Reading Cormac McCarthy

Wars and Rumors of Wars In the Border Trilogy

2011-12-29T19:17:00.002-06:00

Evenin Mr Johnson, he said.
Evenin son.
What's the news?
The old man shook his head. He leaned across the table to the windowsill where the radio sat and turned it off. It aint news no more, he said. Wars and rumors of wars.

–Cities of the Plain, 61.

Commenting on this scene, John Wegner argues that "War is the central thesis to McCarthy's southwestern works" (73).

He follows this assertion with a survey of the wars that frame the Border Trilogy:

The Crossing begins between World War I and World War II with American on the verge of the Depression, and Cities of the Plain essentially ends in 1952 as America's presence in Korea grows. John Grady Cole's father returns from a World War II p.o.w. camp sick and dying; The Crossing ends with Billy's witness of the 'strange false sunrise . . . of the Trinity Test'; and Cities of the Plain begins with John Grady's drinking with Troy, a war veteran.

After pointing out the prominent role of the Mexican Revolution on the one hand, and America's involvement in World War II on the other, Wegner notes that "these two wars act as historical frames for the [Border Trilogy], defining and mapping the world in which these characters must live and survive" (74).

–John Wegner, "Wars and Rumors of Wars in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy," in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, 73-74. (Kindle)

The Bloody Borderlands of Blood Meridian

2011-12-28T14:15:00.000-06:00

The novel recounts the adventures of a young runaway, the kid, who stumbles into the company of the Glanton Gang, outlaws and scalp-hunters who cleared Indians from the Texas-Mexico borderlands during the late 1840's under contract to territorial governors. Reinvisioning the ideology of manifest destiny upon which the American dream was founded, Blood Meridian depicts the borderland between knowledge and power, between progress and dehumanization, between history and myth and, most importantly, between physical violence and the violence of language.

–From Rick Wallach's précis of Blood Meridian.

The Road and the Re-Written Myth of the American West

2011-12-17T16:15:00.000-06:00

The most recent issue of the open-source European Journal of American Studies is devoted to "postfrontier writing." I was happy to see McCarthy and The Road included as a dialogue partner in the discussion.

Title: "Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Rewriting the Myth of the American West"
Author: Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz, a professor at the Universidad de Duesto in Bilbao, Spain.
Source: European Journal of American Studies ("postfrontier writing" issue, 2011)

Abstract:

This article argues that Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road (2006), marks a clear departure from the interests and aesthetics he showed in his earlier works of fiction. Apart from the fact that the Rhode Island-born writer embarks for a first time in his long career on a popular sci-fi sub-genre such as the post-apocalyptic novel, the book exhibits a number of thematic, structural, and stylistic patterns which differ quite radically from those found in his earlier novels. Most likely influenced by some recent events that have deeply shaken the country and others affecting his personal life, McCarthy can be seen to abandon the landscapes and vernacular rhythms that had become the staple of his artistic performance.

By comparing The Road to some of his earlier fiction, the article attempts to establish where those elements of discontinuity become most apparent. In spite of his deadpan naturalism and rather laconic language use, the author manages to keep his readers on their toes thanks to the novel’s much accomplished suspense concerning the fate of the two protagonists. The denouement of the story also strikes those familiar with his fiction as unusual. Still, the second half of the article reveals that, despite all these departures from his previous aesthetics and philosophical wanderings, there are also a number of elements in The Road that speak of his commitment to some values and myths that have contributed to his reputation and fame.

Outline:

Conclusion:

My analysis should have made it clear, then, that his treatment of landscapes, human relations, and language itself is largely refashioned in this work. Probably, it is the ending of The Road that is most likely to catch his most faithful readers unawares. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to say whether this novel signals a definitive turning point in his literary career, for the American West is still very much present in his art and one could even read it as the culmination of his legacy of re-mythologizing the American West.

Like Fairybook Beasts

2011-12-16T10:15:00.000-06:00

Spectators drifted away, the narrow street emptied. Some of the Americans had wandered into the cold waters of the stream and were splashing about and they clambered dripping into the street and stood dark and smoking and apocalyptic in the dim lampfall.

The night was cold and they shambled steaming through the cobbled town like fairybook beasts and it had begun to rain again.

–Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 190.

The First and Last Line of Blood Meridian

2011-12-10T12:15:00.000-06:00

See the child.

He says that he will never die.

–Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, pp. 3 and 327 (in the 1992 Vintage edition).

Ad for Cormac McCarthy's "New" Novel

2011-10-04T08:15:00.000-05:00

From an ad that ran in the New York Times on September 26, 1986:

Commentary from the NYT:

Cormac McCarthy's second novel, “Outer Dark,” is a grim, desolate piece of fiction. It's a grinding story about a woman, Rinthy, who bears her brother's baby, only to have him leave the infant in the woods to die. You don't get a sense of the novel's dark subject matter in this perky advertisement, though. It focuses instead on McCarthy's rugged good looks (he was 35 at the time), and even “pops” his head, giving this ad an ironic, cheerful, proto-Spy magazine feel. The blurbs, mostly from Midwestern book sections, are cliché-strewn even by book-ad standards.

(ht)

In Little Pieces like the Alphabet

2011-08-23T07:15:00.002-05:00

Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet

–Excerpt from Mary Ruefle, "White Buttons," Poetry (September 2011), 415.

(ht)

Cormac McCarthy Journal vol. 8, no. 1 (Fall 2010)

2011-07-14T21:15:00.008-05:00

The Fall 2010 issue of the Cormac McCarthy Journal is now available. With Stacey Peebles taking over as editor of the journal, this issue continues work on The Road (which was the subject of the previous issue) and also includes articles on Sunset Limited, McCarthy's western fiction, as well as a number of reviews interacting with McCarthy scholarship.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction (Stacey Peebles)

God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Erik Wielenberg (1-16)

Prometheus Hits The Road: Revising the Myth
Daniel Luttrull (17-28)

“Minimalist Tragedy”: Nietzschean Thought in McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited
William Quirk (29-46)

A Frontier Myth Turns Gothic: Blood Meridian
Ronja Vieth (47-62)

Cormac McCarthy, Violence, and Borders:
The Map as Code for What Is Not Contained
Daniel Weiss (63-77)

A Note on a Review of Blood Meridian by Robert Bolaño
Samuel Sotillo (78-79)

Don Graham Does Cormac Doing Oprah
Jim Welsh (80-81)

Book Reviews

Luce, Dianne C. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Review by David Cremean (82-85)
Beck, John. Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature. Review by Rick Wallach (86-87)
McGilchrist, Megan. The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier. Review by Nell Sullivan (88-91)
Appalachian Heritage: A Literary Quarterly of the Southern Appalachians. Special issue on Cormac McCarthy. Review by Allen Josephs (92-93)

Contributor Biographies (94-95)

See also,

Table of Contents and Links to the PDFs of the articles
The Cormac McCarthy Society
Read: The Sunset Limited (GBks) (Amz)
Read: The Road (GBks) (Amz) (Kindle)
Read: Blood Meridian (GBks) (Amz) (Kindle)

Novels For Students Features "All the Pretty Horses"

2011-07-12T20:15:00.016-05:00

The latest volume (36) of Gale's Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels is out.

Novels for Students is a literary student textbook aimed at high school and undergraduates that introduces and seeks to contextualize a selection of literary works in each volume (cf. this fuller description of the series).

In volume 36, they feature McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. In their "Criticism" section, they reprint my article on McCarthy's use of dreams that was published in the Explicator a few years ago.

The McCarthy section looks like it would be helpful in teaching this novel (though, obviously I'm biased regarding the quality of at least one of the critical excerpts!).

If you're interested in reading my selection, here are the bibliographic deets:

"Dreams as a Structural Framework in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses." In The Explicator 66.3 (Spring 2008), 166-170. Reprinted in Novels For Students, Volume 36 (Detroit: Gale-Cengage, 2011), 35-37. (full text) (pdf)

How Many Cormac McCarthies Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

2011-04-08T12:15:00.005-05:00

Q: HOW MANY CORMAC MCCARTHIES DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB?

A: Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot, bright bulb and twist it dead. The other two follow, smoking, and whisper about what is to come: the treacherous scramble in wet woolen darkness, the fight to fill that space with light. One of them, the youngest, cradles the thin bowl of glass in his hands like a baby foal born too soon―partly out of gentleness, partly as if to shield it from the mare’s desperate inquiring eyes.

The men walk to the bulb. The Remover’s shadow blackens as he approaches it. A quick unnatural lunge.

Then all is dark.

-via (ht)

Violence and Real Life

2011-03-25T18:45:00.005-05:00

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy says philosophically. "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 afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

—Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" New York Times (April 19, 1992)

The Sunset Limited (HBO) Trailer

2011-02-06T07:15:00.011-06:00

HBO's production of The Sunset Limited is slated for Feb 12. This is my favorite teaser trailer:

The longer trailer provides a glimpse of the dynamic that Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and White (Tommy Lee Jones) will have in the film:

It looks like this will be a quality production (w/ perfect casting, IMO).

See also,

The Sunset Limited page at HBO's website (they have clips, behind the scenes footage, and interviews).

A Glimpse at HBO's Production of Sunset Limited

2011-01-17T08:15:00.003-06:00

Only good can come of this:

I've wondered what kind of relationship Jones and McCarthy have (if any), and an LA Times article sheds a little light on that and Jones' role in this production. Melissa Maerz writes,

Sitting at HBO's offices in Manhattan, looking serious in his long black trench coat, Jones recalls what drew him to "The Sunset Limited," which was first produced by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006. (McCarthy, who rarely does interviews, wasn't available for comment.) Jones, who has known McCarthy for years, meeting through a mutual friend, "Lonesome Dove" screenwriter Bill Wittliff, says the play reminded him of discussions he used to have with other students when he was at Harvard. "We'd sit around for hours talking about things like, is the theater really dead? Is Big Ten football better than Southwest Conference? What is the effect of television on the office of the presidency?" says Jones. "You're more open when you're younger."

He pauses, looking out the window. "I don't talk to anybody like that now," he says, his voice a little colder. "I know what I think, and I expect that you know what you think. I'm not gonna argue with you."

I'm looking forward to seeing this adaptation.

James Franco to Direct Blood Meridian?

2011-01-11T08:15:00.002-06:00

From CNN:

Meanwhile, Franco also hopes to take on Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" in 2012 and is currently in the process of making a deal to write the script and direct the project.

And Showbiz411:

“As I Lay Dying” isn’t the only writer-director project Franco’s involved in. He tells me he’s also in the process of making a deal with Scott Rudin to write and direct Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” in 2012.

Maybe. From the rest of those reports, it looks like Franco has a number of other things on his plate.

So, we'll see if the Blood Meridian bit pans out.

A Few Thoughts on the Epilogue of Cities of the Plain

2010-12-20T12:15:00.009-06:00

One of my friends sent me a note, saying, "I finished the trilogy almost a week ago and I can't stop thinking about the ending. I would love your take on the epilogue since it is all about the nature of dreams. What'd you think of the conclusion of the Trilogy?"

Here's part of my response:

Like you said, the epilogue to Cities of the Plain is really the epilogue to the entire Border Trilogy. There readers are justified in detecting the central importance of dreams in the three novels. I think Boyd's discussion with the vagabond articulates some of the elements that were present or under the surface during all three stories.

The epilogue is interesting because the reader is not entirely sure what is going on. The story being told, the dreams being dreamt, and the dialogue that is taking place all interconnect at various places. The result is that the lengthy sequence is a web of narrative threads. The dreamer starts recounting a dream that a person in his dream has. And, as Billy acknowledges, "A dream inside a dream might not be a dream" (273). We might even need to consider that Billy, an aged vagabond himself, might be dreaming the conversation he is having with the old man.

Billy is at the end of his life and from this vantage point he attempts to make sense of it. From his perspective, "in everything he'd ever thought about the world and about his life in it he'd been wrong" (266). It is in dreams where "two worlds touch," even though "there are no crossroads" and "decisions do not have some alternative." Billy's life is what it is, and that is one of the reasons he dreams.

The man tells Billy that dreams are "acts driven by a terrible hunger." Dreams are a mechanism that seeks to "meet a need which they can never satisfy." I think this is part of the human drive to make sense of the brutality of life. That seems to be a constant theme in all of McCarthy's work.

Though Billy is convinced that everything in his life has "been wrong," his "gnarled, ropescarred" hands tell a different story. His battered hands that have been through so much are bound by "ropy veins" to "his heart." And in this path "there was map enough for men to read," enough for God to "make a landscape. To make a world" (291). Though Billy thinks he "aint nothing" and doesn't know why a random kind woman would "put up with [him]," she assures him, "I know who you are. And I do know why."

Then, significantly, she bids him sleep. I think the interpersonal communication here is interesting. The epilogue is all about how dreams are the escape, and how dreams are the way one finds peace (by escaping the cruel reality of the world); however, it is the kindness of another human being that ultimately allows Billy to find rest at the end of his life. He can rest (and dream), for someone will see him in the morning.

Perhaps this is where Billy finally gets the redemption that he looked for in vain, as he sat at the end of The Crossing watching the Atomic Bomb blow up, waiting for the sun to rise.

On page one of the Border Trilogy, John Grady Cole looks at his grandfather and thinks, "That was not sleeping," and on the last page of the Trilogy, Billy is encouraged, "You go to sleep now." As Edwin Arnold notes, "The visionary experience that is the Border Trilogy comes between, and it offers us a different way of seeing the world(s), of finding our place therein."

Arnold also makes a helpful summary reflection, commenting that "it may be that all of Cormac McCarthy's writings constitute a prolonged dream. Reading McCarthy's works--any one of them--is an experience not quite real."

McCarthy Monday: Chigurh Thinks

2010-10-18T20:15:00.002-05:00

McCarthy's No Country for Old Men follows a rough, cold-blooded hitman named Chigurh (pronounced "sug-ar") who is tracking down a man (Moss) carrying 2.4 million dollars of stolen drug-money.

The money bag has a tracking device, and Chigurh is carrying the unit that tracks it. At one point, as Chigurh returns to a hotel where he previously had a shoot-out with the man he is hunting, the transponder unit begins to beep. McCarthy then gives us a glimpse of Chigurh's cruelly collected, cognitive processes at work:

He could think of no reason for the transponder sending unit to be in the hotel. He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group.

Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that.

—McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, p. 171

Two Reviews of Sunset Limited

2010-10-11T12:15:00.042-05:00

I recently read two reviews of small performances of McCarthy's 2006 play Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form.

In the first, Robert Hurwitt gives a mixed review of a performance in San Francisco, directed by Bill English:

Though the only violence in the 2006 play is either offstage or conceptual, bleakness is both the basis and governing principle of McCarthy's semi-philosophical dialogue for two old men. . . .

McCarthy could've filled out the characters' stories better, but the crisp crackle and humor of his dialogue keep the interchange sharp even when the ideas aren't very interesting. As embodied by Lumbly and Dean, the drama may be thin, but it exerts the urgency of life itself.

In the second, Andrea Braun gives a more positive reflection on a performance at Soundstage Theatre in St. Louis:

This play, like the soup Black serves White, is soul food for the body and potent fodder for the intellect. Coleman and Harvey have excellent chemistry, and they are in dangerous territory here for actors: They must relying only on their words to engage the audience. It works.

Both reviews capture the ambiguity of this work, where all the action is all the dialogue.

"Unpacking" McCarthy's Archives

2010-10-04T20:15:00.001-05:00

In December 2007, McCarthy donated his archives to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos, where Steve Davis works as a curator. In "Unpacking Cormac McCarthy," he describes his initial digging into McCarthy's old files, manuscripts, letters, and annotations.

Because of McCarthy's unrelenting reclusiveness, much speculation has surrounded his life and writing process. Thus, Davis' experience is at once intriguing and enlightening. He ends his article by saying,

When I’d begun my research in the McCarthy archive, I’d pretty much believed in the mythological version of him. I viewed McCarthy as the ultimate literary outsider, a man immune to most commercial considerations. As he’d told Oprah on TV, he didn’t really care whether millions of people read his books. The portrait of McCarthy that emerges in the archives is more complex. McCarthy had briefly allowed me into his living room that cold December morning, but it was the archives that allowed me to wander around the rooms of his house.

—Steve Davis, "Unpacking Cormac McCarthy," The Texas Observer (September 23, 2010)

McCarthy commenting on the first leg of the Border Trilogy storyline

2010-09-20T05:15:00.003-05:00

From an interview in 1992, shortly before the release of All the Pretty Horses:

"You haven't come to the end yet . . . This may be nothing but a snare and a delusion to draw you in, thinking that all will be well."

The Ugly Intertextual Fact

2010-09-16T12:15:00.005-05:00

The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

—Cormac McCarthy, quoted in "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," New York Times (April 19, 1992)

Cormac McCarthy Journal vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 2008)

2010-09-09T05:15:00.005-05:00

Volume 6 of the Cormac McCarthy Journal was dedicated to discussing The Road, McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning, post-apocalyptic novel.

Noting the striking variety of perspective, approach, and method present in the articles, John Cant, the editor for this issue, notes that

There is nothing surprising in that of course, but what is truly astonishing is that they are all able to demonstrate convincingly that all their tropes, images and ideas are to be found in McCarthy’s text in ways which make one sure that he is aware of them himself, that they are not unconscious influences. From Job to Schopenhauer and Derrida, from the Christian mystics to Steinbeck and Ford, from the ‘locomotive’ imagery of death to the painterly imagery of still life, McCarthy seems to know and revere them all. What other living writer displays such erudition?

Table of Contents:

Editor’s Notes
John Cant

Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millennium
Dianne C. Luce (6-12)

Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited: Dialogue of Life and Death: A Review
of the Chicago Production
Dianne C. Luce (13-21)

Another Sense of Ending: The Keynote Address to the
Knoxville Conference
Jay Ellis (22-38)

The Route and Roots of The Road
Wesley G. Morgan (39-47)

The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road
Chris Walsh (48-54)

The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-
Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Tim Edwards (55-61)

Full Circle: The Road Rewrites The Orchard Keeper
Louis Palmer (62-68)

Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Phillip A. Snyder (69-86)

Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism
Linda Woodson (87-99)

Compassionate McCarthy?: The Road and Schopenhauerian Ethics
Euan Gallivan (100-06)

Sighting Leviathan: Ritualism, Daemonism and the Book of Job in McCarthy’s
Latest Works
John Vanderheide (107-120)

“The lingering scent of divinity” in The Sunset Limited and The Road
Susan J. Tyburski (121-28)

“Golden chalice, good to house a god”: Still Life in The Road
Randal S. Wilhelm (129-49)

Contributor Biographies (150)

See also,

McCarthy as a "Serious Reader"

2010-08-16T07:15:00.000-05:00

In the review I spoke of previously, Fonash relays a comment that Kenneth Lincoln made to him in reference to the "other writers" that Lincoln brings McCarthy into conversation with in his book.

Lincoln explains:

The mention of other writers is an attempt to place McCarthy in a modern literary context, as well as an historical tradition. He's too often seen as a literary outlaw, rather than a serious reader who references the Old Testament, Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Yeats, and a raft of 20th-century masters. But he's not for the masses, nor does he curry favor with the light-hearted.

The last sentence here is particularly to the point. Many of McCarthy's narratives are not for the "light-hearted" by any means. Indeed, a reader only familiar with his latest five novels would most likely be surprised (and maybe repulsed?) at the tone and content of his first five novels.

But, perhaps there is no need to sugarcoat the unsavory elements of a great writer. They are what they are. They're part of the whole package that McCarthy brings to the table as an author.

To reiterate the tautology, He is what he is: A human writer writing about the human condition, which invariably contains unsavory elements.

A Perfect Day for Cormac McCarthy

2010-08-09T07:15:00.001-05:00

From a interview in WSJ:

I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

—John Jurgensen, "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy," in The Wall Street Journal (Nov 20, 2009).

(ht)

Locating McCarthy in the Broader Literary Traditions

2010-08-02T07:15:00.001-05:00

In a recent edition of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, Mike Fonash reviews Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles (GBks) by Kenneth Lincoln.

Fonash makes an interesting comment at the beginning of his review that puts McCarthy's work in context, helping readers locate the McCarthy corpus in the broader literary traditions:

Kenneth Lincoln, well- known for his extensive writings involving Native American Literatures, returns his focus to the world of contemporary American fiction in his recent study Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles.

Unlike any other McCarthy critic up to this point, Lincoln offers an alternative intertextual reading that configures McCarthy’s fictions as holding a firm position in the tradition of the great tales of not only America, but the tradition of the Classics as well. Lincoln’s book does not view McCarthy’s writing as postmodern patch-work, thus killing off the author, or as authoritative historical narratives, but instead as tales being told within and to be read alongside the cohesive panoply of the greater narrative tradition.

—Mike Fonash, "Review of Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles," in Cormac McCarthy Journal vol. 7 no. 1 (2009): 40.

Cormac McCarthy Journal vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2009)

2010-07-26T07:15:00.005-05:00

Editor's Page
John Wegner

Cormac McCarthy in High School (1-6)
Dianne C. Luce

The West as Symbol of the Eschaton in Cormac McCarthy (7-15)
Chris Dacus

The Road to the Sun They Cannot See: Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Oblivion, and Guidance in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (16-30)
Carole Juge

A Note on “Weird Little Marks” (31-33)
Wesley G. Morgan

A Keatsian Echo in Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper (34-35)
Richard Rankin Russell

Book Reviews (36-51)

Parrish, Timothy. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. Review by Wallis Sanborn (36-39)
Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. Review by Mike Fonash (40-41)
Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Review by Capper Nichols (42-44)
The Road (Movie), 111 minutes. Review by Mark Busby (45-46)
The Road (Movie), 111 minutes. Review by Cynthia Miller (47-51)

Author Biographies (52-53)

See also,