Tag: Cormac McCarthy

Read 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy by Contributors to Wikimedia projects

Inspired by The Partially Examined Life’s investigation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I re-read the book. I remember by left in both shock and awe at the book when I first read it, but the podcast really helped elucidate what makes the text special for me, particularly the idea of landscape as a character and the contradictory nature of characters such as The Judge. This lead me to reading The Road.

I had never seen the film nor read The Road in the past. To be honest, even though I had heard of it, I did not really know what it was about before starting the journey. It is interesting, I am not sure if I would have read the book based on the summary:

A father and his young son journey on foot across the post-apocalyptic ash-covered United States some years after an extinction event. The boy’s mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, committed suicide some time before.

Realizing they cannot survive the winter in more northern latitudes, the father takes the boy south along interstate highways towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and a supermarket cart. The father is suffering from a cough. He assures his son that they are “good guys” who are “carrying the fire”. The pair have a revolver, but only two rounds. The father has tried to teach the boy to use the gun on himself if necessary, to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals.

Source: The Road – Wikipedia

However, the destination does not always seem that important with McCarthy.

Initially, I was left wondering what had happened to the world that McCarthy’s novel traverses. However, it is soon made clear that it is not really the point. I guess when the whole world catches fire that you might not even know the cause is.

What seems to matter is what it means to exist in a world merely focused on survival. What does it mean to be ‘one of the good ones’ in a world where many have to cannibalism to survive?

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”

In part, the book feels like it is about the future and the threat of global warming, but it also feels like it is about the present. Although I have only read two McCarthy books, I feel different after them.

Bookmarks

McCarthy’s is an elemental voice. In his voice I hear stone shifting, glaciers cracking open, trees moaning in the wind. The ancient cadences of his prose take on an almost otherworldly quality, a quality that transports you. I’m constantly in awe of the language and recognizing how he’s putting together his sentences so exquisitely.

Source: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature by Joe Fassler

Though McCarthy’s not afraid to stare into the abyss, he seems to also carefully consider his use of violence. When I’m reading someone like Chuck Palahniuk, I often feel he’s titillated by a kind of gorenography. He’s writing violence in a way that feels excessive and part of some carnival sideshow meant to make people slap their knees and guffaw horribly. When I look at The Road, or a book like Blood Meridian, McCarthy describes every terrible thing that a mind could conjure. But he’ll also pull back. He’ll allow some violence to take place off stage, because he knows unseen acts can be as brutal and affecting as violence that’s shown—perhaps more so.

Source: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature by Joe Fassler

Joe Fassler explains that what makes McCarthy’s so powerful is his avoidance ‘gorenography’ by leaving so much of the violence off the stage.

The Road is neither parable nor science fiction, however, and fundamentally it marks not a departure but a return to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since Blood Meridian: adventure and Gothic horror.

Source: After the Apocalypse | Michael Chabon by Michael Chabon

The existence of a moral structure—the will to do good—is the soaring discovery hidden in McCarthy’s scourged planet.

Source: Cormac McCarthy’s new masterpiece. by Jennifer Egan

The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection.

Source: Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy by Alan Warner

SamuelBeckett #TheRoad #CormacMcCarthy

Which is to say that, deny it as we like, all of our effort and creativity in this world implies an orientation toward some transcendent place or mind outside this world; that human consciousness suggests a superhuman correlate; that, adapting Nietzsche, to believe in grammar is to believe in God. Following from this premise of a link between human and divine creativity, McCarthy inquires what will become of humanity if all of its efforts come to grief, if the divine security is thereby invalidated? On this question, The Road runs both ways: how can the last survivors of the doomed human race retain faith either in itself or in God?

Source: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by John Pistelli

It is to inquire about what purpose our activities have at all, however mixed and marred by violence or oppression they are.

Source: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by John Pistelli

The only thing in this world that is divine is us, or, more specifically, whatever in us rises above the merely reasonable. Reason can do nothing but perceive and manipulate the already-given, by definition evil in this evil world, but the divine spark preserves the irrational goodness and beauty of the true Lord.

Source: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by John Pistelli

McCarthy is seemingly less interested in exploring the causes of this mass extinction event and its immediate aftermath choosing instead to focus on the dynamic relationship between a father and his son. This relationship, and the uniquely human traits that are exemplified within its bounds, stand in stark contrast to the primeval immorality of the other survivors they encounter on the road.

Source: The%20Road%20-%20Cormac%20McCarthy%20(2006) by Matt Burgess

McCarthy does not say how or when God entered this man’s being and his son’s, nor does he say how or why they were chosen to survive together for 10 years, to be among the last living creatures on the road. But the tale is as biblical as it is ultimate, and the man implies that the end has happened through godly fanaticism. The world is in a nuclear winter, though that phrase is never used. The lone allusion to our long-prophesied holy war with its attendant nukes is when the man thinks: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

Source: Review: ‘The Road,’ by Cormac McCarthy by William Kennedy

Although, as expected, the Father makes all pragmatic decisions concerning survival, the Boy is the clear authority on morality, persuading the father to preserve a charitable spirit in McCarthy’s amoral wasteland. He is the bringer of light in the darkness, the embodiment of “carrying the fire” (p. 234).

Source: Survival and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Exploring Aquinian Grace and the Boy as Messiah by Carla M. Sanchez

Bookmarked Rare Thoughts on Writing From Cormac McCarthy in This Unlikely Interview (Literary Hub)

It turned out that Wilhelm’s boyfriend lived next door to a friend of Cormac McCarthy’s, and had actually seen the author. So Wilhelm and Oseran drafted a list of questions for McCarthy, with some guidance from Sudak, and emailed them to the friend.

Cormac McCarthy answers a series of questions provided to him as a part of a student assignment. Through these responses, he reflections upon the notion of inspiration:

I write what is in my head, in my mind. Certainly there are times when what I am writing about corresponds to a place I know well, such as west Texas and Mexico, but sometimes I have a visual image in my head that does not relate to any specific knowledge of a place.

As well as audience when writing:

I’m not writing for a particular audience. The reader in mind is me. If someone else would write these books I could go play golf.

Bookmarked Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper (nature.com)

The Pulitzer prizewinner shares his advice for pleasing readers, editors and yourself.

Cormac McCarthy’s words of wisdom, as told by Van Savage and Pamela Yeh:

  • Use minimalism to achieve clarity.
  • Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember.
  • Limit each paragraph to a single message.
  • Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct.
  • Don’t slow the reader down.
  • Don’t over-elaborate.
  • And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.
  • With regard to grammar, spoken language and common sense are generally better guides for a first draft than rule books.
  • Commas denote a pause in speaking.
  • Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important — without using bold or italics — and not only for defining terms.
  • Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling.
  • Choose concrete language and examples.
  • Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences.
  • When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend.
  • After all this, send your work to the journal editors.
  • Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like.
Replied to Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy (A Point of Contact)

McCarthy is an incredible writer. There were long segments of description that projected on my mind like a delirious flu induced night of dreams. This might actually be the main reason why a film would be so difficult, no on-screen images could match McCarthy’s descriptions.

I recently read an interesting interview discussion the filming of Blood Meridian, but I had not come across Christopher Douglas’ piece. I like his closing remarks:

Whether the judge is a deputy serving an “evil Yahweh” or a scientist discovering God’s dark designs in nature may not ultimately matter. Blood Meridian is an intensely religious novel that articulates our worst fears — about the world, about each other, about God Himself. Perhaps it’s best to let this novel lie sleeping. Let’s not awake its power for film audiences at all.

I really enjoyed the book. I found Blood Meridian as one of those books that really keeps you thinking well after you have put it down. I wrote more about it here.

Bookmarked Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy, True Heir to Melville and Faulkner (Literary Hub)

If there is a pragmatic tradition of the American Sublime, then Cormac McCarthy’s fictions are its culmination. Moby-Dick and Faulkner’s major, early novels are McCarthy’s prime precursors. Melville’s Ahab fuses together Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth—and crosses them with a quest both Promethean and American. Even as Montaigne’s Plato became Emerson’s, so Melville’s Shakespeare becomes Cormac McCarthy’s. Though critics will go on associating McCarthy with Faulkner, who certainly affected McCarthy’s style in Suttree (1979), the visionary of Blood Meridian (1985) and The Border Trilogy (1992, 1994, 1998) has much less in common with Faulkner, and shares more profoundly in Melville’s debt to Shakespeare.

Harold Bloom discusses Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. He traces the connections to Shakespeare, Melville and Faulkner.