclusion about the virtues of the source novel?”5 Perhaps the best approach, argues James Naremore, is to think of adaptations as performances rather than translations. Whereas the latter “pays close attention to the problem of textual idelity in order to identify the speciic formal capabilities of the media,” the former allows us to emphasize “difference rather than similarity, individual styles rather than formal systems.” This is an approach that is “less reverent toward literature and more apt to consider things such as audiences, historical situations, and cultural politics.”6 The Gardener’s Son avoided some of these dificulties because it was written as a screenplay rather than a novel, because it didn’t appear in print until 1996, and because McCarthy had director Richard Pearce’s extensive input as he put the story together. Pearce approached McCarthy about the project in 1975, and together the two researched the 1876 murder of James Gregg by Robert McEvoy in Graniteville, South Carolina. Although McCarthy told Pearce that “he had never even seen, much less written a screenplay before,” the story came together and was aired in 1976 as part of PBS’s “Visions” series.7 The program was well received; writing in The Washington Post, Alan Kriegsman said that it “may well be the inest ‘Visions’ installment thus far presented,” and noted that the drama relects “a writer’s accurate ear for local vernacular, and a ilmmaker’s grasp of the revelatory power of imagery.”8 163 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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In it, Brad Dourif plays Robert McEvoy as a disheveled, wild-eyed sore thumb whose alienation is compounded when his leg is amputated in an opening scene. McEvoy is a deeply inarticulate character, but we can infer from his behavior, and from Dourif’s performance, that he resents the textile mill that now dominates his town, those who own and run the mill, and his new status as disabled. An early shot shows him carving a wooden leg, using his uninjured leg as a model, but the likeness doesn’t help him much; he walks with dificulty even as he assures others that “I can do anything anybody else can.”9 Pearce follows the carving scene with the irst extended shots of the mill, which take the viewer from its exterior, in the midst of a pastoral landscape, to the interior, where children work at long rows of clattering, humming machinery. This is a new life for Graniteville as well, but McEvoy wants no part of it. He doesn’t want his mother buried in the mill’s cemetery, and when a local asks him if he’ll try to “get on at the mill,” he quickly responds, “I ain’t lost nothing down there.” His confrontation with James Gregg reveals his deep anger about the class divisions that the mill has introduced. “You think you can say anything you want to people and they just have to put up with it,” he tells Gregg angrily, moments before Gregg goes for his gun and McEvoy reacts, iring the shots that will kill the mill’s owner. As McEvoy lurches through the areas around Graniteville and the mill, Pearce often shoots him peering through doorways before moving slowly and reluctantly through them. This is most notable in the moments leading up to the confrontation with Gregg, when he looks through a doorway in the mill, moves through the machinery on the way to the ofice, and then appears irst as a shadow through the opaque glass of the ofice window before crossing through the doorway and into the mill’s heart, Gregg’s ofice. One gets the sense that he doesn’t want to breach these thresholds any more than he wanted to learn how to walk with a crutch, or to pass through the inal doorway, the trap door that opens below him as he is hanged at the end of the ilm. “You wake up sometimes of a morning,” he tells Martha, “and you feel good for a minute and then you see where you are.” He doesn’t like this new world, and pushes back against it with inarticulate rage. He has no statement to make at his execution, and after his death, the sun still rises over the mill’s tower, relected in the water of the river, before the ilm fades to black. Although two scenes emphasizing the dificulty of capturing the past in a story were cut from the inished ilm – because exact translation is always impossible – The Gardener’s Son itself ultimately moves more smoothly from one world to another than McEvoy does (Figure 13.1). John Grady Cole is more articulate that Robert McEvoy, but no more comfortable with the changes to the world around him. Matt Damon plays 164 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

McCarthy and Film

Figure 13.1 In The Gardener’s Son (PBS, 1976), Robert McEvoy (Brad Dourif) trudges wearily through a doorway and into James Gregg’s ofice, moments before the murder.

him in Billy Bob Thornton’s 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses as a young man with conidence, physical ability, and a strong idea of what kind of world he wants to live in, but who inds himself – quite literally – up against a wall, the world stubbornly beyond his control.10 John Grady and his friend Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) want to go to Mexico, to escape their unsupportive families and to live like the “old time waddies” – “real cowboys” – in a way that they can’t do in the States. A slow motion shot during the opening credits emphasizes that disjunction, as a horse and rider race alongside a pickup truck. Both will take you places, but in different ways and on different roads. Their own road to Mexico intersects with Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black), whose later killing of three men condemns John Grady and Rawlins by association and leads to their imprisonment and Blevins’ execution. The ilm was eagerly anticipated, but reviewers were disappointed. “The material to which Mr. Thornton and Mr. Tally [Ted Tally, the screenwriter] have been so ardently faithful has betrayed them,” wrote A. O. Scott in The New York Times.11 Steve Persall, comparing the ilm to an old cow skull, called it “just one more Hollywood decomposition of a good book.”12 Although the ilm does hew closely to the novel, the most effective sequences are, in fact, its departures. John Grady’s impressive 165 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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feat of breaking sixteen horses in four days (which he does, in the ilm, with Rawlins as his partner rather than his helpmeet) is shot in a lively but appropriately earnest montage of images of the two boys roping, saddling, and riding the horses. This is an entirely different procedure than the one in the novel, where John Grady watches, restrains, pets, whispers to, and inally rides the horses in a quiet display of gentle horsemanship that disappoints Rawlins, who merely looks on.13 Thornton doesn’t translate the sequence directly from the novel, but nonetheless it works cinematically as a performance that emphasizes less John Grady’s mystical connection with horses than it does his grit, toughness, and determination to be a part of this ranchero world that he desires so much. It is all for naught, however, when the boys’ connection with Blevins is veriied. After reuniting with him as prisoners, they sit against a wall in Encantada as Blevins is hauled across a dry riverbed to be killed. The camera pans over their faces and those of the young men guarding them as they hear the shots; they linch at the noise, and there is nowhere to go except to the Saltillo prison. There, they are up against the wall again, this time wearing the striped uniforms of a more oficial incarceration, and one with greater dangers. “I never dreamed that there was such a place as this,” Rawlins says. John Grady responds that “I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.” After Rawlins is stabbed in the prison yard, John Grady buys a knife, which he needs soon enough during an attack in the mess hall. Whereas McCarthy describes an elaborate dance between John Grady and the cuchillero, Thornton shoots the ight as a quick and brutal confrontation. John Grady is hurt badly, but as soon as he gets the edge, he pushes the man up against a post and stabs him repeatedly – sixteen times, by my count, an unsettling parallel with his earlier feat of breaking sixteen horses. His injuries lead to unconsciousness, which leads to reverie. He dreams of Blevins and then of standing with Rawlins and a group of prisoners, one of whom sings “The Red River Valley” in both English and Spanish. “From this valley they say you are going,” he sings, as everyone, this time, is up against the wall (Figure 13.2). Sequences like this are effective, although the ilm as a whole feels oddly paced, a consequence that many have attributed to a production conlict between Thornton and the studio over the ilm’s running time. Some 112 minutes of material was cut in order to produce a version that ran about two hours, and the abbreviation frustrated many involved with the ilm. After it was all over, Thornton commented that in the future, his contract with studios will consist of three words: “Kiss my ass.”14 The ilmmakers here had a deep respect for McCarthy’s source novel, but the aesthetic and 166 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

McCarthy and Film

Figure 13.2 While in the Saltillo prison, Lacey Rawlins and John Grady Cole (Henry Thomas and Matt Damon, center at rear) are up against the wall with other prisoners during a dream sequence in All the Pretty Horses (Columbia Pictures, 2000).

political challenges of adaptation seemed to put everyone up against the wall. If McCarthy’s novel about John Grady raises questions about the ability of a young man – preternaturally skilled as he may be – to master his own narrative in the midst of a new environment, then the story of the ilm adaptation raises some of those same questions. John Grady can’t quite translate himself into a different world, despite – or perhaps because of – his reverence for it, a problem that the ilmmakers faced as well. “The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen,” McCarthy has noted about the ilm, and adaptation in general. “Well, you can’t do that.”15 And so the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) is something of a different story. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), and even Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) all end the ilm with some degree of failure – Moss is dead, Bell feels defeated, and Chigurh has been literally blindsided by a station wagon – but the Coens were seen to be on top of their game, and won a few Oscars to prove it, even though this was their irst adaptation of a novel.16 The ilm was praised by critics in the same terms that Pretty Horses was criticized – for being faithful to the book. “The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene,” wrote A. O. Scott about this one, “and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes,” adding that the effect is “breathtaking.”17 Rick Groen called it “impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy’s prose,” although he also noted that the novel already reads like a “masterful screenplay” to begin with.18 (Because, of course, that’s how it started, back in the 1980s.) The Coens joked about that quality, saying that when they prepared their script, one of them held the book open while the other typed into the computer. “That’s why there needs to be two of us,” Joel said. “Otherwise he’s 167 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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gotta type one-handed.”19 Much of the dialogue and a good deal of the plot does hew closely to the novel, though the Coens aren’t shy about making signiicant changes, simplifying some of the more complex vectors in the drug-and-money network, leaving out Bell’s rumination about his experience in World War II, and truncating his discussion with Uncle Ellis about God’s intervention in the world, the latter a conversation similar to those found in other McCarthy novels. One of the ilm’s most memorable sequences takes an event from the novel, puts it on ilm with a high degree of technical skill, and adds an embellishment that is so appropriately Cormackian it makes you think that it must have been in the book, too, even though it wasn’t. No Country is a web of predators and prey. We irst see Moss when he’s hunting, and the characters move among big, rough dogs, hawks, even cats scavenging some spilled milk from the scene of a killing. Moss, a former Vietnam-era sniper, is no stranger to dificult territory, but when he takes the money from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, he inds himself on unfamiliar and dangerous ground. It is a new world. When he’s discovered returning to the scene, the erstwhile hunter has to take off in desperate, scrambling light, eventually getting away but getting shot in the process. The Coens get the shot, too, ilming that pursuit in a pre-dawn darkness with a distant thunderstorm slashing the sky, and the camera shakes and jostles as it follows Moss’s wild footrace in front of faceless pursuers in a pickup. As Moss stumbles over a ridge and down toward the river, the men stop the truck to continue iring at him, and a pit bull vaults past them and over the ridge, launching itself into the river after Moss. Moss escapes the men as the day breaks, but the dog is still coming. After Moss swims downstream and exits the water, he has just enough time to ready and ire his gun before the dog attacks, knocking them both to the ground, the embrace of two igures who are both predator and prey (Figure 13.3). The dog is all Coen, but one would be forgiven for going back to try and ind it in the book. It’s not there – at least not in this scene – but on seeing the ilm, one gets the sense that it should have been. Although they joke about translating the narrative directly from book to typewriter, the inal product bears the stamp of a Coen brothers’ performance as much as it does McCarthy’s novel. The Coens are good hunters, and they work in new environments better than Moss does, inding some less obvious treasures in this milieu of someone else’s story. The entire world has become someone else’s story in The Road, McCarthy’s 2006 novel that was adapted into ilm by John Hillcoat in 2009.20 The boy knows only the cold and gray life after an unspeciied disaster, but his father remembers an existence richer in color and light – if not in love for his son, which is his sole motivation for survival. The plot drifts between the 168 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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Figure 13.3 Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) tries to escape the men pursuing him from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong in No Country for Old Men (Miramax and Paramount Vantage, 2007).

dangerous reality of this new world and the old stories of the father’s life before the boy and the disaster. The book won the Pulitzer and a great deal of attention from its status as an Oprah Book Club selection, and so the hazards of carrying an old story into a new environment were clear. Mark Naglazas noted that the process of adapting a beloved novel like this one is as “fraught with danger as McCarthy’s own chilling dystopia.”21 The opening of the ilm emphasizes the harsh transition from one story to another. A montage of bright, sunlit images of trees, lowers, a comfortable house, and a happy husband (Viggo Mortensen) and wife (Charlize Theron) gives way to a scene of father and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) waking to the sound of “just another earthquake” in a dirty, barren camp. “Cold, gray days, no animals, crops long gone,” the father explains in one of his occasional voice-overs. “As the world slowly dies.” The man and boy move through desolated landscapes, trying to avoid the roaming bands of cannibals and ighting against starvation. “Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice, dificult as they are to remember,” the father explains. The voice-over accompanies an image of the man reading to the boy by irelight, turning the pages of a worn book. “If you licked your tongue like a chameleon, you could lick the food off your plate without using your hands,” he reads. “What would your mother say? . . . If you had eagle eyes you could spot a running rabbit.” The book – which is not included in McCarthy’s novel – is If You Hopped Like a Frog, by David Schwartz, and is designed to teach children about proportions and the abilities of animals. The snippet of text that we hear is rendered deeply 169 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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ironic in the context of the ilm – animals are now gone, food is hardly plentiful enough to be toyed with, and there are much worse hunters in the world than eagles. Finally, the phrase “What would your mother say?” has a much bleaker resonance than simply as a comment about table manners. Like the animals, the mother is also gone, an absence that the ilm underscores with frequent lashbacks to the father’s life with her both before and after the disaster. The warmth of their marriage dissolves when the world does, and her leaving the man and boy to commit suicide is framed as abandonment, despite the fact that the man also sees suicide as preferable to capture by the cannibals. The ilm lashes back to their conversation across a kitchen table, two bullets on the surface between them. “I should just go ahead and empty every goddamn bullet into my brain and leave you with nothing,” she says harshly. “I would take him with me if it weren’t for you.” “Listen to yourself,” the man pleads. “You sound . . . crazy.” “Other families are doing it,” she responds. The rhetorical strength of the mother’s argument as it appears in the book is undercut by the hostility with which Theron plays the scene and by the argument’s abbreviation, which in the novel contains a coherent philosophical claim about the meaningless of life and for suicide as a reasonable response to the circumstances – a claim that the father sometimes inds himself agreeing with, although he sees himself as too weak to follow through. The “hundred nights they’d sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall,” and the mother’s eloquent, if bleak, statement (echoing White in The Sunset Limited) that her “only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope for it with all my heart” become, in the ilm, a desire to hurt the man and a weak bandwagon appeal.22 Although the man cries when he remembers her after her death, he also struggles to release her memory, throwing away her picture and his wedding ring. “She was gone,” he says in voice-over after a lashback to her inal departure, “and the coldness of it was her inal gift. But she died somewhere in the dark and there’s no other tale to tell.” The loss of the wife is the old story, the absence that creates the coldness of the new world, and yet the father does have another story to tell – the insistence on being the good guys and carrying the ire that the son repeats. The words may pale in comparison to the luminous visions of the mother that drift through his consciousness, but they provide a narrative structure for the son that guide his decisions and allow him to vet his new father-igure at the end of the ilm. And when the boy must leave his father, who inally dies, he assures his father in turn that “I’ll talk to you every day. And I won’t forget.” The boy will continue to perform his father’s story, though the ilm’s performance of McCarthy’s is somewhat pale. The mother is indeed luminous in memory, but as a substitute for the luminous language describing 170 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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the lost world – the brook trout whose backs are “vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming” – she is lacking indeed.23 In The Road, old stories are powerful – and hence their appeal as well as their danger. They can drag the father back into the past, but also propel the son into his future while providing him with a way to navigate those new experiences. It is the mother’s story, however, that is narratively enlarged and yet philosophically impoverished in the ilm, a problem that is emphasized when The Road is set against The Sunset Limited, a play adapted for television in 2011 that pits Black, an unorthodox evangelical Christian, against White, a nihilist professor whom Black has just saved from committing suicide by throwing himself in front of a train.24 Here, the arguments for a commitment to a world with others and with God (as articulated by Black) and for the necessity of self-annihilation in the face of an absurd, violent, and isolating world (as articulated by White) are given full rhetorical and dramatic consideration. The Sunset Limited, irst performed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company in 2006 and published that same year, has been produced theatrically a number of times across the United States and abroad. Tommy Lee Jones directs and stars as White in the 2011 HBO version opposite Samuel L. Jackson as Black. Even though two separate reviewers of the adaptation used the word “stultifying” to describe what it is usually like to watch a two-character stage play put to ilm, they both went on to call it a success, saying that it is “beautiful,” “thought-provoking,” “eminently watchable,” and “hypnotic.”25 True to the play as written, the ilm’s action takes place entirely in Black’s apartment, without lashbacks to the characters’ lives outside this conined space. Working with McCarthy’s input, the actors shot the entirety of the script in sequence, though the ilm was later cut to ensure that its length was no longer than ninety minutes; Tommy Lee Jones estimates that approximately twenty minutes was cut from their inished footage, and that he was reluctant to make those changes for HBO.26 The majority of the characters’ interaction happens at the kitchen table – an echo of that table in The Road – although occasionally they rise to look out the window, make coffee, or move to a sofa or chair. The table is, notably, round – a difference from most, if not all, of the stage adaptations, a feature that allows Black and White to move, by degrees, closer to one another or further away. At times the two sit directly opposite one another, but White scoots closer to Black when he entreats Black to let him go home, and Black scoots closer to White when he wants to make his point about White having “more elegant reasons” for suicide than the general rabble. As the discussion ebbs and lows, Jones allows the camera to cross the axis of action, which is generally verboten in the classical Hollywood style. Consequently, 171 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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Figure 13.4 White (Tommy Lee Jones) and Black (Samuel L. Jackson) are close together but still far apart in The Sunset Limited (HBO Films, 2011).

neither character is continuously on the same side of the frame, and neither is always “in the right” either literally or iguratively (Figure 13.4). That round table allows Black and White to drift into each others’ rhetorical spaces as well. Black is a person who reaches out to others, and White is in retreat, or outright recoil, from everyone. Black says that the truth he knows is that “you must love your brother or die,” while White wishes, longs for “No community . . . Silence. Blackness. Aloneness. Peace.” And yet, during the course of their conversation, Black reveals that his religious conversion happened after a violent jailhouse ight that left another man horribly injured, and White reveals that his suicide is at least partially motivated by the weight of collective human suffering worldwide. Black values all life, but doesn’t explain that injured prisoner; White seems to hate everyone, but still feels and laments their pain. And so where exactly does each one sit in relation to the other? It is not so easy to be drawn into someone else’s story, over to their side of the table. After their long, intense conversation and the sharing of coffee and food, White inally wrests himself away and Black lets him go, slumping to the loor in tears afterward. He shouts at God, asking Him why He didn’t give Black “the words” to keep White in a better story. He then calms himself, assuring God that he will keep His word. The ilm ends, however, with Black’s inal question. “Is that okay?” he asks, looking upward, and again: “Is that okay?” The camera then zooms in over his right shoulder and through the window, where the sun is rising over a nearby building, and uplifting 172 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

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music begins to play. Because “the most widespread symbol of the deity over the centuries has been the sun,” Tommy Lee Jones notes, “I thought that’s how we would go out – we would just watch the sunrise and move into it.” He also calls Black’s inal words “the most important speech of the play.”27 The ilm, then, ends by privileging Black’s position, whereas the play’s ending as written is much more ambiguous. Black, however, remains unaware of his ilmic “victory,” and we last see him staring straight ahead at the camera, as if asking the viewer if the words have been okay, if the performance has been enough to draw us into the story and into our own place at the table. Fuller consideration of McCarthy and ilm would also include archival materials – his original treatment and drafts of the screenplay “El Paso/ Juarez” (the story that later became Cities of the Plain), the original screenplay of “No Country for Old Men,” and “Whales and Men,” a screenplay that has never been produced or published. And, of course, there’s also Blood Meridian. Rumors of adaptations headed by Ridley Scott, Tommy Lee Jones, Todd Field, and James Franco have abounded over the years, though many have openly speculated that the book, for all its violence, erudition, and cosmic resonance, may be essentially unadaptable. McCarthy himself, however, disagrees. “The fact that it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen,” he asserts. “That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very dificult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.”28 A new world, after all, is always a tempting thing. Great ilm and literature have the ability to challenge and enchant us with exactly that promise, and the worlds of McCarthy – both textual and visual – keep us reading and watching, eager to catch a glimpse around the next bend in the road. NOTES 1. Lawrence Bensky to Albert Erskine, Albert Erskine Papers (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, July 9, 1963), Box 29, Folder 3. 2. Cormac McCarthy, Albert Erskine Papers, “Author’s Questionnaire” (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, 1964), Box 29, Folder 4. 3. Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 57. 4. André Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” Film Adaptation, p. 20. 5. Jim Welsh, “Borderline Evil: The Dark Side of Byzantium in No Country for Old Men, Novel and Film,” No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, ed. Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach, Jim Welsh (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), p. 83. 173 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.020

Stacey P eebles 6. James Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” Film Adaptation, pp. 7–8. 7. Cormac McCarthy, The Gardener’s Son (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1996), pp. v–vi. 8. Alan Kriegsman, “Public TV’s ‘Visions’ of Expanded Dramatic and Creative Horizons,” The Washington Post (January 16, 1977), p. E3. 9. The Gardener’s Son, dir. Richard Pearce (“Visions” series, PBS, 1976). 10. All the Pretty Horses, dir. Billy Bob Thornton (Columbia Pictures, 2000). 11. A. O. Scott, “Lost Souls Adrift Across a Barren Mesa,” The New York Times (December 25, 2000), p. E1. 12. Steve Persall, “Long Trail Rides Off,” St. Petersburg Times (December 25, 2000), p. D1. 13. I have written more extensively about the horsebreaking sequence in the article “Hang and Rattle: John Grady Cole’s Horsebreaking in Typescript, Novel, and Film,” included in the collection Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. Ed. Sara Spurgeon (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 43–57. 14. Acting McCarthy: The Making of Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses, dir. Peter Josyph and Raymond Todd, Lost Medallion Productions, 2001. 15. John Jurgensen, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy,” The Wall Street Journal (November 20, 2009), web. 16. No Country for Old Men, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen (Miramax and Paramount Vantage, 2007). 17. A. O. Scott, “He Found a Bundle of Money, and Now There’s Hell to Pay,” The New York Times (November 9, 2007), p. E1. 18. Rick Groen, “A Brilliant Tour through a Twisted Moral Landscape,” The Globe and Mail (Canada) (November 9, 2007), p. R5. 19. John Patterson, “We’ve Killed a Lot of Animals,” The Guardian (December 20, 2007), web. 20. The Road, dir. John Hillcoat (Dimension Films, 2009). 21. Mark Naglazas, “Road to McCarthy,” The West Australian (Perth) (January 28, 2010), web. 22. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 57. 23. Ibid, p. 287. 24. The Sunset Limited, dir. Tommy Lee Jones (HBO Films, 2011). 25. Hank Steuever, “All Aboard HBO’s Theological Choo-Choo,” The Washington Post (February 21, 2011), p. C8; “The Sunset Limited: Stellar Thesps Keep Limited on Track,” Variety (February 7, 2011), web. 26. Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Cormac McCarthy, “Audio Commentary,” The Sunset Limited, dir. Tommy Lee Jones (HBO Films, 2011). 27. Ibid. 28. Patterson, “We’ve Killed.”

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14 J OHN DUDLEY

McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity

With the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, Cormac McCarthy’s fortunes as a novelist changed dramatically. Although McCarthy’s earlier novels had received considerable critical attention and had earned him the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Grant, the irst volume of the Border Trilogy quickly outsold McCarthy’s previous works and garnered the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author’s position as both commercial success and canonical igure was further consolidated when The Road was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Although both of these novels contain the dense wordplay and shocking violence that characterize all of McCarthy’s work, their appeal is not surprising. Like nearly all of McCarthy’s ictions, these novels are travelogues through treacherous and forbidding territory, but more than most, they offer a clearer sense of hope of transcendence at the end of their journeys. Moreover, they convey paradigmatic stories of initiation involving sacriice, family, and established codes of manhood. Taken as a whole, however, McCarthy’s writing offers a revisionary study of contemporary masculinity which simultaneously interrogates the narrative myths that provide his novels with their popular appeal and cultural resonance. This essay explores the ways in which abject violence undermines the heroic narratives embedded in McCarthy’s novels, and more speciically, argues that the recurrence of the abject disrupts male subjectivity in McCarthy’s protagonists. Moreover, the presence of abjection explains the epistemological crises at the heart of McCarthy’s narrative journeys, crises that are central to his critique of traditional masculinity. The Appeal of Masculine Myth in McCarthy’s Fictions It is worth noting that McCarthy’s commercial success in 1992 also coincided with the emergence of the mythopoetic men’s movement. As the most readily identiiable intellectual response to the late-twentieth-century “crisis in masculinity,” this movement coalesced in the aftermath of Robert Bly’s 175 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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1990 Iron John, an explicit attempt to address the anxieties of late capitalist male identity through a loose adaptation of Jungian psychology and an appeal to cross-cultural, transhistorical myths of male initiation. Among the alleged deiciencies of the contemporary “soft male” described by Bly are an absence of meaningful connections to their fathers, an inability to respond to women newly empowered by feminism, and an alienation from “the deep masculine,” an instinctive male nature that has been obscured by modernity.1 Initial readings of All the Pretty Horses suggest precisely the kind of archetypal initiation narrative, rife with allusions to chivalric romance, primitive masculinity, and violent struggle, which Bly and others found lacking in the “feminized” American culture of the 1990s. The novel further represents McCarthy’s most explicit example of a traditional Western, a genre with the strongest possible attachment to mythic male archetypes. In fact, much of the novel’s allure can be traced to its explicit connection to earlier modalities, but this connection remains more complex than many readers might conclude. Set in 1949, John Grady Cole’s picaresque adventures across the Mexican border on horseback with his friend Lacey Rawlins are only slightly less anachronistic in his postwar America than in our own. The novel is as much about nostalgic longing for earlier narrative form as it is an example of this form. Furthermore, in the context of the subsequent parts of the Border Trilogy, as well as its ostensible forebear, Blood Meridian (1985), readers are hard-pressed to place faith in the characters’ capacity for wisdom or transcendence. John Grady’s border crossing occurs in the footsteps of an unforgivably bloody history and foreshadows his own violent demise in Cities of the Plain (1998). The central characteristics of McCarthy’s iction, which form the focus of much of the critical discussion, include the linguistic richness and density of his style, the centrality of quest narratives and mythic storytelling, and an almost unbearable level of violence. All of these preoccupations intersect with contemporary debates about masculinity, and suggest a problematic and contradictory relationship to a postmodern revival of masculinity that arose alongside the mythopoetic men’s movement, and which produced a wide range of cultural responses, both high and low, from Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club to the 1999 debut of the self-consciously retrograde television series The Man Show. Although it at times suggests a renewal of time-honored heroic codes, McCarthy’s oeuvre ultimately critiques traditional American masculinity, explaining the always incomplete longing for closure and transcendence that has characterized the mythic search for masculine identity in Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, and their many descendants, literary and otherwise. Whereas John Grady Cole and The Road’s father 176 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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provide the closest things to conventional “heroes” in McCarthy’s work, his other male protagonists, including The Orchard Keeper’s Marion Sylder, Outer Dark’s Culla Holme, Child of God’s Lester Ballard, Cornelius Suttree, the kid in Blood Meridian, Billy Parham from The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, and No Country for Old Men’s Llewellyn Moss and Ed Tom Bell, offer provisional, incomplete, or even monstrously perverse versions of heroism. Each contends with a masculine code that they perceive to be vanishing or devolving, but which might be more accurately understood as inherently lawed or dangerously inadequate. Standing at the center of McCarthy’s work, both chronologically and iguratively, Blood Meridian marks the author’s relocation from the mountains of east Tennessee to the desert southwest and the introduction into his work of the most historically resonant heroic igure in American mythology, the cowboy, as well as the morally ambiguous frontier narrative that dominates the national imaginary. Whereas his southern novels demonstrate McCarthy’s deep engagement with Celtic, Christian, and Classical mythology, the borderlands of the southwest provide him with his most fertile mythic landscape. As in McCarthy’s iction, violence has long igured prominently in our understanding of the history, literature, and culture of the American west. Although Richard Slotkin’s notion of “regeneration through violence” continues to provide a compelling paradigm for the traditional western mythos, McCarthy’s novels offer little promise of regeneration in their depictions of bloodshed and death.2 In place of the archetypal western hero, sacriicing himself in the name of progress and civilization, there is the meaningless, empty violence of Blood Meridian’s “tree of dead babies,” a moment that promises no catharsis, no transcendence, no regeneration.3 Moments of senseless violence prove a most troubling and enduring motif in McCarthy’s novels, often linking death, childbirth or reproduction, and the landscape. Furthermore, traditional narrative theories fail to fully explain the role of violence as a formal element in his works. It is this very resistance to explanation that marks the violence as an explicitly epistemological phenomenon. If the Western has always demonstrated what Lee Clark Mitchell refers to as “a certain necrological impulse,”4 Blood Meridian carries this impulse to an almost unbearable extreme. Although moments of brutality erupt in traditional Westerns, these moments are generally ameliorated or contained by a subsequent civilizing gesture that helps explain the necessity of this violence. Blood Meridian, however, actively resists the impulse to demonstrate the narrative purpose of the extreme bloodshed to which it bears witness. The unrelenting violence never yields to explanation, but only spawns new horrors. In this context, McCarthy’s transformation into a paradigmatic “Western” writer provides insight into 177 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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the striking relationship between language and violence that deines the masculine hero in his work. “A Border that has Encroached on Everything”: Abjection As a Threat to Subjectivity In an essay on McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark, Ann Fisher-Wirth applies Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to the haunting story of incest, deception, and murder. Fisher-Wirth identiies the semiotic language of resistance to patriarchy provided by Rinthy, the child-like young mother who wanders the dark woods in search of her stolen infant.5 For Kristeva, the subject is deined by his or her place within the symbolic order, the world of language and meaning. The abject, however, is that which deies the categories of subject or object, and which resists signiication, which remains “unspeakable.” According to Kristeva, then, abjection constitutes the inevitable reaction to ilth, waste, death, and the “improper or unclean,”6 and the presence of the abject highlights the material condition of human existence, as well as this condition’s resistance to language. Abjection also occurs in the nursing child’s reaction to the mother’s body, an alien terrain neither self nor other, and which is the object of narcissistic devotion and fear. It is noteworthy that as McCarthy’s only female protagonist, Rinthy is also a thorough embodiment of feminine, maternal abjection: powerless, violated, homeless, inarticulate, seeping blood and mother’s milk. In deining the association of landscape and “the feminine” within abjection, Fisher-Wirth notes her answer to the question, where is “woman” in Blood Meridian? In that novel, “woman,” she claims, is “in the mud”: “The realm of physicality and death against (and toward) which the males relentlessly struggle has long been linked both mythically and psychoanalytically with the feminine.”7 The persistence of abjection in McCarthy’s novels highlights a poetics of violence that resonates with contemporary debates about masculinity, and with a patriarchal discourse of regeneration and renewal. The application of Kristeva’s deinition of abjection to the “westering” trajectory of McCarthy’s iction helps account for the persistence and power of abject violence as a counter-narrative embedded within the ever-resurgent frontier thesis and the mythopoetics of masculine identity associated with it. Women characters are notably absent from Blood Meridian, and notwithstanding the crucial mentorship provided by Dueña Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses, women frequently occupy marginal positions in the subsequent Border Trilogy and his most recent works.8 McCarthy’s male protagonists are nonetheless haunted by the presence of the feminine in several forms, whether memories of the absent wife and mother in The Road or the more 178 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity

abstract threats to male subjectivity that abjection provides. In his study on McCarthy’s reworking of the pastoral mode, Georg Guillemin also notes the signiicant presence of abjection, connecting the “total alienation and self-abjection” of the kid in Blood Meridian with the many images of infancy and infanticide in the novel.9 Likewise, several critics have traced the role of the abject in explaining the imagery and violence in McCarthy’s work.10 In “From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystiication of the Martial Code,” Rick Wallach calls on Kristeva’s notion of abjection to account for the incomplete ritualized expulsion of violence in both the Anglo-Saxon epic and McCarthy’s revised western myth.11 Within the Euro-American mythos, the words and actions that keep the abject at bay are grounded as male homosocial rituals which routinely dismiss the feminine as “other.” Not only does abjection contribute to a dismissal of the feminine or maternal in McCarthy’s work, but male encounters with the abject explain the failure of his protagonists to transcend their liminal status and to pass completely through the initiation rituals that recur throughout his narratives. McCarthy offers variations on this character both before and after Blood Meridian, but the “kid” in Blood Meridian serves as the archetype for all of McCarthy’s male protagonists: an unnamed adolescent who never grows up, a troubled and troubling Peter Pan whose inner life remains a closed book, and whose descent into violence and depravity has no clear objective, with no end in sight. For Kristeva, the presence of the abject threatens the integrity of the self/ other binary through which individual identity is constructed. The presence of a corpse – not a sterilized signiier for death, but its literal embodiment – offers the most profound and disruptive example of the abject: “If dung signiies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached on everything.”12 Blood Meridian certainly provides countless examples of corpses, reminders of the immanence of death, but the centrality of dead bodies is unmistakable throughout McCarthy’s work. Just as the fact of Kenneth Rattner’s death in The Orchard Keeper connects his son, John Wesley, with his Uncle Ather and his father’s killer, Marion Sylder, so are the characters’ fates irrevocably linked by the actual presence of his unidentiied and unburied corpse, rotting in an abandoned spray-pit that “served as a crypt which the old man kept and guarded.”13 Like Uncle Ather, McCarthy’s characters are compelled to observe some form of ritual with the dead, but these rituals fail to purify the world of the abject presence of death. More horrifying than most, Lester Ballard’s response to inding two asphyxiated lovers in a parked car in Child of God 179 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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involves not only sexually violating the dead girl’s body, but bringing her body into his home and treating it as a child would a doll. His accidental encounter with her dead body unleashes his dark and murderous urges, culminating in his increasingly perverse and ritualistic acts that include illing a cave with corpses, while he dresses himself in the dead women’s clothes and hair. Among McCarthy’s wandering and itinerant protagonists, Lester Ballard is identiied by Brian Evenson as his most extreme example of the “nomad,” a wanderer who “remains far astray, even detached, from conventional ethics and social codes.”14 In Powers of Horror, Kristeva classiies the typical response of the individual subject to abjection as a form of “exile” or “straying”: “The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging or refusing. . . . For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance.”15 In Kristeva’s Lacanian terms, jouissance represents a deep and disquieting enjoyment, quite unlike the more benign plaisir, and which accompanies profound absence or loss. This characterization of exile accurately describes Lester Ballard, as well as Blood Meridian’s protagonist, the kid, introduced as a child, “pale and unwashed,” in whom “broods already a taste for mindless violence.”16 Driven not by the desire that helps constitute identity formation, but by “mindless,” unmotivated jouissance, the kid’s inherent proclivities are soon compounded by circumstance. The scant biographical details of the kid’s early life bring to mind another orphaned fourteen-year-old southerner lighting out for the territory in the 1840s, and like Huck Finn, the kid’s provisional, unformed subjectivity is molded and transformed by those he meets. Even as an adult, the kid never earns full subjectivity, or even a name, and at the novel’s conclusion he lies murdered in an outhouse, his inal appearance left without description by the narrative. Blood Meridian is a bildungsroman without the necessary development; like the kid’s life, the narrative ends not with adulthood, but with death. Whereas abject violence – from Pap’s corpse in the ruined house loating on the river to Buck Grangerford’s murdered body visiting Huck’s dreams – haunts Twain’s seminal narrative, McCarthy’s work lingers over these dark spaces, and explores the impact these events have on his protagonists. As Stephen Shaviro notes, “Orphanhood is taken for granted in Blood Meridian,”17 and indeed most of McCarthy’s protagonists are not only orphaned, but also remain desperately unformed, incapable of anything beyond a child-like level of moral development. Implicit in his characterizations of the heroic male is a critique of the pattern of extended adolescence that informs contemporary rituals and performances of masculinity, and 180 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity

which has made Huck Finn and his cultural descendants so central to the construction of American masculinity.

“Calamitous beyond reckoning”: Abjection, Landscape, and Meaning For Kristeva, abjection can be traced to the period of ego formation she calls the “chora,” from the Greek for “region” or “country,” a temporal state connected to the mother’s body. To the nursing child, the mother is neither “self” nor “other,” and the source of sustenance and denial, not yet the object of the incest taboo. As such, the maternal body remains a provisional space which threatens to disrupt the subject. Moreover, the intrusion of the abject casts the subject into a pre-symbolic state, an archaic and indescribable space which deies meaning and language. The dominant regions in McCarthy’s work – the Appalachian south and the desert southwest, though disparate in many ways, are linked in their attachment to a primordial past and to a monstrous motherhood. In his irst novel, The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy describes the hill country east of Knoxville with a lyrical density that emulates the lushness and sense of foreboding in the dense woods: In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine lourish with a cynical fecundity, and the loor of the forest – littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills – has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.18

Here, McCarthy explicitly connects the “cynical fecundity” and reproductive power of the landscape with its “primordial quality,” a linkage with the prehistoric past that cannot help but affect the people who inhabit this place. Moreover, characters such as Uncle Ather, Culla Holme, and Lester Ballard carry few markers of their historical present, but inhabit a seemingly timeless zone, driven largely by instinctive urges. Though arid and barren, the borderlands of the southwest likewise connect the characters to an earlier time. Connecting Blood Meridian’s “mythic space” to Erich Neumann’s characterization of the west as a “Terrible Mother,” Neil Campbell notes its character as “a symbolic landscape that relates directly to the characters in the novel and is both ‘womb’ and ‘death.’”19 This space is the territory in which the kid inds himself, a “scoured and darkening waste” that deies the notion of progress and any chance for human development. When Glanton’s men arrive in Tucson, the lieutenant observes that “Even the horses looked alien to any he’d ever seen, decked as they were in human hair and teeth and skin. Save for their 181 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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guns and buckles and a few pieces of metal in the harness of the animals there was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel.”20 Driven initially by an amoral quest for wealth, “harvesting the long black locks” of the “savages,”21 and turning each in as a “receipt,”22 Glanton’s men soon ind themselves so immersed in violence, so driven by a narcissistic urge toward killing, that any sense of purpose or meaning is lost. In these borderlands, McCarthy writes, The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. . . . [I]n the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.23

The “strange equality” of the landscape of the novel creates an epistemological void in which meaning itself is impossible. Without the symbolic markers that delineate subjectivity, the men remain provisional creatures, left to enact the primitive rites of manhood in a world emptied of meaning. Although associated with ilth, Kristeva claims, “It is . . . not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”24 In her discussion of abjection in The Crossing, Nell Sullivan notes, “the wolf becomes the perfect vehicle for the abject, combining the animal and the maternal.”25 Billy Parham undertakes the irst of his three “crossings” into Mexico to return the pregnant she-wolf that has been preying on his family’s cattle to her home in the mountains across the border. When the wolf is taken from him in a Mexican town and subjected to a series of cruel ights with dogs, Billy shoots the wolf to spare her a torturous death, and then trades his rile for her body so that he may bury it in the mountains. The series of actions has no apparent motive, and Billy himself seems to lack an understanding of his decisions. When asked what he’s traded his rile for, he admits, “I aint sure I could put a name to it.”26 As with many events in McCarthy’s narratives, no language exists to describe the desires that compel his protagonists. Billy’s subsequent journeys into Mexico are all noble or heroic in nature, to some degree: he and his brother Boyd search for their stolen horses when their parents are murdered, but end up saving a Mexican girl who has been abducted, and Billy later returns alone to ind Boyd, but is left to retrieve his bones for reburial in New Mexico. Near the end of the novel, Billy says to a fellow traveler, “[t]his 182 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity

is my third trip. It’s the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after. But it sure as hell wasnt what I wanted.”27 Each of the journeys involves an attempt to restore order in the wake of violence and injustice, but each quest falls short of its goal. The abject provides a recurring and irresolvable threat to the symbolic order, and deies any coherent, linear narrative of “the frontier” – that uniquely American space that is also a border whose crossing promises initiation into masculine subjectivity. In its own restaging of the male initiation ritual, the national narrative of western expansion incorporates ideologies of gender and race into its mythic structures. The landscape of Blood Meridian, described as a “hungry country,”28 a “terra damnata,”29 is a space that deies the binary oppositions of good and evil, civilized and savage, articulated by the aptly named Captain “White” early in the novel, as he recruits the kid for his mercenary army to invade Mexico: “What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico.”30 In a refutation to this racialist faith in the black and white truths of American exceptionalism, however, the expedition is ambushed and slaughtered by Comanches and the kid discovers Captain White’s head memorably displayed in a jar of mescal in a traveling medicine show, another victim to the “bloodslaked dust” that consumes men and their ideals. In Blood Meridian, the igure who would seem to promise the assertion of the patriarchal symbolic order is Judge Holden, whose very title suggests “logos,” the lawgiver. Although able to cite “cases civil and martial” and to quote “Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales,”31 the judge seeks to prevent, rather than assert, order. “The truth about the world,” argues the judge, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded ield is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.32

In his essay in this volume, Steven Frye explores the role of the carnivalesque as it relates to the aesthetic rendering of violence. Invoking the carnival, Judge Holden highlights the tension between static and performative notions of identity that recur in McCarthy’s work. Another man of the law, Sherriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, describes his own father’s Polonius-like advice: “My daddy always told me to just do the best you 183 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.”33 As events spiral beyond Bell’s control or understanding, his desire for authenticity represents an increasingly futile effort to contend with igures such as Anton Chigurh or Judge Holden, who consistently deploy language to deceive and obfuscate, to allow the carnival to continue, to forever defer any reckoning. Described as an “enormous infant,” naked, pale, and hairless, Holden is both a representation of primal narcissism of the needy, nursing child and the very embodiment of the Lacanian Real, the “naked fact,” articulated in the novel by the “expriest” Tobin, that “men are made of the dust of the earth.”34 The Deadpan and the Myth of the “Deep Masculine” Although McCarthy’s narratives draw heavily on mythic archetypes for their themes and structures, the nature of their quests remain elusive not only to the characters who undertake them, but to readers who seek to understand them. The questing narrative itself operates as an empty vessel, a shell with no discernible center. Describing its “outlandish aesthetic and moral territories,” Dana Phillips notes that Blood Meridian “seems designed to elude interpretation.”35 The landscape’s “neuter austerity” mirrors McCarthy’s cold, uninlected chronicling of violence, and like the “optical democracy” of the desert, the narrative never offers a privileged moral perspective on the events it depicts. The purchasing of whiskey, the appearance of a constellation in the night sky, and the bashing of an infant’s head on the rocks are all told with same matter-of-fact precision and clarity, what Phillips refers to as the novel’s “strange equanimity of tone.”36 The nominal protagonist, the kid, is granted no inner life, and his actual death, like that of Llewellyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, is not narrated, but mentioned only in passing. Susan Rosowski, exploring the laconic western hero of The Virginian, Riders of the Purple Sage, and Shane, notes, “Whereas the Logos of Greek philosophy and the Bible gives rise to generativity and creativity, the Western’s Logos restricts meaning, denies generativity, and excludes procreativity.”37 If McCarthy’s expressionless recounting of horror its into the restrictive pattern of the Western, it also suggests what Greil Marcus has described as the rhetorical “mask” worn by southern folk and blues performers: [T]he mask is what in the nineteenth century came to be called the deadpan, the poker face. . . . The mask hides the voice no less than the face, and the voice it makes you might call Yankee Midwestern, though it is also Appalachian, mountain-still, a speech made as much of silences as of words, and the silence is the edge. So what? says the voice; it is dulled, unimpressed . . . unsurprised. 184 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity Those who use the voice claim they can’t be surprised even by the weather – that is, by god – and that’s their claim on life, why they expect you to listen to them, regardless of whether what they’re saying makes sense.38

The “deadpan” – the lifeless face that is eternally unsurprised – is ultimately the most disconcerting quality found in McCarthy’s narrative voice, and it inds its origins in the remote hills of Appalachia that belong to the kid’s and the author’s past. Among the most pervasive and striking instances of the deadpan can be found in the “murder ballads” of the American south, songs with origins in the Scotch-Irish ancestry of so many of its practitioners. In the typical ballad, a speaker recounts his killing of a female lover in terms that fail to mention any motive or regret. One example of such a song is “The Knoxville Girl,” a sixteenth-century British folksong reset in McCarthy’s hometown, and a commercial hit for the Louvin Brothers in 1956. In their version, the speaker is out walking with his girlfriend when he “picks a stick up off the ground and [knocks] that fair girl down.” While she begs for her life, he beats her until “the ground around me with her blood did low.”39 Condemned to prison (or, in other versions, to death), the speaker offers no explanation or remorse for his actions, and the song’s meaning remains elusive: no lessons can be drawn from it; it offers no transcendence or catharsis. To return to Kristeva’s formulation, the girl’s abject body is a stark and sudden glimpse of the Real – “death infecting life.”40 The voice that tells his story is calm and controlled, and it is this voice that one inds in Samuel Chamberlain’s “confessions” of his service under John Joel Glanton, and in accounts of Sand Creek and My Lai more than a century apart. With its origins in the hills of Appalachia, the deadpan is the voice of the prototypical American hero, and its presence within McCarthy’s characterizations highlights the abjection – the loss of self – that it seeks to contain. The threads that link these accounts with Cormac McCarthy’s work are the distinctly masculine discourse and homosocial rituals which accompany the brutality of misogyny, racism, and conquest. As Vince Brewton argues, McCarthy’s turn to the southwest “testiies to his meditation on the continuous quest for identity in the space created by violence.”41 For McCarthy, the deadpan mask that deines the masculine hero is just that: a mask donned in rituals that connect modern man to his prehistoric ancestor, a performance that belies any “deep masculine” essence. In The Crossing, McCarthy writes, “[t]he ends of all ceremony are but to avert bloodshed.”42 The rituals that deine masculinity, however, consistently fail at this purpose, and even the most heroic of McCarthy’s protagonists cannot stem the bloody tide of abjection, “a border that has encroached on everything,” threatening to swallow us whole. 185 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.021

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Notes 1. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), p. 8. 2. See Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 3. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 57. 4. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 172. 5. Ann Fisher-Wirth, “Abjection and ‘the Feminine’ in Outer Dark,” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, ed. James D. Lilley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), p. 128. 6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 2. 7. Ibid, p. 125. 8. See Linda Townley Woodson, “‘This is another country’: The Complex Feminine Presence in All the Pretty Horses” Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, ed. Sara L. Spurgeon (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 25–42. 9. Georg Guillemin, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2004), p. 92. 10. J. Douglas Canield identiies abjection as a “fear of the maternal” in Suttree. See “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” Contemporary Literature 44.4 (2003), pp. 664–96. On the presence of abjection in The Crossing, see Nell Sullivan, “Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 228–55. 11. Rick Wallach, “From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystiication of the Martial Code,” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, ed. James D. Lilley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), pp. 199–214. 12. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 13. Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 52. 14. Brian Evenson, “McCarthy’s Wanderers: Nomadology, Violence, and Open Country,” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995), p. 41. 15. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 8. 16. BM 3. 17. Steven Shaviro, “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), p. 146. 18. TOK 11. 19. Neil Campbell, “Beyond Reckoning: Cormac McCarthy’s Vision of the West in Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West,” Critique 39.1 (1997), p. 57.

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McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

BM 232. Ibid, p. 157. Ibid, p. 98. Ibid, p. 247. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Sullivan, p. 236. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 170. Ibid, p. 416. BM 17. Ibid, p. 61. Ibid, p. 34. Ibid, p. 239. Ibid, p. 245. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Vintage, 2007), p. 249. BM 297. Dana Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68 (1996), p. 434. Ibid, p. 449. Susan J. Rosowski, Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 173. Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 51–52. The Louvin Brothers, “Knoxville Girl,” Tragic Songs of Life, Capitol Records, 1996, compact disc. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Vince Brewton, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy,” Southern Literary Journal 37.1 (2004), p. 142. TC 359.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAP H Y

Works by Cormac McCarthy

Textual Note: The editions cited here for novels are the hardback irst editions, relecting the irst printings of each work. All McCarthy works are available in various paperback editions and in compiled editions. Novels The Orchard Keeper. New York: Random House, 1965. Outer Dark. New York: Random House, 1968. Child of God. New York: Random House, 1974. Suttree, New York: Random House, 1979. Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House, 1985. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. The Crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Cities of the Plain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. No Country for Old Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Published Plays and Screenplays The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994. The Gardener’s Son: A Screenplay. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1996. The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Unpublished Screenplays Whales and Men (n.d.). Manuscript held in the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Wittliff Collection, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos. Cities of the Plain (1984). Manuscript held in the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Wittliff Collection. Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos. No Country for Old Men (n.d., but began as a screenplay in 1984). The Counselor. Currently in production. Director: Ridley Scott.

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Sele cte d Bi bli ogra phy Short Fiction “Wake for Susan.” The Phoenix. A Publication of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 1959. “A Drowning Incident.” The Phoenix. A Publication of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 1960. Interviews Woodward, Richard B. “McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” The New York Times Magazine, 19 April 1992. “Cormac McCarthy; Cormac McCarthy Would Rather Hang Out With Physicists Than with Writers.” Vanity Fair, 1 August 2005. Ogden, Eric. “A Conversation between Author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, About the New Movie No Country for Old Men.” Time (18 October 2007). Kushner, David. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse.” Rolling Stone, 27 December 2008. Jurgensen, John. “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy.” The Wall Street Journal (20 November 2009). “Connecting Science and Art.” Science Friday: Interview with Cormac McCarthy, Werner Herzog, and Lawrence Krauss. National Public Radio (NPR) (8 April 2011). Book-Length Scholarly Studies Bell, James Luther. Cormac McCarthy’s West: The Border Trilogy Annotations. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Bell Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Bowers, James. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Boise State University Western Writers Series. 139. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press, 1999. Cant, John. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge, 2007. Cooper, Lydia R. No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Ellis, Jay. Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2006. Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Holloway, David. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport CT: Greenwood, 2002. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997. Luce, Dianne C. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 190 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.022

Sel ect ed Bibl iograph y Owens, Barkley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian. Louisville, KY: Bellarmine College Press, 1993. Reprinted 2008. Austin: University of Texas Press. Spurgeon, Sara. Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. New York: Continuum, 2011. Tatum, Stephen. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. Edited Essay Collections Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2002. Chapman King, Lynnea and Rick Wallach. No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Chollier, Christine, ed. Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus. Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003. Hall, Wade and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Lilley, James D. ed. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Monk, Nicholas. Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings. New York: Routledge, 2011. Wallach, Rick. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Journal The Cormac McCarthy Journal. A Publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society. Selected Essays Ambrosiano, Jason. “Blood in the Tracks: Catholic Postmodernism in The Crossing.” Southwestern American Literature 25.1 (Fall 1999): 83–91. Arnold, Edwin T. “Naming, Knowing, Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 45–69. “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 221–47. “‘Go to Sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001: 37–72. 191 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.022

Sele cte d Bi bli ogra phy “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing.” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, James D. Lilley, ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002: 215–38. “The Mosaic of McCarthy’s Fiction, Continued.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 179–87. Campbell, Christopher D. “Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and McCarthy’s Enigmatic Epilogue: Y que clase de lugar es este?.” Cormac McCarthy Journal 2 (Spring 2002): 40–55. Canield, Douglas J. “Crossing from the Wasteland to the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001: 256–69. “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” Contemporary Literature 44.4 (Winter 2003): 664–96. Carlson, Thomas A. “With the World at Heart: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with Augustine and Heidegger.” Religion & Literature 39.3 (2007): 47–71. Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 159–74. Douglas, Christopher. “The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Critique 45.1 (Fall 2003): 3–24. Frye, Steven. “Wilderness Typology, American Scripture, and the Interpreter’s Eye: The Interior Landscapes of McCarthy’s Western Novels.” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus. Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003: 115–21. “Fate without Foreknowledge: Style and Image in the Late Naturalism of Suttree.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 4 (Spring 2005): 184–94. “Cormac McCarthy’s “world in its making”: Romantic Naturalism in The Crossing.” Studies in American Naturalism 2:1 (Summer 2007): 46–65. “Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” and McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: Art and Artiice in the New Novel.” No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, reprinted from The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2009). Grammer, John M. “A Thing Against Which Time Will Not Prevail: Pastoral and History in Cormac McCarthy’s South.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 29–44. Hawkins, Susan. “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia.” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus. Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003: 95–103. Hoberek, Andrew. “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion.” American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 483–99. Hunt, Alexander. “Right and False Suns: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and the Advent of the Atomic Age.” Southwestern American Literature 23.2 (Spring 1998): 31–37. 192 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.022

Sel ect ed Bibl iograph y Josyph, Peter. “A Conversation [with Harold Bloom] about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 205–21. Luce, Dianne C. “’When You Wake’: John Grady Cole’s Heroism in All the Pretty Horses. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995: 155–67. “The Road as Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 195–219. “The Vanishing World of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001: 161–97. Luttrull, Daniel. “Prometheus Hits The Road: Revising the Myth.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 9.1 (2010): 20–33. McBride, Molly. “The Crossing’s Noble Savagery: The Wolf, the Indian, and the Empire.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 71–82. McMurtry, Kim. “’Some Improvident God”: Metaphysical Explorations in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 143–57. Monk, Nick. “’An Impulse to Action, an Undeined Want’: Modernity, Flight, and Crisis in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 83–103. Morgan, Wesley G. “The Route and Roots of The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6.1 (2009): 39–47. Morrison, Gail Moore. “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 175–94. Palmer, Louis H. III. “Southern Gothic and Appalachian Gothic: A Comparative Look at Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy.” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 3 (1991): 166–76. Parrish, Timothy. “Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The First and Last Book of America,” in From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008: 80–116. Parrish, Timothy L. and Elizabeth A. Spiller. “A Flute Made of Human Bone: Blood Meridian and the Survivors of American History.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 23 (1998): 461–81. Peebles, Stacey. “What Happens to Country: The World to Come in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 127–42. “Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45.2 (Summer 2003): 231–44. “‘Hold Still’: Models of Masculinity in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men.” No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film. Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach, and Jim Welsh, eds. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009: 124–38. 193 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087438.022

Sele cte d Bi bli ogra phy “Hang and Rattle: John Grady Cole’s Horsebreaking in Typescript, Novel, and Film.” Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. Sara Spurgeon, ed. London: Continuum, 2011: 43–57. Prather, William. “Absurd Reasoning in an Existential World: A Consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995: 103–14. Quirk, William. “‘Minimalist Tragedy’: Nietzschean Thought in McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 9.1 (2010): 34–54. Ragan, David Paul. “Values and Structure in The Orchard Keeper.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 17–27. Robisch, S. K. “The Trapper Mystic: Werewolves in The Crossing.” Southwestern American Literature 25.1 (Fall 1999): 50–54. Scoones, Jacqueline. “The World on Fire: Ethics and Evolution in Cormac McCarthy’s the Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001: 131–60. Sepich, John Emil. “What Kind of Indians Was Them?”: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999: 123–43. Snyder, Phillip A. “Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001: 198–227. Wallach, Rick. “Judge Holden, Blood Meridian’s Evil Archon.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995: 125–36. “Theatre, Ritual, and Dream in the Border Trilogy.” Sacred Violence Volume 2: The Border Trilogy. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, eds. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002: 159–77. “Cormac McCarthy’s Metaphors of Antiquity and Deep Time.” Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus. Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003: 105–13. Wegner, John. “’Mexico para los Mexicanos’: Revolution, Mexico, and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Southwestern American Literature 25.1 (Fall 1999): 67–73. “‘Wars and Rumors of Wars’ in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001: 73–91. Wielenberg, Eric. “God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 9.1 (2010): 1–19. Woodson, Linda Townley. “‘The Lighted Display Case’: A Nietzschean Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction.” Southern Quarterly 38.4 (Summer 2000): 48–60.

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INDEX

abjection, 185 absurdism, 54, 62, 63 absurdist, 62 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), 62, 67 Alamagordo, New Mexico, 4 The Alamo (ilm), 110 Alarcón, Daniel Cooper, 127 Alkek Library (Texas State University, San Marcos), 139 All the Pretty Horses, 17–19, 121–30 Aristotle, 108 Arnold, Edwin T., 134 “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables”, 120n11 Austin, J. L., 16, 17 avant garde, 29, 30 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 115, 116, 118 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 115 Rabelais and His World, 115 Bardem, Javier, 167 Barthes, Roland, 27–28 Barthesian, 27, 37 “The Death of the Author”, 27 Bazin, André, 163 Beats (Beat Generation), 63 Beckett, Samuel, 30 Bell, Vereen, 58 Bensky, Lawrence, 162 Black, Lucas, 165 Black’s Law Dictionary, 35 Blevins, James, 48 Blood Meridian, 107–19 Bloom, Harold, 3 Bly, Robert, 175, 176 Iron John, 176 Boehme, Jacob, 54, 139 salitter, 139

Borgnine, Ernest, ix, 112 Brahman, 139 Brewton, Vince, 80, 109, 185 bricoleur, 36 Brolin, Josh, ix, 167, 169 Brown, Irving, 6 Brown, Larry, 98 Buffon, Georges, Compte de, 27 Bultmann, Rudolph, 9 Burke, Edmund, 109, 110, 117, 154 Burkean, 109 Bush, George H. W., 82 Campbell, Neil, 181 Camus, Albert, 54, 62 Camusesque absurdity, 63 ecriture blanche, 62 Canield, Douglas J. “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree”, 186n10 Cant, John, 140 carnivalesque, 46, 110, 115–19 Carpentier, Alejo, 68 Carr, Peter, 128 Cather, Willa, 68 Cervantes, Miguel de, 67, 69 Quixotic, 125 Chamberlain, Samuel, 4, 6, 110, 111, 185 My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue, 111 Chase, Richard, 95 Child of God, 46–48, 60–62 Christian existentialism, 143 Cimino, Michael The Deer Hunter, 120n13 Cities of the Plain, 20–21

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I ndex Civello, Paul, 153, 154 American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformations, 153 Clausewitz, Carl Von, 81 Clinton, William Jefferson (Bill), 80 Clute, John, 133, 134, 139, 140 Coen Brothers (Joel and Ethan), 167, 168 No Country for Old Men (ilm), ix, 167, 168, 169 Common, Thomas, 7 Cooper, James Fenimore, 76, 95 Coover, Robert, 30 Crane, Stephen, 95, 97, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 “The Blue Hotel”, 158 Maggie, 151 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 97 Crews, Harry, 98 Cromwell’s Rock, 135 Damon, Matt, ix, 164, 167 Dante, 7, 67 Dantean, 7 The Divine Comedy, 7 Darwin, Charles, 67, 95 Darwinian, 156 Darwinism, 156 The Origin of Species, 151 post-Darwinian, 150, 151, 153, 160 Daugherty, Leo, 10n5, 136 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 155 Life in the Iron Mills, 155 Deleuze, Gilles, 88 A Thousand Plataues (Deleuze and Guattari), 88 DeLillo, Don, 3, 153, 155 Derrida, Jacques, 31 Diaz, Poririo, 126 Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes), 67, 69, 70 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9 The Brothers Karamazov, 9 Dourif, Brad, 164, 165 Doyle, Michael Scott, 36 Dreiser, Theodore, 95, 151, 155 Sister Carrie, 156, 159 Eaton, Mark A., 122 Ecclesiastes, 136 Einstein, Albert, 153 El Paso, Texas, 6

Elijah (the prophet), 135, 136 Eliot, T. S., 30, 136 Ellis, Jay, 135, 136, 141 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 157 Erskine, Albert, 162 Essex (whaling ship), 150 Evenson, Brian, 180 “McCarthy’s Wanderers: Nomadology, Violence, and Open Country”, 91n40 existential Christianity, 5, 9–10 existential humanism, 54 existentialism, 7, 54, 56, 63 existential, 62 existentialist, 63 Exodus (Old Testament book), 138 Faulkner, William, 16, 30, 67, 95 Faulknerian, 62 Faulknerian, 3 Feast of Circumcision, 115 Feast of Fools, 115 Field, Todd, 173 Fisher-Wirth, Ann, 178 Forbis, Christopher, 36 Ford Coppola, Francis Apocalypse Now, 120n13 Godfather trilogy, 120n13 Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 18, 20, 27–28 Foucauldian, 18 “The Order of Discourse”, 16 “What Is an Author?”, 27 Franco, James, 173 Franklin, Benjamin, 151, 156, 157 Autobiography, 156 Franklin, Tom, 98 French Revolution, 80 Freud, Sigmund, 98 Freudian, 98 Freudianism, 98 Frost, Robert, 69 “The Gift Outright”, 69 Frye, Steven, 52n37, 95, 143, 183 “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘world in its making’”, 160n10, 161n13 Understanding Cormac McCarthy, 38n32, 51n19, 52n55, 95, 144n39, 161n22 Fuentes, Carlos, 30 Gay, William, 98 Gein, Ed, 48 Gell-Man, Murray, 4

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Index Genesis (Old Testament book), 134 Giles, James R., 108, 109 “Teaching the Contemporary Naturalism of Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark”, 161n13 Glasgow, Ellen, 95 Gnosticism, 5–6, 7, 102, 143 gnosis, 5 Gnostic, 5, 6, 47, 49, 54, 62, 63, 136, 138, 140 Gnostic philosophy, 6 Gnostic thought, 5 Gnostically, 58 gothic, 41–50, 95, 96, 97, 99, 150 Graniteville, South Carolina, 163, 164 Gregg, James, ix, 163, 164 Greil, Marcus, 184 Groen, Rick, 167 grotesque, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 96, 97, 98, 150, 155 southern grotesque, 42 Guattari, Pierre-Félix, 88 A Thousand Plataues (Deleuze and Guattari), 88 Guggenheim Foundation, 3 Guillemin, Georg, 102, 179 The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, 102 Gwynne, S. C., 117 Haeberle, Ronald, 114 Hawkins, Susan E. “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia”, 90n4 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 29 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 24, 95, 96 “The Custom-House” Introductory to The Scarlet Letter, 24 “Young Goodman Brown”, 96 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 139 Heisenberg, Werner, 153 Hemingway, Ernest, 141, 142, 153 Heminwayesque, 139 iceberg technique, 139 Heraclitus, 107 Hillcoat, John, 168 The Road (ilm), 168, 171 Hirsch, François, 31 Holden, William, ix, 112 Holloway, David, 30–31, 34 The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, 30

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 155 Elsie Venner, 155 Homer, 67, 70 Horace, 108 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 85 Howard, June, 98, 104 Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, 98, 104 Howells, William Dean, 151 Huerta, Victoriano, 126 Hume, David, 54 Iser, Wolfgang, 47 Jackson, Samuel L., ix, 171, 172 James, Caryn, 107 Jameson, Fredric, 15, 30 John (fourth gospel in the New Testament), 137, 138 Johnson, Samuel, 108 Jones, Tommy Lee, ix, 167, 171, 172, 173 The Sunset Limited (ilm), ix, 171, 172 Josyph, Peter Acting McCarthy: The Making of Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses, 174n14 Tragic Ecstasy: A Conversation about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, 10n1 Joyce, James, 30 Jung, Carl, 44, 45 Jungian, 44, 45, 176 Jurgensen, John “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy”, 144n15, 174n15 Kafka, Franz, 16 Before the Law, 16 Kennedy, John F., 87, 111 Kerouacian (Jack Kerouac), 62, 63 Kierkegaard, Soren, 9 The King James Bible, 67 “The Knoxville Girl” (folksong), 185 Knoxville, Tennessee, 3, 4, 36, 41, 43, 50, 181 Kreml, Nancy, 34, 35 Kriegsman, Alan, 163 Kristeva, Julia, 17, 185 abjection, 175, 178, 179 Powers of Horror, 180

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I ndex Lachaud, Maxime “Carnivalesque Rituals and the Theological Grotesque in the Southern Novels of Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy”, 52n37, 120n17 Lawrence, D. H., 30, 76 Studies in Classic American Literature, 76 Leech, Geoffrey, 32 Leone, Sergio, 72, 111 Once Upon a Time in the West, 72 Levinas, Emmanuel, 56 Life Magazine, 114 Lincoln, Kenneth, 35, 42 Lingis, Alphonso, 56, 60 Link, Eric Carl, 95, 108 The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, 95 “Deining American Literary Naturalism”, 160n1 London, Jack, 95, 151, 157 Martin Eden, 151 The Sea-Wolf, 157 Lorca, Federico García, 142 Louvin Brothers, 185 Luce, Dianne C., 6, 37n6, 45, 61, 62, 63, 96, 102, 123, 142 Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, 6, 96 Lucretius, 67 Lyotard, Jean-François, 15, 29, 30 The Postmodern Condition, 15, 29 The Postmodern Explained, 30 MacArthur Fellowship, 3, 175 MacArthur Foundation, 4 Macquarrie, John, 9 Madero Brothers (Francisco and Gustavo), 18, 79, 122, 124 Mailer, Norman, 155 The Man Show (Television series), 176 Marcel, Gabriel, 9 Mark (the second gospel in the New Testament), 99 Marquez, Gabriel García, 68 Marx, Karl Marxism, 98 Marxist, 98, 99, 149 Maslin, Janet, 143 McCarthy, Cormac, 95, 107, 121, 133 All the Pretty Horses, 3, 7, 17, 23, 32, 34, 35, 55, 56, 57, 67, 68, 71, 74, 79, 83,

87, 88, 107, 150, 152, 162, 175, 176, 178 Blood Meridian, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 32, 33, 35, 36, 42, 55, 57, 60, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 95, 102, 122, 136, 138, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184 Border Trilogy, 7, 20, 31, 55, 59, 67, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 121, 122, 123, 128, 175, 176 Child of God, 6, 35, 46, 48, 57, 60, 62, 97, 98, 103, 116, 154, 155, 158, 177, 179 Cities of the Plain, 4, 8, 20, 21, 23, 67, 82, 84, 89, 121, 123, 127, 133, 173, 176, 177 The Crossing, 15, 19–20, 22, 34, 35, 67, 72, 74, 77, 79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 128, 133, 141, 150, 152, 154, 177, 182, 185 The Gardener’s Son, ix, 62, 162, 163, 164, 165 No Country for Old Men, 7, 8, 21, 43, 57, 58, 60, 67, 71, 72, 73, 75, 133, 138, 153, 159, 162, 177, 183, 184 “No Country for Old Men” (screenplay), 173 The Orchard Keeper, 3, 4, 32, 42, 56, 134, 162, 177, 179, 181 Outer Dark, 5, 6, 8, 45, 57, 138, 150, 152, 155, 177, 178 The Road, 3, 7, 8, 9, 15, 22, 32, 36, 59, 60, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 162, 171, 175, 176, 178 The Sunset Limited, 9, 32, 162, 170, 171 Suttree, 5, 16, 20, 33, 35, 36, 41, 48, 57, 60, 62, 136 “Whales and Men”, 173 McCarthy, Joseph, 85 McEvoy, James, 164 McEvoy, Robert, ix, 163, 164, 165 McHale, Brian, 28, 30 Postmodernist Fiction, 30 Medhurst, Martin J., 80 Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor and Ideology, 80 Melville, Herman, 67, 95, 108, 135, 150, 159, 160 Moby-Dick, 108, 135, 149, 150, 159 Menippean satire, 116 Milton, John, 67 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 177

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Index modernism, 28–31 Mohammed, 136 Morgan, Wes, 36 Morrison, Toni, 3 Mortensen, Viggo, 169 My Lai Massacre, 111, 114, 115, 185 Nabokov, Vladimir, 30 Naglazas, Mark, 169 Naremore, James, 163 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 87 naturalism, 95–105, 149–60 Nelson, Ralph, 111 Soldier Blue, 111, 114, 115 Neo-Platonism, 5, 54 Neo-Platonic, 6, 7 Neumann, Erich, 181 The New York Times, 107, 114, 165 The New York Times Magazine, 157 Newton, Isaac, 153 Newtonian, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7–8, 19, 67 Nietzsche, 20 Nietzschean, 7, 8, 20, 21, 136 Nietzschean-Islamic, 136 “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”, 19 Übermensch (superman), 7 Nietzschean materialism, 5 nihilism, 7, 158 nihilistic, 58, 77, 136 Norris, Frank, 95, 97, 151, 155, 157 McTeague, 97, 151, 155 Vandover and the Brute, 155 “Zola as a Romantic Writer”, 97 Oates, Joyce Carol, 155 Oates, Warren, ix, 112 O’Connor, Flannery, 67 The Orchard Keeper, 42–45 Otto, Rudolf, 155 Outer Dark, 45–46, 57–58, 95–105 Owens, Barkley, 108 Oxford English Dictionary, 35 Palahniuk, Chuck, 176 Fight Club, 176 Panentheism, 119n1 Parker, Cynthia Ann, 117 Payne, Roger, 4 PBS’s Visions series, 163

Pearce, Richard, 4, 163, 164 Peckinpah, Sam, 72, 111, 112, 113 The Wild Bunch, ix, 72, 111, 112, 112, 113, 114 Peebles, Stacey “Hang and Rattle: John Grady Cole’s Horsebreaking in Typescript, Novel, and Film”, 174n13 Penn, Arthur, 111 Bonnie and Clyde, 111 Persall, Steve, 165 Phillips, Dana, 184 Pizer, Donald, 98, 152–54, 157 “Contemporary American Literary Naturalism”, 152 “Is Naturalism Dead”, 153 Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism, 98 Planck, Max, 139 Plato, 6–7, 61, 62, 67, 149 Giorgias myth, 6 Narcissus, 6 Platonism, 5, 54 Platonic, 6, 7, 47, 61, 63 Plotinus, 6 Narcissus myth, 6 Poe, Edgar Allan, 95, 96, 110 Pope, Alexander, 108 postmodernism, 28–31 poststructuralism, 28, 54 Pound, Ezra, 30 Powers, Francis Gary, 86, 87 Prather, William “Absurd Reasoning in an Existential World: A Consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree”, 64n24 Pratt, Mary Louise, 122, 123 Price, Richard, 98 Promethean, 41, 118, 138 Providence, Rhode Island, 3 Pynchon, Thomas, 30 Reagan, Ronald, 82, 88, 109 “The Red River Valley” (song), 166 Revelation (New Testament book), 138 Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey), 184 Rio Bravo (ilm), 110 River Great Ouse, Cambridgeshire, 135 The Road, 22–24, 133–43 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 30 Rosowski, Susan, 184

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I ndex Roth, Philip, 3 Rulfo, Juan, 68 San Angelo, Texas, 124 Sand Creek Massacre, 114, 185 Santa Fe Institute, 135, 140 Sartre, Jean Paul, 61 Being and Nothingness, 56 Sartrean, 56 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 87 Schwartz, David, 169 If You Hopped Like a Frog, 169 Scorcese, Martin Mean Streets, 120n13 Scott, A. O., 165, 167 Scott, Ridley, 173 Selby, Hubert, 98 Last Exit to Brooklyn, 98 Sepich, John, 36 Sewanee Review, 107 Shakespeare, William, 67, 108 Shane (Jack Schaefer), 184 Shaviro, Stephen, 180 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 68 Shelton, Frank W. “Suttree and Suicide”, 64n24 Ship of Fens, 135 Short, Mick, 32 Slotkin, Richard, 72, 111, 177 Gunighter Nation, 72 Smit-McPhee, Kodi, 169 Snyder, Phillip A., 135 Sophists, 16 Soto, Isabel, 128 Southwestern Writers Collection (Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos), 138 Cormac McCarthy Papers, 134, 138 Wittliff Collections, 138 Spencer, Herbert, 95 Spencer, William, 58, 102 St. Augustine, 67 Stalin, Joseph, 80 Stam, Robert, 162, 163 State Department (United States), 87 Stein, Gertrude, 30 Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Chicago), 171 Sterne, Laurence, 29 Tristram Shandy, 29

Sullivan, Nell, 182 Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, 186n10 Sullivan, Walter, 107 Suttree, 48–50, 62–63 Tally, Ted, 165 Tao, 139 Tartarus, 6 Tennes Valley Authority (TVA), 4, 42 Theron, Charlize, 169, 170 Thomas, Henry, ix, 165, 167 Thornton, Billy Bob, 165, 166 All the Pretty Horses (ilm), ix, 165, 167, 167 Tillich, Paul, 9 Todd, Raymond Acting McCarthy: The Making of Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses, 174n14 Townley Woodson, Linda “‘This is another country’: The Complex Feminine Presence in All the Pretty Horses”, 186n8 Trilling, Lionel, 95 Trotignon, Béatrice, 34 True Grit (ilm), 110 Truman, Harry S., 87 Twain, Mark, 67, 180 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 181 Updike, John, 3 Villa, Pancho, 86 The Virginian (Owen Wister), 184 Wall Street Journal, 135 Wallace, Garry, 6 Wallach, Rick, 179 “From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystiication of the Martial Code”, 179 The Washington Post, 163 Watson, Jay, 16 Wayne, John, 110 Welsh, Jim, 163 Wharton, Edith, 151 William Faulkner Foundation, 3 Williams, Tennessee, 95 Winfrey, Oprah, 28, 44, 84, 133, 143, 169 Winslow, Arizona, 79

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Index Winthrop, John, 156, 157 Woodson, Linda, 16, 24n24 “Deceiving the Will to Truth”, 16 Woodward, C. Vann, 88 The Future of the Past, 89 Woodward, Richard B., 4, 8, 108, 157

“McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction” (The New York Times Magazine), 4 Woolf, Virginia, 30 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 103 Wright, Richard, 97 Native Son, 97

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