Cormac McCarthy – Author Study

1. Cormac McCarthy – Author Study Please note: this is a simplistic version of what is required.

2. Who is he? Cormac McCarthy (1933- ) USA Novelist and playwright 10 novels

3. Should IB students study McCarthy? • Yes. For the following reasons: • His use of language • His vision of the world (most importantly) • His exploration of themes of violence, fate, our place in the universe • His characters, especially his portrayal of men under pressure.

4. Language Use • There is no God and we are his prophets." The Road. • Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." All the Pretty Horses.

5. Language Use • The point is there ain't no point. No Country for Old Men. • 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, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red 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. Blood Meridian

6. Language Use • Mostly sparing, sparse, concrete. Hard to penetrate. It suggests that the content is nothing more than what it is – flat, undeniable, true. • Occasionally there appears great, glorious sentences that appear to tell all about the universe and its dark secrets. • There is a strong connection between his sentence structure and meaning.

7. Themes • Horrific violence. Some critics have argued that there is no point to the mindless brutality of Blood Meridian. I think that’s the point. It paints man (and it’s always men) as little more than a predatory animal with weapons. • Gnosticism/Faith/Purpose to the universe. If there is it’s probably malevolent. You still have to live even if life is meaningless. • Survival • Male relationships • Journeys

8. Characterization • Protagonists of Blood Meridian and The Road are both unnamed. Readers cannot empathize with characters. Readers have to recognize that the characters are only a small part of larger events. • In The Road the characters’ struggles are somehow made smaller by the lack of empathy the reader has for them. Paradoxically, this makes the story more poignant. • Blood Meridian contains one of the most brutal, dangerous and memorable characters in all American fiction – Judge Holden. His philosophical ramblings are central to the themes of the novel. • Shallow, hard to know. Quiet, estranged from society. • Man against the elements.

9. Setting • In some ways McCarthy’s novels are all about the setting. • The settings reflect the loneliness of the world, the vast emptiness, the dry and dangerous terrain and emphasize the insignificance of humans. • There are many descriptions – through detail, rather than metaphor – of deep red sunsets, dawns, deserts, empty water holes and disappointment. Occasionally the operatic sentences appear and the reader is confronted with the sheer enormity of the universe that dwarfs any humanity present.

10. Criticism • Multiple award winner • Blood Meridian ranked 4 in the NYT English-written novels of the 20th century. • The Road is the best novel of the last ten years – Time • Harold Bloom included him in The Western Canon. • In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny, of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville.

11. Quality Judgement • See rubric.

12. So, in conclusion… • Extraordinary writer. • Themes and visions well worth studying as an antidote to banal positivity of American popular culture. • Study in grade 12 only. • He can create great beauty and understanding of our plight on this ball of dirt through violence and loneliness and silence.