Celestial Timepiece

By Joyce Carol Oates

Originally published in the New York Review of Books
This revised and expanded version collected in In Rough Country

“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?”
—Blood Meridian

Pascal’s enigmatic remark in the Pensées “Life is a dream a little less inconstant” would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, which unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol Blood Meridian; from the prose ballads of the Border Trilogy to the tightly plotted crime novel, No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motion—on foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy’s worlds as “real” except in the way that fever dreams are “real,” a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was brought to live in East Tennessee at the age of four and from there moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. By his own account, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1952 and was asked not to return because his grades were so poor. Subsequently he drifted about the country, worked at odd jobs, enlisted in the US Air Force for four years, of which two were spent in Alaska; after his discharge, he returned to the University of Tennessee for four years but left without receiving a degree. McCarthy’s first four novels, which won for him a small, admiring audience of literary-minded readers, are distinctly Southern Gothic in tone, setting, characters, language; his fifth, the mockepic Blood Meridian, set mostly in Mexico and California in the years 1849 to 1878, marks the author’s dramatic reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances for whom the intensely personal psychology of the traditional realistic novel holds little interest.

Rare among writers, especially contemporary American writers, Cormac McCarthy seems to have written no autobiographical or memoirist fiction or essays. Suttree (1979), set along the banks of the Tennessee River at Knoxville, has the sprawl, heft, and gritty intimacy of autobiographical fiction in the mode of Jack Kerouac, but it is not. McCarthy’s most intelligent and sensitive protagonist so far has been John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain, a stoic loner at the age of sixteen who plays chess with surprising skill, is an instinctive horseman, and, in other circumstances, would have studied to be a veterinarian, but John Grady is not representative of McCarthy’s characters and shares no biographical background with the author. More generally, McCarthy’s subjects are likely to be individuals driven by raw impulse and need, fanaticism rather than idealism, for whom formal education would have ended in grade school and who, if they carry a Bible with them like the nameless kid of Blood Meridian, “no word of it could he read.”

In The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, the dreamlike opacity of Faulkner’s prose is predominant. These are slow-moving novels in which back-country natives drift like somnambulists in tragic/farcical dramas beyond their comprehension, let alone control. The setting is the East Tennessee hill country in the vicinity of Maryville, near the author’s childhood home. Very like their predecessors in Faulkner’s fiction set in mythical rural Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, McCarthy’s uneducated, inarticulate, and impoverished characters struggle for survival with a modicum of dignity; though they may endure tragic fates, they lack the intellectual capacity for insight. In The Orchard Keeper, the elderly Ather Ownby, “keeper” of a long-decayed peach orchard, is an independent and sympathetic figure who winds up confined to a mental hospital after firing his shotgun at county police officers. His rebellious spirit has been quelled, he has little but banalities to offer to a neighbor who has come to visit him: “Most ever man loves peace, and none better than an old man.” In Outer Dark, the hapless young mother Rinthy searches the Appalachian countryside for her lost baby, taken from her by her brother, the baby’s father, and given to an itinerant tinker: a mix of Faulkner’s Dewey Dell, of As I Lay Dying, who vainly seeks an abortion, and Lena Grove of Light in August, who vainly seeks the man who has impregnated her, Rinthy makes her way on foot through an increasingly spooky landscape, but never finds her baby. Outer Dark is a more willfully obscure and self-consciously literary novel than The Orchard Keeper, burdened by an excess of heavily Faulknerian prose in which even acts of startling violence come muted and dreamlike, lacking an elemental credibility:

The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme [Rinthy’s brother] saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.

Beyond even Faulknerian obliqueness, McCarthy has eliminated all quotation marks from his prose so that his characters’ speech isn’t distinct from the narrative voice, in this way adumbrating the curious texture of our dreams, in which spoken language isn’t heard so much as felt and dialogue is swallowed up in its surroundings. This manner of narration, which some will find distracting and pretentious, like McCarthy’s continuous use of (untranslated) Spanish in his later novels, seems appropriate in these circumstances, and in any case will persist through his career:

The man had stretched out before the fire and was propped up on one elbow. He said: I wonder where a feller might find him a pair of bullhide boots like them you got.

Holme’s mouth was dust dry and the piece of meat seemed to have grown bigger. I don’t know, he said.

Don’t know?

He turned the shirt again. He was very white and naked sitting there. They was give to me, he said.

Of McCarthy’s four Tennessee-set novels, Child of God (1973) is the most memorable, a tour de force of masterfully sustained prose set pieces chronicling the life and abrupt death of a mountain man named Lester Ballard with a proclivity for collecting and enshrining dead bodies, predominantly those of attractive young females, in a cave to be discovered by Sevier County, Tennessee, officials only after his death:

The bodies were covered with adipocere, a pale gray-cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places, and scallops of light fungus grew among them as they do on logs rotting in the forest. The chamber was filled with a sour smell, a faint reek of ammonia. The sheriff and the deputy made a noose from a rope and they slipped it around the upper body of the first corpse and drew it tight…Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver’s chin. She ascended dangling. She sloughed in the weem of the noose. A gray rheum dripped.

Presumably based upon an actual case, or cases, of necrophiliac devotion in Appalachia, the legend of Lester Ballard is presented with dramatic brevity and an oblique sort of sympathy in a chorus of local voices:

I don’t know. They say he never was right after his daddy killed himself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run off…Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him down. He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hanging. We just cut him down, let him fall on the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time.

The narrator’s voice suggests an eerie channeling of the “child of God” (that is, one who is “touched in the head”), Lester Ballard, if Ballard possessed the vocabulary to express his deepest yearnings: “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.” Ballard’s debased and choked voice in collusion with the author’s skill at simile yields wonderful results on every page:

When Ballard came out onto the porch there was a thin man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.

Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor. They looked like constipated gargoyles.

Say you found that old gal up on the turnaround?

Ballard sniffed. What gal? he said.

Freed of the ponderous solemnity of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness, McCarthy has found a way to dramatize Faulknerian themes in a voice brilliantly his own. Like a balloon the author’s omniscient eye floats above the bleakly comic adventures of his mock-hero: “An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched [Lester Ballard] go.” Among the set pieces of Child of God are inspired riffs like outtakes from Erskine Caldwell’s luridly exploitative Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), in which redneck Appalachians spawn swarms of dim-witted mammalian females as in a pornographic fever dream: the dump keeper’s “gangling progeny” with “black hair hanging from their armpits” and “sluggard lids,” named from a medical dictionary—“Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue”—who move like cats and like cats in heat attract “swains” by the dozens. Ballard is attracted to the “long blonde flatshanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers. She laughed all the time.” Yet it isn’t Ballard but the omniscient narrative voice that presents such scenes:

They fell pregnant one by one. [The dump keeper] beat them. The wife cried and cried. There were three births that summer. The house was filling up, both rooms, the trailer…The twelve year old began to swell. The air grew close. Grew rank and fetid. He found a pile of rags in a corner. Small lumps of yellow shit wrapped up and laid by. One day in the woods…he came across two figures humping away. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of his girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through the woods hauling up his breeches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He over-balanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Ohhh.

Fleeing lawmen, Ballard finds himself trapped in an underground cave:

In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.

Tragic farce, or farcical tragedy, Child of God is very likely McCarthy’s most perfectly realized work for its dramatic compression and sustained stylistic bravura, without the excesses of his later, more ambitious novels.

Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West, McCarthy’s fifth novel and the first set in the southwest borderlands to which he would lay a passionate literary claim, is the author’s most challenging work of fiction, a nightmare chronicle of American marauders in Mexico in the 1850s, it is rendered in voices grandiloquent and colloquial, ecstatic and debased, biblical and bombastic. Like William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Blood Meridian is a highly idiosyncratic novel much admired by other writers, predominantly male writers, but difficult of access to a general reading audience, if not repellent. Admirers of Blood Meridian invariably dislike and disparage McCarthy’s “accessible” best-selling Border Trilogy as if these novels were a betrayal of the solemn rites of macho sadism and impacted fury of Blood Meridian,¹ for which the ideal cover art would be a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of some scenes of Zane Grey

Yet Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Whereas Blood Meridian scorns any idealism except the jeremiad—“War is god”—the interlinked novels of the Border Trilogy testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh, exhausting, and dangerous environment: “I love this life,” says Billy Parham of Cities of the Plain. After the phantasmagoria of Blood Meridian, the domestic realism of much of the Border Trilogy comes as a natural corrective.

All of the novels of McCarthy’s memorialize the southwestern landscape and its skies and weather, obsessively. In all, men and boys on horseback are in continual, often repetitive movement. “They rode on” is a mantra persistent as a clatter of hoofbeats. Often, whether in nineteenth-century Mexico or twentieth-century Texas, men may camp “in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains,” oblivious of the history of such indigenous native ruins as they are of what such ruins might suggest of their own mortality. In the most romantic of the novels, All the Pretty Horses, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole rides on his grandfather’s ranch beneath a sun “blood red and elliptic,” along an old Comanche trail:

At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like 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…all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.

“In Blood Meridian the adolescent romance-fantasy of Native American savages on the warpath erupts into an apocalyptic reality experienced by a crew of American mercenaries hired by a Mexican governor to scalp Indians at $100 a head:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stove pipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil…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…

…they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives…and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls “of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.

McCarthy’s scenes of ecstatic violence are interlarded through Blood Meridian with a periodicity the reader will find effective or numbing depending upon his predilection for fantasy violence beyond even the biblical Book of Revelation or the most lurid of comic books.

Where Child of God is a horror story writ small, depicted with masterly restraint, Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence. The “degeneracy of mankind” is McCarthy’s great subject, infinitely demonstrable and as timely in our era of jingoistic American aggression as it would have been in the decade following the end of the Vietnam War debacle, when Blood Meridian was published. Early on in the novel, a U.S. army captain broods over the “loss” of Mexican territory in the recent (1846– 1848) war:

We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didn’t give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion on God’s earth of honor or justice or the meaning of a republican government…

The captain leaned back and folded his arms. 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…We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them…

We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land.

Soon, the nameless kid from Tennessee, eerily adumbrating Cormac McCarthy’s migration westward, has signed up with a renegade band of Americans to embark upon, in a Mennonite prophet’s words, “War of a madman’s making into a foreign land.”

Though “the kid” is the closest to a sympathetic protagonist in Blood Meridian, McCarthy makes no effort to characterize him in any but a rudimentary way. We are not meant to identify with him, only to just perceive him, the youngest among a crew of psychopath-killers, as an unreflective participant in a series of violent, often demonic and deranged, episodes that soon begin to repeat themselves. Countless men seem to be killed, yet the crew, led by a psychopath named Glanton, seems never to be depleted: “They rode on.”  Blood Meridian is coolly detached from any of its subjects, ironic in the way of a classic Brechtian play; terrible things occur but only as in fairy tales, bluntly summarized and soon forgotten:

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the [Gileno Indian] 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….One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and the humans on fire came shrieking forth…

Among Glanton’s crew, a black man named Jackson resolves his feud with a white man named Jackson:

The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head.

Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

Apache revenge for the Americans’ atrocities:

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests…

Animals, too, are prodigiously slaughtered in Blood Meridian, among them horses, dogs, puppies, even a dancing bear. Here, the Americans attack a Mexican mule team, unleashing an ecstatic gush of language beyond even Faulkner:

The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth’s heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside.

Among the mercenaries is an unlikely seer/prophet known as the judge. Initially a figure of uncanny eloquence and utterly without conscience, the judge would seem to be McCarthy’s demented spokesman, interpreting what would otherwise be brute violence passing immediately into oblivion. The judge is a gigantic man nearly seven feet tall, bald, beardless, the “enormous dome of his head when he bared it blinding white and perfectly circumscribed so that it looked to have been painted.” A figure out of some demonic mythology or cartoon Hades, the judge “shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere on that vast corpus, not in any crevice nor in the great bores of his nose and not upon his chest nor in his ears nor any tuft at all above his eyes nor to the lids therof.” He carries a rifle inscribed Et In Arcadia Ego. He rescues an Apache child from a slaughter only to wantonly scalp him on the trail as, later, he rescues two orphaned puppies only to toss them into a river. Even on the war trail he pauses like a gentleman naturalist to “botanize” and take notes for demented sermons to be delivered between bouts of mayhem and murder:

The truth about the world…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 antecedent nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddy field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The judge’s constant theme is the “degeneracy of mankind” of which he would seem to be a prime example, preaching an ethic out of Thomas Hobbes in which “all trades are contained in that of war” and “war is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” Improbably, the obese, often naked judge survives while most of his comrades are killed; the last we see of him, through the kid’s eyes, is in 1878, in a tavern somewhere in Texas “among every sort of man” as their seeming exemplar. Prone to inflated rhetoric, as much buffoon as seer, the judge would seem to be a more deranged and far more malevolent Captain Ahab, or an unstoppered Kurtz (of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) whose succinct judgment “The horror! The horror!” has been replaced here by slews of verbiage and goofy behavior in the way of Marlon Brando’s shamelessly campy performance in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a reimagining of Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. But where Conrad presents the “impenetrable darkness” of the debased Kurtz sparingly, McCarthy so frequently unleashes the judge upon the reader that over the sprawl of hundreds of pages he becomes increasingly a caricature:

Towering over [the dancers] is the judge and he is naked dancing…huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die.

Cormac McCarthy’s least-known and surely most undervalued work is his five-act play The Stonemason (1994), a remarkable feat of ventriloquism in its intimate depiction of four generations of a close-knit black family, descendants of slaves, in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. With its enormous, commercially impractical cast (thirteen named characters in addition to numerous others) and lengthy, eloquent but undramatic monologues, The Stonemason would seem to have been written to be read and not performed.

Where Blood Meridian celebrates an unflinching and numbing nihilism, The Stonemason celebrates bonds of family love and responsibility. Like the Border Trilogy, it celebrates the integrity of work and the sometimes mystical bond between individuals (in McCarthy’s work, exclusively men) linked by a common craft or trade. “You can’t separate wisdom from the common experience, and the common experience is just what the worker has in plenty.” The play’s narrator is a thirty-two-year-old black man, Ben Telfair, who’d originally planned to be a teacher but turned stonemason in emulation of his revered 101-year-old grandfather Papaw; it’s a memory play, with elaborate stage directions intended to “give distance to the events and to place them in a completed past.” Its central event is the death of the patriarch stonemason Papaw, which seems to precipitate, as in a classic tragedy, the sudden disintegration of the Telfair family: the suicide of Ben’s father, a stonemason not content to live within his financial means, and the heroin-overdose death of Ben’s nineteen-year-old nephew Soldier. Intelligently tender-hearted, realistic in language, characters, and story, The Stonemason more resembles a play by August Wilson than anything by Cormac McCarthy; it’s a testament to the author’s versatility if not his audacity.

Much of the play is comprised of beautifully composed language turning upon Ben’s idealization of Papaw and of the sacred vocation of stonemasonry. The play avoids a dramatic resolution but takes us through a period of mourning and regeneration as Ben, grieving for his losses, has a vision of his deceased grandfather that assures him “[Papaw] would guide me all my days and he would not fail me, not fail me, not ever fail me.” Is this ending meant to be taken at face value, or ironically? The Stonemason would seem to be a play lacking a subtext, imagined without irony; its conflicts are open and reiterated. Admirer’s of McCarthy’s lurid grandiloquence and penchant for minutely described scenes of carnage would very likely be baffled by the naive and unquestioned idealism of The Stonemason:

Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?

And,

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 is pressed in place by the thumb of God…For we invent nothing but what God has put to hand.

As The Stonemason is a rebuke of sorts to the “war god” of Blood Meridian, so the closely linked novels of the Border Trilogy are a tribute, in their warmly sympathetic depiction of the lives of young ranch hands in Texas and New Mexico in the 1950s, to such traditional values as friendship, loyalty, compassion, courage, physical endurance, and (male) stoicism; though suffused with nostalgia for a way of life rapidly coming to an end in the Southwest in the decade following the end of World War II, for the most part the novels avoid sentimentality. (Why “sentimentality” need be avoided in serious literature, as it’s rarely avoided by serious people in actual life, is another issue.) Where the prevailing atmosphere of the Blood Meridian is apocalyptic and its structure operatic, erupting into arias of esoteric violence and inflated language at regular intervals, the prevailing atmosphere of the Border Trilogy is something like the common sense of (male) adult maturity as it collides with (male) adolescent passion and idealism. What erupts as drama, often as tragic drama, in the ballad-like tales of John Grady Cole (of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain) and his contemporary Billy Parham (of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), is adolescent yearning, beautifully rendered by McCarthy in an infinity of ways through hundreds of pages of prose in homage to the West:

There was an old horseskull in the brush and [John Grady Cole] squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands. Frail and brittle. Bleached paper white. He squatted in the long light holding it…

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

With this statement the novelist would seem to bare his own ardent heart, making vulnerable what in practitioners of literary irony is kept well hidden.

In a telling scene in Cities of the Plain, John Grady Cole on his way to town with “hair all slicked back like a muskrat” pauses for a conversation with an old ranch hand to whom he speaks with a touchingly filial courtesy. The old man tells John Grady a tale of barroom violence in Juarez, Mexico, in 1929.

…Tales of the old west, he said.

Yessir.

Lots of people shot and killed.

Why were they?

Mr Johnson passed the tips of his fingers across his jaw. Well, he said. I think these people mostly come from Tennessee and Kentucky. Edgefield district in South Carolina. Southern Missouri. They were mountain people. They come from mountain people in the old country. They always would shoot you. It wasn’t just here. They kept comin west and about the time they got here was about the time Sam Colt invented the sixshooter and it was the first time these people could afford a gun you could carry around in your belt. That’s all there ever was to it. It had nothin to do with the country at all. The west.

Nothing to do, in other words, with the “degeneracy of mankind” but only with the brainless predilection for violence in a specific historic/sociological context.

Through the more than one thousand pages of the Border Trilogy the essential conflict is between two distinct ways of life: the way of the wanderer-on-horseback and the way of settled, circumscribed life. The yearning to leave home and “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (in Huckleberry Finn’s memorable final words) is perhaps the most powerful of yearnings in McCarthy’s novels, far more convincing, for instance, than John Grady Cole’s romantic infatuations with Mexican girls. Though for most Americans vast, empty spaces of rural Texas and New Mexico would seem roomy enough, for the boy-heroes of McCarthy’s fiction Mexico is the region of exotic adventure and mystery: “where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of man.” The slickly villainous Mexican pimp Eduardo of Cities of the Plain gives the yearning a cruder interpretation:

[Americans] 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. Being farmboys of course the first place they think to look of course is a whorehouse.

In fact there is nothing salacious nor even sexual in the interlocked tales of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Even as John Grady becomes a lover he remains in essence chastely stoic as the hero of a traditional boy’s adventure story.

Initially, both John Grady and Billy, of Texas and New Mexico respectively, are drawn to crossing the Mexican border on horseback as a means of escaping the increasingly somber facts of their lives (with the death of John Grady’s grandfather, the family ranch will be sold and he must leave; both Billy Parham’s parents are murdered) and of proving themselves as men. Though minutely grounded in the verisimilitude of ranch life and the gravitas of the physical world, which no one has more powerfully evoked than Cormac McCarthy, each novel attempts to link its boy-heroes with ballad or fairy-tale elements that some readers may find implausible, if not preposterous. The best way of appreciating McCarthy’s achievement in the Border Trilogy is simply to suspend disbelief when the novels swerve into their mythic mode. For example, the first part of The Crossing is a tenderly observed love story of a kind between the teenaged Billy Parham and a pregnant female wolf he has trapped, and leads across the Mexican border with the intention of releasing her in the mountains, is an extraordinary piece of imaginative prose, like the novel’s final pages in which Billy encounters a terribly crippled stray dog. Here is Billy’s homage to the mysterious and beautiful predator he has had to kill, to end her suffering:

He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight…Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from…He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.

John Grady’s “ardent heart” for horses is equally convincing, but far less convincing is the boy’s predilection for falling disastrously in love with Mexican girls (highborn in All the Pretty Horses, an abused prostitute in Cities of the Plain) whom he naively wishes to marry. Not much of this is credible, and virtually none of it is original, but the doomed boy–girl romance of All the Pretty Horses helped to make the novel McCarthy’s breakthrough best seller. In the more skillfully composed Cities of the Plain, in essance a reprise of All the Pretty Horses in a darker tone, John Grady’s second love affair, with a teenaged prostitute both abused and saintly in the way of a Dostoyevskian girl of the streets, leads to their death in a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence with Eduardo, stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play. Before he is killed by the American boy he hasn’t taken altogether seriously, Eduardo pronounces this cultural judgment:

In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him. Whores. Superstition. Finally death. For that is what has brought you here. That is what you were seeking…

Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one. But 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.

In McCarthy’s later fiction such seemingly allegorical figures begin to intrude, as if the author had become impatient with the conventions of realism, like the later, pointedly didactic Tolstoy in his “moral fables” telling us what he wants us to think in an elevated vatic language. Dialogue gives way to rambling monologues, sermons, and homilies in the second half of The Crossing, as Billy Parham encounters strangers on his pilgrimage, each with a story to tell him. After the dramatic conclusion of Cities of the Plain, the author adds an anticlimactic epilogue in which a garrulous stranger appears to tell the now seventy-eight-year-old Billy Parham what life is all about:

This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.

It’s as if the novelist were providing a gloss on his novel, or his notes to himself during its composition.

So long as McCarthy trusts to John Grady Cole and Billy Parham to embody truths they cannot perhaps articulate, the Border novels are works of surpassing emotional power and beauty; elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world, in the decades following World War II. “The world will never be the same,” the adolescent Billy is told by an older horseman in The Crossing, to which Billy replies, “I know it. It ain’t now.” By the end of the trilogy Billy has become an elderly homeless man, long since horseless and friendless, taken in by a family out of pity and given “a shed room off the kitchen that was much like the room he’d slept in as a boy.”

As if we were forced to see Huckleberry Finn in his later years, a homeless drifter broken in body and spirit, for whom the romance of “setting off for the Territory” is long past.

A partial inventory of the macho artillery employed in McCarthy’s ninth novel No Country for Old Men includes: a short-barreled Uzi with a twenty-five round clip; an AK-47 automatic; a short-barreled H & K machine pistol with a black nylon shoulderstrap; a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol stock and a twenty-round drum magazine; a Tec-9 with two extra magazines; a nickel-plated government .45 automatic pistol; a heavy-barreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut and a Unert1 telescopic sight; a stainless steel .357 revolver; a nine-millimeter Glock; a twelve-gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish fitted with a shop-made silencer “fully a foot long and big around as a beercan.” Too many to count are undesignated pistols and shotguns, some of them short-barreled. There is a cattle gun acquired by a psychopath killer and put to cruel use:

[Chigurh] placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see.

Llewelyn Moss, a former Vietnam War sniper, a Texan on the run from the psychopath, employs some of the weaponry in this arsenal but is “a strong believer in the shotgun.” The sheriff of Comanche County, an older man named Bell, prefers old-fashioned police-issue Colts—“If that don’t stop him you’d better throw the thing down and take off runnin’”—and the old Winchester model 97—“I like it that it’s got a hammer.” Men are judged by their prowess with firearms but also by the boots they choose to wear: “Nocona” for Moss; “expensive Lucchese crocodile” for a self-described hit man named Wells in the hire of a wealthy Houston businessman/drug smuggler; ostrich-skin boots for the psychopath Chigurh.

Not the Texas frontier of legend but contemporary rural Texas in the vicinity of Sanderson, near the Mexican border, is the setting for this fast-plotted action novel about heroin smugglers and the considerable collateral damage among the innocent and not-so-innocent in their wake. The novel takes its title from William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “That is no country for old men. The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees/—Those dying generations—at their song…” Yeats’s country is Ireland, seemingly suffused with erotic energy; McCarthy’s country is suffused with the malevolent Eros of male violence. Not horses or wolves but firearms and their effect upon human flesh is the object of desire in the novel No Country for Old Men, which reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino. With the exception of Sheriff  Bell, the moral conscience of the novel, characters are sketchily and perfunctorily drawn as if on the run. At the center of the action is a psychopath who shoots his way through scenes invincible as a Terminator-like instrument of destruction, and given to vatic utterances: “When I came into your life your life was over.”

Shorn of the brooding lyricism and poetic descriptive passages that have become McCarthy’s signature style, No Country for Old Men is a variant of one of the oldest of formula suspense tales: a man discovers a treasure and unwisely decides to take it and run, bringing upon himself and others a string of calamities ending with his death. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “MacGuffin” to signify the arbitrary object of pursuit: someone has something (an icon, a secret formula, any variety of treasure) that other want, generating chase scenes, killings, suspense in Hitchcock’s ingeniously contrived films. In No Country for Old Men the MacGuffin is drug money—“Two point four million. All used bills”—discovered by Moss in the aftermath of an apparent shoot-out by rival drug smugglers in the wilds north of the Mexican border, where Moss is hunting antelope. In addition to the money, Moss also takes some Mexican brown heroin and several firearms which in the course of his doomed adventure will be put to frequent use.

Thirty-six, married to a much younger woman, a naive risk-taker who puts both himself and his wife in jeopardy, Moss doesn’t exist as much more than a function of the plot, a kind of puppet jerked about by the author. Since the predominant mode of narration in No Country for Old Men is detached, as in a screenplay, a documentation of physical actions, we follow Moss and his nemesis Chigurh, cutting from one to the other as in an action film, without being privy to their motives. (After several readings, I still can’t understand why, having stolen the drug money and escaped safely, Moss decides to revisit the scene of the carnage to help the only surviving, badly wounded Mexican, rather than anonymously summon professional help for the man. Except to get himself sighted and pursued by drug dealers, and precipitate the plot, this isn’t a very sensible decision.)

In essence, No Country for Old Men is a showcase for McCarthy’s psychopath killer Anton Chigurh and the mayhem he perpetrates upon mostly unarmed and helpless individuals. There is no sexuality in McCarthy’s fiction but only a minutely described, ecstatically evoked Eros of physical violence, repeatedly evoked in prose. As his almost exact contemporary John Updike has written with ecstatic tenderness of physical heterosexual love, so McCarthy writes of physical violence with an attentiveness found in no other serious writer except Sade:

Chigurh shot [Wells] in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing.

And, in the aftermath of a bloody street shoot-out:

The man [he’d shot in the back] was lying in a spreading pool of blood. Help me, he said. Chigurh took the pistol from his waist. He looked into the man’s eyes. The man looked away.

Look at me, Chigurh said…

He looked at Chigurh. He looked at the new day paling all about. Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching him. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world.

No match for Chigurh is the former Vietnam War sniper Moss, who takes “a couple of rounds in the face”:

There was no chock under Moss’s neck and his head was turned to the side. One eye partly opened. He looked like a badman on a slab. They’d sponged the blood off of him but there were holes in his face and his teeth were shot out.

Like an invincible figure in a video game of murder and mayhem, Chigurh is flatly portrayed and not very convincing: “I have no enemies. I don’t permit it.” When he delivers most of the drug money to the unnamed Houston businessman/drug smuggler, instead of keeping it for himself, he explains that his rampage has been “simply to establish my bonafides. As someone who is an expert in a difficult field”

All that keeps No Country for Old Men from being a skillfully executed but essentially meretricious thriller is the presence, increasingly rambling and hesitant as the novel proceeds, of the sheriff of Comanche County, one of the “old men” alluded to in the title. Dismissed as a “redneck sheriff in a hick town. In a hick state,” Bell is intended as a moral compass amid the whirligig of amorality. He is courageous and well intentioned but ineffectual as a lawman, unable to stop Chigurh’s rampage and hardly capable of identifying him. Where he hadn’t had a single unsolved homicide in his jurisdiction in forty-one years, now he has nine unsolved homicides in a single week. The new breed of psychopath drug dealer/assassin is beyond Bell’s power to control as the new Uzis and machine pistols are beyond the old-style Colts and Winchesters. It’s possible that Cormac McCarthy, described in a recent interview as a “southern conservative,”² intends Bell’s social-conservative predilections to speak for his own, explaining the high crime rate in Comanche County in this way: “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…It reaches into ever strata.” More pointedly,

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics…[Satan] explains a lot of things that otherwise don’t have no explanation.

Bell is evidently unfamiliar with the blood-drenched history of his state and its protracted border wars, so vigorously documented elsewhere in Cormac McCarthy. He’s a man left behind by his era confronted with a moral void beyond even Satan: “What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?”

Nowhere has Cormac McCarthy addressed this question more powerfully, and more succinctly, than in his post-Apocalyptic novel The Road (2006), the most widely acclaimed of his numerous works of fiction. Throughout this bleakly prophetic short novel with its affinities to such twentieth-century visionaries as Samuel Beckett and José Saramago, we are in the presence of a stripped-down humanity, in extremis; utterly vanished is the crude, jocular, tall-tale black humor of McCarthy’s earlier novels, and McCarthy’s sense of a community of individuals bonded by common loss, or threat of loss, as in the elegiac Border Trilogy and the besieged Comanche County of No Country for Old Men. Throughout the novel McCarthy evokes an air of antiquity: though we are presumably in a future time, we are more truly in the past, before history: this is the Hades of Homer, the Inferno of Dante. In the way of Bosch, Dürer, and Goya, and in the mode of the most malevolently inventive contemporary doomsday filmmaker—like George Miller, creator of the Mad Max series—McCarthy exults in the depiction of human corpses amid his desiccated landscape, and in the suggestion of violent, grotesque deaths: mummified bodies are sighted in doorways and in vehicles, garishly displayed on pikes, or posed like waxworks dummies in a vast and unspeakable allegory. In a little clearing is a “black thing skewered over coals”—a “charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.” In this hell, McCarthy’s protagonist is shrewd enough to know that he must always be able to see behind him—he has affixed a rearview motorcycle mirror to the shopping cart in which he pushes his belongings, in the kind of small but painstakingly defining detail that makes Cormac McCarthy so vivid a writer. What would be an abstract and perhaps over-familiar doomsday polemic in the imagination of another writer is an emotionally gripping tale in McCarthy’s.

The Road is quintessential McCarthy: a variant upon a picaresque adventure tale. Where in the Border Trilogy the boys’ quests began as romantic pilgrimages, however bleakly the last novel, Cities of the Plain, ends, and there is a youthful vigor to the prose suggestive of ceaseless, restless, exuberant motion—usually on horseback—The Road is a work of numbing bleakness, pessimism; the journey is on foot, very slow, haphazard, less an adventure than an unmitigated ordeal. An unnamed father and his son—Everyman, Everyboy—are embarked upon a journey with no destination other than the hope of escaping the impending Appalachian winter by taking back roads along the southern coast. Here is a return to McCarthy’s eastern Tennessee roots—though in tone very like the rough country of McCarthy’s West. Civilization has been destroyed in what seems to have been an instantaneous flash of nuclear energy—ash sifts down from overcast skies, most wildlife has become extinct, and other surviving Homo sapiens, observed with great caution and horror, have reverted to barbarism in graphic visual imagery of the kind scattered through Blood Meridian:

Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away. The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes…The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink.

As McCarthy has never shown the slightest interest in politics or history—even his most realistic novel, Suttree, takes place in a topical vacuum—so in this parable of human folly and its tragic aftermath there is no explanation of why war was waged, and by whom; if in fact the devastation is global, as we are led to assume; from this point onward, history itself is extinct. It’s as if the demons of Blood Meridian—the men who “settled” the West by imposing their barbarism upon an exquisitely beautiful nature—have triumphed. McCarthy’s vision is Manichean: there are “good” people and there are “evil” people—the former at the mercy of the latter. Horribly, in The Road, evil people are devouring good people in orgies of desperate cannibalism.

This monochromatic vision would be unbearable except for McCarthy’s beautifully rendered “poetic” prose. Here is an incantatory voice that makes of devastation—doom itself—something rich and strange, as in the late poetry of T. S. Eliot:

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulated sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.

And in the richly evocative final passage of the novel:

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 fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and forsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

As usual McCarthy’s perspective is coolly omniscient: his narrative voice seems to hover just above individuals like the questing father and his son, without entering into them fully. We see through the father’s anxious eyes—we share his anxious thoughts—but we are simultaneously distinct from him and are aware at all times that he’s a (fictitious, allegorical) character in a tale. Admirers of McCarthy’s more varied prose may miss the flashes of his droll, deformed wit, always evident amid the excesses of Blood Meridian, the novel that most resembles The Road; McCarthy’s favored theme is male barbarism, in contrast to the brotherly sentiment of the boy-heroes of the Border Trilogy, or the tender feelings Billy Parham has for the (female) wolf in The Crossing—the (female) wolf as the boy-hero’s anima. In The Road, it’s significant that there is no maternal figure: McCarthy has disposed of the mother, as a suicide. (McCarthy’s female portraits are flat as cartoon figures set beside his men. The wife in The Road speaks as no woman in recorded history is ever likely to have spoken—“I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time.” No word more inexorably male than whorish!) Only a father remains—only the father—pushing the possessions of his depleted family in a shopping cart—an ironic, disfigured artifact of a lost consumer culture—armed with a revolver containing only two bullets. It’s significant—and alarmingly timely—that father and son are wearing masks to protect them from the befouled air. Their primary tasks are to scavenge food and to stay out of sight of other people. In the course of the journey the boy begins to perceive that the father, intent upon his and his son’s survival, is gradually changing into a savage like the others. One is reminded of Faulkner’s terse summation of the Negro housekeeper of the afflicted house of the Compsons, in The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” (As if the singular Dilsey were in fact multiple, emblematic.)

The Road is McCarthy’s most lyric novel as it is his most horrific and perhaps his most personal: there is an acknowledgment of human love here missing in McCarthy’s more characteristic work. Who could have imagined, given the lurid and zestful black humor of Child of God and Blood Meridian, and the celebration of unfettered bachelorhood of the Border Trilogy, that in later years Cormac McCarthy would write so feelingly about parental love for a child? Of course the child is a boy as the parent who has been courageous enough to survive to protect him is male. In McCarthy’s Manichean/Old Testament cosmology, the female has yet to be born.

Notes

1. Typical of the sharply divided opinion on McCarthy’s work is A. O. Scott’s entry on McCarthy in The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors in which Scott says of Blood Meridian that it is “by any criterion a masterpiece and one of the great American novels of the last quarter century” while the Border Trilogy is “sentimental, crowd-pleasing cowboy fiction” in which “some parts read like bad Hemingway, others read like bad Hemingway retranslated from the Spanish.”
   
   
2. See “Cormac Country” by Richard B. Woodward, Vanity Fair, August 2005.”

Image: New Mexico backroad, Michael Dunn, blurred and mixed with author portrait.

Image: Cormac McCarthy book jacket portrait, Joe Blackwell, 1965