Reviewing Cormac McCarthy's New Novels - A Different Take

I like Cormac McCarthy, I would not say I would follow him everywhere, but there would be few places I would not go. His novels do not flinch from American violence. His style is as distinctive and hard as Hemingway's. Blood Meridian impressed me by how it transcended and transgressed genre; the same can be said about The Road.

His two latest novels have been reviewed favorably, but the review published by The Baffler, Erik Baker's Reenchanted Science How did Cormac McCarthy become a shill for libertarian utopianism? presents problems not raised by other reviews.

Who knows? I doubt McCarthy does. These novels are vehicles for his thematic preoccupations, and for this purpose who the Westerns are is more important than what they do, or when they die. Perhaps most fundamentally, they are the tortured children of the atomic age. This is one thing they have in common with the Santa Fe Institute (one referent, I believe, of their audaciously polyvalent surname). SFI was founded by alumni of nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory in the twilight of the Cold War; the Westerns were sired by a Manhattan Project physicist. As his children remember it, Western père was unrepentant and even uncomprehending in the face of the magnitude of his sin. In the schema of the antimodernist German philosopher Oswald Spengler, a touchstone in Stella Maris, he symbolizes the scientist as Faust—so entranced by the unlimited demonic power at his disposal that he forfeits his soul.  

McCarthy is at his best as both a stylist and a moralist here in his treatment of the Bomb. The single most powerful passage in either novel, for my money, is Alicia’s account of her father’s recollection of the Trinity test, where not coincidentally her speech shifts suddenly into McCarthy’s familiar descriptive voice:

The ungodly detonation followed by the slow rumble, the afterclap that rolled away over the burning countryside into a world that had never existed before this side of the sun. The desert creatures evaporating without a cry and the scientists watching with this thing standing twinned in the black lenses of their goggles. And my father watching it through his fingers like See-No-Evil.

A foretaste of the apocalypse erupts into history as the hubristic government scientist shrinks away from the fruits of his labor: this is the nightmare that haunts the Westerns, and in opposition to which they strive to define themselves.

The review raises a point here where I find myself differing from McCarthy:

 Redemption lies in the knowledge that the world is irredeemable: all those scholars who’ve spent their careers explicating McCarthy’s gnosticism—Leo Daugherty influentially described Blood Meridian as a “gnostic tragedy” in 1992—will take a victory lap after reading these new novels. Whether McCarthy’s message is as transgressive or profound as he hopes is another question. It seems to me to depart little from the form of gnosticism that Harold Bloom, one of McCarthy’s most important early champions, described as the “American Religion.” Surely most Americans do not need McCarthy to tell them that the eggheads don’t know as much as they think they do; that this corrupt world is not our true home; that wisdom is the recognition that there are things that cannot be explained and should not be meddled with. In the form of the libertarian intellectual Friedrich Hayek’s protest against “scientism”—as he saw it, the socialist delusion that it was possible through rational planning to improve on the spontaneous outcomes of capitalist markets—a very similar conception of knowledge and its limits has exerted an enormous influence on the development of neoliberal politics on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1970s. “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design,” Hayek wrote near the end of his life.

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It’s compelling cosmology but bad social theory. Most of the history of science has taken place somewhere in the vast terrain between the demiurges and the mystics, between Faustian and gnostic science. Here innumerable anonymous chemists have gone to work in large corporate labs, tinkering with the formula for this or that industrial product; here survey researchers and community epidemiologists have painstakingly assembled evidence of the toxicity of many of those products; here patient-activists and bureaucrats have met together to review clinical trial protocols for experimental pharmaceuticals; here graduate student research workers have organized labor unions and challenged ingrained patterns of harassment and discrimination in their workplace. There is heroism and villainy to be found, but there are no heroes and villains, nor geniuses. Only people. 

My problem lies in me trying to manage my depression. When depressed, I certainly thought the world was irredeemable. I would go so far as to say I thought humanity should do the world a favor and die. There was no good value in people or the civilization we have built. We had only the heat death of the universe ahead of us, which would render null any and all achievements of humanity. Accepting humanity's irredeemability Would put me back into the craziness of my old, self-destructive ways. I do not see any profit in going back down that road.

What I find common in Albert Camus' absurdism and Orthodox Christianity is a world that may be redeemed by the acts of men, but one that can be endured. Neither sees man as perfect, but as an ongoing process. Now, I will go further and say a literature that divides on the line of good/bad is a Manichean literature. Such a literature may be appealing to American thinking, which does have a problem with complexity. Such a literature, infantilizes its readers. Heroes without flaws meant to be overcome, are not truly heroic. As for ethics, I once told a woman agonizing over her choice of an abortion, it was an abortion or likely death and the separation of her daughters, the important ethical choices are not between good and bad or good and good, but between bad and bad. All we can do is make the best choice possible and live with the results. That was about 25 years ago. Now I would add, we cannot get so wrapped in the badness to think there is no good; that we cannot let our regrets poison us into thinking all is wholly bad. People and our lives are a mixture of good and bad; good intentions can lead to bad results and bad intentions can create good; what we learn from our acts, good and bad, is the standard by what our lives need to be judged. Seems to me, we do well if we break even.

sch 12/24/22