No Country for Old Books

Cormac McCarthy and the End of the American Literary Mainstream

Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute. Photo by Nerissa Escanlar.

I picked either the best or the worst possible time to rediscover Cormac McCarthy. In the weeks leading up to his death, I’d been considering Cormac, researching Cormac, and consulting the appropriate sources for contextualizing Cormac, all in anticipation of the final test of actually reading Cormac, of finally diving deep into his oeuvre. Then, suddenly, he was gone. The timing was almost funny, as if the man’s death were one of his extraordinarily dry, extraordinarily grim jokes. I like to think he’d see the humor in it.

McCarthy was inescapable at a critical time in my reading life. Both The Road and the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men were released when I was in high school, insisting by virtue of their merits on being treated as events, and both lingered in the culture for years afterward. Though I wouldn’t read The Road until college – and still haven’t read No Country, despite my love for the film – I couldn’t help but absorb something of Cormac McCarthy through osmosis. I had, or believed I had, a clear sense of who he was and what he was about. This may be why I needed to “rediscover” him in the first place. It was too easy for me to take the surface-level simplicity of his style at face value, and, I think, I overlooked how the historical, the apocalyptic, the cosmic, the biblical, and the distinctly American course through his prose and give it life. Only now is that beginning to change.

The loss of Cormac McCarthy is a tremendous loss for American literature. Of this there can be no doubt. The moment following his death, with the outpouring of remembrances and lamentations that followed, carried a distinctly monumental air. It felt like an ending. It would be premature to call it the end of literature, and it might be melodramatic to say the end of American literature – after all, Thomas Pynchon still walks among us, albeit discreetly – but the end of a particular era of American literature? The end, or at least the demotion, of the lineage, stretching back through Faulkner, Twain, and Melville, that helped fashion a distinctly American consciousness? These characterizations are harder to dismiss. To paraphrase another great American writer, something is happening here, even if we don’t know quite what it is.

The People’s Fatalist: All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses has more modest ambitions than McCarthy’s most celebrated works.¹ The style might be described as “McCarthy lite.” Even so, there’s a reason that Horses was his breakout success, selling 100,000 first-run copies and winning the 1993 National Book Award. Its delicate balance of ruthlessness and tenderness makes it a useful point of entry – or in my case, re-entry – into McCarthy’s oeuvre.

Though set in 1949, Horses could easily be confused for a Western. Most of the genre’s key tropes appear. Its teenaged protagonists, John Grady Cole, Lacey Rawlins, and, for a time, a boy who claims his name is Jimmy Blevins, travel extensively through south Texas and Mexico on horseback. They ride across the border, pass through various frontier towns and settlements, find work at a hacienda, and do hard time in a Mexican prison. Blevins is arrested for stealing his own horse. John Grady finds love with the hacienda owner’s daughter. At times, the novel resembles a boys’ adventure story or a coming-of-age melodrama. But in the particulars, in its majestic sweep, its hard edges, its fine details, and its surprising moments of humor and pathos, All the Pretty Horses demonstrates a distinctly Cormacian insight and subtlety.

The difference, of course, is in the writing. Striking passages are deployed with masterful deftness, often at surprising moments. McCarthy excels at revealing the cosmic, divine, and mythological behind the mundane, to the point where even a moment as seemingly inconsequential as John Grady and Rawlins vomiting from too much drink can suddenly peel back to reveal a strange hidden darkness:

They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

Consider the trajectory of these five sentences. The first two neatly establish the scene with Hemingwayesque economy. In the third, though, the reader is suddenly aligned with the perspectives of the horses. Through the act of their hearing, McCarthy moves into otherworldly territory, and the sound of John Grady and Rawlins’ vomiting becomes an intrusion on the natural order of things. That sound marks the boys, and humanity in all its pretentions by implication, as a “rude provisional species,” “something imperfect and malformed,” “a gorgon in an autumn pool.” They, and we, are an absurd blot on the natural order, or on some other, deeper, thing, impossible for human language to capture. What we can know, McCarthy suggests, is that humanity and this order are fundamentally incompatible. Existence is zero-sum. The gorgon will either destroy or be destroyed. Either way, someone will be turned to stone.

The result is a passage that appears to bend human language to meet the dictates of nonhuman logics. The veil of objective reality is abruptly pierced, and in a moment of Joycean epiphany a hidden cosmology emerges.² With seeming effortlessness, McCarthy reveals worlds inside grains of sand.

The average reader is unlikely to notice this, it’s true. Most readers, one might observe, will be drawn in by the standard narrative devices of character and story and clarity of style, not oblique references to hidden cosmologies and long-dead Irish writers. Fair enough! But the effect will be felt, even if it isn’t observed or named. Part of what makes McCarthy unique is how his work troubles the distinction between the accessible and the inaccessible. Even his most popular novels sustain a mysterious, hypnotic cadence at every level, and even his most direct language is always on the verge of piercing the veil.

If the fine details of epiphany are always simmering, simmering, simmering with Whitmanian hidden knowledge in McCarthy’s descriptions of the natural world, then it is most frequently through monologue that he conjures the Emersonian boil that will bring them to the surface. In short, McCarthy is a master of the monologue, and he uses the technique to striking effect, enigmatically and authoritatively re-weaving previously-established subtext directly into the text.³ What was implicit in syntax is soon made explicit in story.

All the Pretty Horses’ most important monologue is delivered by the Dueña Alfonsa, aunt of the hacienda owner and “both grandaunt and godmother” to his daughter Alejandra. Though the Dueña is a spinsterish former schoolteacher, McCarthy quickly establishes her as a formidable presence. She speaks with a rare erudition, possesses a fierce, probing intelligence, and her visible scars – two missing fingers on her left hand, lost when she was 17 in a shooting accident – hint at her intimate acquaintance with the world’s rough edges. Most importantly, she is highly invested in ensuring that Alejandra’s reputation is protected.

It is to discuss precisely this subject that the Dueña first invites John Grady to the hacienda’s ranch house. Following casual conversation over an evening game of chess, she finally states her purpose: warning him away from Alejandra. Her opposition, she explains, is based not on her personal feelings, but out of concern for what a love affair, should it become known, could do to her niece’s social standing. The traditionalist mores of their world are unforgiving, she says, particularly to women.⁴ John Grady assures her that he understands, but her worries prove prophetic, and she ultimately forbids Alejandra from seeing him. Upon learning this, John Grady returns to the ranch house to plead his case. He insists that the Dueña will not keep him from Alejandra, nor she from him, but the Dueña is unwavering. She is fully aware of her intentions, and, aiming to disabuse John Grady of all illusions about the nature of her choice, she provides him with a comprehensive account of her personal history of suffering.

The Dueña was once, like Alejandra, rebellious and freespirited, a scourge on high society even as she began an inevitable assimilation into it. This was halted only by her disfigurement. The loss of her fingers, she says, was a “devastation,” endurable only with support from her lover Gustavo, brother of soon-to-be president Francisco Madero. Since then, she has accumulated even deeper scars. She tells John Grady of Mexico’s paroxysm of revolutionary violence and how it took both Gustavo and Francisco. Their gruesome deaths are relayed in excruciating detail, the horrors steadily compounding until her monologue finally reaches its climax:

That night in the garden here at my father’s house Gustavo said to me that those who have suffered great pain of injury or loss are joined to one another with bonds of a special authority and so it has proved to be. The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow. I did not return from Europe until my father died. I regret now that I did not know him better. I think in many ways he was also ill suited to the life he chose. Or which chose him. Perhaps we all were. He used to read books on horticulture. In this desert. He’d already begun the cultivation of cotton here and he would have been pleased to see the success it has made. In later years I came to see how alike were he and Gustavo. Who was never meant to be a soldier. I think they did not understand Mexico. Like my father he hated bloodshed and violence. But perhaps he did not hate it enough. Francisco was the most deluded of all. He was never suited to be president of Mexico. He was hardly even suited to be Mexican. In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I’ve thought a great deal about my life and about my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.

An epiphany that reveals a hidden, unknowable world behind the natural world – the rude, provisional species, the gorgon in the autumn pool – must be elusive. Difficult to detect, all but impossible to understand. But the monologue form allows, even requires, for the the point to be stated directly. The Dueña’s steady, meticulous accounting must coalesce into something, lest all the suffering she has catalogued fall away into the void. The result – “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting” – is a distilled summation of McCarthy’s fatalistic philosophy. The veil has been pierced again, and this time only the most obtuse reader could miss it.⁵

Conventional wisdom – or at least the strong infantilizing impulse currently flooding our culture – would suggest that a vision this bleak would hold extremely limited popular appeal. But McCarthy was, is, and will for some time remain widely read. Again, this bleak vision is from his breakout novel. This is McCarthy for the crowd, not the ivory tower, and his most celebrated work is much in the same vein. The ruthlessness of his vision, the deceptive simplicity (and muted sophistication) of his prose, the depth of his engagement with literary, historical, philosophical, and religious traditions (which, needless to say, I’m barely touching on here) – it’s mind-boggling to me that this book is what brought him a wider readership, and it’s perhaps even stranger that several even more difficult works enjoy such widespread, enthusiastic acclaim. How utterly strange that is. How unbelievably alien.

That a writer like Cormac McCarthy could become a part of the mainstream is both a cause for celebration and a deeply weird phenomenon, almost a fluke, to the point where it’s possible that nothing like it will ever happen again. I know I’m not alone in worrying that it won’t.

Cured of Sentiments: American Literature after McCarthy

It’s long been a truism to say that books are in trouble, especially in the United States. Philip Roth, to name one of our more prominent Cassandras, for years habitually heralded the coming end of the literary novel, noting that the audience for this type of fiction was shrinking (true), that the book can’t compete with the screen (for many, also true), and predicting that novel-reading would become a “cultic activity” within twenty-five years. At the time, he received a lot of pushback, but fourteen years on it’s hard not to think he had a point.

Granted, for those of us still reading, it’s a good time to be in the cult. Plenty of great books are still being written, attempts to address historical disparities have opened up the canon to writers of nearly every conceivable background and identity, an army of small presses are spotlighting the foreign and the forgotten and the obscure and the up-and-coming, and platforms like this one theoretically allow any writer with sufficient talent and drive to find their audience. Readers can now easily discover precisely the books most appealing to their specific interests, however marginal those interests might be. It’s not an exaggeration, I think, to say we’re living in a reader’s paradise. Whatever other problems we might be facing, a shortage of reading material is not one.

And, in a way, that’s the problem. Literary culture is splintering even as it shrinks, putting more and more layers between the public and readers, and between readers and their own written history. Fragmentation has its advantages – I’d be the first to admit that – but readers don’t make their choices in a vacuum. With so much to read, is it possible to determine which writing matters? Can it still matter?

Many of Roth’s critics appear to have missed that his prediction was not the disappearance of books and reading per se, but that a particular approach to reading, which he called “aesthetic literacy,” was in a state of irreversible terminal decline. This form of reading, which I understand to mean reading with careful attention not only to the construction of sentences and paragraphs but to history, context, and some version of the literary canon, is increasingly becoming the domain of specialists. Among general readers, the sense that any given book is part of a much larger historical whole appears to be rapidly deteriorating, breeding a disinterest in, even chauvinism toward, the literary past that spells serious trouble for the health of American literature as a mainstream phenomenon. Without entry points – without writers like Cormac McCarthy – the cultification of aesthetic literacy is inevitable.

If interest in literature, and specifically American literature, is to survive, there must be clear, direct avenues through which the average person, or even just the average reader, can discover it. There need to be well-known writers who might capture the public’s interest, and who might cultivate in them a sense that there’s more out there to read, to learn, and to know. Cormac McCarthy’s death tore a hole in American literature as the province of present-day, living people, and that that rupture is still open, still raw, still palpable. Though he will take his place in the pantheon of American greats alongside Melville, Twain, and Faulkner, along with other recently-departed giants like Roth and Toni Morrison, his passing means that there is one fewer living link to a version of American literature that can widely penetrate the mainstream without sacrificing its vibrancy or relevance. Without obvious heirs, or even other octogenarian giants who can equal his reach, McCarthy may well prove to be the last practitioner of a dead order.

The long-predicted marginalization of serious literature as a mainstream pursuit appears to be all but complete. Deep engagement with works of this kind has cemented its status as a niche within a niche, and, so far as I can tell, that will not be reversed. I hope I’m wrong. I can hope for a renaissance of reading, that some new McCarthy emerges to become a household name. But it’s hard to imagine another fiction writer of McCarthy’s stature – a new fiction writer of any kind, really – commanding an audience of comparable size, scope, and passionate devotion. I wish that weren’t so. But I fear it is.

Because his reach extended well beyond what is typical for literary fiction, Cormac McCarthy helped keep it alive. I’m grateful for his contribution, even as I lament what I fear his passing might mean for the rest of us. Novelists of his type have always been exceedingly rare, but never have they been more necessary.

1. The degree to which any given book is “celebrated” relative to any other is obviously up for debate, but praise for Horses tends to be fairly muted compared to that reserved for Blood Meridian, The Road, The Crossing, or, among the real diehards, Suttree. That’s my impression, anyway.

2. In my view, McCarthy’s epiphanies strongly resemble those of James Joyce, which recur throughout Joyce’s early story collection Dubliners. For those unfamiliar, the Joycean epiphany is a “sudden spiritual manifestation” revealing personal qualities that have been carefully and deliberately hidden. Joyce’s influence on McCarthy is well-known, so this may be intentional, and, if so, McCarthy’s innovation is in using the technique to reveal the naturalistic truths rather than psychological ones. Joyce’s epiphanies occur when individuals reveal themselves. McCarthy’s reveal the world that lurks outside of not only the individual, but humanity itself. It’s possible I’m not the first to see a connection here, but I’m not well-versed enough in McCarthy scholarship to know for sure.

3. To my ear, they also convincingly mimic the rhythms of the ancient oral poets. Listen to the opening and (especially) closing monologues of No Country for Old Men carefully enough and you’ll begin to hear faint echoes of Homer and Virgil.

4. Given McCarthy’s reputation as a “man’s writer” concerned exclusively with traditionally male subjects, it’s worth spotlighting his careful attention to the gender norms of post-revolutionary Mexico and how they shape the Dueña’s perspective. She frequently highlights gender disparities – indeed, this is core to her reasoning for why Alejandra’s reputation must be protected – and even voices an all-but-explicitly feminist critique of Mexican society:

I am not a society person. The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women. Society is very important in Mexico. Where women do not even have the vote. In Mexico they are mad for society and for politics and very bad at both.

McCarthy does indeed typically focus on male characters, but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he also excelled at writing compelling women.

5. Hilariously, “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting” is sometimes reappropriated to motivational ends, similar to how Silicon Valley has bastardized Samuel Beckett’s “Fail better.” We have no shortage, it seems, of obtuse readers.