More Cormac McCarthy

 I like what my friend, Joel C. wrote me:

Hey Sammy, just writing to commiserate with you over the loss of Cormac — a great writer who wrote so lyrically of a dark, often bleak, landscape where beauty and violence intertwined. I’ve always found his prose, as I’m sure you know, to be lovely and fierce and inspirational. He was one of a handful of authors whose works are, in my estimation, essential reading. I may have to once again revisit Blood Meridian for perhaps the 4th(?) time. Rest in Peace…

 Joel was the one who turned me onto Cormac McCarthy.

From The Western Gothic in Film, Music, and Literature: A Primer:

...But for a western novel to be truly gothic, we need more than starkness and loneliness; we need more than a morally ambivalent antihero. We need a sense of the grotesque. I would argue that, in this case, Cormac McCarthy is the master of the western gothic. Novels like Blood Meridian and The Road combine this western aesthetic with something truly terrifying. Sometimes McCarthy’s lyricism distracts us from the grotesqueness of his vision. In Blood Meridian, he writes, “…all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.” Throughout the novel, McCarthy forces us to reckon with the realities of the Old West, realities that include blood-soaked scalps, dead infants, and severed body parts. Other of his novels, namely The Road and No Country for Old Men, continue with this brutality within the setting of the west, but they don’t quite match the pure grotesquerie of Blood Meridian.

From The Hedgehog Review, Cormac McCarthy’s Poetics of Being: Depicting life in the border country between cosmic order and immanent futility by Christopher Yates. I get his point, one that I think I missed in my reading (but we know I am not all that smart), that is made in the following:

It is a difficult question, of course, because it forces us to peel back our humanist confidence and query the very nature of existence and how we can know it. This search is possibly why Aristotle wrote his Poetics, why Nietzsche penned The Birth of Tragedy, and why the Book of Job appears in the Bible. But it is certainly not an “abstract” consideration. McCarthy knew that the asking of it may matter more than the answering. He did not side with nihilism (despite appearances). Nor would he countenance any inclination to transcendent cosmic assurance that failed to struggle with abyssal darkness. What his works do in a singular way is expose us to the question, face us with the contest, and show how it is the kind of existential puzzle that can, if endured, help us live up to the madness and mysteries of life.  

A good point of entry into McCarthy’s work is his 2006 play, The Sunset Limited, in which two strangers meet on a New York City subway platform just as one of them attempts to take his own life. The action unfolds afterward, in the spartan Bronx apartment of the man who intervened to save the other. The two engage in a long discussion about whether the value of life is assured, or not, by the claims of religious faith. Motivated by a resolve to live up to the logic of his atheistic nihilism, the guest (a professor), wants to leave and get on with his suicide. The host, an ex-con, Christian, and caregiver to society’s castoffs, wants to help the professor find faith in life through faith in God. Categorically different, the two men bond through their tacit agreement that the topic matters, that reason matters, and that a person must draw ultimate conclusions only after close and honest consideration of the hard realities of human existence. Yet they are unable to arrive at a common answer. The host challenges the professor: “I think it’s what you do believe that is carryin you off, not what you don’t.” The professor doubles down: “The world is basically a forced labor camp from which the workers—perfectly innocent—are led forth by lottery, a few each day, to be executed.” McCarthy leaves it to the reader to imagine where these lives and their allegiances go from there. And he impresses on us the sense that the question debated in that apartment must—whatever shape it takes—be addressed.

Yes, this is not hype. Yes, McCarthy does not make things easy for readers. I suggest reading the Hedgehog essay in full, then go read McCarthy. He will make you think and he will make you feel, and he will leave you wondering. I still find myself thinking about Blood Meridian.

sch 6/23