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Harold Bloom once said that there were only four active great American novelists: Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. That was in 2003, and it was an absurd thing to say even back then (I won’t dignify it with an elaborate rebuke). Twenty years later, Roth has died; Pynchon is retired, or close to it; DeLillo continues to publish, but with diminishing readership and acclaim; and, as of a couple weeks ago, Cormac McCarthy has died.
As silly as Bloom’s statement was, I think this list represents a certain cohort of broadly postmodern American literature, a generation in the process of fading away, although one that has enjoyed broad appeal, has had lasting influence, and has produced certain works that will likely be read for some time to come.
Cormac McCarthy needs little introduction. His sparse yet lyrical signature prose style devoid of all but the most minimal punctuation, his meditations on the violence embedded in America’s founding, his virtual reinvention of the Western genre—these are all well-known. I like to think of him as the one who, maybe better than anyone, was able to synthesize the minimalist-maximalist divide of Hemingway and Faulkner, drawing from each yet creating his own style. And, I might add, an outwardly American style—it’s worth noting that McCarthy is arguably the most authentically “American” writer among Bloom’s four horsemen.
When I heard that McCarthy had passed, I picked up The Crossing; I just now finished reading it. The second novel in the Border Trilogy, it follows the journeys of Billy Parham, a teenage cowboy from New Mexico. At the beginning of the novel, a wolf is attacking the Parham family’s cattle, and so Billy hunts down and eventually traps the wolf. Instead of killing her, he decides to return her to Mexico and release her to live with the wolves from whence she came.
After Billy crosses into Mexico, everything changes. A simple if treacherous journey with a straightforward objective becomes a gothic picaresque of privation and violence. One crossing turns into several, and nothing that Billy knows and loves will remain the same.
I won’t get into a summary of each and every episode, but Billy encounters various figures of the borderlands: a blind man, a lost girl, a traveling opera troupe. He encounters many whose lives have been upended by the Mexican Revolution. He encounters other young men who like Billy have set along an uncertain path, traversing Mexico and the southwestern U.S. in search of, if anything in particular at all, various fortunes and comforts.
The Crossing, like many of McCarthy’s other works (off the top of my head: Blood Meridian, The Road, All the Pretty Horses) takes the form of a hero’s journey, but one in which there is no clear moral topography. They’re more Moby-Dick than the Odyssey. But here there’s not even an obvious objective or geographical destination. McCarthy is interested in the mythos of the American frontier, and what he sees as its real content—unceasing violence and depravity which, although his characters attempt to reach beyond, it’s unclear if there’s actually anything on the other side.
The latent nihilism here manifests in an invocation of Divine Providence of some form, whether the will of the traditional Christian God, or of some demiurge. Or perhaps the borderlands are a place which God has abandoned (a la Denis Johnson), where Providence has ceded power to mere Fate. While the expansionist violence of Manifest Destiny is by no means triumphalist in McCarthy, it operates under some logic of necessity that keeps Manifest Destiny intact in its most literal meaning.
And yet, this Fate is revealed not as a careful plan but rather as an incomprehensible sequence of events:
No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?
No.
It's never like what you expected.
Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised about the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.
The agents in McCarthy’s world are macho, there’s no doubt about it. I’m reminded of McCarthy’s masculine bravado which proclaimed that Proust and James didn’t write “real literature” because they didn’t deal with matters of life and death. I say horseshit—they did!
Yes, McCarthy’s protagonists are not portrayed as straightforward heroes—their moral system is repeatedly shown to be hollow. But in its place, rather than an alternative moral system, there is a sort of Nietzschean ontology of power, power that exerts itself upon the world. Power that is. This can be seen most readily in the figure of the Judge in Blood Meridian, but even too in less forwardly demonic characters like Billy Parham or John Grady Cole.
Billy’s journey includes many acts of masculine bravery, but, like his journey overall, his motivations and goals are unclear (and I don’t believe this to be an oversight on McCarthy’s part). Even the Mexican Revolution is shown to be little more than a sequence of arbitrary violence without real political stakes. Alongside the sense of providential necessity is a listless wandering across the wretched landscape. These are parts of a whole—the hero has little agency to do anything other than exercise power.
None of this is to say that McCarthy’s artistic vision is somehow lacking. On the contrary, Blood Meridian is easily one of the most beautiful and interesting things I’ve ever read. I would instead say that perhaps McCarthy’s project has a specific, even narrow, range, one that has difficulty assimilating other perspectives. Even stylistically, I think one can see his efforts bursting at the seams a bit in later works like The Road or No Country for Old Men, where the signature demeanor feels a bit frayed. (I haven’t read either of those in some years, so please be gentle with me if I’m wrong.)
Cormac McCarthy was a giant among giants, one who continuously reinvented American literature in ways shocking and profound. Any writer who takes up an American register, and especially a southern or southwestern one, will have to contend with McCarthy, just like any American poet to this day, knowingly or not, engages Whitman in that Oedipal struggle of influence.