Material
Cormac MacCarthy: Beginnings in a Vacuum 

Brendan Kerr

Any writer faced with the task of beginning a narrative is simultaneously confronted with the uselessness of beginnings in the first place.  Where, in any passage of time, does a narrative begin?  If a writer is lucky enough to find a critical moment of change to dramatize, at what point are the events resulting in that moment put in motion?  How much is necessary to know, practically, affectively, artistically?  How much can be captured in flashback without losing psychological momentum?  These enormous questions can flummox the most imaginative writer.  Companies financially reliant on the steady production of stories have invented systems to deal with the dilemma.  Disney relies on The Hero’s Journey.  Based in the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Disney’s system prescribes narrative rungs such as the “Ordinary World,” the “First Threshold,” and “The Innermost Cave” in order to draw a beginning to action.  Such techniques are useful, anthropologically sound and immediately rewarding, but they can leave a sour taste in the mouths of ambitious, original artists and they can easily lead to the patriarchal, oppressive schlock that has given narrative a bad name.

What is a writer to do if his landscape lacks such prescribed landmarks?  In a moral wasteland, for example, there is no innermost cave, no first threshold.  Where, in such a changeless environment, is one to begin?

The question of beginnings is deceptively complex.  McCarthy’s moral vacuum, shorn of context and history, is a useful setting for writers—like us—to pressure the question.  The narration of The Road notes: “Where you have nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”  A fascinating way of putting it; let’s see how it’s done.

One enters into McCarthy, more than any other living writer, through the frustration of his prose.  Whether this frustration be biblical (Blood Meridian), historical (All the Pretty Horses) or prohibitively masculine (No Country for Old Men), it is inarguably a problematic of real talent.  No one writes more delicate descriptions of nature.  The protagonist of Child of God, a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.”  How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shriveling. 

In All the Pretty Horses “A pair of herons stand footed to their own shadows.”  That curious word “footed” is characteristic of his willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearean liberality.  “Footed to their long shadows” perfectly conveys the sense of a bird that is all foot and leg, and that, moreover, seems fastened by its feet to the ground.  McCarthy can describe the human form just as exactly; in the same novel, Rawlins is attacked in prison and flinches backward, “with his shoulders hunched and his arms outflung like a man refereeing his own bloodletting.”

McCarthy is probably best known for his majestic register, with which he opens his lungs and bellows like an antiquated Faulkner or Melville.  In this mode he often eschews commas in favor of the biblical “and” which creates a processional, primordial tone: “They’d had their hair cut with sheepshears by an esquilador at the ranch and the backs of their necks above their collars were white as scars and they wore their hats cocked forward on their heads and they looked from side to side as they jogged along as if to challenge the countryside or anything it might hold.” 

Or this, from Blood Meridian:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets . . . and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

 

It is a terrifying evocation of a specific flock.  On the strength of such passages Blood Meridian is praised for doing much to singlehandedly reimagine the myth of the American frontier west.  There are times, however, that such risky writing sounds emptily theatrical.  He has a fondness for what could be called analogical similes, in which the linking phrase “like some” introduces not a visual likeness but a hypothetical and often abstract parallel: “And he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.”

The danger such prose flirts with is not only melodrama.  At times his mythmaking is so hypnotic that it takes a moment to recognize the practical absurdity of the grandiose diction.  Out of context, the much-celebrated introductory sentence to All the Pretty Horses might read as imprecise, possibly even nonsense: “It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes.”  It is dawn, hence the train’s headlamp is seen as a satellite of the coming sun, and I suppose the wormlike train is vaguely phallic, hence “ribald.” But surely “ribald” is a meaning too far.  Does a train ever seem “ribald”?

In Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, notably, the characters are devoid of emotional reactions.  Emotions are attributed, through personification, to the landscape.  Emotions, primarily fear, do not occur within the character, but surround him.  In McCarthy’s later work he pares down such descriptions and here we see hints of Hemingway.  In No Country for Old Men we are reminded of A Farewell to Arms when, along with emotion, McCarthy begins to suppress thought. Throughout the book we are told that characters fall into thought.  But it turns out to be a briskly end-stopped affair: “He stood there thinking about that.”  “He sipped the wine and when the steak came he cut into it and chewed slowly and thought about his life.”  “He sat on the bed thinking things over. . . . He thought about a lot of things but the thing that stayed with him was that at some point he was going to have to quit running on luck.”  “I stood out there a long time and I thought about things.”  What appears to be thought is actually suppression, the sanction of male taciturnity.

While we will likely sense McCarthy’s suppression of thought and emotion, we do not sense him flinching from the suffering he confronts as we might sense, say, Dostoevsky flinching from Raskolnikov.  Evil in McCarthy is not a bodiless emanation; it is always palpable, bloody.  We get the gory details; we get mechanical facts of gun gauges and horsepowers.

The die-hard McCarthian would insist that his occasional lapses into melodrama, imprecision and borderline Conrad-parody are inevitable given the narratives’ context, but we cannot accept this argument because context is precisely what McCarthy’s books dismiss.  In Child of God we get this assurance:  “As in olden times so now.  As in other countries here.”  The mercenaries in Blood Meridian are said to ride “like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote.”  McCarthy’s myth of eternal violence—his vision of men “invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them”— asserts, in effect, that rebellion is pointless because this is how things have always been and will always be.  Instead of suffering, there is represented violence; instead of struggle, death; instead of lament, blood.

As understood in The Road: “Old and troubled issues resolved into nothingness and night.”

Which brings us to our original question.  In a moral vacuum where hope is expired and “old and troubled issues resolved into nothingness,” how is a narrative begun?  Of what use, or what reality, is narrative? 

In a nod to traditional structure, Blood Meridian begins with the childhood of its anti-hero, The Kid.  It lasts three short paragraphs.  For the remaining 350 pages he is treated as an adult reacting to the violent here and now.  All the Pretty Horses begins similarly, with two boys running away.  Character, it seems, is something a person becomes upon leaving home.  No Country for Old Men begins with a deceptively standard narrative occurrence—the discovery of a lost and dangerous fortune—but as this discovery sets Llewellyn on the run we see, again, things set in motion by escape from domestic life.

The Road, the most obviously barren of all McCarthy’s wastelands, has the oddest beginning in McCarthy.  Here also the main characters, a man and his son, are outside of domestic life, but there are significant differences between their situation and that of the previous novels’ runaways.  First, these characters were cast out of domestic life; they find themselves in the wasteland not by choice, but because of apocalypse caused by others.  Second, unlike any previous McCarthy character, the man (in contrast to the boy) occasionally flashes back to remember a previous domestic life.  Third, interestingly, their narrative begins eight years after they left the domestic world (and an unindicated time after the suicide of the mother).  We do not discover the wasteland along with them; we discover its rules through their familiarity with it and their habits of dealing with it.

There is a practical reason to begin at this chronological point.  The boy is now old enough to express conscious opinions about their situation.  This is necessary for the story to be told.  But there is also another reason, one not so easily apparent, one we, as writers, may be able to use to crack our fundamental question about narrative’s value in an amoral world: The Road begins months prior to the man’s death.

The man and the boy are described as being “each other’s world entire.”  This dependence allows them to believe that they are among the “good guys.”  They “carry the fire,” they refuse to—no matter how hungry they get—eat human meat.  They maintain a standard of humanity.  This is an individual moral stand.  It is not indicative of, or even sensible in, the fear and destruction that surrounds them.  Because they individually make these choices (choices directly related to the man’s ability to remember) it is a significant moment when the man dies. 

The fact that the man’s death is significant is the fact that creates narrative.  It is the conceptive (though not narrative) beginning.  This fact enables McCarthy to track back in time from the significant event and to find a moment amongst the millions of indistinguishable wasteland moments at which he might bring these characters to the page.  The story begins with the man’s sickness and his decision to walk south to the warmer shore where he hopes to survive the winter.  From there he and the boy (spatially, in both pages and walked miles) approach the man’s death, but now—even amidst nothingness—the significance of their lives is apparent.  They carry the torch.

There is often the disquieting sense that McCarthy’s fiction puts certain fond American myths under pressure merely to replace them with one vaster myth—eternal violence.  McCarthy’s fiction seems to say, repeatedly, that this is how it has been and how it always will be.  The inflamed rhetoric of Blood Meridian is problematic because it reduces the gap between the diction of the murderous Judge Holden (whose announcement that “War is God” dominates the book) and the diction of the narration itself; both speak with mythic afflatus.  Blood Meridian comes to seem like a novel without internal borders and (despite its brilliance) it thereby undercuts its own narrative value.

The Road, on the other hand, keeps its distinctions clear.  One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, "things he'd no longer any way to think about."  Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely.  The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now.  In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose.

Brendan Kerr lives and writes in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh.