Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

By Scott Esposito
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Discussed in this essay:
• The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Child of God, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 206 pp.
• Suttree, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 480 pp.
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 352 pp.
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 320 pp.
• The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 432 pp.
• Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 292 pp.
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.00. 309 pp.
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 287 pp.

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The Road

With McCarthy’s failure to make Ed Tom a convincing (or even memorable) character, it is surprising then to see him follow up that book with two of the most believable, interesting characters of his entire career. McCarthy’s most recently published novel, and quite possibly his last ever, The Road shares the style of his late phase, but in many ways it is a singular work. Spatially, we are back in the Appalachia of McCarthy’s first four novels, but temporally we are someplace we have not yet been: terra incognita, the imaginary future.

The Road finds McCarthy’s language at its most minimalist; yet out of this very spare language McCarthy creates one of his most deeply felt characters, the closest we have ever been to a novel-length first-person narrator. He frequently places us into the father’s head indirectly. (“He knew that he was placing hopes where he’d no reason to. He hoped it would be brighter where for all he’d knew the world grew darker daily. He’d once found a lightmeter in a camera store that he thought . . .”) In terms of morality, the almost complete state of nature McCarthy imagines post-apocalypse and the unrequited chain of horrors entailed by it (not seen since Blood Meridian) mark this book as far more bleak and morally vacant than anything in McCarthy’s late phase—even No Country for Old Men’s anti-heroes and psychopaths still had something to live for (money, power, material accumulation) beyond pure survival.

The Road is, in many ways, a logical endpoint of his career, and one imagines that were McCarthy to publish another novel he would have to leap into entirely new territory. For all his career McCarthy has followed characters choosing to leave civilization, but in The Road McCarthy envisions the opposite: a world in which civilization leaves his characters. For once McCarthy’s protagonist is not a drifter. Rather, he is a man with a wife and a young boy, and he probably would still be but for the apocalypse. In an undefined worldwide catastrophe (I take it to be an asteroid impact), civilization is destroyed, leaving those still living to face a de facto life permanently alienated from civilized life. The road becomes an end in itself. McCarthy’s most alienated characters have always had some home to return to (even Lester Ballard could return to his asylum), but in The Road home ceases to exist. Home is the road.

The Road is a very morally ambiguous book. What is quite clear is that, a) many of the survivors have completely eschewed any morality of any sort, and b) the father and the boy whose story we follow do believe in some kind of morality, what they often refer to as “carrying the fire.” What makes this so morally ambiguous is that it’s not at all clear that either father or son actually believes that there’s anything to preserve or that their actions in such a world are more than futile. The idea of “carrying the fire” may just be purely functional, just another trick for getting themselves to walk a few more miles down the road instead of surrendering into death. In that case it’s hardly a morality, which should be an expression of higher ideals, although in its functionality and general derivativeness it does resemble the beliefs of McCarthy’s wanderer-cowboys in his Western novels.

It is notable that whether or not the father and son believe their choices ultimately will have any consequence, they do occasionally reach limits that they will not transgress. Cannibalism—widely practiced in McCarthy’s bleak future—is one such limit. The boy and the father also argue fiercely over whether they should help fellow travelers. The weight that McCarthy places on these decisions—even though the world is free from any greater power (even God, it seems) to enforce norms of behavior—seems consistent with his career-long belief that certain decisions can prefigure one’s future regardless of time or place, something that began with Sylder’s fateful murder of a hitchhiker and ran all the way up through Chigurh’s pseudo-religious code of action.

In The Road, McCarthy has finally gotten his late style settled into a workable whole. Despite the spare prose, it is a book primarily concerned with imagining its world, but it is also a somewhat allegorical work; instead of focusing on fate and free will, McCarthy strikes a more religious stance, with overtones that this father and son are the Father and Son. At one point the boy moves “with light all about him.” On the eve of the father’s death, the son says:

You said you wouldnt ever leave me.

I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

Will I hear you?

Yes, You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up. Okay?

What makes The Road a more artistically pleasing work than the novels after Blood Meridian is that McCarthy has returned to his love of imagining how people get on with their lives from day to day. The father and boy are two of his most inventive characters yet, and McCarthy seems to relish the challenge of imagining survival in a wholly fictive time and place. When McCarthy does strive for something beyond the text, his discussion is carefully folded into the surrounding action: gone are the lengthy monologues that come up from nowhere or the odd little scenes that are pieced in for no other reason than to make a philosophical point. ¹

The style is almost as spare as in No Country, but because we have a better sense of the son and father as characters, it is easier to imagine their movements and manner of speaking. This allows The Road to be a much more ironic work than anything after Suttree (itself a monumentally skewed piece of writing), but it is also a much more understated work than Suttree; the irony here requires a more sensitive ear, and it is thus open to greater interpretation. The Road is also richer than other late McCarthy because instead of only seeing their life insofar as it relates to murder, cleaning wounds, or horsemanship, in The Road McCarthy imagines a wide range of human behavior, again harkening back to his work before Blood Meridian. In this last book McCarthy has grafted some of the better elements of his early and late styles and finally gotten the late style right.

Although it has been reported that McCarthy was at work on several manuscripts concurrently with No Country for Old Men, and was relatively unconcerned as to which order they were published in, it is hard to imagine McCarthy publishing another novel in his late manner after The Road. The book ends with the clear implication that this is the end of humanity: on the backs of trout are “maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not made right again.” Finding a map of the world on the back of a trout is consistent with imagery in McCarthy’s other books, where portents of humanity and its future are glimpsed in natural phenomenon. The “maps and mazes” too are reminiscent of past McCarthy; for instance, the tangled paths of John Grady’s and Billy’s lives, which can only be seen whole and comprehended in retrospect. The difference is that The Road implies that this map is not of just one man’s life but of the entire human race. Even the elegiac tone is consistent with his Southwestern works, but never have the stakes been so high as to accord that “not made right again” such finality. This is the perhaps inevitable conclusion of McCarthy’s late-stage theme that war is the one defining feature of humanity. ² This would further point to The Road as the logical terminus of McCarthy’s work, for where else would he go with this theme that has sat at the core of his last six novels?

If this is indeed the end for McCarthy, then it seems clear that his place in American letters is secure. McCarthy published his first novel in 1965, and there few American novelists have remained such a consistent, forceful presence over the following forty years. Furthermore, I cannot think of any that have—to use Harold Bloom’s term—so strongly misinterpreted Faulkner’s Southern tradition or have attempted to reconsider the myths of the American Southwest as McCarthy has. His style has attracted admirers and imitators, his novels have found both adherents and detractors, even the reclusive author’s place in American pop culture and the mainstream literary canon is growing.

Such profound and sincere engagement with his writing bespeaks an author who has very much struck a nerve with all kinds of readers. I think this can be traced to his lifelong obsession with the search for identity: no one thing has been as consistent in McCarthy’s work over his forty-year career as his insistence that we are only offered certain moments to really influence our identity, though we may not know them when we see them and we may be illusioned as to what the choices represent. Furthermore, his most financially successful books and his avowed masterpiece have powerfully stated this idea while also arguing for a distinctly revisionist idea of American identity. Yet what is noteworthy about the latter is that McCarthy has not revised using the typical subversive agents of literature; rather, he has made his revisionists cowboys, the very representatives of the rugged West that first gave birth to the myths McCarthy subverts.

In sum, McCarthy has spent his career probing the fence-posts lining the borders of free will and developing his own distinctly postmodern view of identity, plot, and country. He is a writer both very distinctly a part of his times and his nation, yet one whose books also reach back to the traditions of the American literary canon. His books, though varied, represent a coherent whole, and they can and should be read as such. Perhaps most importantly, McCarthy is simply an author who has striven at every turn to refresh the English language and create new forms for it. Though not without its flaws, his work, it seems safe to say, will stand the test of time, and future generations will know Cormac McCarthy as one of the major American writers of the 20th century.

¹ James Wood has, with much justification, argued that McCarthy still doesn’t get the mix quite right in The Road, although he has not let this prevent him from highly praising the work. See http://www.powells.com/review/2007_05_17.html
² Admittedly, this does suggest that the calamity that inaugurates The Road is not an asteroid but a nuclear barrage.

Scott Esposito edits The Quarterly Conversation.

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