Reading Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Journal and Penn State University Press

2014-05-31T18:32:00.001-05:00

Starting in 2015, the Cormac McCarthy Journal will be published by Penn State University Press. This is great news for McCarthy scholarship. I think also this move demonstrates the high quality of the contributions already published in the journal thus far.

Stacey Peebles, editor of the journal, comments on the announcement:

I’m happy to announce that beginning in 2015, The Cormac McCarthy Journal will be published by Penn State University Press, which will be a boon for us in terms of design, prestige, visibility, production assistance, and availability in libraries and databases like JSTOR. Although our upcoming 2014 issue will be published before Penn State UP takes over our hard-copy production, we have already worked together to create a website for CMJ on their journals page. Clicking “Submissions” on that site will take you to our new online submissions website for the journal.

Although I’m still happy to field inquiries from my gmail address as I’ve done in the past, I’ll now direct submissions to the website, as well as use the site for readers’ reports as much as possible. We also have a new email address specifically for the journal. Access to previously published articles will soon be available through JSTOR (and hopefully MUSE) links on our Penn State UP website. When those links have been established, we’ll take down our old journal website, which has been hosted by the Texas Digital Library.

Members of The Cormac McCarthy Society who pay for “Membership with Journal” will continue to receive a subscription at no extra cost, and Penn State UP will handle subscriptions for non-member individuals as well as institutions.

This has all been possible because the community of McCarthy scholars has produced such great work over the years, and because there’s so much still to be done! Thanks to everyone who has supported CMJ by submitting work, commenting on others’ essays, subscribing, and reading with interest.

Here’s to keeping the critical conversation going!

Running Toward a Reckoning

2014-05-19T08:06:00.000-05:00

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it.

A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

–Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, 5.

J. Frank Dobie and Cormac McCarthy

2014-05-18T20:48:00.001-05:00

Sometime in 1987, a courtly, middle-aged gentleman approached the front desk at the Special Collections library at the University of Texas at El Paso. The man was well known by this time to those who worked at the library. He'd been coming in regularly over the past decade, doing research on Texas and Mexico and the Southwest. Some people knew that he was a writer, knew that he'd even won a MacArthur "genius" grant for his work—although few readers had heard of him and he toiled in obscurity.

At the help desk, speaking in his a soft Tennessee accent, the man asked for a slender volume kept in the reserve stacks, housed inside a red pamphlet box. The item is a reprint from an article originally published in the American Hereford Journal in 1954. Its title is, simply, "Babi'cora," and its author is the great folklorist of the Southwest, J. Frank Dobie of Texas. . . .

The researcher at UTEP in 1987, Cormac McCarthy, paid very close attention to Dobie's Babicora article. McCarthy arranged to have the story photocopied, and he made exacting pencil marks in the margins of particularly interesting passages. McCarthy went on to make substantial use of Dobie's work as he fashioned his novel in progress--a book that would be published seven years later as The Crossing.

–Steven L. Davis, "Mining Dobie: Cormac McCarthy's Debt to J. Frank Dobie in The Crossing," Southwestern American Literature 38.2 (Spring 2013): 52.

Tolkien's "Rambling Juvenilia" and "Dorky Minutiae"

2012-12-26T13:15:00.003-06:00

In a recent New Yorker article, Erin Overbey talks about the criticism that J. R. R. Tolkien's work received at the hands of its initial reviewers.

Edmund Wilson: "The Fellowship of the Ring [is a] children’s book which has somehow gotten out of hand."

The New Yorker, 1954: "The Fellowship of the Ring [has] the air of having been written as a hobby by a man with a ferreting imagination and a capacity for industry that will not allow him to stop inventing long after all the facts are down and the picture is clear."

Overbey notes that W. H. Auden was one of the first to defend Tolkien's stories as formidable works of literature.

Auden repeatedly challenged the idea that Tolkien’s work was only suitable for children. Tolkien’s world may not be the same as our own, Auden wrote in a 1956 review of the author’s work for the New York Times, but it’s a world “of intelligible law, not mere wish,” that represents our own reality. Moreover, Auden wrote, Tolkien’s moral sensibility was profoundly grownup, especially when it came to theological questions. “The Lord of the Rings,” he wrote, aimed to reconcile “two incompatible notions” we have about God. On the one hand, we envision “a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his love”; on the other, we picture “a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand.” It’s a story about how, as we gain power, we lose freedom. “Mr. Tolkien is not as great a writer as Milton,” Auden conceded, “but in this matter he has succeeded where Milton failed.”

Overbey ends by summarizing Auden's perspective and also describing one of the central literary elements of Tolkien's stories:

In his reviews, Auden argued that Tolkien’s work wasn’t just rambling juvenilia; it was part of a literary tradition of reinterpreting ancient archetypes to create a modern mythology. Yet the rambling nature of Tolkien’s universe is part of what drew those nerdy Brooklyn students to his work. We love to think about the dorky minutiae: how Hobbits invented the art of smoking pipe-weed, why trolls speak with Cockney accents, whether Middle-Earth is spherical. These elements aren’t distractions; they’re the magical details that elevate Tolkien’s books. People may come to Tolkien for the Milton-esque struggle between good and evil, but they stay for the fresh mushrooms and the Elvish.

The Caravan of Carnival Folk That Begins Child of God

2012-10-13T10:21:00.003-05:00

From the opening scene of the novel, which is the setting for the origin of Lester Ballard's eminent descent into degeneracy:

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truck bed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinned and gesturing to the others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.

–Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, 3.

Nightmarish Narrative Logic

2012-05-14T07:15:00.000-05:00

Edwin T. Arnold's apt comment on the nightmarish narrative logic of Outer Dark:

This story seems derived from the world of folklore or dream, peopled as it often is by mysterious denizens and ruled by some nightmare logic which makes one question at what level of reality the story operates.

Stone Figures Quarried from the Architecture of an Older Time

2012-05-10T14:45:00.001-05:00

It was late afternoon when they set forth again, out from the town, the wheels rasping in the sand, back down the yellow road. Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew.

On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 77.

Strung Out in Silhouette Against the Sun

2012-05-10T09:15:00.000-05:00

The first sentence of Outer Dark (which I think sets the tone and ethos of the narrative that follows):

THEY CRESTED OUT on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a moment and going on again strung out in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 4. Capitalization and emphasis in the original typography.

Finding the Intellectual Meaning of a Book

2012-05-08T08:15:00.000-05:00

It is from the kind of world the writer creates, from the kind of character and detail he invests it with, that a reader can find the intellectual meaning of a book.

–Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, 75.

Dictionary Graveyards

2012-05-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

Dictionaries are the graveyards of language.

–Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader, 24.

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."