The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy's novels are as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of plot. On the other hand, each of them constitutes densely created world as authentic and persuasive as any that there in fiction. The worlds are convincing not because the people in them do normal and recognizable things, or represent us metaphorically, or even inhabit identifiable time and space, but because McCarthy compels us to believe in them through the traditional means of invention, command of language, and narrative art. To enter those worlds and move around in them effectively we are required to surrender all Cartesian predispositions and rediscover some primal state of consciousness prior to its becoming identified with thinking only. There powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy's novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into communicable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy's world, existence seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its importance from this fact alone. The vivid facticity of his novels consumes conventional formulae as black hole consumes light. He Walker Percy turned inside out--intuitive, unideological, oblivious to teleological fashions, indifferent if not hostile to the social order, wholly absorbed in the strange heterocosm of his own making. Ethical categories do not rule in this environment, or even pertain: moral considerations seem not to affect outcomes; action and event seem determined wholly by capricious and incomprehensible fates. His stories are lurid and simple; they seem oddly like paradigms without reference and are all the more compelling because of that, since the matter of the paradigm does not lose its particularity in abstraction. The characters--without utilitarian responsibilities to well-made plots and unrelated to our bourgeois better natures--are real precisely to the degree that they resist symbolization. At the end of Outer Dark (1968) the road that Culla Holme following brings him abruptly to swamp, and absurdly ends there: Before him stretched spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth's curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why road should come to such place. (1) This as close to conventional paradigm as McCarthy usually comes, and it, of course, paradigm of dead-end, paradigmless world (and for its novel also kind of gothic, self-referential joke). A more sophisticated Cornelius Suttree, in McCarthy's most recent novel, Suttree (1979), dreams in delirium that his life being voided into a cold dimension without time without space and where all was motion. When, past his crisis, he speaks with an attending priest he tells him that what he has learned close to death that God is not thing. Nothing ever stops moving. (2) This McCarthy's metaphysic: none, in effect; no first principles, no foundational truth; Heraclitus without logos. At the end of Child of God (1973), Lester Ballard, the logic of whose poignant, homicidal loneliness we have attended step by relentless step, permitted in death last socially redeeming value: at the state medical school in Memphis he was preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid out on slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. …