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Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023): a great writer who evokes the terror of nihilism

Cormac McCarthy’s fiction constitutes a reckoning with the Age of Aftermath

Cormac McCarthy: If his sentences lurched and swooped towards meaninglessness, only to right themselves at the last moment, this was because meaninglessness was their necessary precondition

Kevin Power
Wed Jun 14 2023 - 11:04

Early in Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), there is a description of an inn in rural Tennessee, the Green Fly, built “on a scaffolding of poles over a sheer drop” down to a mountain gorge.

On windy nights, “the inn-goers trod floors that waltzed drunkenly beneath them […] At times the whole building would career madly to one side as though headlong into collapse. The drinkers would pause, liquid tilting in their glasses, the structure would shudder violently, a broom would fall, a bottle, and the inn would slowly right itself, and resume once more its normal reeling equipoise”.

Reading the prose of McCarthy, who died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Tuesday at the age of 89, is like drinking in the Green Fly Inn. A sentence begins, more or less like any other sentence, but then it lurches, sways, swings by acrobatic leaps into unmapped syntactical and lexical realms, the world leans sideways, and you are abruptly certain that the whole precarious structure will collapse into meaninglessness; and then it doesn’t, everything rights itself, and the sentence, like the inn, stands magnificently above the void.

Take the opening line of McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God (1973): “They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.”

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Or this sentence from The Road (2003): “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.” Or this simile from All the Pretty Horses (1992): “his father’s shape or father’s shadow would pass behind the gauzy window curtains and then turn and pass back again like a sheetiron bear in a shooting gallery only slower, thinner, more agonised.”

[ A guide to Cormac McCarthy’s best books: stark, merciless stories of misfits and the apocalypse ]

It is a prose ripe, and occasionally overripe, with literary inheritances (Hemingway, DH Lawrence, the King James Bible, Milton, and pre-eminently William Faulkner), but it is also a cinematic prose – look again at the opening line of Child of God and tell me that you can’t see the long shots and the close ups, the editor cutting from “the hill in the morning sun” to the fiddler who listens “with a wrinkled face.”

This is another way of saying that McCarthy’s is a prose native to the postwar decades, a prose native to the Age of Cinema and therefore native also to the Age of Aftermath: our age, still, shadowed by Hiroshima and Gulag and the Nazi camps, and by what these horrors tell us about the world and about ourselves.

In the closing paragraphs of The Crossing (1994), the teenage cowboy Billy Parham wakes in the New Mexico desert to a strange, premature dawn that rapidly fades: “that noon in which he’d woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark.” Then the real dawn breaks: “the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.” The date is July 16th, 1945; Billy has witnessed the Trinity nuclear test, which apocryphally provoked J. Robert Oppenheimer to say, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

McCarthy’s fiction in toto constitutes a reckoning with the Age of Aftermath. If his sentences lurched and swooped towards meaninglessness, only to right themselves at the last moment, this was because meaninglessness was their necessary precondition. His novels evoke the terror of nihilism – the unspeakable knowledge that God has absented himself and that violence and death may now be the final truth of the world. In such a void, all you can do is speak; all you can do is “carry the fire”.

“There is no god,” thinks the father in The Road, “and we are his prophets.” After 1945, the whole human world is the Green Fly Inn, scaffolded on rickety poles over a sheer drop; on a windy night, everything might just collapse. If there is hope, it lies perhaps in the making, or finding, of “maps of the world in its becoming”, like those that appear on the backs of the brook trout in The Road’s mysteriously prophetic closing paragraph. Of course, it’s always risky, listening to prophets. They might just be telling you the truth.

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