Cormac McCarthy Project (Honors Special Topics Course)

This website dedicated to Cormac McCarthy and his works is the brainchild of a fantastic group of undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, all of whom were registered in an interdisciplinary Honors seminar. One of the most dedicated classes I have ever had the pleasure of teaching, this class read all of McCarthy’s works to date and also much of the McCarthy criticism. While that describes the process we went through, with each student taking responsibility for one of the works, the genesis for this course came from my graduate study during which I knew Rick Wallach, who inspired me to read and teach McCarthy. A more immediate muse, however, came from supervising undergraduate research.

 Introduction

 Several years ago, I was serving as an advisor for a student writing a senior thesis on Cormac McCarthy. We would sit down together and brainstorm and discuss, but I always felt he was struggling more than he should be, for he could put complex, abstract ideas into words easily. Finally, one day, I found out what caused some of the struggle as he told me about a presentation he had given on McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968) at the University. Apparently, he did his best to convince the class of McCarthy’s worth, but he felt dismissed when the only question asked about the book was: “What moral value does this literature have?,” a question that sent him reeling. Maybe it had something to do with the book’s graphic descriptions, like this one in which three mysterious riders end the life of an ill-begotten child born out of an incestuous union:

 Harmon was watching the man. Even the mute one stirred. The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat. (236)

 But of course, it could have been the scene that follows, in which the child’s mother finds her daughter’s remains:

 Late in the afternoon she entered the glade, coming down a footpath where narrow cart tracks had crushed the weeds and through the wood, half wild and haggard in her shapeless sundrained cerements, yet delicate as a fallow doe, and so into the clearing to stand cradled in a grail of jade and windy light, slender and trembling and pale with wandlike hands to speak the boneless shapes attending her.

And the stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage. She poked among the burnt remains of the tinker’s traps, the blackened pans confused among the rubble, the lantern with its skewed glass, the axle and iron wheelhoops already rusting. She went among this charnel curiously. She did not know what to make of it. She waited, but no one returned.

Here, amidst the horror, we find a woman divining from ashen fragments. She, like us, reads, experiences, and interprets, finding, as with Samuel Beckett’s narrators of the skull, pieces of an inconceivable whole whose truth, neither relative nor absolute, lies beyond, physically dismembered and metaphysically unperceivable. Not only is the second passage difficult to decipher, but also it is unsettling because it places us in close proximity with the mother. Like her, we seek to find a moral position from which to evaluate the mysterious men of the apocalypse who rein terror throughout the book. We want to know what all this carnage has to do with making the world a better place and how the book might benefit its readers. Like the mother seeking her baby, abandoned earlier in the woods by her sexual partner and brother and found by the novel’s wondering tinker, we seek a moral center. But what if there is no clear moral center? What if the position we desire to occupy is not available in McCarthy’s works? What if we are asked to weigh the unthinkable and find only a black hole rather than the bright stars that constellate a moral cosmos? To ask these questions is to not only take on McCarthy’s difficult works but also to frame McCarthy’s dark creations as works of literature: irreducible works of art that leave us, as with the great Greek tragedies, horrified at the spectacle of existence, shocked at our brutality, and awed by an imagination that calls forth, from the nether regions of the tragic abyss, an infernal world where the dream-haunted protagonists of both The Orchard Keeper (1965) and Outer Dark (1968), the necrophiliac serial killer of Child of God (1974), the eponymous protagonist of Suttree (1979), and those who wander amid ruin in The Road (2006) dwell.

 McCarthy undermines his own creations, indulging in a self-reflexive moment that might sum up many of the scholarly interpretations of his works. But, in the end, we are left only with questions asked by two interlocutors that mirror McCarthy’s readers, followers of Ariadne who often search in vain for a thread that might provide the way to a viable metaphysics. McCarthy’s works seduce us to make meaning. This act of seduction has theoretical implications. All of McCarthy’s works contain a metaphorical, imaginative self-reflexivity, an uneasy awareness that creating fiction involves seduction.

McCarthy’s literature presents a stunningly contemporary context—the context of both the marketplace, where literature and the humanities have little agency, and the context of the academy, where literary works once taken for granted have been supplanted by artifacts chosen for their cultural significance, objects of desire: desire in the sense of what we think we should be reading to become better people and desire as in a commodity from which political exigencies can be consumed. Into such a world comes another Hermann Melville, another George Eliot, another Faulkner or Joyce, who enshrines the world he describes with all of its uncertainties. McCarthy’s narrators suffer under the same sort of interpretive anxiety his readers share. Both, in their efforts to come to terms with bitter realities, reduce the stories to objects of desire, and in which the only way to keep art works from becoming dead, fixed objects is, ironically, for them to become more alluring, more seductive in nature.

Cormac McCarthy’s works are what Roland Barthes refers to as “writerly texts” that rely upon the reader for their seductive power. They place us in the position of the writer: “Nous en train d’ecrire” (we are ourselves writing), as Roland Barthes says of writerly texts in S/Z. Much of the fictive power generated in the agonistic encounters McCarthy’s texts enshrine comes through what Ross Chambers calls “situational self-reflexivity”: “ the paradoxical law of narrative power” that is “dependent for its force on the power to undo itself” (221). Thus, “the power to undo,” as helps create a hermeneutical event facilitated deliberately by McCarthy’s anxiousness about how meaning will be produced.

While critics continue to debate whether his works contain gratuitous violence, whether his worldview is nihilistic, or whether he has neglected women, many agree McCarthy is one of the most significant writers in the American literary tradition, a novelist whose command of language and epic vision challenge us to confront the brutality of human life and the inevitability of death.

by Blake G. Hobby, Ph.D.