Cormac McCarthy, RIP
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Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. No one else has captured McCarthy’s blend of the old and modern like the Coen brothers.
I was genuinely grieved to learn of the death of Cormac McCarthy yesterday afternoon. No other writer has accomplished something quite like his body of work, and no other writer’s work has meant quite what his has meant to me.
I discovered him in the summer between my last two years of college. I have a standing rule that I will check out any unfamiliar book or author I hear about more than twice within a certain short amount of time. With McCarthy, I ran across references to his novel Blood Meridian in three places within the same week. I picked it up at the Barnes & Noble in town and that was that.
Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s magnum opus. It is also the worst place to start with his work. It is rich, dense, sprawling, arcane, operatic, a deliberate fusion of old fashioned curlicued prose and modern muscularity and bluntness. The chapters have strange headings summarizing the content and McCarthy does not use quotation marks. And of course there is the much-remarked upon brutality. But because of the allusions that had convinced me to pick Blood Meridian up, that was the one thing I was prepared for.
I was flummoxed. I knew something great was going on but I struggled to wrap my mind around it. I thought the lack of quotation marks was a risible affectation. And I only barely followed the story. I think I gave it three stars on Amazon.
But it stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. And I bought more of McCarthy’s novels.
I read through everything except Suttree by the time I graduated, and I reread several of them over the coming years. At last, I reread Blood Meridian last year, and while I want to say that I found it a completely different book, it was I who had changed. Age and maturity and years and years of reading McCarthy and reflecting back on Blood Meridian through his other work and—to throw it into relief—the work of less skilled imitators had prepared me for the novel. I had grown into it. It amazed me all over again.
Blood Meridian was the beginning of a long challenge to my way of writing. It was a bold early demonstration to me of the power of the precisely-chosen verb, of how to use a wide-ranging but carefully controlled vocabulary to create texture (or music, if you prefer), of the necessity of deep research presented as an organic part of the story, seamlessly and without ostentation.
And the lack of quotation marks that annoyed me so much at first caused me to reconsider even more. McCarthy, I realized, had set himself an artistic limitation by refusing punctuation conveniences. He did not use quotation marks—or semicolons or, unless absolutely necessary, commas—the same way a sonnet writer does not use a fifteenth line. It was a self-imposed boundary that strengthened and liberated his style. It meant, as McCarthy has said himself, that there was less to get in the way. It allows the language to tell the story. Pure words.
From this I learned to avoid leaning on typography to communicate meaning. And so while I have not gone nearly as far as McCarthy in this regard, in my fiction I don't italicize words for emphasis or to establish the rhythm of a person's speech or use elaborate punctuation or typesetting. In a scenario like that of his penultimate novel, The Road—which as a student of the early medieval period I don’t have a hard time imagining—how much of your typographical shenanigans will survive transmission? McCarthy wrote to last. I hope to, too.
So much for style. What Blood Meridian and McCarthy’s work also taught me was to confront the harshness and evil of reality head on. Because of the violence and darkness of his work—most especially Blood Meridian, with its scalphunters and Comanches and hangings and the inscrutable, unstoppable Satanic figure of the Judge—people call him a nihilist. He wasn’t. What McCarthy had was a deeply moral sense of the utter fallenness of the world and an unwillingness to look away.
There is a time and place for the opposite approach, but we need our McCarthys, too, in all their bleakness. Witness this passage from a 1992 interview that I’ve seen circulating since yesterday:
There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. 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.
Uplifting? No. But it’s true. All the charge of nihilism means is “McCarthy did not reassure me.” Good. Those “afflicted with this notion,” which is most of us nowadays, need to be unsettled. McCarthy, a master of this kind of prophetic unsettling, showed us how.
Cormac McCarthy, novelist, prophet, and personal hero, RIP.
