Cormac McCarthy and hope

Despair of or longing for hope? Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men

This spring I finally reread the very first novel by Cormac McCarthy I ever read—Blood Meridian. This is the worst possible place to begin in McCarthy’s body of work, but it was the one I had heard of and I slugged away at it over several months one summer in 2005 or 2006. I finished it as befuddled as I was impressed, but it stayed with me, and it only grew in my estimation over the years as I read more and more of his work and figured out who McCarthy was and what he was doing in that most baroque and bleak of his novels.

Rereading it was a revelation. I had intended to write a long review and appreciation here, but this has been the busiest and most difficult semester I’ve worked through in a while and that project never came to fruition.

But as I was reading about Blood Meridian I came across an admiring but not uncritical piece on McCarthy from Chilton Williamson Jr at the Spectator. After summarizing a few of McCarthy’s most nightmarish novels, giving special attention to Child of God, which has turned off more than one of my friends to McCarthy’s work, Williamson makes this striking argument in his conclusion:

I do not think it farfetched to imagine that McCarthy means to suggest the ability of art to conquer insanity and evil by raising them to a higher level, or power. If that is not indeed his intent, the sole plausible alternative is that McCarthy is a nihilist, which I do not believe. Nihilists are without hope. Yet, ‘People without hope,’ Flannery O’Connor thought, ‘do not write novels.’

Bringing Flannery O’Connor into it only set the hook deeper, of course.

This passage, delivered almost as a throwaway observation in the wake of Williamson’s summary of the most disturbing highlights in Child of God, caught my attention because as long as I’ve been reading McCarthy’s work I have heard and seen him called a nihilist, and just as long it has been my intuition that McCarthy is not.

What is more, I feel like this should be rather obvious, especially so in his two most recently published novels: No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). Both are violent picaresques in which men flee evils that implacably pursue them across barren and desolate lands, and both end in the heroes’ deaths. Each has more than its share of the bleak and disturbing, not least The Road, which features, among other things in a landscape marked by some kind of apocalypse, cannibalism.

But the entire point of The Road is also hope. That’s precisely because it concerns preserving life into the next generation. The bleakness only emphasizes how important this remote and unlikely hope is and makes it shine all the brighter. Indeed, the most important and often-repeated metaphor at the heart of the book is that the unnamed father and son are “carrying the fire,” saving what they can—not least each other.*

And it is striking to me that the image of “carrying the fire” also appears in the conclusion of No Country for Old Men. Here’s Sheriff Bell’s concluding reflection on his father, which comes at the end of a novel marked throughout by greed and lethal, merciless violence:

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

Making a fire “somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold,” a spot of light and warmth built from the preserved remains of the past despite the dark and cold—if that’s not an image of hope I don’t know what is.

But the final piece of evidence is the very bleakness and violence in McCarthy’s novels. Evil in McCarthy’s work always is evil, and while it is often random and casual it is never presented indifferently. Indeed, the characters most indifferent to and animalistic in the violence they inflict, as in Glanton’s crew of scalphunters in Blood Meridian or the various cartel thugs in No Country, are the most clearly and purely evil. Everyone else is mixed, whether Judge Holden, a titan of both intellect and perversity and the most clearly Satanic figure in any of McCarthy’s books; or the Kid, in whom “broods already a taste for mindless violence” on page one but who learns nonetheless what good and evil are; or Llewelyn Moss, a seemingly straightforward working man protagonist who sets the plot of No Country for Old Men in motion by stealing and running and only keeps it going by refusing to give up his loot.

None of this would matter to a nihilist, and as O’Connor put it in the line quoted by Williamson above, “People without hope do not write novels.”

What I think McCarthy might be more interested in is guilt and sin, and it is only true to life that everyone and everything is tainted with it. And only when one is indisputably, bluntly, violently confronted with one’s need for hope can hope be made clearest and most enticing.** Per Sheriff Bell, you’ll love the fire more if you know how dark and cold the night is.

There’s certainly more to consider here, and I don’t pretend to have reached the bottom of this. But I think Williamson is right to contend with those who characterize McCarthy as a prophet of meaninglessness and despair, and to suggest, even in passing, some of where McCarthy may hide those elusive and flickering embers of hope.

You can read Williamson’s entire piece on McCarthy at the Spectator here. I was pushed to finally reread Blood Meridian by an appreciative but in many ways wrongheaded essay on the novel at the LA Review of Books, which you can read here.

*I read The Road as a single college senior when it was first published. I reread it a few years ago as the father of three. If you’re a father and take your duties at all seriously, read and reread The Road. Here are some thoughts from when I reread it a few years ago.

**Here’s Flannery O’Connor again: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”