Cormac McCarthy: fiction and criticism

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. 

The Crossing

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 William Faulkner or James 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.

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...

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. First and foremost, he is a writer of irreducible literature. We hope you find this guide to his works helpful and share our love for this man who has inspired so many.