Religion in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction

Apocryphal Borderlands

Manuel Broncano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415507325
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317915317
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book addresses the religious scope of Cormac McCarthy's fiction, one of the most controversial issues in studies of his work. Current criticism is divided between those who find a theological dimension in his works, and those who reject such an approach on the grounds that the nihilist discourse characteristic of his narrative is incompatible with any religious message. McCarthy's tendencies toward religious themes have become increasingly more acute, revealing that McCarthy has adopted the biblical language and rhetoric to compose an "apocryphal" narrative of the American Southwest while exploring the human innate tendency to evil in the line of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, both literary progenitors of the writer. Broncano argues that this apocryphal narrative is written against the background of the Bible, a peculiar Pentateuch in which Blood Meridian functions as the Book of Genesis, the Border Trilogy functions as the Gospels, and No Country for Old Men as the Book of Revelation, while The Road is the post-apocalyptic sequel. This book analyzes the novels included in what Broncano defines as the South-Western cycle (from Blood Meridian to The Road) in search of the religious foundations that support the narrative architecture of the texts.

1 The World as a Tale

Preliminary Considerations in Theory

After that again he [Jesus] went through the village, and a child ran and dashed against his shoulder. And Jesus was provoked and said unto him: Thou shalt not finish thy course. And immediately he fell down and died.

—“The Infancy Gospel of Thomas.” Attributed to Thomas the Isrealite

Any narrative is primarily allegory of its own reading.

—Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, 76

ETHICS, AESTHETICS, AND POLITICS OF THE APOCRYPHA

The Judeo-Christian is a written civilization, a logo-centric construction whose very existence depends upon the alphabet and its conventional and systematic disposition into signifiers and signified meanings. This civilization is, therefore, dependent on language, a textual artifact that accounts for the world by means of the arbitrary codification in abstract symbols, as opposed to, for example, pictographic representation. Writing does not imitate experience through icons or hieroglyphs, but articulates it in signs that are unavoidably ambiguous, that is, open to varying interpretation. Pictograms, like the petroglyphs that populate the desert wastelands of the Southwest in McCarthy’s fiction, do not require the existence of a pre-established code that governs their meaning: they largely signify per se, as long is they are iconic, in the Peircean sense of the term. The written word postulates instead the a priori knowledge of language, i.e., the possession of the logos that ensures legitimacy as a member of the group, let it be family, clan, city, church, or state. It requires literacy. In the course of this book we will encounter two characters, the kid in Blood Meridian and the son in The Road, who are significantly illiterate, as if they were representatives of a “post-linguistic” individual who has escaped the ontological and epis-temological trap that language represents. The Judeo-Christian civilization is founded in the Bible, the collection of “little books” that contains the divinely inspired word,¹ the text that becomes the Text: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 KJV). Creation and writing (captured speech) are thus equated to the extent that they become undistinguishable. Such an equation would provide one of the central aesthetic principles of Romanticism, as the romantic poet very often adopted a divine role in his creation of new worlds. When God revealed to Moses his Commandments on Mount Sinai as part of the covenant he made with the people of Israel (Ex. 20:2–17 and Deut.5: 6–21), He did so in writing, engraving them indelibly on the stone Tables, as if He distrusted the spoken word and meant his message to be passed down from generation to generation in its original wording until the end of time.

Written cultures have imposed their supremacy over oral cultures, as the alphabet has subjugated speech. When Judge Holden erases the pictographs on the rocks in Blood Meridian, he is reenacting the erasure of the nonverbal that has characterized Western civilization as least since the Greeks, who invented the alphabet and then coined the onomatopoeia barbarous (

) to refer to those whose speech was unintelligible for the inhabitants of the polis, the foreigners who, lacking the word (being illiterate), could never be legitimate citizens. Petroglyphs preside over the landscape of the Southwest novels (except in All the Pretty Horses, in which no explicit mention is found), a reminder of the timelessness of a territory that has been the immemorial site of ritualistic hunting. For instance, just before finding the wreckage in the desert in No Country for Old Men, Moss observes some pictures on the rocks, ancient pictographs drawn by “hunters like himself” who had left no other trace of their existence behind (Country 11). These drawings are akin to the ones Bill Parham sees in The Crossing: ancient pictographs representing men and animals, as well as suns and moons and other pictures that apparently no longer have a “referent in the world although they once may have” (Crossing 135). They are also similar to the ones John Grady sees in Cities of the Plain, again pictographs representing men, animals, and moons, as well as “lost hieroglyphics whose meaning no man would ever know” (Cities 47). Finally, in Blood Meridian, Judge Holden and his men come across old bones and broken pieces of ancient pottery, and on the rocks “pictographs of horse and cougar and turtle and the mounted Spaniards helmeted and bucklered and contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself” (Blood 133). Like mute witnesses, these rocks stand as silent testimony of the ancestral drama of man’s fight for survival in the primeval wastelands of the Southwest, which in McCarthy’s fiction is turned into a spiritual domain. Before deleting the pictographs, Holden reproduces them carefully in his notebook, just as, before destroying them, he copies the pieces of pottery that are a testament to the ancestral presence of other peoples and other cultures in a territory that has now become a true palimpsest: “Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been” (Blood 173). In fact, with his erasure of all remnants, he is reinforcing the palimpsest-like texture of a landscape that, for Holden, must become a blank slate upon which to write the new Bible in which he will impersonate divinity. The territory of McCarthy’s southwestern cycle is a repository of humankind’s transits since the beginning of time: “[A] good deal of what could be seen in the world had passed this way. Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying. And all that was seen was told and all that was told remembered” (Crossing 192). The pictograms that populate the desert contain in themselves an alternative history of the land that is not found in books. A history told by the anonymous protagonists who bore testimony through their drawings, drawings that acquire a rich allegorical dimension whose primary meaning has largely been lost for us, but perhaps not so for Judge Holden, thus his drive to destroy them.

The written word, as noted above, is essentially open to multiple significations and is thus potentially subversive. Therefore, words and texts need to be domesticated and their meaning restricted within safe confines. Language is the primordial instrument of power, but it may also be the vehicle of resistance. The paradox is, as deconstruction has sufficiently argued, that meaning is essentially unstable and, consequently, unsusceptible of fixation. The ecclesiastical hierarchies of all Christian denominations have based their legitimacy in the possession of the key to true meaning, and thus to salvation. By defining a canon (from the Greek kanōn, literally, a reed or cane used as a measuring rod and, figuratively, a rule or standard), the Church, or rather, the Churches, have appointed a set of authoritative texts that codify the divinely inspired voice and, by the same token, they have deemed a large number of other religious writings as spurious and often heretic. The canon wars that dominated literary studies in the United States during the decades of the eighties and nineties, and which still continue in our own days, were a reenactment of the time-old struggle to control what was and what was not accepted as containing the holy word, and hence, what could and could not be read, and what could and could not be used as material for the instruction of lay people. Such a struggle translates in our times into the strife to control what our students can and cannot read, what our teachers can and cannot use in their classroom. Even today, for example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is deemed unfit from many ideological sectors, from the ultra-conservative to the radical left, because of the language it uses and the views it purportedly conveys on gender and race. Canon is thus but another word for ideological orthodoxy.

The Roman Catholic mass is based on the reenactment of the ritual of the Passion, in which Jesus, the Word Incarnate (“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” John 1:14), was crucified by those who defied the truth of his message. The first part of the ritual, the liturgy of the Word, consists of readings from the Old and New Testament, followed by the homily, in which the priest performs the exegesis of one or more of the readings. In the second part, the liturgy of the Eucharist, the bread and the wine are transubstantiated into the blood and flesh of Christ through consecration by prayer. The climax of the celebration, the Communion, is the communal sharing of the body of Christ, not figuratively but materially, because the Transubstantiation turns the wine and the bread into the holy body of the Messiah. Obviously, that is a matter of faith, and as such goes beyond the scope and purpose of this book. I bring up the ritual of the mass here because of its fascinating implications for my argument: during the mass, the congregation becomes what we can define as a semiotic community that undergoes a discursive metamorphosis by which symbols are turned into flesh and flesh returns to its primeval condition as utterance. Jesus Christ, the incarnated verb, is swallowed by the parishioners, and by so doing, they partake not only of the divine Body, but also of the celestial speech that is Jesus Christ. They are thus restored to the primordial language that all humankind once spoke and that it would eventually lose by its pride and arrogance, as we learn in the biblical episode of the destruction of the tower of Babel: “let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” (Genesis 11:7 KJV). In an earlier and equally significant loss, humankind had been expelled from the Garden of Eden and its perpetual bliss. Adam and Eve, who had been endowed with the gift of naming (“whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof,” Genesis, 2:19 KJV), fell victim to the enticing power of Satan’s speech.

If Roman Catholicism finds its cornerstone in the infallibility of the Pope and the councils in their interpretations of the Holy Word, Protestantism is founded on the claim that the Scripture is the only basis of authority, as formulated by Martin Luther in what is the central tenet of the ninety-five theses that he made public in 1517. Whereas the Catholic Pope was and is considered the legitimate inheritor of St. Peter, whom Jesus appointed as his representative on earth, Luther identified papacy with the Antichrist. Furthermore, he denied the doctrine of Transubstantiation as explained above, and by so doing he questioned the very essence of sacerdotalism through negating the power of priests to perform the miracle of the conversion of the bread and the wine into the body of Christ. Priesthood was thereby divested of its role as intermediary between man and God, and this was rightly perceived as a direct threat to the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy that culminated in the Pope. Luther’s alternative “priesthood of all believers” extended that gift of communicating with God to all members of the church by means of the Holy Text. When on December 10, 1520, Luther burned a copy of the Canon Law along with a papal bull, he planted the seed of a textual battle among the different Christian churches that has come down to our own days. Luther’s famous words, in his defense before the Diet of Worms in Germany in 1521, reveal the extent to which Christian religion is a discursive artifact: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” Martin Luther, one of the most influential theologians of all times, found in his translation of the New Testament from Erasmus’ Greek version the best instrument to propagate his teaching (that translation, by the way, represented a momentous contribution to the development of modern German). In this context, exegesis and hermeneutics are key to ecclesiastical and political power.

CANONICAL VERSUS APOCRYPHAL

In his groundbreaking study of William Faulkner’s post-Nobel Prize fiction, Faulkner’s Apocrypha (1989), Joseph Urgo established the apocryphal vocation of the Mississippian writer, and hence provided the lead that inspires the present study. For Urgo, Faulkner’s fiction is a permanent reminder that readers should not “be so trusting of the authority of the Word” and should instead “delve beyond the surface of the simply stated.”² Urgo reads Faulkner’s production as an act of resistance against conventions and mores, a revolt against the totalitarianism in politics and culture characteristic of contemporary society, and an assault on “common sense ideas about reality and on what passes by ordinary for truth, authority, and perception.”³ It is, in other words, a sustained and implacable act of de(con)struction of the real, the normal, and the familiar; an inexhaustible exercise at decentralizing the self and the world this self colonizes. By displacing the self from the centers it has atavistically occupied, Faulkner provides an alternative order of existence, an apocryphon (singular for apocrypha) that disposes a different arrangement of the primeval chaos and its subsequent history: “The labor (the creation of my apocryphal county) of my life … will never make a living for me,” the author commented despairingly to Harold Ober in August 1945,⁴ convinced that the radical subversion inherent in his oeuvre would never achieve recognition. And yet, in that same quote Faulkner sees himself as a surrogate god involved in the creation of a surrogate (or apocryphal) world made of words, even if profoundly suspicious of language, or, as Urgo puts it, “Faulkner” (the person) was not an “unified individual” but “an apocryphal production”: “Faulkner did not stop at the creation of multiple possibilities of telling and knowing: he also created multiple possibilities, in his own lifetime, for being.”⁵

In Section 4 of “The Bear,” Isaac McCaslin holds a long conversation with his cousin Edmonds about the ledgers that old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the founder of the lineage and the plantation, started keeping in the commissary as a record of transactions made, of goods and slaves traded; ledgers that were continued by his descendants as an informal memory of the property’s history. For Isaac,

“[I]t was as though the ledgers were … spread open on the desk or perhaps upon some apocryphal Bench or even Altar or perhaps even before the Throne itself for a last perusal and contemplation and refreshment of the Allknowledgeable before the yellowed pages and the brown thin ink in which was recorded the injustice and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution faded back forever into the anonymous communal original dust”⁶

Not only are the ledgers the accounting books of the plantation, but they also contain the “cryptic” history of a lineage founded upon the original sin of slavery,⁷ and tainted beyond hope by the perversion of incestuous miscegenation and even suspected homosexuality between Isaac’s Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy.⁸ In their succinct and abbreviated style, the ledgers are open, however, to interpretation and, despite Ike’s longing for a fixed and immutable meaning to be found in them, the accounting books resist stable and fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Rick Wallach
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cormac McCarthy's Religious Enigma
• 1 The World as a Tale: Preliminary Considerations in Theory
• 2 Genesis of a Cursed Territory: Blood Meridian
• 3 Cicatrices and Wounds on the Skin of History: All the Pretty Horses
• 4 Of Knights and Wolves and Witnesses: The Crossing
• 5 The Virgin, the Whore, the Pimp, and the Monk: Cities of the Plain
• 6 The Devil's Territory Revisited: No Country for Old Men
• 7 Grocery Shopping in the Commissary of Hell: The Road
• Epilogue: The Tale of a World that Was
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index