The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
By Vereen M. Bell.
Louisiana State University Press, 1988/2023.
Paperback, 160 pages, $24.99.
Reviewed by Michael Yost.
“I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.” – Suttree
After the death of an author, the carrion-seekers descend on slow wheels from the broad blank sky of the internet to interpret his work. It is a spectacle that provides no little insight into human nature, as well as the nature of interpretation. The late Cormac McCarthy’s work seems built to resist any attempt to make it mean something beyond its own representation of narrative and material fact. But whenever a scribbler or reviewer deals with an author whose work is complex, their immediate impulse is to place him in the family crypt as quickly as possible or to immediately convoke a post-mortem auto-da-fé to pronounce the author’s heresy. Every dead man belongs to a school.
In the case of Cormac McCarthy, a great deal of the funeral dirge was carried out by conservatives. The Lamp had a special issue, almost rivaling the grandeur of their issue in memory of Benedict XVI. Articles on McCarthy appeared for weeks in First Things, National Review, et alia. A new surge in the popularity of McCarthy’s works is the result, helped along by the fact that the author left us two of his longest novels, Stella Maris and The Passenger. McCarthy’s publishers may well be asking themselves, “O death, where is thy sting?”
The irony of the literal “death of the author” is, of course, that it leaves only the texts behind; unlike a person, a text cannot be understood, only interpreted. As the poet Yvor Winters put it, “the mind’s immortal, / but the man is dead.”
But the book I am reviewing, Vereen M. Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, was originally published in 1988. For reference, that’s eighteen years before The Road and seventeen years before No Country for Old Men. This was also before The Border Trilogy, published sequentially in the nineties, and before McCarthy’s plays and screenplays, such as The Stonemason and The Counselor. However, Bell’s critical appraisal of McCarthy was published three years after Blood Meridian, much heralded by Harold Bloom. This fact is significant: Bell’s claims about McCarthy can only be understood as true or false with reference to the books he treats, namely The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian. The first academic monograph on McCarthy, it was recently put back into print.
The problem with this influential survey is that it ends only halfway through McCarthy’s career. Therefore, how clearly Bell sees McCarthy and his work remains to be seen. Vereen M. Bell’s primary contention is that McCarthy presents us with a dead end—confronting us, in a kind of stoical existentialism, with the universality of death and non-being. One good example of Bell’s broad interpretation comes from the Introduction:
On the last page of Outer Dark, one of the roads, among many, that Culla Holme is aimlessly traveling comes abruptly to a portentous dead end.
‘Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.’
Bell gives us the following gloss:
The prevailing gothic and nihilistic mood of all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels is condensed in this passage.
[…]
The novel … has led us nowhere. All of its thematic implications have been left suspended, its mysteries—narrative and metaphysical—deepened but never clarified. Each promise of direction and understanding has been thwarted. Metaphorically a road is the equivalent of a signifier in language or structure: it points us in a direction and leads us somewhere that could reasonably be anticipated to be a vicinity of meaning. But the roads of McCarthy’s novels, Outer Dark in particular, do not do that. The point in the novels of the alternating lurid and lyrical events seems to be precisely that roads are helpful to us only as long as we believe they are taking us somewhere but that in the long run they don’t: that real moral experience does not lend itself to reassuring thematic paraphrase.
This is an adept and direct summation of much, but not all, of McCarthy’s work. McCarthy’s work changed over time, both in style and subject matter. The shift is dramatic and apparent for anyone who has read more than one or two of his works. A reader of the Joycean Suttree and or the Joycean-Miltonic Blood Meridian will be surprised at the brevity and clarity of his play-novella The Stonemason, or the Hemingwayish staccato (almost written as if it were already a screen-play) of No Country for Old Men and The Road.
We have already quoted a passage from Outer Dark, an early novel, above. Here is a quotation from Blood Meridian:
Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them.
Antiquely tinged, modernist, and almost approaching stream of consciousness, such passages as these are strewn liberally throughout McCarthy’s corpus, stitched together with sparse dialogue that at first seems like an attempt at hardboiled realism but eventually emerges as a kind of testament to man’s brutishness and triviality, together with two other types of passage to which McCarthy is addicted: sensuous landscapes and “process passages.” Here, there is a kind of close attention to discrete material realities, a kind of empiricism overrun with gothic qualities. It reminds one of literary modernism’s mantras: “no ideas but in things.” Typically, McCarthy’s prose is not overburdened by abstraction. His bent is towards the imagist, the visual. Yet in passages like the ones quoted above, the recurring phrase in one of McCarthy’s grotesque (and often, frankly, purple) passages is “like” or “as if.” These prepositional phrases signal the beginning of some pseudo-apocalyptic, janky likeness that often lends profundity but sometimes bathos to the passage in question. Although most of his similes work, more ridiculous examples include: “like small lucent eggs concocted alchemically out of the desert darkness.” These are the moments when McCarthy’s much-lauded genius seems to veer into self-parody and prose that screams, “I have metaphysical and thematic weight! Look at me!” For example, by the time we finish Suttree, we are exhausted by such passages. However, later works (like The Road) seem almost impoverished in their economy, although the occasional classic McCarthy passage makes an appearance.
Below is an example of a McCarthy “process passage,” minute, comprehensive descriptions of people performing certain tasks like breaking a horse, hiding a briefcase of drug money in an air vent, or setting a trap:
He took the deerhide gloves out of the basket and pulled them on and with a trowel he dug a hole in the ground and put the drag in the hole and piled the chain in after it covered it up again. Then he excavated a shallow place in the ground the shape of the trap and springs and all. He tried the trap in it and then dug some more. He put the dirt in the screenbox as he dug and then he laid the trowel by and took a pair of c-clamps from the basket and with them screwed down the springs until the jaws fell open. He held the trap up and eyed the notch in the pan while he backed off one screw and adjusted the trigger. Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eye-level against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older more subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself somewhere in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.
The reader should note that in the last two sentences of that paragraph, McCarthy moves from a highly concrete, almost mechanical description to a highly abstract simile that comments on the preceding passage’s metaphysical significance. It is a clear division, like the difference between holding one’s breath underwater and breaking the surface to draw air. And the metaphysical “commentary” is itself divided. On the one hand, it promotes the centering power, the rootedness, and the telic nature of man. Setting the trap is just so, and in the process of doing it right, there is a localized purposiveness, a meaning, a thing to be done. This helps the character find his place in the world, “fixing himself somewhere.” On the other hand, there is a flattening existential skepticism: “If there be such space. If it be knowable.” This division comes from a tension that exists throughout the whole of McCarthy’s works: a tension between a kind of nihilism that stems from the nominalist tendencies of our age and the slim possibility of truth, goodness, and beauty indicated by certain aspects of man’s nature and the world’s.
But why does McCarthy adopt these differing styles, and for what purpose? It seems that McCarthy explores different philosophical questions as he writes each of his different books. He explores these questions in various ways, but his primary preference is for immersive hyper-descriptive “realism” a la Joyce and Faulkner. He tells us the story, and that story speaks for itself. But he is no stranger to the parable, the allegory, or contemplation. His characters will often sum up a cosmic vision of the world by reflecting upon a particular scene. In fact, it is by contemplating nature through the medium of his art that McCarthy presents us with different perspectives on the primary questions of life: who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? The answers to these questions change from book to book. Every artist, by presenting us with a simulacrum of reality, draws our attention to those aspects of reality that they are able to show us. What parts of the real does McCarthy see fit to present to us? What does he leave out?
Cormac McCarthy’s major subject is Death and man’s relationship with it. One could broaden the statement by saying “the problem of evil” more generally, but that is to dampen the visceral nature of McCarthy’s technique and style. Death is emblematic of evil. Death is the evil of all evils, the privation of all privations. Every limitation and finitude in man can be expressed by the symbol of Death. For McCarthy, Death is the end of being, both in the sense of its edge and destination. Death is indeed a problem. Only in certain cases and in specific ways does our author present a solution.
Suttree is the book that most clearly represents this tendency. Suttree shares vices and virtues with Blood Meridian. Suttree is disorganized, non-sequiturian, episodic. It is more akin to Don Quixote than anything. One feels that it and Blood Meridian might have been shorter. It is astounding how McCarthy manages to maintain the same constant level of pressure in both works. One is not drawn into any story, but the intensity of the prose never lets up. Unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, which clearly influences the work, Suttree does not lead its eponymous antihero towards any definable goal or end. However, there is a similar effect: both affect a kind of stream of consciousness, although in Suttree, the narrator’s rather than the main character’s descriptions and thoughts are presented. Suttree is an immersive but irrational experience of decay, death, and decadence. In it, the filthy, grotesque, and deformed have full sway. Moreover, since nothing ever happens to effect a change or development in the character’s life, there is no sense that each episode is essential to the story, since there is no story to tell. Everything decays and stops existing materially, and although some of the episodes provide a kind of witness to humanity’s reaction to this state of affairs; blind optimism, rage, delirium, black-magic, nostalgia, and so forth, there is no sense in which any of our actions are of any avail, or have any value. The majority of the characters are defined by their desires; there is no rational man or woman among them. Good things exist; there is food and material wealth, sex, and even a kind of communion with the natural world:
He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth’s core sucking his bones, a moment’s giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.
But as in the rest of the novel, everything becomes submerged in the flood of existence. Notice that Suttree’s experience of the natural world speaks to him, but in a pantheistic sense. “The earth’s core sucking his bones” sounds as much like burial and decomposition as it does like feeling the gravitational pull of the earth.
There are hints of a structure: just as Don Quixote’s story involves a series of “sallies” into the outside world, armed with the armor of delusion and wearing the sword of innocence, so Suttree, armed with a total and utterly ironical distance from everything and everybody, moves through the landscape of Knoxville and the Tennessee River examining various episodes of human greed, lust, anger, drunkenness, squalor, poverty, sacrilege, and desuetude. It is a kind of atheist’s Ecclesiastes.
Bell’s case is that McCarthy presents us with a vision of cosmic nihilism, and in all his books, there is ample evidence, as cited above. In addition, McCarthy seems to adopt what one might call a nominalist or even a Lucretian attitude toward metaphysics. To be clear, by nominalist, I mean the position that the truth of being is not, on the whole, perceivable to man, either in God or His works. It is as if the world outside of man is meaningless, and man’s meaning is within himself. The good man alone carries the fire. Thus, McCarthy seems intent on presenting us with things we would rather not see: death, torture, decay, poverty, slime, vice, and darkness. His artistic vision is almost totally bent towards the liminal, the extreme, and the abnormal. Only occasionally do we get a glimpse of something normal, something that actually speaks to how human life has been normally lived.
The reasons for this are not hard to construe. Since (at least) Darwin and Freud, man has become more popularly conceived, not as a ghost bottled in the machine, but as a deluded consciousness that is nothing more than the outgrowth of animal life. Hence the subconscious has been thought (by a certain generation) to be the truth of the conscious, the animal of the human, and, in an inversion of the story of Genesis, non-being has been taken to be the truth of being, and death the truth of life. Sartre’s existentialism summed it up the modern metaphysical view perfectly: “l’existence précède l’essence.” McCarthy’s task as an artist, then, is not that of Sartre, but of the sometime-stoical Nietzsche. As Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, “The poison from which the weaker nature perishes strengthens the strong man—and he does not call it poison.”
However, there are exceptions. McCarthy also pays a conscientious tribute to man’s nature as a conscious being and even as a being with higher potencies, one who can, to quote The Road, “carry the fire.” The imagery of light and fire, symbolically representing the human soul, has its lineage in the gnostic tradition. But it also recalls the sacred fire kept alive by the vestal virgins of ancient Rome. It is the fire of humanity and human skill at erecting temporary barriers against the savagery of nature and our own evil.
No Country for Old Men ends with such a passage, describing a dream sequence:
I was on horseback goin through the mountains at night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me, and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire 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 fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
So does Blood Meridian:
In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… (351)
Likewise, the theme runs throughout The Road:
We’re going to be okay, aren’t we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That’s right. Because we’re carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.
Again, later in the book:
I want to be with you.
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I dont know how to. Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I dont know where it is.
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there.
I can see it.
Just take me with you. Please.
I cant.
Please, Papa.
I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
You said you wouldnt ever leave me.
I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
The purpose of these passages seems clear: they set themselves against the predominant tone of McCarthy’s work. They are, as it were, an asterisk set at the end of Death’s paragraph.
Another such asterisk—one that seems to counteract Bell’s thesis of McCarthy the nihilist, the ironic Diogenes of literature—is McCarthy’s novella/play The Stonemason. The play is set in the Louisville, Kentucky of the 1970s. Its action follows the Telfair family as they cope with the death and legacy of their patriarch, affectionately referred to as “Papaw,” a master stonemason. Papaw’s grandson, Ben Telfair, narrates. He is the only member of the family who has carried the fire. His own father abandoned the family trade, but Ben had a close relationship with his dying grandfather. As the play progresses, McCarthy allows Papaw to become an ideal figure, an image of a good man in a world that often lacks integrity. Papaw’s goodness and integrity come from his trade. Ben comments: “for true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch pressed in place by the thumb of God.” This relationship between the “truth” found in masonry and the cosmos alike is reiterated throughout the play. Indeed, masonry sets the moral standard of the play, and the various character’s proximity to or distance from the craft determines their fate. Ben’s nephew, Soldier, joins a gang and becomes a drug addict. His father commits suicide. Ben occupies the center of the story as leader of his sorrowing family and heir to his grandfather’s wisdom. That wisdom is particular, but also cosmic. Ben speaks of his grandfather:
I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness unknown and unknowable both in truth and in principle where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and let the rain carve them if it can.
McCarthy allows, in a rare moment, for the possibility of a connection between the principle of existence and the phenomena of existence. He sees it incarnate in knowledge of the world, in the logic of human craft. Even if the principal cause of the world is “unknown and unknowable,” it is still “silent nowhere in the universe.” From the creator of the demonic Judge Holden, this is an astonishing sentence. It echoes St. Bonaventure, who wrote that “the entire world is like a mirror full of lights presenting the divine wisdom . . . ” But of course, just as we cannot attribute the Judge’s words to McCarthy, neither can we do the same with Ben. However, this sentence is significant precisely because it runs so much against the grain of McCarthy’s broader work. It is as if, having presented his witness to the reality of evil and steeled himself against it. He felt compelled to quietly testify to the primary existence of goodness and its possibility for human beings. It is primarily because of The Stonemason that I believe McCarthy was not simply an ironist. Bell’s thesis may be true as far as it goes, but it still has to contend with the fact that McCarthy chose to represent both evil and good, both demonic vice and human goodness, both life and death in his work.
Michael Yost has written and published essays and poems for The St. Austin Review, The Brazen Head, Crisis Magazine, Dappled Things, Communitas, and Hearth and Field. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and children, where he is the Senior Admissions Officer for his alma mater, the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.
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