Cormac McCarthy is at once carnally present and fastidiously invisible in his work – present through his distinctive voice and invisible because there is not a trace of autobiography in his novels, at least the pen never wavers like a divining rod over the waters of the Self.His style is Classy Southern Gothic and has often been compared to Faulkner’s. Certainly neither man is reluctant to deck drab characters out in purple prose. McCarthy alternates lines of Appalachian dialogue (‘git!’) with Maeterlinckian cadences (‘a meniscus of pale brown froth’), just as Faulkner’s convict shouts, ‘Gimme that oar’ and then rows off ‘with a calculated husbandry of effort’. On the very first page of Suttree, one of McCarthy’s later novels, he is capable of writing: ‘wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease’. The trick, apparently, is to juxtapose gritty Anglo-Saxon concreteness with refined Latinate abstractions (‘spoorless analogues’, whatever that means).Despite such occasional excesses, McCarthy is a more controlled and resourceful stylist than Faulkner. Although both McCarthy and Faulkner are given (as Mary McCarthy once observed of another Southern Gothic, Tennessee Williams) to dropping the needle down on their poetic LPs in order to break up an otherwise pedestrian page, the resulting ‘poetic realism’ is less jarring in McCarthy’s fiction, especially in his most recent novels, Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses. But even in Horses (the first volume in a projected trilogy), McCarthy can get LPish, as in this evocation of an old Comanche road in Texas: ‘nation and ghost of nation in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives’. Of course it all depends on how much you can take. I can take this sentence fine up through ‘waste’. I like the Poundian tone of ‘nation and ghost of nation’ (as in Pound’s ‘drums and kettledrums’) and even in the windy last bit I recognize it’s not just all blarney but that a sort of intelligence animates the contrasts between ‘all history’ and ‘transitory’ or ‘grail’ and ‘secular’, but the grail does seem out of place on the Texas plains, and in general the periodic sentence structure and the overkill rhetoric are far less admirable than McCarthy’s more usual dry eloquence, as when he notes ‘the muted run of sand in the brainbox’ when a character turns over a horse skull, or compares the glow of distant lightning to ‘welding seen through foundry smoke’.
>>25346242The rusting sadness of American train yards, the melancholy pyrography of the bleak American landscape are as comfortably within McCarthy’s register as they are in Pynchon’s (or Kerouac’s), and the scandalous rearing up of violence out of a banal nowhere is as much McCarthy’s as Flannery O’Connor’s subject. Indeed McCarthy is the chronicler who has shown us (in Blood Meridian) the ceaseless bludgeoning violence that must have been the reality of all those heroic legends about the Old West, just as he is the poet of male solitude in a lonely man’s world of cowboys and Indians or half-sane drifters.Critics used to praise writers for their ‘range’. They probably had Tolstoy or Balzac or Dickens in mind, and no one was considered great if he or she didn’t render at least one birth and one death, one miser and one spinster, a first ball and a last hurrah, war and peace. These literary occasions have come to seem less and less obligatory as the twentieth century wanes; what we fin de siècle readers prize is obsessiveness and fervor, rhetorical energy, passionate intensity – all necessarily narrow, I suppose.Cormac McCarthy’s forte is solitude. He’s always written about it. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, has but a ghost of a plot: a man kills a stranger and then unknowingly becomes a friend to his victim’s son. The characters are hillbillies lost in the mists and drizzle of their mountain fastnesses. His second novel, Outer Dark, is out of print and I haven’t read it, but his third, Child of God, is Southern Gothic at its creepiest, the sort parodied by Nabokov in the afterword to Lolita (‘I’m crazy, you’re crazy, I guess God is crazy’). In Child of God a half-wit (‘child of God’ is regionalese for people with a screw lose) loses his ancestral farm, becomes a forest hermit, discovers a naked couple asphyxiated in a parked car and soon develops a taste for dead women.Although few of the man’s thoughts are reported and there is no meretricious effort to pass necrophilia off as just one more delightful variation on the great human themes, nevertheless we understand the murderer’s single-mindedness. Within a cavern he assembles his corpses like the members of the family he’s lost. The writing is as hard and mineral as A. A. Ammons’s poetry:>In the night he heard hounds and called to them but the enormous echo of his voice in the cavern filled him with fear and he would not call again. He heard the mice scurry in the dark. Perhaps they’d nest in his skull, spawn their tiny bald and mewling whelps in the lobed caverns where his brain had been. His bones polished clean as eggshells, centipedes sleeping in their marrowed flutes, his ribs curling slender and whitely like a bone flower in the dark stone bowl.
Not terrible but>there is not a trace of autobiography in his novelsNot true. I've only read Blood Meridian and did so before knowing much about Corncob but you can feel his familiarity and identification with Tennessee and detect the authentic, quintessential, American Boomer's pathetic overcompensation for the racial contempt of his ancestors. Or you can if you're from the area at least.
>>25346253Suttree is a long, dense novel about outcasts who live on a polluted river, probably the Tennessee. There’s a terrible scene in which a bum tries to drown his dead father in order not to pay the funeral expenses, but the cadaver surfaces. The style has become more layered and detailed: ‘Beyond the counter ranged carboys and galleypots and stained glass jars of chemic and cottonmouthed bottles cold and replete with their parti-colored pills’. Again the mineral note is the purest McCarthy sound: ‘The incessant drip of water echoed everywhere through the spelean dark like dull chimes’.A trace of plot emerges only towards the end of the book when Suttree is briefly kept by a salty whore and the two of them live through Hopperesque scenes set in Tennessee, becoming sweaty nighthawks in diners with rusting chrome and smudged windows. Up to this point McCarthy’s books seem like pretexts for singing the songs of poverty, solitude and mineral hardness. The plots are dicey, story points are scattered here and there like insufficient clues and they rarely condense into anything so solid as a mystery. Characters are half-glimpsed through palimpsests of words, and motives are difficult to dope out. Of course, as Vereen Bell has argued in her excellent book The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, these may all be strategies for de-centering his novels and people (‘only the aimless can be adequately open to the saving rhythm of experience’).But with Blood Meridian McCarthy seems to have discovered that suspense and memorable characters are the best fictional structures for promoting a sense of duration in the reader’s perceptions. Since fiction, like music, is primarily a temporal art, any device that inflects the reader’s perception of time becomes crucial, not just as a hook for grabbing the reader’s attention but as a strategy for modifying the very material out of which this art is composed: time. Plots generate suspense and characters promote a sense of identification, both elements that engender a taut awareness of duration that has little to do with clock time.Blood Meridian may be episodic but it is filled with a gathering horror as the author recounts the bloody progress made by a group of American adventurers into Mexico in the 1850s. Here the Indians are no noble savages; they are as rapacious, drunk and debased as the white men they fight. Presiding over the ghastly revelries is Judge Holden: ‘He was as bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God.’ A gifted gabber, a born charlatan, fiendishly cruel, the judge is a cross between Tennessee Williams’s Big Daddy and William Burroughs’s Doctor Benway copied out in brimstone.
>>25346263A fourteen-year-old named The Kid is the other protagonist in Blood Meridian, and as in all of McCarthy’s novels a young man is learning sorry lessons about a hostile world. In All the Pretty Horses that youngster is brought to the extreme foreground, which is probably what makes this newest book more touching, more accessible, even more interesting than the others. Once again a youngster has lost his family and home, this time because his mother, a talentless actress, is divorcing his dying father and selling off her unprofitable Texas ranch. John Grady, the youngster, lives for nothing but horses and open spaces. He and his best friend, Rawlins, head south of the border. There they come across a hapless, unlucky North American lad named Blevins, who from the first smells of trouble.Trouble is quick to find them all, but throughout the book the reader is convinced of John Grady’s integrity. If Blood Meridian blasted away our last illusions about the Old West, All the Pretty Horses restores some of them; McCarthy has rescued for us out of the debris of all those bad movies and hackneyed books the ideal portrait of the stony-faced, stoic, completely decent cowboy. Grady suffers a nightmarish sentence in a Mexican prison because he’s befriended the hotheaded Blevins. And he suffers from a broken heart because he’s fallen in love with a highborn Mexican young lady.McCarthy has never been much good at portraying women. In any event his men are too poor, downtrodden, crazed or shy to attract women. But here he has exquisitely rendered a high-spirited maiden out of a fairy tale (‘she came in past him all rustling of clothes and the rich parade of her hair and perfume’). That ‘parade’ is worthy of Sir John Suckling. The increased human warmth, fortunately, has done nothing to dispel the metaphysical chill so essential to McCarthy’s art:>The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.In this book the lyricism is under control, it serves a purpose, the number of rare words is reduced, the sense of overall design is surer. Politically the book seems admirably even-handed; Mexicans are as virtuous or evil as North Americans – and as various and complex.
>>25346270Nor has the world of horses ever been shown with more knowledge or pleasure. Grady and Rawlins win over the Mexican ranch-hands by breaking in a whole troupe of wild horses. Blevins dies when he protests against the theft of his horse. The horses are felt as living, sensitive creatures. Even human beings are described in equine terms (‘You look like you been rode hard and put up wet’).This is almost as hard and relentless a book as the others. Only this time McCarthy has shown everything through the eyes of a young man who has some illusions left. To be sure, there are flaws in the novel; the Mexican maiden aunt is allowed to discourse on and on in an utterly unbelievable, heightened way for page after page. Grady wavers between being a wise, preternaturally adult aristocrat and a typical redneck kid. But these ‘flaws’ mark the suture points where McCarthy has tried to graft a fairy tale on to realism, and this strange admixture gives the book its darkly poetic majesty.
>>25346242>not a trace of autobiography>immediately references suttreei don’t know who this hack fraud is but i stopped reading there
