Point Quote Comment

Cormac McCarthy and the ‘Reader Sublime’

It’s just over a year since the world of American letters lost one of its all-time greats. June 13^th, 2024 was one year on from the death of Cormac McCarthy, whose work appeals to the serious reader because it habitually delivers them to that most uncomfortable of nexus where they are forced to consider their/our relationship with the horrors of history and the relentless drift of time. ‘Ooft,’ we might say in contemporary onomatopoeic parlance, a catch-all reaction to an emotional, mental, physical, economic or romantic punch in the solar plexus; in the case of reading McCarthy, a response to an encounter with a brand of literary sublime that leaves the reader momentarily inarticulate. I can still remember, in The Road (2005), being led to the remnants of a fire where the charred remains of an infant caused the boy in the story to turn away and sob into his father’s chest, “Oh Papa, Papa” (the only reaction available to him), a scene deemed too dark or distasteful for John Hillcote’s 2009 film, and yet a scene so crucial as a marker for humanity’s rapid slide from capitalist consumption into cannibalistic self-consumption.

This ‘ooft factor’ is stretched to a socio-historical-mathematical-cosmic configuration in McCarthy’s final sprawling two-part epic: The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022), in which two siblings’ tragedy is inextricably entangled with the twin nadirs of the twentieth century. “The forces which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry,” thinks McCarthy’s central protagonist, “were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” To choose one or two quotes from McCarthy’s swan song magnum opus is reductive to say the least. However, the whole point of this brief communiqué and those that will follow is to do just that, share a great quote or two from a novel, poem, play, film or song and explore the greatness therein.

In his rendering of Bobby Western (whose name calls to mind a whole hemisphere of civilization), McCarthy creates an anti-hero caught between the dread poles of his incestuous love for his sister and his parents’ roles in the Manhattan Project, a homeless Odyssean/Oedipal wanderer struggling on self-destructively through the guilt of his Promethean family history and the memories of his unspeakable desire:

‘Ooft’ again, as the brain takes pause to unpack what McCarthy is saying. Once more in the realm of The Road, we’re forced to consider not just the horrors of the apocalypse but our part in the tragedy of humanity’s destruction of the living world and its own ability to describe it: “The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever” (The Road, 184). Who else (in the “sacred idiom” he laments) could so succinctly accomplish the confounding idea of the disappearance of things and thus the need for the words to label and classify them? Where The Road captured the apolalyptic zeitgeist of post 9/11 and America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Passenger and Stella Maris are books of the older man, battling in the twilight and dying years to join the dots between the personal, historical, political and global anthropocentric forces of his time, playing (if you like) Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, who moves (as we all do) irresistibly into the future, watching (as we all must) the wreckage of the past pile up, “unable to craft the least thing god-like” from the remnants, except, one might argue for McCarthy, the sublimity of the body of work he leaves behind.