Blood & Grace: The Fiction ofCormac Mc

Carthy
Arnold, Edwin T., Commonweal

Cormac McCarthy's novels compose an extended journey. His characters travel themountain roads and
forests of east Tennessee, the city streets of Knoxville, the deserts andhills of Mexico and the Southw
est. For the most part, their wanderings seem withoutimmediate purpose, or purpose of the vaguest sor
t: an undefined desire to withdraw or toexplore or to escape. They are descendants of Ishmael, both the
biblical outcast andMelville's nomadic seagoer. I can think of no other author who so carefully charts
hischaracters' movements from street to street or town to town--
you can follow them onmaps if you wish. And yet his novels usually cease their telling in the midst of
journeys,still on the road, short of destination, for, in the world of McCarthy, the only truedestination i
s death.
"He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence andlife but an e
manation thereof." This is the author's description of a gypsy encountered byhis protagonist Billy Parh
am in McCarthy's new novel, The Crossing, but it could applyequally well to McCarthy, who himself
seems fascinated, at times even exhilarated, by themultiple manifestations of doom. In his novels, deat
h is portrayed with astonishing varietyin the constant violence men do to men. "Holme saw the blade
wink in the light like a longcat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat
and went allbroken down the front of it," reads a passage in Outer Dark (1968), and the effect causess
ome to throw the book to the floor. In Child of God (1973), death is amatory, a means forthe necrophil
e-
murderer Lester Ballard to "[pour] into that waxen ear everything he'dever thought of saying to a wom
an. Who could say she did not hear him?" In BloodMeridian (1985), a tale of Western scalp hunters, d
eath is all butchery and business,murder for profit in a landscape of terra damnata: "They moved amon
g the deadharvesting the long black locks with their knives and leaving their victims rawskulled andstr
ange in their bloody cauls.... Men were wading about in the red waters hackingaimlessly at the dead an
d some lay coupled to the bludgeoned bodies of young womendead or dying on the beach. One of the
Delawares passed with a collection of heads likesome strange vendor bound for market, the hair twiste
d about his wrist and the headsdangling and turning together."
And yet it should not be surprising that a man so taken with death should prove equallypassionate abo
ut life, for each, he argues, makes the other possible. McCarthy turns to thewild to revel in the majesty
of unnegotiated vitality. In his first novel, The Orchard Keeper(1965), he embodies this fierce joy in t
he hawk which the boy, John Wesley Rattner, trapsfor bounty, only later to comprehend that such an a
ct is sacrilege. "I cain't take no dollar,"he tells the clerk. "I made a mistake, he wadn't for sale." In later
books, those set in theSouthwest, McCarthy employs the horse, whose physical vitality he extols in lo
fty,mystical celebration:
While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees
the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the
blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue
convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and
knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that
drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articula-
tions and of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the
flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning ground-
mist and the head turning side to side and the great slaver-
ing keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes
where the world burned.
In The Crossing (1994), it is the wolf that stands as emblem of a fierce, uncompromisedwisdom which
sees the balance of life in death, and death in life:
He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it
knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world
save that which death has put there. Finally he said that
if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand
the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish
to be serious but they do not understand how to be so.
Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world
and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in
the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and
fro, yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of
their own hands or they see that which they name and
call out to one another but the world between is invisi-
ble to them.
It is the "world between," the invisible place of blood and grace, that lies at the heart ofMcCarthy's fict
ion.
McCarthy, now sixty-one, is the author of seven published novels, one published five-
actplay, and one filmed screenplay. His first four books--
The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark,Child of God, and Suttree (1979) are set largely in the first half of th
e century, inTennessee around Knoxville, where McCarthy attended Catholic high school and, without
graduating, the University of Tennessee. His screenplay, The Gardener's Son (directed byRichard Pear
ce, and shown on PBS in 1977), is based on an 1876 murder in Graniteville,South Carolina. His drama
, The Stonemason (published in 1994 but written earlier,apparently around 1980) takes place in Louisv
ille, Kentucky, in the 1970s.
Shortly before the publication of Suttree, McCarthy left his second wife (he is twicedivorced) and mov
ed to the Southwest, first Tuscon and then El Paso, which he has sinceused as his home base. His subs
equent books have been Westerns, although to label themas such is no more accurate than to call his ea
rlier books Southern or Appalachian;McCarthy's writings, for all their detailed accuracy of speech and
custom and place, easilytranscend any notion of region. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in th
e West, is ahyperviolent tale of scalp hunters in the 1840s, based on historical record and renderedwith
such realism that many readers cannot get past the first third of the book. All thePretty Horses (1992),
the first volume of The Border Trilogy, is set one hundred years laterand, in effect, reconstructs the w
orld of Blood Meridian in more romantic and forgivingterms (for McCarthy, at least); it is not surprisi
ng that it has proved to be his one best-
seller, although the scope of its success (it sold over 100,000 copies in the first year; wonthe National
Book Award and the National Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for thePulitzer Prize; the screen
rights were bought by Mike Nichols, filming set for next year) isastonishing, indeed. The second volu
me of the trilogy, The Crossing, was published lastspring in an initial printing of 200,000 copies, and t
he book was a main selection of theBook of the Month Club. A darker, sadder, but also deeply compas
sionate work, TheCrossing denies its readers the conventional plot satisfactions found in Pretty Horses
,although it tells essentially the same story, paralleling its sixteen-year-
old protagonist BillyParham's journey with that of sixteen-year-
old John Grady Cole in the first volume (and,inevitably, with the sixteen-year-
old "kid" in Blood Meridian). Whether this somber, lessengaging but, I believe, more significant novel
will hold the readers of All the PrettyHorses remains to be seen. So far, however, it has sold well.
Incest, infanticide, necrophilia; drunkenness, debauchery, sacrilege; physical deformityand spiritual m
orbidity: this is a bleak place McCarthy explores in his fiction. But it hasbeen too easy, especially of th
e books leading up to The Border Trilogy, to categorizeMcCarthy as an unusually talented purveyor of
nihilistic Southern Gothic horror showsand to miss the essential religiosity at the core of his writing.
Denis Donoghue, followingearlier critics like Vereen M. Bell, the author of The Achievement of Corm
ac McCarthy(1988), describes the characters in the first novels as "recently arrived primates, eachposs
essing a spinal column but little or no capacity of mind or consciousness." And while itis true that Cull
a Holme in Outer Dark or Lester Ballard in Child of God and, to jumpahead, the kid in Blood Meridia
n are unlikely to put their feelings of despair and alienationinto reasoned words, Culla dreams of hims
elf standing before a prophet, crying "Me...CanI be cured?"; from his cave Lester watches the "hordes
of cold stars sprawled across thesmokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself"; a
nd the kid, after hisyear with the scalpers, "began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men h
aveseen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts ofblood in whic
h he had participated." In later time he wanders the Southwest carrying withhim a Bible he cannot read
, moving inevitably toward his final judgment.
The kind of spiritual devastation suggested in these novels is detailed at length in Suttree,considered b
y many to be McCarthy's magnum opus. The remnants of his Catholiceducation and sensibilities are di
splayed most clearly in this lengthy work. Suttree is alapsed Catholic but a haunted one, hounded by th
e specter of death, especially that of hisstillborn twin brother: "If our dead kin are sainted we may right
ly pray to them. MotherChurch tells us so.... I followed him into the world, me.... And used to pray for
his souldays past. Believing this ghastly circus reconvened elsewhere for all time. He in the limboof th
e Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell." Having abandoned his wife and ownchild, having broken
with his well-to-
do family, Suttree passes his days fishing on thepolluted Tennessee River which runs near the slums of
Knoxville. "He said that he mighthave been a fisher of men in another time but these fish now seemed
task enough forhim," McCarthy writes.
Suttree is a brilliant book by many measures, a hugely comic, extravagantly written,richly told epic of
bedraggled humanity. Peopled by over 150 named characters (someactual figures from 1950s Knoxvill
e), it concentrates on Suttree and on the country youthGene Harrogate, whom he meets in prison and
who follows him to the big city. Harrogate(an extraordinary creation, echoed by Jimmy Blevins in All
the Pretty Horses and, to alesser extent, Boyd Parham in The Crossing) brings out Suttree's sense of re
sponsibility; hetries to save the boy from his own innate foolishness. But Harrogate is hell-
bent, beyondrescue, and finally Suttree can try to save only himself. By the end of the novel, he hasnea
rly died, faced judgment in his delirium, and been granted a kind of grace (it is hismother's name: he c
omes to refer to himself as "son of Grace"). Given last rites by ayoung priest, he is asked, "Would you
like to confess?" "I did it," he answers, and the truthembraces his whole life. "God must have been wat
ching over you. You very nearly died,"the priest says. "You would not believe what watches," Suttree
answers. "He is not a thing.Nothing ever stops moving."
Although each of the earlier books (with the possible exception of The Orchard Keeper, anovel which
suggests mystical truths but is largely devoid of outright religiousconsiderations) questions the relation
ship between man and God, in Suttree it becomes amain theme. (The book was apparently written over
a twenty-
year period, and the threeother novels can be read as offshoots of the larger work.) Starting with Blood
Meridian(and including his play The Stonemason), McCarthy's writings have become increasinglysol
emn, his style more stately, his concerns more overtly theological. The world is a wildplace in McCart
hy's fiction, and its God a wild and often savage and mostly unknowableGod, but a God whose presen
ce constantly beckons. In Blood Meridian, the former priest,Tobin, says of the "Almighty": "Whatever
could it mean to one who knows all? He's anuncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom
resides in the least of things sothat it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profound
ly in such beingsas lives in silence themselves.... No man is given leave of that voice."
"I ain't heard no voice," the kid spits in reply.
"When it stops...you'll know you've heard it all your life," Tobin answers.
It may be surprising to think of marauding scalp hunters debating the existence of God,but, as if in res
ponse to the muteness of his earlier characters, McCarthy's more recentones engage in lengthy convers
ations discussing the issues of life and death and God's rolein both. As another former priest tells Billy
Parham in The Crossing, "Men do not turnfrom God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each ma
n is the knowledge thatsomething knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hi
d from. Toimagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable." He continues:
Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not
to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees
and their souls are riven and they cry out to him and there
is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs
from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence
for they know at once that while godless men may live
well enough in their exile those to whom he has spoken
can contemplate no life without him but only darkness
and despair.
There are godless men aplenty in McCarthy's novels, and many of them are evil, rangingfrom the three
dark ghoulish figures who roam the land of Outer Dark, haunting Culla'spath, to the "sooty-
souled rascal" Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who finally calls thekid to judgment, to the strange In
dian who brings violence to Billy Parham's home andsets him journeying in The Crossing. But for eac
h man there is always also the possibilityof grace. "You think God looks out for people?" Lacey Rawli
ns asks John Grady Cole inAll the Pretty Horses. He answers himself, "I do. Way the world is. Someb
ody can wake upand sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there'
swars and ruination and all hell. You don't know what's going to happen. I'd say he's justabout got to. I
don't believe we'd make it a day otherwise." Or, as a Mexican bandit tellsthe kid in Blood Meridian, "
When the lambs is lost in the mountain....They is cry.Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf."
McCarthy's protagonists are most often those who, in their travels, are bereft of the voiceof God and y
et yearn to hear him speak. This is especially true in the first two volumes ofThe Border Trilogy. "Lon
g voyages often lose themselves," a traveling actress tells BillyParham. "The road has its own reasons
and no two travelers will have the sameunderstanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an unde
rstanding of them at all.Listen to the corridos of the country. They will tell you. Then you will see in y
our own lifewhat is the cost of things."
The "corridos," the stories of the country: these are the messages, the lessons, the parablesMcCarthy te
lls. As a character says in The Crossing, "For this world also which seems tous a thing of stone and flo
wer and blodd is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is atale and each tale the sum of all lesser t
ales and yet these also are the selfsame tale andcontain as well all else within them. So everything is n
ecessary. Every least thing.... Of thetelling there is no end.... Rightly heard all tales are one." For both
John Grady Cole andBilly Parham, the tale is very much the same, and the "cost of things" unusually h
igh; andby his book's end, each boy seems depleted, shriven, leading one to contemplate theirpossible
meeting in volume three and the consequences of that meeting.
Indeed, rightly seen, all of McCarthy's works take the same journey, tell the same tale,posit the same
moral and spiritual questions. Everything is necessary, nothing ever stopsmoving, and when God spea
ks, in gift or in blood, all fall to their knees. As the priest tellsBilly Parham, "In the end we shall all of
us be only what we have made of God. Fornothing is real save his grace."
Books discussed in this essay
The Crossing, Knopf, $23, 426 pp.
All the Pretty Horses, Vintage, $12, 302 pp.
Outer Dark, Vintage, $10, 256 pp.
Blood Meridian, Vintage, $11, 327 pp.
The Orchard Keeper, Vintage, $11, 256 pp.
Child of God, Vintage, $10, 208 pp.
Suttree, Vintage, $12, 480 pp.
The Stonemason, Ecco Press, $19.95, 133 pp.
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Blood & Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy. Contributors: Arnold, Edwin T. - Author. Magazine
title: Commonweal. Volume: 121. Issue: 19 Publication date: November 4, 1994. Page number: 11+. 1999 Commonweal Foundation.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Gale Group.