Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

John Cant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136095061
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This overview of McCarthy's published work to date, including: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script, locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America's vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world.

Introductory chapters outline his personal background and the influences on his early years in Tennessee whilst each of his works is dealt with in a separate chapter listed in chronological order of publication.

Part I
Preliminary

Chapter One
Introduction

All is telling. Do not doubt it.

—The Crossing

“The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.”¹ Conrad’s dictum for modern man, spoken in Germanic English by Stein, the revolutionary turned merchant, in Lord Jim, is perhaps appropriate to both my purpose in writing this book and the attitude of the writer who forms its inspiration.

My purpose is to write on the complete published literary output of the contemporary American author Cormac McCarthy. This consists of eight novels, two short stories, one TV screenplay and an unperformed play for the theatre.² Both the depth and extent of this output may be considered oceanic in itself. I intend to identify themes that unify McCarthy’s texts and also to deal with the texts individually. In addition I shall trace lines of development that emerge when his oeuvre is considered as a whole.

Such largeness of ambition is, of course, as nothing compared to that shown by McCarthy himself. Whilst making it quite obvious that he places himself in the tradition of such diverse literary forbears as Melville, Faulkner, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and a great many more besides, McCarthy has the confidence to seek to emulate their scale and profundity. In an age in which we have been made increasingly aware of the limits of language, of its inability to “signify the real,” he makes clear his profound love of language, his confidence in its ability to do what he wants it to, and of his willingness to deploy it in many different modes—from the spare colloquialism of Tennessee mountain speech, through a lyricism that is uniquely his own, to the grand and musical cadences of the King James Bible. This mastery of language is deployed in the creation of texts that reveal a willingness to confront the most profound issues of human existence and to express implications that are neither comforting nor, in some cases, fashionable.

Whether or not McCarthy comes to be ranked alongside the great figures of the past on whom he draws so readily there seems no doubt that he has been prepared to dare to aspire to their scale, their scope, their heroic seriousness. This may, of course, appear to be hubris, or at least vanity. I suggest that the truth is that, for McCarthy, this largeness of purpose is an inescapable characteristic of literature; this is the destructive element in which he has immersed himself in a literary career that spans forty years. That this career is not yet necessarily over merely adds another unknown depth to the task that confronts those who, like myself, seek to consider his output “as a whole.”

Although McCarthy has been publishing novels since 1965 his reputation was largely confined to specialized academic circles until All the Pretty Horses (1992) bought him belated and unexpected popular success. The publicity associated with this success had the effect of greatly increasing the level of critical attention paid to McCarthy, indicating that the market and the academy are more closely allied than either would perhaps care to admit. Certainly my own interest was initially stimulated by a chance encounter in a local provincial bookshop and the publisher’s modest claim that All the Pretty Horses was “One of the greatest American novels of this or any time.” During the period of his writing career so far only two full length works of McCarthy criticism by single authors have been published, Vereen Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988), dealing perforce with what McCarthy achieved before the publication of The Border Trilogy, of which All the Pretty Horses was the initial volume and Robert Jarrett’s Cormac McCarthy (1997) in Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Jarrett dealt only with the novels and was faced with the invidious task of writing on The Border Trilogy when the final volume, Cities of the Plain, was not available to him. A number of book length editions of criticism of McCarthy’s complete oeuvre do exist but these are all collections of essays by different authors and all of them deliberately set out to present a wide range of different critical points of view on McCarthy and to expose his work to a range of theoretical approaches. This book is therefore, I believe, the only work so far that aspires to present a single unified vision of McCarthy’s output including his early short stories and the Border Trilogy as a whole. McCarthy does spend years rather than months over the production of an individual novel. However it is possible that my claim to represent a comprehensive, if individual, critical view of McCarthy’s work may be undermined by an extension of that work. Since the only way to avoid this possibility would be to wait for the author’s death and since he and I are of about the same age there is no alternative but to proceed. That I may eventually be overtaken, as the other authors mentioned have been, would in fact be a welcome development, since it would mean that we had further McCarthy texts to enjoy.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most eclectic of novelists. He claims to have read 300 different books in preparation for the writing of Blood Meridian alone.³ In the first of only two published interviews, both with Richard B. Woodward, he commented that “The ugly fact is that books are made out of other books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”⁴ However we may conclude that the “ugliness” involved has been insufficient to deter him from the extensive use of intertextuality throughout his work. Perhaps, like D.H. Lawrence, we must trust “not the artist but the tale.” It has become a commonplace of contemporary criticism to equate eclecticism and postmodernism and a number of critics do regard McCarthy as a postmodern writer. Jarrett labels his chapter on Child of God and Suttree, “Postmodern Outcasts and Alienation” and sees him as undertaking the task of “rewriting” the South and, later, the Southwest. However it is my contention that labeling McCarthy’s texts in this manner obscures as much as it illuminates. Postmodernism asserts the failure of the various “grand narratives” of western culture and I shall argue that one of the unifying themes of McCarthy’s work is his depiction of the failure of the “grand narrative” of American Exceptionalism. However the postmodern critic also rejects the essentialist notion of a fixed human nature. McCarthy’s depiction of various of his protagonists “in extremis” makes it clear that he believes in an all too powerful “essential” human nature and that violence is inherent to that essence. This is made very plain in Blood Meridian; the third introductory quote to that text notes that “a 300,000-year-old fossil skull shows evidence of having been scalped.” The implication is clear—since the scalp-hunters of Blood Meridian are nineteenth century white Americans, acculturated by Christianity and the Enlightenment, and living in the age of Darwin, such evolution as they may have undergone over the millennia has failed to remove them from a state of nature that owes more to Hobbes than it does to Locke. A tabula rasa it is not. Indeed McCarthy’s reference throughout his texts to the existence of fossilized remains of extinct creatures and the symbols and broken artifacts of lost cultures “that seemed to have no referent in the world although they may once have”⁵ makes clear his vision of humanity as of cosmic insignificance, and of modern man as the representative of a culture that will, like all others before it, become no more than “myth, legend, dust”—the final words of The Orchard Keeper.⁶ Against this, the ultimate pessimism, McCarthy consistently asserts an existential antithesis, the inherent vitality of “ardenthearted” man.

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.⁷

This also is an aspect of an essentialist view of human nature. The “dialectic of vitality and insignificance” is one of those common threads that unifies McCarthy’s work. References to the heart occur throughout his texts and are always of great significance. Blood is a recurring emblem in his work and signifies both life and death, each defined in relation to its inescapable other. For McCarthy one might say that optimism comprises the notion that there is no death without life! The fact that social and cultural forces so often turn McCarthy’s ardenthearted Americans to self-destructive and at times all-consuming violence is an aspect of his critique of American culture, and by extension, of Western culture as a whole.

McCarthy’s eclecticism extends beyond the American concerns that Jarrett not unreasonably asserts, and is emphasized by his recurring references to Eliot, himself a deliberately and overtly eclectic writer. When Eliot claimed that “These fragments have I shored against my ruins,”⁸ he was claiming descent from a literary and spiritual tradition that he believed to be both lost and of transcendent value. When McCarthy places the phrase “rock and no water”⁹ unobtrusively in his most extreme denunciation of American culture he is not indulging in postmodern pastiche nor does he quote with playful irony. He also is claiming literary descent, from Eliot and by extension from Shakespeare, Dante, The Bible, Webster, Goethe, and all the sources of Eliot’s “fragments”. He is also asserting another of his unifying themes, that of the American Waste Land. In other senses however McCarthy refutes the Eliot who believed in the spiritual superiority of the past; McCarthy implicitly and consistently attacks the myth of the pastoral in all its forms, Southern, American, Western. Eliot recast myth in order to try to turn the modern world back to what he saw as the vision of a lost civilization. McCarthy recasts myth to attack what he sees as the false and destructive cultural constructs of American Exceptionalism in particular. He is what Matthew Guinn terms a mythoclast.¹⁰ McCarthy also refutes Eliot in his obvious affection for the language of the everyday, in particular the everyday of the poor of Tennessee, Texas and Mexico. He deliberately and lovingly writes the voices of the excluded into his discourse of America; and he defiantly asserts the paradoxical value of language in all its forms, in particular the narrative form. “All is telling. Do not doubt it” says the storyteller in a ruined Mexican church.¹¹ That this church is ruined, like so many in McCarthy’s texts, indicates that McCarthy’s universe is without God. A number of critics point out the absurdist nature of this universe and draw parallels between the ceaseless wandering and repeated journeys of Billy Parham in The Crossing and Camus’ absurdist existential reading of The Myth of Sisyphus.¹² Christine Chollier characterizes the Border trilogy as “baroque,” pointing out that the term

… expressed the world’s and man’s decentering (especially the decentering of humanity’s vision), man’s isolation from the deus absconditus, as well as the endless expansion and reflection of forms and lines which could break down the barriers between illusion and reality.¹³

If “All is telling” this is because man lives by telling stories and hearing the stories of others. He defines himself by telling himself what he hopes will be the true and happy story of his own life. He creates his history and his identity by telling his own story to others.¹⁴ He witnesses and is witnessed. Thus is created the infinite matrix of human language, history, narrative. If Eliot saw the writer’s task as one of persuading men to look back in despair at the great story of the past, McCarthy surely agrees with Emily Dickinson that an ignis fatuis is better than no light at all. Or rather he asserts that “no light” or rather “no story” is not a possibility. Man lives by story. His critique of America lies in the fact that he sees the “great story” that America has told her people in the same way that Eduardo sees John Grady Cole’s story; “What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story.”¹⁵ John Grady’s story is indeed an American story, the American pastoral and Western myth that McCarthy seeks to deconstruct as a destructive lie. McCarthy is fully aware of the inescapability of myth; he realizes that language is not able to completely and unambiguously signify the world. Edwin T. Arnold, a longtime admirer and a frequent contributor of critical articles on his texts is one of the few scholars to have seen McCarthy’s unpublished screenplay Whales and Men. He quotes as follows:

…. language is described by the character Peter Gregory as “a thing corrupted by its own success. What had begun as a system for identifying and organizing the phenomena of the world had become a system for replacing those phenomena. For replacing the world … Everythi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Studies in Major Literary Authors
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Permissions
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: PRELIMINARY
• PART II: THE TENNESSEE TEXTS
• PART III: THE SOUTHWESTERN TEXTS
• Appendix One The Sunset Limited
• Appendix Two The Road
• Appendix Three Supplementary Bibliography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index