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Chris
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Jan 25, 2013 01:16PM
Is it just me, or does McCarthy mention God a lot in his novels. Do you think he does this because he's trying to indirectly push God and religion through his writing? Or do you think he does it because he's aware that religion is unquestionably a part of mankind, past and present, and not to mention it would make his pieces (especially since some take place in the south?) not believable. I don't know, I guess McCarthy just strikes me as more spiritual, and I get kind of thrown-off when I hear his characters kind of preaching God. Either way, I still love him and his books. And I, myself, am not an atheist (but I won't preach either). What do y'all think?
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I don't think he is pushing God, at least not in The Road. It seems like he wrote a pretty godless world. I think he puts it in there because it is what he thinks his characters would say. The story itself is the story of a dad trying to teach his child morality and how to survive while still keeping his innocence. I think God fits into that pretty well.
Hey Chris, which of his books are you referring to, specifically? Just the road, or other ones, too?
Ed, yeah, The Road and other ones, too. Like, at the end of The Road (2nd to last paragraph), the other man's wife starts talking about God and the breath of God. Um, let me think here ..... I think John Grady Cole is asked if God watches over people, and I believe he says something to effect that he believed God does watch over people and he didn't think we all would get through a day without God watching over us. In The Crossing, I'm pretty sure the subject of God comes us between Billy and Boyd and with the characters whom they encounter.
I think God comes us in Outer Dark (but don't quote me) and in Blood Meridian, just to name a few.
But, I don't believe Jesus ever comes up; it's always a sort of generalized concept of God.
And it always struck me as profound because McCarthy seems to me, well, godless or atheist or just spiritual at best. I don't know, I can't see him as church-going man. But, maybe he is. I don't REALLY know him or what he does with his spare time. Yeah, God and Cormac. I don't know.
Yeah I was a bit put off with the mentioning of God in the Road with the subtext that it was what made the boy's future brighter (when the woman & family he met talked to him a lot about God). The implication being the world was ruined because it was godless and it was knowing God that would save it.I didn't mind characters speaking about God but this subtext was irritating.
Diana wrote: "I didn't mind characters speaking about God but this subtext was irritating."Completely agreed. I'm able to look past it because I'm so used to hearing it, but it is undoubtedly a shady worldview.
I think McCarthy's mention of God is indeed his purpose behind The Road (haven't read any of his other books). I think he subtly lays out the case that the destruction of society was a result of the people and governments moving away from God. And the family at the end was clearly successful and had a bright future BECAUSE they believed in God. It's an uplifting message for such a bleak book. I enjoyed it and believe in it.
Oh good, so it wasn't just me....others picked up on the godless/god theme too. phew!
I really don't think that was his intent or "message," because it was much too subtle if it was.
Maybe the God parts were just a big Freudian Slip for McCarthy. ;)
Maybe in his old age he's "found God."
Chris wrote: "Is it just me, or does McCarthy mention God a lot in his novels. Do you think he does this because he's trying to indirectly push God and religion through his writing? Or do you think he does it be..."In Blood Meridian there were several different interpretations of God: The Judge equated God with war and fate, the ex-priest Tobin thought God was a cynical and universal force, and then the lay people held the traditional view. I think this shows that McCarthy isn't pushing for religion, but is rather conveying that humanity's attachment to the spiritual--be it God or the universe itself--is inextricable from our culture, they just take on many forms. The road took it another step: what happens to religion when our culture dies or significantly decays? I think the father's continued conflicts with religion in the road, even in the dead godless world around him, shows just how strongly humans search for something beyond the immediate world.
Michael wrote: "Chris wrote: "Is it just me, or does McCarthy mention God a lot in his novels. Do you think he does this because he's trying to indirectly push God and religion through his writing? Or do you think..."I completely agree with everything you just wrote.
I thought about it more. I too think he just incorporates talks of God because it's just apart of the human experience, and not because he's secretly trying to convert reader or whatever.
Great comment. Thanks
Chris wrote: "Michael wrote: "Chris wrote: "Is it just me, or does McCarthy mention God a lot in his novels. Do you think he does this because he's trying to indirectly push God and religion through his writing?..."And I have to say that you definitely know your Blood Meridian
I'm still bothered by the narration in The Road that says the woman talked to the boy about God but then again, I may be bringing my own experiences and judgements to the work (which is the cool part about literature). Really, I think the fact that we're contemplating this possibly lends credence to what Michael wrote - that humans search for something beyond the immediate world. It's a teaser for us. It brings us into the mindset of the characters as well as we struggle to place meaning on things (even what the heck happened to the world). One line that stands out is when the Man is questioned who he is (a doctor, what) and he said he is nothing. It's a hint to us as readers perhaps. :)
Diana, thanks for the link.I almost feel like the fact that the man and the boy don't have names, or are never mentioned, kind of suggest it's a world that's been stripped away of a lot. Even quotation marks! LOL I couldn't resist.
I guess we all have to believe in something. I'm not against believing in a higher power. I guess every culture or society would have to have some kind of creation story. Yet, I like how the last word in the book is mystery. So, I mean, who really knows why we're here or where we're going?
cities of the plain comes up in the bible a lot.
Hmm. That's one I've been meaning to read. Still trying to finish ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Will have to check it out.
Chris wrote: "Hmm. That's one I've been meaning to read. Still trying to finish ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Will have to check it out."It'll help tremendously to have a spanish dictionary when reading the trilogy.
When reading "The Road" I did not feel like McCarthy was being overly or overtly preachy - at least not as much as many post-apocalyptic novels - which are inherently about humankind's 'fall from grace,' even though some are more secular than others. Nonetheless, I find myself intrigued by what you brought up, and it makes me want to reread "The Road" ~ although I don't know if I really want to go through all that again.
Alrighty, then. Sorry I'm a bit late coming back to the party, Chris. I'm busy, and this post needed a first draft or two. I've got a ton of stuff to say on this topic, so hopefully those who're really interested will bear with me.I think that McCarthy fits in pretty damn neatly with the 19th century Christian existentialists, specifically Dostoevsky. For those of you who're looking at me like I've got three heads, I believe I can back this up, very much so.
First, let me pull a couple of quotes from some of his interviews. In his August 2005 Vanity Fair interview, he told Richard Woodward that Anton Chigurh from NCFOM is "pretty much pure evil". (This interview is really hard to find. I only was able to get it through my university's library. It does not seem to be on any website anywhere, and I do not have an electronic copy to link to. Sorry. So y'all are gonna have to either take my word for it or find this interview yourselves somewhere.) I'm including this b/c when I first started reading McCarthy a few years ago, I was super, fully convinced that he was a pure nihilist. I really thought that he was speaking through the judge in Blood Meridian and through Chigurh, and that his books, especially BM, were essentially paeans to war and violence and the dark side of man. I gradually started backing away from that reading of him, and this quote was the final nail in the coffin. He definitely is not speaking through Chigurh, and I'm comfortable inferring thence that he is not speaking through the judge, either. He does believe that evil exists, he has his own particular sense of it, and he is trying to expound upon it.
Second: A friend of a friend of McCarthy, some guy named Garry Wallace, recently recounted some of his conversations with him. You can find an interview with Wallace at these links:
http://trackofthecat.blogspot.com/201...
http://trackofthecat.blogspot.com/201...
http://trackofthecat.blogspot.com/201...
http://trackofthecat.blogspot.com/201...
The second and third of those links, especially the third, deal most with McCarthy. The first and fourth just provide context, dealing with Garry Wallace himself, who is apparently also a writer. More information can apparently be found in an essay by Wallace, titled "Meeting Cormac McCarthy". I've not yet been able to track this down. But I will, even if I have to pay for it somewhere.
Some of the notable things said in this interview are:
" 'McCarthy commented that some cultures used drugs to enhance the spiritual experience, and he said that he had tried LSD before that drug was made illegal. He said that it had helped to open his eyes to these kinds of experiences.' "
" '[McCarthy] said that the religious experience is always described through the symbols of a particular culture and thus is somewhat misrepresented by them. . .He went on to say that he thinks the mystical experience is a direct apprehension of reality, unmediated by symbol, and he ended with the thought that the inability to see spiritual truth is the greater mystery.' "
My purpose for prefacing with these interviews and quotes is to bolster my view that McCarthy is not only definitely not nihilistic, but he even has a strong spiritual/religious component to him. He believes in good, and he believes in evil, and he has thought about what constitutes each in great detail. He even said in the Oprah interview that whether or not he believes in God changes by the day. And he followed it up by saying the main message of The Road was that "we should be grateful". These don't sound like the words of a death-loving, God-hating nihilist to me.
So now to address the big piece of evidence against my view. Everyone who hopes for McCarthy to be some Stentor of nihilism loves to bust out this quote from the 1992 NYT interview with Richard Woodward:
" 'There's no such thing as life without bloodshed,' McCarthy says philosophically. '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.' "
That quote totally sold me on his nihilism when I first started reading his books. After I started seeing more in him than utter hopelessness, I kept wondering if that quote was perhaps saying something other than what it seemed to be saying. And soon after it hit me. (It takes awhile for me to get to the point here. Sorry I'm rambling a bit. I personally think most of what I'm saying is useful/interesting, but I'm not so great at pruning and organizing it.)
I believe that McCarthy is reacting against a sort of Camus/Sartre-style existentialism and is quite in line with the Dostoevskyan (and to some extent Tolstoyan) brand. Dostoevsky argues in several of his books, perhaps most eloquently in Brothers Karamazov, (btw, lest you think I pull this from the void, in McCarthy's 2007 Rolling Stone interview with David Kushner, he mentions BK as one of the only four books he considers great. (The others, for those who're interested, are Sound and Fury, Ulysses, and of course, Moby-Dick.)) that with the Enlightenment and the success of science came an en masse abandonment of traditional religion, followed by a shift to positivism/materialism (the ideas that nothing nonphysical or spiritual exists, that there is no knowledge except scientific knowledge, that any claims to other sorts of spiritual or inherent knowledge are false, and that anything not explained by science (e.g., God) does not exist). This positivist/materialist perspective is most embodied by Ivan in BK. Dostoevsky's argument, which I believe McCarthy holds with, is that this shift to positivism/materialism (or, the "first wave" of liberals in 19th century Russia, in the 1840s) would ultimately give rise to nihilism (the "second wave" of liberals, in the 1860s). This nihilism is most embodied in Smerdyakov in BK. Dostoevsky believed the link between the "Ivans" of the world and the "Smerdyakovs" of the world was causal, that the initial wave of liberalization would have no choice but to end in the second wave. And he feared what the world would come to subsequently.
I believe this is McCarthy's primary message. I think he sees the evidence *for* God to be rather slim, and I believe this troubles him greatly, both personally (think Suttree's existential crisis) and socially (think everything in BM and The Road). For instance, in BM, I think it's clear that the judge embodies both the positivism/materialism and the nihilism that Dostoevsky writes about, and I believe that McCarthy, like Dostoevsky, wishes to portray the two as fundamentally linked. To me, this coherently explains the two most obvious facets of the judge: He is obviously phenomenally, horrifically cruel and violent, on a scale not witnessed in any of the other men. But he is also phenomenally intelligent, not only in logical, capacitive way, but in a scientific, information-driven way. I never could understand how these two aspects cohered in the judge. Now I believe I do. And I believe that this reading opens up much in his other books as well.
Getting back to the NYT quote: Dostoevsky was also reacting against those liberals of the time who were seeking to "remake" man, to find those "laws of nature" that governed man and civilization and to demonstrate to mankind that he had no choice but to follow these laws, leading presumably to a communist society. Dostoevsky railed against this at great length in Notes from Underground. And I believe that this idea is what McCarthy is getting at in that NYT quote: The idea that man is a certain way. Some is good, some is bad. But those who seek to remake man are the truly evil. I believe this is what that quote actually means, and I believe that evidence for this idea, that those who try to shape the world to their own vision are the truly evil, can be found in just about all of his books.
Where I believe McCarthy breaks with Dostoevsky is in his resolution to this problem. McCarthy is finally optimistic, but not very. For Dostoevsky, the Orthodox Church and Christ and love for one's fellow man resolved his problems, his "existential crisis", so to say. I don't believe that McCarthy is satisfied with an answer like that. He seems to approach these questions in much the same way that Ivan does in Brothers Karamazov, specifically in the Rebellion and Grand Inquisitor chapters. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, in two consecutive chapters in Brothers Karamazov, Ivan defends his atheism and actual disdain for God to his brother Alexei. Ivan defends his beliefs superbly eloquently. These chapters have a reputation for converting people away from their faith, and apparently Dostoevsky feared putting them in the book, because he did not believe he would be able to make the counter-argument, the argument for the side he actually believed, as forcefully. Essentially, Ivan recites a litany of horrible events that have happened in the world, reading from newspaper clippings, These stories all involve some sort of horrible fate, be it torture, rape, murder, et al befalling children, specifically children. And Ivan asks what kind of God could make such a world. And then he argues that either there is no God, or there is a God who in fact hates mankind, and we should rebel against him.
I believe this is the primary reason for the bleakness, the barrenness of McCarthy's novels. I believe he realizes, like Ivan, that the world is a terrible place much of the time. I believe he is troubled by this, as it hints at there being either no God or a malignant one. I believe he couples science and atheism with evil and nihilism (see the judge, and note that in both The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason education is linked to evil). And I believe that the point he makes is that *if* there is a God, a good God, *if* there is good in the world, then it must somehow exist *despite* the evil in the world. And I think that his argument to this end is a recognition of the limited good there is in the world (e.g. the boy in The Road). I believe that he sincerely wonders where that good comes from, whether it's an accident or a sign from God, and how it could possibly arise on such a cold, hostile earth.
Finally, just take a look at this interview with John Hillcoat, the director of the film The Road:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2...
In it, he says how, on meeting McCarthy, Hillcoat asked if he had any advice or requests, and McCarthy only asked that he put as much Christian/spiritual symbolism in the movie as possible. If that doesn't sound like a guy who's guy some serious theological concerns and beliefs, I don't know what does.
I've also got a bunch more to say on my reading of McCarthy, specifically on Blood Meridian. But I'm going to put that on another discussion in case anyone's interested. The guy who started this discussion, Chris, seems to have another discussion going on Blood Meridian. I'll probably post over there soon, but it'll probably take a while.
So long. Hit me back with questions/comments if you want.
Ed wrote: "Alrighty, then. Sorry I'm a bit late coming back to the party, Chris. I'm busy, and this post needed a first draft or two. I've got a ton of stuff to say on this topic, so hopefully those who're re..."Damn, you certainly came back with a thought or too. :)
Very very cool stuff. Give me a day or two to digest it all.
Chris
Also, just a quick survey of McCarthy's books shows a ton of religious references. And given some of the interview quotes I posted above, I don't really believe these are idle references. For instance, the titles of some of his books are religious (Outer Dark and Cities of the Plain come straight out of the bible, and Child of God is clear enough.. I even read a paper once arguing that The Road is a reference to the Road to Damascus. I believe that less, but that book is the one most steeped in religious references and feel, and it *does* kind of fit, a little bit, so who knows. Don't remember where I read that paper, though, so I can't give a link.) Outer Dark pretty much reads like an inverted Nativity (instead of a child born to a virgin, it's a child born of incest; instead of three wise men, there's the "grim triune", who also seem to play the role of a tripartite Satan, much the opposite of the traditional trinitarian Christian God.) There's also the "possessed" swine at the end, seeming to come straight out of Matthew.
There seem to be some parallels in Child of God with Jonah (when Lester escapes the men at the end of the book, he spends three days in the cave, much like Jonah spent three days in the whale. Since the cave is described on more than one occasion as seeming like it is the inside of some great beast, this doesn't seem unreasonable.) Also, when Lester finally escapes from the cave at the end, there's a lot of birth imagery and terminology, like he's being reborn. This is interesting given he was called a Child of God (the jury's still out on whether I think McCarthy meant this sarcastically or not. The more I think about it, the more I believe he meant it in earnest.) And finally, when Lester is living in the cave in the third part of the book, the cave is frequently compared to Hades. (Three instances I can think of off the top of my head: When Lester watches bats fly out of the cave, McCarthy compares the bats to "souls of Hades". When Lester builds a fire in the cave with *no* opening (I believe that's the second cave), the smoke collects like some "stygian mist". And when he's listening to the stream in the cave when he has his dream, he imagines it running to the center of the earth, much like the Styx was believed to.)
Suttree has his sort of existential crisis and even has his trip into the underworld to help/save Gene Harrogate. One of the most interesting things in connection with that scene is that way earlier in the book, Suttree is having a conversation about what he thinks hell is like, and he says that he imagines that the people there just would want some ice water. When he goes into the sewers following Gene, like 150 pages later, Gene tells Suttree what he would pay to have some ice water. That pretty much blew my mind when I saw that.
Blood Meridian is so full of this stuff it's not even funny. On like page 1 there's a reference to the "agony in the garden". Obviously there's Tobin always talking about God. The whole Tobin chapter (chapter X I believe) is chock full of this stuff, from the cloven hoof footprints in the malpais, to the judge making gunpowder from the earth, which comes from Book 6 of Paradise Lost (lines 469-495).. There, Satan does the same thing. There is a TON of destroyed church imagery, which is fascinating in light of the theory I proposed in my previous post. There are a few scenes of Christian believers, almost always slaughtered (the disemboweled Christ on the cross, the penitent brothers, the Mexicans collected in the church). The kid starts carrying a bible, people take him for a preacher, and the narrator says that the kid was "no witness to them, neither of things at hand or things to come, he least of any man", which sounds a bit like Romans 8:38 (things at hand, things to come.. present and future, depending on the translation). The judge misquotes from one of Christ's parables, Luke 12:20, in the final chapter: "Tonight thy soul shall be required of thee." And even the epilogue quotes from the bible. The "striking fire out of the rock" bit echoes the book of Judges (which is interesting in itself), chapter 6 verses 20-24 or so.
And then there's The Road, which is also loaded with this. I think the most interesting one is the reference to "salitter", which is a neologism coined by Jacob Boehme (yup, *that* Jacob Boehme, the same one who McCarthy quotes in his epigraph to BM). I won't claim credit for tracking this one down, I'll just link you:
http://thefirstmorning.com/2008/09/11...
Salitter is a word meaning essentially the physical essence of God. And *that* is what the man sees drying from the earth in The Road. Whoa. Then there's the bit with the boy being the man's "warrant", the bit with the family at the end, which has been mentioned in an above post, and the "carrying the fire" bit, which always makes me think of those pictures of Jesus I used to see hanging around in my Catholic school, one hand raised in benediction, and his heart visible, surrounded by the crown of thorns and engulfed in flames. Much like this:
http://www.priestsforlife.org/blog/wp...
And no one ever mentions McCarthy's plays. They're so different from anything else McCarthy has written. Very little violence, much more introspective, much more overtly concerned with the role of religion in the world and in a person's life. Since so few people have read them, I won't bother giving a bunch of examples, but you should check them out. They're really interesting, especially in light of some of the things I've mentioned.
So long.
Ed
Hey there Ed,Very interesting stuff! I particularly like what you said about McCarthy's NYT quote on the true nature of evil:
"I believe this is what that quote actually means, and I believe that evidence for this idea, that those who try to shape the world to their own vision are the truly evil, can be found in just about all of his books."
I think your idea most definitely rings true throughout McCarthy's works. Blood Meridian (the only McCarthy book I have any real authority on) opens up with a few epigraphs, but the one by Jakob Bohme really touches on these ideas:
"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness"
Under the guidance of this quote, I'll take this conversation a step further. I think McCarthy may be playing with the idea that, although good and evil certainly exist independently of each other, they may only be human constructs that do not objectively exist or describe human nature. The Judge from BM, at least, expresses this clearly when he speaks about Moral Law:
"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test..."
I think many of McCarthy's characters confront this possibility in one way or another. Returning to The Road, we see the effects of war have degenerated mankind to a primitive state of survival, and the line dividing "good" and "evil" has largely degenerated with it. How "evil" is it for the father to leave that lone thief bereft of clothing and items? How "good" was it for him to then bring back his clothes? The answers to these questions are not clear-cut, and I believe the Road, like other McCarthy books, may be positing that good and evil never are (if they objectively exist at all).
I'll end with another great quote, this one by Walt Whitman, that also echoes these ideas:
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
And now I REALLY want to read Blood Meridian again!
Hey Michael,A couple comments from the way I see things: First, I'm definitely wary of linking McCarthy's message (assuming, as I do, that there is one) to anything that the judge says. I've totally come full circle with that book. When I first read Blood Meridian, I fully believed that the judge was acting as McCarthy's mouthpiece. From the fact that no one is given a voice to really oppose the judge, to that NYT quote I made such a big deal about two posts up, to the way that the book seems to *revel* in the violence and gore, not shy away from it or portray it as something inherently horrible, I really thought McCarthy was speaking through the judge. I really thought that he was advocating some kind of extreme individualist, everyone's-out-to-get-everyone-else-and-that's-the-way-it-should-be kind of worldview. Over the last couple years, I've fully reversed myself. I believe that everything the judge says is precisely what McCarthy is opposed to. I've come to believe that he has set the judge up to be the embodiment of all that he sees to be evil in this world. And he believe that he has done so in the manner he has precisely to demonstrate how seductive that evil can be: Namely, the judge, and all he embodies, is all the more seductive if there is no one to oppose him. If McCarthy were to give a voice to a strong counterargument to the judge, the way Dostoevsky gives a counterargument to Ivan's Rebellion and Grand Inquisitor speeches in the Zosima chapter (and really in the rest of the book), it would weaken the effect. (My apologies if you haven't read Brothers Karamazov.. That book is the greatest point of contact I have to a lot of McCarthy's work, so I tend to reference it a lot. But my point stands without that reference.) But by making the judge so damn smart, so eloquent, and by not letting anyone oppose him, it does grant him an air of authority. And I believe that's exactly McCarthy's aim.
So that quote you mentioned, about "Moral law"... I think the old me would have agreed with you, but I'm just in a different place in terms of how I see this book now. I do indeed believe that McCarthy is arguing that good and evil do exist independently of us, but he is wondering where that could come from, if that's a hint that there's a God out there. There are so many other things in his other books and his interviews that lead me to think this.
Second, I've actually come to believe that the father in The Road is something of the antagonist. That moment at the end, when the boy has his sort of Kierkegaardian leap of faith with that new family.. I think that's the point of the book. That yeah, it may well be that there are people who're out to get you, to harm you, to steal your food, to kill you even, but if your response is that of the dad's, if you value safety above all else, to the extent that it cuts you off from other people, if you are so intent on living in this world for fear that there is nothing afterwards that you fight for your life with everything you've got... it merely perpetuates that apocalyptic world. So all those things that the father does, taking the thief's clothes, etc... It does paint him as a "bad guy". And I think that's the point. He loves his son, but in other respects, he's not really a "good guy". His son is. That's the "carrying the fire", and that's the "leap of faith" at the end.
And third, that Walt Whitman quote is great. What poem is that from?
But all in all, this stuff is great. I could read these books endlessly and find new stuff in them each time.
Ed wrote: "Hey Michael,A couple comments from the way I see things: First, I'm definitely wary of linking McCarthy's message (assuming, as I do, that there is one) to anything that the judge says. I've tota..."
The Whitman quote is from "Song of Myself". If you haven't read it before, and you have the will to read through the whole thing, it is very much worth your time!
And I agree with you for the most part since I was mostly just throwing ideas around :) But I do believe that the moral-greyness of McCarthy's characters at least suggests that the principles of human behavior transcend a simple moral scale of "good" versus "evil".
BUT, if McCarthy is asking where this independent "good" comes from, and if it's a hint towards God as you mention, where is the good in Blood Meridian? The most moral character, the kid/man, is himself guilty of the same immoral acts as the rest of Glanton's gang. On a traditional moral scale, he isn't far from the judge.
Unless we recall McCarthy's idea of the true evil, the act of remaking man. I suppose that the kid/man might embody "good" simply because he EVADES the Judge's acts of remaking man (until the end, which undoubtedly has a message about this too).
The thing is, the Judge's method of remaking man seems to be destruction, isn't it? He destroys everything he gains knowledge over (and writes in his book). He destroys the mexican and indian villages and cultures, religion, etc. He doesn't destroy the Glanton gang because it itself is a force of destruction. That is, until they disperse, but then he embarks on a quest to kill each member. So the Judge's idea of human harmony=death. Only the protagonist rejects and avoids the judge's verdict. So, perhaps this makes him good? If my memory serves me right, he is one of the few who seems to just *accept* life as it is.
Also, what about the Road's theme of suicide? The son certainly embodies good, but his intermittent suicidal thoughts are only held back by his father. If you ask me, the father's role in that is one of the greater instances of good in the book.
But, if you can't tell, I'm running out of substance! You certainly know much more about these books than I!
Hey Michael,Sorry for the delay in responding, I've just been really busy with work lately.
You definitely bring up some really solid points here. I worry how well my thoughts on McCarthy's writing will stand up to all of them. But regardless, kind of like you said, I'm just throwing thoughts around. I really like the ideas I've proposed mainly because I've had myriad other theories on his work in the past, and I've found massive gaps in them all. This current one seems to explain a lot of stuff. But if I start to get the feeling it doesn't do an adequate job... well, back to the drawing board then.
So I'll defend my view as best I can, but some of the things you mentioned are *definitely* leaning against the weak points in my ideas.
So first of all, just to clarify a subtle point, I'm *not* claiming that McCarthy's wondering where this good comes from is a hint that he believes there's a God out there. I was just pointing out that he does in fact seem to wonder where this sort of transcendent good comes from, and it was just me spinning my wheels wondering the extent to which he attributes that to God. I don't think this is unreasonable considering some of his statements in interviews (like the Garry Wallace one above, where he mentions the "spiritual" side of life, or the Oprah one, where she asks him if he believes in God and he says it changes day to day, or the Wall Street Journal one in 2009 where he says he'd "like to be a spiritual person". Also, in that same WSJ interview, he mentions a conversation between him and his son, where his son once asked him what he (McCarthy) would do if he (the son) died, and McCarthy told him he'd want to die too so they could be together. Granted, later in the interview he seems to pull back from this, mentioning how there's no specific afterlife he believes in... But it's interesting, and telling, and seems to indicate a man who has some belief in the possibility of there being some sort of God.) I also don't think this is unreasonable given some of the bits in his books, like all those religious references I cobbled together above. But I don't fully believe it, and I'm not really pushing it. It just seems interesting and plausible.
Next, call me crazy, but I do indeed believe there is a fair bit of good in Blood Meridian. Before I explain, allow me a (probably too long) preface:
One of the aspects of McCarthy's writing I'm most interested in, but which I've not written about in this discussion at all because I don't feel I understand it terribly well, is his symbolism. McCarthy seems to have an uncommonly intricate and consistent symbolic infrastructure spread throughout his books. From Outer Dark up to The Road and The Sunset Limited, he seems to use the same symbols over and over and seemingly for the same purposes each time. E.g., coins feature prominently in two scenes in Blood Meridian, in All the Pretty Horses, and in No Country for Old Men. Each time, coins are linked to the concept of fate or man's attempt to control his fate: There's the coin trick scene in BM (which hints at the possibility that the judge is in control of just about everything), there's the kid's dream in BM (this one doesn't seem to be much about fate on the surface, except when you realize that the coldforger is hammering out the coin "like his own conjectural destiny"), there's the cara y cruz scene in ATPH, and then Chigurh's use of the coin in NCFOM. So now, anytime I see coins mentioned in his works, I wonder whether it's an idle reference or if he's saying something deeper. He mentions bats in Child of God and Blood Meridian, each time comparing them to souls of the damned. He mentions fire a lot, most obviously in The Road, but also in just about every one of his books, and it always seems to be linked to the inherent goodness inside a person or a person's yearning for goodness. (Caveat: Child of God seems to be the sole exception here. CoG uses fire on multiple occasions to be an agent of destruction... I'm not sure how this fits in with my interpretation here... Maybe it fits, and I'm just looking at it the wrong way. Maybe he decided to use it differently in that book. And maybe I'm just wrong.) He uses caves a lot, most notably in Child of God and the man's dream in The Road, and on two separate occasions (once in CoG, once in TR) describes the damp walls of the cave as looking like the innards of some great beast. He uses shadows in just about every one of his books, frequently describing them as if they existed independently of the body which cast them and seeming to link them to the wicked side of man. He uses stone a LOT, seemingly to refer to man's intransigence, his stubbornness, his desire to shape the world to his will. Cf. e.g. the following conversation between Suttree and himself during one of his "existential crisis" moments:
"What do you believe?
I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.
Equally?
It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
Of what would you repent?
Nothing.
Nothing?
One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all."
Then there's what the judge says about the man who builds in stone versus the man who builds in reeds. And also, there's the entirety of The Stonemason, which, as best as I understand it, seems to be about a man who tries to control too much in his family and winds up causing a lot of bad stuff to happen. Over and over, stone seems to be the bad aspect, the hard aspect, the *judge* aspect of man. And there's whiteness: I find it very interesting that the professor, White, in The Sunset Limited is so similar in philosophy to the judge and is identified *solely* by the characteristic of being white. And obviously one of the most memorable descriptions of the judge is how white he is. I believe their whiteness is not a racial trait, but a symbol of their blankness, the nihilism that they hold. And McCarthy definitely seems to have some association with intelligence and evil: There's the judge, obviously, then there's White in The Sunset Limited, there's this quote by McCarthy from an interview with him, Tommy Lee Jones, and Samuel L. Jackson in the NYT about The Sunset Limited http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/art... :
"I’ll say what I said before: I don’t think it’s true that an education necessarily is going to drive you to suicide, but it’s probably true that more educated people commit suicide than people who are not educated."
And then there's The Stonemason, where there's a whole conversation about how dangerous professors, and more generally, ideas, can be. The main character, Ben, is talking with his wife, Maven, about how much wisdom his grandfather Papaw has:
BEN: Papaw was talking about the law yesterday. He said that law can only work in a just society.
MAVEN: He said *that*?
BEN (smiling): Well, more or less. It's what he meant anyway.
MAVEN: You think his opinions are valuable because he worked all his life. Isnt that a pretty romantic notion?
BEN: Yes. It's also true. You cant separate wisdom from the common experience and the common experience is just what the worker has in great plenty.
MAVEN: Then why arent more workers wise?
BEN: I guess for the same reason that more college professors arent wise. Thinking's rare among all classes. But a laborer who thinks, well, his thought seems more likely to be tempered with humanity. He's more inclined to tolerance. He knows that what is valuable in life is life.
MAVEN: And the professor?
BEN: I think he's more apt to just be dangerous. Marx never worked a day in his life.
MAVEN: Sounds a little neat to me.
BEN: I don't have a theory about it. I think most people feel that books are dangerous and they're probably right.
Aside from these, over and over and over do we see cryptic references to bones, to mules, to wolves, to doubles/doppelgangers, to the sun, to idiots, to orphans, etc. Some of these I believe I can reasonably interpret or find frequent associations with, others less so.
So... that's my far too long preface. The point is, I've recently begun noticing that McCarthy uses the same symbols over and over again, and for the most part, it's uncannily consistent across books. Hell, across decades. And I'm not saying I'm right in my interpretations of these symbols. I'm not even saying that there are strict "interpretations" per se. But these repetitions, these motifs, are there. And the associations seem pretty strong to me.
So back to the good in BM: For the most part, I see it symbolically. All the references to fire in the book. The scene at the end of chapter 15 when the gang is sleeping in the barn and they get undressed and static electricity is being caused by them taking their clothes off and McCarthy writes that "each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so." The burning bush scene. All the times they're sitting around the fire, watching the fire, keep note of who's watching the fire and who's not, which characters have the fire reflected back in their eyes. More often than not, it's the kid, the idiot, and the dog. And pairing this with the fact mentioned above, that McCarthy seems to have some association between unbridled intelligence and evil, the fact that it's these 3 who're frequently depicted with fire reflected in their eyes is interesting. Moreso, there are all those mentions of the sun. The sun is the only thing, it seems, that can harm the judge. He's always so concerned about wearing a hat, and he burns when he's in it for too long. He even says to Tobin and the kid at the well, when he's telling them to make up their minds and get a move on: "Yonder sun is like the eye of God and we will cook impartially upon this great siliceous griddle I do assure you." Point is, there's *something* that can do harm to the judge. Now, you can interpret that symbol however you like (I'm partial to God, as mentioned by the judge himself, and which goes back to Plato's Form of the Good and his Metaphor of the Sun, which I feel like I read somewhere that McCarthy was familiar with. But there are other possibilities), but the point is that the sun represents something that can oppose the judge. That's good right there. There are a few random acts of kindness, such as the tavernkeeper's wife who takes care of the kid after he's shot in chapter 1, or the Dieguenos who care for the kid and Tobin after they escape from the judge in chapter 21. (not sure if I'd count the kid pulling the arrow out of David Brown's leg or him refusing to kill Shelby as kindness, but possibly).
Wow, I need to start a new post b/c I'm running out of room. I hope you're not minding reading all this. I guess it really doesn't matter, in a sense. I've had all these ideas twirling around my head for so long now, it's just nice to just write them down and see them coalesce, even if no one or only a few people read it.
Continuing with the good in BM: And then finally, the biggest one, for me at least, is the epilogue. I've come to believe very strongly two things about the epilogue. One, it serves as a refutation of the judge. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I fully believe that McCarthy has set the judge up as something to be reviled. Whatever the judge says or stands for is what McCarthy finds evil. Furthermore, no character in the book ever really poses a philosophical challenge to the judge. That's what I believe the purpose of the epilogue is. If the epilogue merely affirmed what the judge has already said, if the man in the epilogue were the judge himself, as a lot of people believe, I think the epilogue would have no purpose in the book, either philosophically, thematically, or even aesthetically. It would be redundant. I think the purpose is essentially to deny the judge the last word, to hint that he's wrong. The second thing I strongly believe about the epilogue is that the only way to understand it is symbolically. And despite the fact that I don't understand it fully, I think that some of the things I mentioned above form a good start. First, as I mentioned in a previous post, the whole "striking fire out of the rock" bit comes out of the book of Judges. In that story, the entity who comes to strike the fire out of the rock is a messenger of God. Next, if you're willing to accept my interpretations of his symbolism, this messenger of God (now, I don't hold to any specific interpretation of God in McCarthy's books.. Yahweh? Jesus? Allah? Doesn't seem to matter.. Just *some* God, a creator, who is the font of all things good.) comes and strikes fire (read: the inherent, perhaps latent, goodness in man) out of the rock (read: the hard, selfish aspect of man that wants to remake the world the way he thinks it should be) which God has put there. Read in the context of The Road, with all its talk of "carrying the fire", this makes a lot of sense to me. It also sheds light on what may be McCarthy's belief as to how good came to be in what is often such a cold, terrible, heartless world: There are just a few people, like the man in the epilogue or the boy in The Road, Christ-like figures, who come into the world already good and show/inspire others to be the same. Also, the fact that the epilogue is taking place "[i]n the dawn" is a good sign, if you believe that the sun is that which opposes the judge. What I *can't* make heads or tails of is the bit with the people searching for bones. Bones are one of those symbols that gets used over and over again in McCarthy, frequently in ways that seem to scream "THIS IS A SYMBOL", but I have no idea what it means. There's the bit where the judge cracks open the legbone and lets the marrow drip into the fire. In the desert after they leave the well, the kid and Tobin are hiding among bones. Hell, Tobin even fashions a cross out of bones. When the man gets to Fort Griffin at the end, he walks towards the bar between "ricks" of bones. Bones are conspicuously mentioned in the opening paragraph of The Crossing, much the same way that fire is mentioned in the opening paragraph of ATPH. Is this supposed to be death? The physical, non-spiritual aspect of creation? History/the past/man's memories? Something else? I can't pull it together. But I definitely get the sense I'm onto something, so if you happen to have noticed something with bones in this book or another of his, please, by all means, pass it on.Next, I do not get the sense that the kid is the most moral character in BM. I see him throughout the first 22 chapters as nothing more than a potential. He could be good, he could be bad. He starts off bad, has flickers of good, and at the end of chapter 22, seems to try to find a different path. But regardless of what happens to him in those intervening 28 years or so, by the time he's "the man", he's failed. He's back to his old tricks, killing Elrod. (By the way, I'm aware of what a problematic scene that is, in the sense of "Is it justified self-defense or not?" But I definitely believe it's meant to solidify the man's journey back down the path of evil. I have several reasons for this, but chief among them is that *before* he kills Elrod, he tells that group of boys, the bonepickers, that he's on his way to Fort Griffin, which is acknowledged as "the biggest town for sin in all Texas". I definitely get a Dante's Inferno kind of vibe from that. He knows full well what Fort Griffin is. It's hell. The judge doesn't come there looking for him. He goes there looking for the judge. That's where the judge resides. At that epicenter of sin. Even when he's about to enter the bar, the Beehive (what an unbelievably creepy, horrifying name, if read in this context), where he finds the judge, he gets to the door and "look[s] back a last time at the street and at the random windowlights let into the darkness and at the last pale light in the west and the low dark hills around." Emphasis on *last time*. He knows full well where he is and what he's doing. So I think. And him killing Elrod is indicative of that. Especially since, as I said above, he was on his way to Griffin even before he killed Elrod.) So no, I definitely don't see him as really good or moral. In my view, he's someone who at the start has the potential for good, but forsakes it. He fights his own judge aspect, weakly, meekly, but not fully. He never just up and leaves. He doesn't actually stand up against the judge. I'm not even convinced that the judge kills him at the end. Part of me wonders whether that hug is a "welcome to the dark side" or if it's the judge fully engulfing him, where in a sense, the judge owns him. And maybe what the other men see in the outhouse is that little girl who went missing. I'm not fully convinced of it, but I believe it as much as that the judge kills him in the outhouse.
Next, I'm honestly not sure how to respond to your point about the judge killing the members of the gang. I have so many random thoughts spinning around my head about that aspect, some of them contradicting others, and I just can't sort them out. But I'll give a few: First, surely, most of the gang dies in the Yuma massacre. What I find interesting is the order in which this happens. Black Jackson dies first. This is fascinating in light of two scenes from earlier in the book: One, the tarot card scene, in which Black Jackson chooses the card, the "beldam" mumbles some mumbo-jumbo, and the judge interprets it as saying "I think she means to say that in your fortune lie our fortunes all." Then there's the scene after the shootout in Jesus Maria in Chapter 14 when Black Jackson goes missing. The judge freaks out and goes himself back to look for him. What is that about? Pulling these all together, I wonder if the judge needs Black Jackson for something. For, surely, once Black Jackson gets killed, so do (almost) all of the other gang members. So in that sense, "in [his] fortune [lay their] fortunes all". So should we infer that had Black Jackson been killed at Jesus Maria, that the judge's plan would have come to naught? I'm not sure, but it seems very plausible. Second, who does *not* die in the massacre? Aside from David Brown, who wasn't even there and who dies shortly after anyway, and the idiot, who, as I mentioned above, seems to embody some amount of goodness according to my symbolic interpretation (he's the one who doesn't even *think* to try and impose his will on the world), the only ones who survive the massacre are ones who have attempted to go against the judge at one point or another: Toadvine (who was pissed over the massacre of the Tiguas and even put a gun to the judge's head over the killing of the Apache kid), Tobin (who is *always* seeming at odds with the judge), and the kid. So might it not be the case that the judge kills the gang members (or causes, or maybe just *allows* their deaths) only once they've fully given in to him? Because we see that Toadvine sides with the judge at the well, and he's found hanged next. And Tobin seems to have a further break from the judge in chapters 20 and 21 (the biggest one being that after he tells the kid to stop listening to the judge, the *narrator* refers to Tobin as the "priest" for the one and only time in the book, not the "expriest"), and we never see him again. Maybe the implication being that he's never killed? He fully breaks from the judge, and thus the judge has no power over him? And then finally the kid lives into middle age and is only killed after he fully gives into the judge (I know I said above I don't know for sure the judge kills the man. I don't. I'm also not sure of this line of reasoning, with the judge killing people once they fully give into him. But it's interesting, so I'm entertaining it.)
But ultimately, I do agree with you: In a sense, the kid evades the judge until the end, and to the extent to which he does so, he is good. But he does not do so at the end, and surely that has a meaning.
And finally, about your comment on The Road: The son having suicidal thoughts? I don't remember that ever happening. Granted, that's the McCarthy book I read longest ago, so maybe my memory's a bit fuzzy. I remember the mother killing herself and the dad talking about suicide, but never the boy. You have a page reference for that? I'll look it up. If that's the case, I may need to seriously retool how I think about that book.
Anyway, this post has gone on for long enough. If you can slog through it all and have some stuff to say in return, I'd love to hear it. So long.
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