The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical: The Latent Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy 1443838829, 9781443838825

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The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical

The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical: The Latent Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy

By

Hanna Boguta-Marchel

The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical: The Latent Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy, by Hanna Boguta-Marchel This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Hanna Boguta-Marchel All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3882-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3882-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Abbreviations ........................................................................................... xxi Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 From Augustine to Badiou: Grappling with the Concept of Evil Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 Evil as Excess: Visualizing Violence Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 67 Evil as Fate Chapter Four............................................................................................ 111 Evil as the Legacy of Metaphysical Desire Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 141 Glimpses of the Metaphysical: Biblical Themes in McCarthy’s Novels Bibliography............................................................................................ 175 Afterword ................................................................................................ 185 McCarthy’s Via Negativa

PREFACE DISCOVERING MCCARTHY

When I came across one of McCarthy’s novels for the very first time in 2003, he was a strictly marginal novelist, commonly referred to as a “writers’ writer.” In Poland, he was virtually unknown, with merely two of his novels translated into Polish: All the Pretty Horses in 1996 and The Crossing in 2000.1 Today, this situation has changed quite radically. After receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his latest novel, The Road (2006), accepting, to the great surprise of his readers, Oprah Winfrey’s offer to sit for a television interview with her, and finally agreeing to the Oscar-winning film adaptation of No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers as well to John Hillcoat’s screening of The Road, McCarthy is commonly recognized as one of the best living American authors. Another five of his novels have been recently translated into Polish, and the blurbs on their covers proudly present him as a superb equal of such celebrated American novelists as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth.2 Since my first encounter with Cormac McCarthy’s prose, I was strongly convinced that he would, sooner or later, acquire a broader reading public. Each of his books makes a truly striking impression, blending an exquisite elaborateness, lyrical enigma, and profound wisdom on the one hand with some kind of genuinely basic simplicity, unfeigned forthrightness, and an absolutely unique ability to instantly reach the very “bones” of things on the other. Similarly, McCarthy’s language is both defiantly intricate, with juxtapositions such as “witless paraclete,” “threatful 1

Cormac McCarthy, Rącze konie, trans. JĊdrzej Polak (PoznaĔ: Zysk i s-ka, 1996); Przeprawa, trans. JĊdrzej Polak (PoznaĔ: Zysk i s-ka, 2000). 2 No Country for Old Men was translated as To nie jest kraj dla starych ludzi (trans. Robert Bryk, Warszawa: PrószyĔski i S-ka, 2008), The Road as Droga (trans. Robert Sudoá, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008), Child of God as DzieciĊ boĪe (trans. Anna Koáyszko, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2009), Blood Meridian as Krwawy poáudnik (trans. Robert Sudóá, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010), The Orchard Keeper as StraĪnik sadu (trans. Michaá Káobukowski, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010), and, most recently, Outer Dark as W ciemnoĞü (trans. Maciej ĝwierkocki, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010).

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supplicant,” or “besotted bedlamites,” with sentences running on for whole pages without any punctuation marks to guide us through, and, at the same time, amazingly simple, offering lucid, matter-of-fact descriptions of the most elemental daily activities of the protagonists, and dryly reporting their succinct, synoptic conversations. Although the reality McCarthy portrays is essentially dark and hostile, the people–malicious, unsociable, and estranged, and the nature–violent and unpredictable, the reader is not burdened with an experience of meaninglessness, despair, or futility. Quite paradoxically, we have an overwhelming impression that all existence in McCarthy’s books is imbued with deep and resonant spirituality, and that each described entity– whether it is a horse saddle, a human being, or a forest creek, is intensely sacred in some arcane, fundamental sense. Despite the fact that violence and evil, which I have adopted as the subject matter of my study, are the predominant topics of virtually all of McCarthy’s novels, what attracts us to them the most is not the sensational, often intimidating dimension of their plots but rather the irrepressible feeling that the message they convey comes remarkably close to our deepest thoughts and convictions, imparting a kind of elementary though challenging and disturbing truth about ourselves and the world around us. As I will be attempting to demonstrate, this import is anything but plain or straightforward; in fact, the very value of the books I will be analyzing lies precisely in their inconclusiveness and equivocacy, in their convergence not on the final destination but on the road in itself, not on the “will be” or “ought to be” but on the “is.”

McCarthy’s Actual and Virtual Identity Not much is known about Cormac McCarthy. In what has for many years been referred to as the only full time interview McCarthy has ever given (even though it is not in fact an interview per se but just an essay comprising the free impressions of a journalist who managed to invite the writer out for lunch), Richard B. Woodward described him as a “hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America.”3 And although, as I have already mentioned, with McCarthy’s recent coming into fame the present circumstances are somewhat different than back in 3

Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction,” New York Times, April 19, 1992. Accessed May 4, 2009. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DA163EF93AA25757C0 A964958260&sec=&spon.

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1992, still, the facts we may be certain about with regard to his person are truly scarce. What we do know is that he was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933, as Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., and that his family (his parents, two brothers, and three sisters) moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, when Cormac was four. We also know that he studied liberal arts at the University of Tennessee, but never finished his studies since he joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953, where he served for four years. From that point on, his life consisted of unstable relationships (he was married three times) and unstable jobs (he never took up a steady occupation and earned his living doing various types of casual physical work). In 1976, he moved to El Paso, Texas, and at the end of the 1990s to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives until today. Since The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965, McCarthy has written altogether ten novels, two unfinished plays, and one screenplay. The first four novels (The Orchard Keeper, 1965; Outer Dark, 1968; Child of God, 1973; Suttree, 1979), because of their characteristic local scenery, are referred to as the Appalachian works, and they are all set either in the murky forests, hills, and valleys of Appalachia or else, in the case of Suttree, in the slums and street mazes of Knoxville, Tennessee. Although during this time McCarthy received three scholarships for creative writing, the sales of his novels never exceeded 2,500 copies. He therefore lived practically on the verge of indigence, rejecting all offers to lecture on his work, to blurb a newly published novel, or to teach a course on creative writing. As his former wives report, he had lived in barns, pig farms, and rented rooms in cheap motels, cutting his own hair, eating his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias, and doing his wash at the Laundromat. In 1985, McCarthy completed Blood Meridian, which most critics regard as a turning point in his writing career. Although at the time of its printing it received scarce critical attention, today it is probably the most extensively analyzed work of all that McCarthy has written. Because it is set on the borderlands between Texas and Mexico and, to some extent, alludes to the conventions of the American Western, Blood Meridian is referred to as a South-Western masterpiece. McCarthy’s next three novels (the so called Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, 1992; The Crossing, 1994; and Cities of the Plain, 1998) depart from the puzzling mysteriousness and outright violence of his earlier works, and instead consistently depict the adventures and the maturing of two American boys, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Focused around the motif of the journey, they follow the heroic protagonists in their quests across the Western frontier. Interestingly, All the Pretty Horses was McCarthy’s first novel that gained

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unanimously positive reviews and attracted the attention of a broader reading public (it sold 190,000 copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication, became a New York Times bestseller, and won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). After a seven-year period of silence, in 2005 McCarthy published No Country for Old Men. Although the events that it depicts take place sometime in the twenty-first century, in its grim portrayal of callous evil, No Country for Old Men is thematically closer to McCarthy’s earliest works. Finally, a year later, he completed his most renowned novel, The Road, hailed as “the searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.”4 Despite his increasing literary fame, the whole knowledge we possess concerning Cormac McCarthy’s person–his private life, his views, opinions, and experiences–is a mere hodgepodge with scraps of secondhand information coming from various sources, many of them of questionable reliability. When he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his last novel, The Road, and agreed to be interrogated by Oprah Winfrey during her show, the public hoped to learn more about the renowned “hermit.” The interview was a surprise indeed, yet McCarthy, for all the uneasiness he must have felt being on TV for the first time in his life, quite naturally replied to Oprah’s detailed inquiries delving into his secretive life. As commentators later admitted, “McCarthy wasn't as gnomically apocalyptic as we’d speculated he would be. Slouching in an overstuffed armchair, he seemed more like a nice-enough old man, gamely trying to answer the inane questions posed by the overenthusiastic woman sitting opposite.”5 Although Oprah Winfrey’s enquiries were disappointingly derivative and facile (“Where did the idea for this novel come from?”; “Do you have a writing routine?”), McCarthy treated them seriously and replied with thoughtful care. Yet apart from learning that he has an eightyear-old son, to whom The Road is dedicated, we did not find out anything new about the “best unknown novelist in America.” Oprah’s interview, pronounced as poor and wasted, went practically unnoticed by the wider public, while McCarthy himself admitted he did not mind that millions of people were at present reading his books, but that he also did not honestly care. “You would like for the people who appreciate the book to read it,

4

The dust jacket of the 2007 Alfred A. Knopf hardcover edition. “Cormac McCarthy Bombs on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’” New York Magazine, June 6, 2007. Accessed May 6, 2009. http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/ 06/cormac_mccarthy_slouches_towar.html.

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but as far as many, many people are reading it, so what?” he said. “It's ok, nothing wrong with it.”6 This is the authentic Cormac McCarthy–ascetic and reserved, overly modest and distanced. However, we may risk the contention that, owing partly to his specific aloofness and partly to the unrestrained development of cyber technology, besides this “real” McCarthy, there is also a virtual one–one whose identity has been construed online by his readers, fans, and regular blog-enthusiasts. Interestingly, not everyone is aware of the fact that the two are actually distinct. One of McCarthy’s readers sensed the incongruence and admitted he “was surprised Mr. McCarthy even put a forum on his site [cormacmccarthy.com] in the first place,” to which the Cormackian guru, Rick Wallach, promptly and comprehensively replied, It’s not Mr. McCarthy’s site. The site was put up by the Cormac McCarthy Society, with which the author has no official connection whatsoever. FYI the site began as a scholarly group thirteen years ago, but Mr. McCarthy’s growing popularity resulted in a much broader field of interest. In any case the Society has since 1993 sponsored annual scholarly conferences in both the USA and Europe on Mr. McCarthy’s work and related fields. Many, if not most, of the critical books on McCarthy currently in print were compiled from papers first delivered at those conferences.7

Cormacmccarthy.com, “the official Web site of the Cormac McCarthy society,” is indeed a very elaborate, systematically updated site, with links to McCarthy’s works and biography, to a comprehensive list of resources regarding his books, such as a thorough bibliography, reviews, articles, and translations of the Spanish fragments of his novels, as well as to the Cormac McCarthy journal, society, bookshop, and forum. The last one, whose visitors were praised by Dwight Garner as “smarter, and definitely more laid-back, than [the fans] of just about any other living writer,”8 comprises numerous threads regarding topics related not only to McCarthy’s novels (many of them being discussions on a highly academic level), but also to everything that is going on in the world of the media and show business that is in any way related to McCarthy’s work or to his 6

Michael Conlon, “Writer Cormac McCarthy confides in Oprah Winfrey,” Reuters, June 5, 2007. Accessed May 6, 2009. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20070605/ten-uk-mccarthy-91c27f7.html. 7 Paper Cuts, a blog about books, New York Times, July 25, 2007. Accessed May 7, 2009. http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/the-fighting-cormackians/. 8 Dwight Garner, “Inside the List,” The New York Times, October 15, 2006. Accessed July 27, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/books/review/15tbr .html?_r=2&ref=review&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.

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person.9 They share useful links, exchange intricate insights, and speculate about the most meticulous details of the novels’ settings. Apart from the rather scholarly forum at cormacmccarthy.com, there are numerous other, less serious and definitely more light-hearted blogs featuring McCarthy’s name.10 On profile.myspace.com, Cormac, obviously the “virtual” one, actually appears as one of the official contributors. And again, many bloggers tellingly mistake him for the real writer (although there is a small note at the bottom of the page stating, “PLEASE NOTE: The real Cormac McCarthy does not manage or check this profile. It exists only for promotion and to keep fans updated on McCarthy news”), while others sincerely doubt if there truly is any substantial reality behind his online profile. Nevertheless, this skepticism does not deter them from deeply emotional disclosures such as: I wish you were real. You are my favorite literary recluse. Excepting Emily Dickinson, of course. I love Cormac McCarthy's books so much. I wish this were him actually inviting me to be a friend. I would probably flip out. Mr. McCarthy, your books are actually physically painful to read, yet I keep coming back. You'd think after being ripped apart emotionally after Cities of the Plain, I'd pass on The Road. Wrong. Thank You for your books. You are truly the greatest living American writer. Though It's hard for me to imagine Cormac McCarthy checking his Myspace page... Hey! If only the real Cormac wanted to be my buddy . . . heh.11

Is it at all possible that this “doubleness,” this existence on the world wide web as a construct that is wholly independent, detached, and unfettered from the flesh-and-blood McCarthy, has any influence on his novel writing as such? Obviously, it would be difficult, not to mention somewhat risky and naïve, to make such speculations, the more so because there is a substantially high probability that McCarthy is actually totally unaware of the elaborate existence of his virtual double. Those readers of McCarthy’s fiction who are the most active in sharing their ideas, doubts, and conjectures both about the books themselves and 9

When I searched the forum for themes related to The Road, I have found 201 threads, each containing from 8 to 145 exchanges–I am quoting these numbers just to give an idea of the abundance of the forum’s content. 10 Recently, the first Polish website devoted entirely to McCarthy’s writing has been established and is frequently visited by the growing circle of his readers in Poland (http://www.cormacmccarthy.pl/). 11 MySpace, “Cormac.” Accessed July 27, 2007. http://profile.myspace.com/index. cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=161785678.

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about their author, are certainly highly dependent upon technology, the net being their major means of communication and source of information. McCarthy, on the other hand, is said to even avoid using a computer since he prefers to write his novels on a classical typewriter. One of the characteristic features of the plot of those books is a practically absolute absence of any technology. McCarthy’s protagonists, regardless of whether the events they experience are set in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty first century, do not use phones, do not listen to the radio or watch television, do not wash their clothes in washing machines, do not iron their shirts or vacuum their carpets. The most highly developed equipment they utilize are gas stoves, pistols, and pick-up trucks. This conspicuous lack of technology in McCarthy’s novels, apparent especially in The Road which uses the circumstances of a technological disaster, seems to highlight a puzzling clash with the increasingly “technologized” virtual reality of his readers, virtually communicating with and applauding McCarthy’s virtual self. I assume that this distinctive “doubleness” may be regarded as another paradoxical feature of McCarthy’s writing and person, underscoring his propensity to escape all definite categorizations and neatly ordered arrangements.

Major Trends in McCarthian Criticism McCarthy has been receiving substantial critical attention since the 1980s. The first book-length study concerning his writing, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy by Vereen Bell, appeared in 1988 and hailed the novelist as a profoundly nihilistic author, whose “characters are almost without thoughts” and whose vision is a “dark parody” of reality presented as “an incoherent and unrationalized gestalt of mass and process, without design or purpose.”12 Since that time, six major monographs and collections of essays have been published,13 and numerous journals have 12

Vereen Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988), 4, 38. 13 Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne Luce, eds, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999); W. Hall and R. Wallach, eds, Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy (El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 1995); Robert L. Jarret, Cormac McCarthy (NY: Twayne, 1997); Barceley Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000); Rick Wallach, ed, Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000); Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne Luce, eds, A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (Jackson, Mississippi: UP of Mississippi, 2001).

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printed independent articles on McCarthy’s work.14 While nearly all of them unanimously agree that his books are genuine masterpieces in terms of style and form, there is no similar agreement as to the basic message they are meant to convey. In 1995, Nell Sullivan remarked that “since Cormac McCarthy arrived on the literary scene almost thirty years ago, the critics have been at a loss about how to view his texts.”15 With a certain degree of simplification, we may, following Dana Phillips, divide most critical works on McCarthy into two “camps, which . . . can be distinguished geographically.” Those who view McCarthy as a predominantly Southern writer (and a follower of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor), “tend to want to find in each of his novels something redemptive or regenerative, something affirming mysteries . . . of a Christian or Gnostic variety.” On the other hand, those who consider McCarthy as a rather Western author, “see in the trajectory of [his] career a move toward wider relevance and a broader worldview,” that is an acknowledgment of Western tradition as a whole, with such figures as Dostoevski, Conrad, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. His “nihilism” would therefore be precisely “what one would expect from a writer who has fed on such corrosive, demystifying influences.”16 This disagreement may be aptly illustrated by two quotations referring to one and the same novel by McCarthy. While Leo Daugherty asserts that his reading of Blood Meridian–particularly its epilogue–causes [him] to conclude that it is redemptionist (…), and that those who consider McCarthy a nihilist are off the track, although it is not difficult to see how they got there,17

Steven Shaviro maintains that

14

A complete bibliography (regularly revised and updated by Dianne Luce) can be found at www.cormacmccarthy.com. 15 Nell Sullivan, “Cormac McCarthy and the Text of Jouissance,” in Sacred Violence, Hall and Wallach, eds., 115. 16 Dana Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 434-35. Among the “Southern” critics he lists such names as Terence Moran, Walter Sullivan, Edwin T. Arnold, and Leo Daugherty, while the “Western” camp is represented by Vereen Bell, Steven Shaviro, John Lewis Lonley, Jr., and, obviously, Dana Phillips himself. 17 Leo Daugherty, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Southern Quarterly 30 (1992): 133.

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Everything in Blood Meridian is violence and blood, dying and destruction . . . . And for all its exacerbated sense of fatality, its tenor is profoundly anticlimactic and anticathartic.18

McCarthian criticism is abounding with such contradictory statements, which, more than anything, testify to the textual richness and profound ambiguity of his novelistic output. With regard to the theoretical approaches that the texts on McCarthy tend to adopt, we may point to a whole variety of methodologies, ranging from Marxist criticism,19 references to the pastoral tradition,20 to Gnostic theology,21 or to cowboy codes of the American Western,22 feminist23 and eco-critical approaches,24 finally to theological existentialist readings.25 My own analysis draws predominantly on broadly understood Western philosophy and theology (I use the writings of, among others, St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, and Jean Baudrillard) as well as on the Christian Bible as a major source 18

Steven Shaviro, “'The Very Life of Darkness': A Reading of Blood Meridian,” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 120, 119. 19 Dana Phillips, for example, adopts Georg Lukács as his major theoretical source. 20 See for instance John Grammer, “A Thing Against Which Time Will Not Prevail: Pastoral and History in McCarthy’s South,” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992): 19-30 or George Guillemin, “‘As of some site where life had not succeeded’: Sorrow, Allegory, and Pastoralism in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Companion, Arnold and Luce, eds., 92-130. 21 Leo Daugherty, “Gravers False and True…” 22 See for instance Phillip A. Snyder, “Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Companion, Arnold and Luce, eds., 198-228. 23 Nell Sullivan, “Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” Southern Quarterly 38.3 (Spring 2000): 167-85; “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God,” in Myth, Wallach, ed, 68-77. 24 For instance, Jacqueline Scoones, “Ethics and Evolution in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Companion, Arnold and Luce, eds.,131-160. 25 Edwin T. Arnold, “Blood & Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy,” Commonweal 121 (4 Nov. 1994): 11-16; “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing,” in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, James D. Lilley, ed. (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2002), 215-38; “‘Go to sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy,” Southern Quarterly 38.3 (Spring 2000): 34-58; “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables,”Southern Quarterly 30 (Summer 1992): 31-50; Douglas J. Canfield, “The Border of Becoming: Theodicy in Blood Meridian,” in Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001), 3748; “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Companion, Arnold and Luce, eds., 256-69.

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for and influence on McCarthy’s novels. I also refer to contemporary research carried out by social psychologists since I consider their results and assumptions as the most representative of the now commonly accepted notion of evil and wrongdoing.

The Main Influences on McCarthy’s Work The broad, sweeping vision of McCarthy’s writing, especially of the novels preceding the Border Trilogy, has caused many critics to point to the most fundamental works of Western literature as his potential sources of influence. The long list comprises not only The Bible, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, but also Conrad, Joyce, de Sade, Melville, and Poe. Nevertheless, most reviewers agree that the two authors whose work bears the closest affinities to McCarthy’s writing are William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Southern American literature (of which Faulkner and O’Connor are undoubtedly the most conspicuous paradigm representatives) typically tends to be characterized as obsessed with the past, focused on evil (often associated with blackness and femininity), committed to the notion of bravura and artifice, fond of rhetoric, and deeply embedded in the regional background of family and local community.26 Above all, to quote a recent book by Martyn Bone, “a truth universally acknowledged among southern literary scholars” is that “’the South’ and ‘southern literature’ have been characterized by a ‘sense of place.’”27 McCarthy’s writing only partially fits this categorization, and regionalism is in his novels confronted with a kind of anonymity of time and location–despite the conspicuous focus on the past, the events are rarely situated in a particular historical period, the setting most often remains unspecified, and even the protagonists themselves are quite frequently devoid of a name or a characteristic set of features. Their upbringing and family environment are either altogether disregarded or else have a marginal influence on their choices and actions. The notions of nobility and honor, so crucial for many typically Southern protagonists (such as Thomas Sutpen or Quentin Compson) are totally outside the scope of interest of most of the characters who appear in McCarthy’s novels. In fact, they are customarily so strongly concentrated on their own needs and deficiencies that they are wholly alienated and 26

See for instance Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986). 27 Martyn Bone, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP, 2005), vii.

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estranged from one another, viewing all people as hostile strangers and potential enemies. Nevertheless, McCarthy’s links with William Faulkner, that roaring “Dixie Limited” of Southern literature,28 are quite obvious. The writings of both of these authors share an exquisite style, with elaborate sentences frequently devoid of punctuation marks, with refined and intricate vocabulary, with lyrical and minutely detailed depictions of the surroundings, and with a non-linear progression of the plot. Harold Bloom notes that McCarthy’s “language, like Melville’s and Faulkner’s, is deliberately archaic,” a distinction that he says “so contextualizes the sentence that the amazing contrast between its high gestures and the murderous thugs who evoke the splendor is not ironic but tragic.”29 Despite these noticeable similarities, there are some equally plain differences: McCarthy does not convey the thoughts and emotions of his protagonists, nor is he interested in abrupt changes of focalization or nebulous streams of consciousness so recurrently employed by Faulkner. What is more, for all their ornate intricacy, McCarthy’s plots are told with a simplicity and economy which critics compare to the phraseology of folk tales or parables.30 The thematic associations between McCarthy and Faulkner are similarly dubious. On the one hand, both of them have a penchant for dealing with grave matters of life and death, both seem to suggest that those who are generally considered to be deranged are the ones who are the closest to the most profound truths about man and the surrounding reality, and both display a distinctive interest in the past. We can also draw parallels between such protagonists as Lena Grove and Joe Christmas from Light in August and Rinthy and Culla Holme from Outer Dark, or look for similar scenes and motives, like the suicide by jumping from a bridge in The Sound and the Fury and in Suttree, the longish monologues of Miss Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! and of the Dueña Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses, or the theme of bear slaying in “The Bear” and in the conclusion of Blood Meridian. McCarthy’s vision, however, seems to 28

A memorable phrase used by Flannery O’Connor with reference to the difficulty of going beyond Faulkner which is experienced by every Southern American writer. 29 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to: Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West,” in How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2001), xi. 30 See John Ditsky, “Further Into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy,” Hollins Critic 18 (Apr. 1981): 1.

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go beyond Faulkner, “further into darkness,” as John Ditsky phrased it.31 The sincerity and soundness of Faulkner’s moral vision cannot be doubted or questioned; like Flannery O’Connor, he employs violent means only to render his message about our obligation to remain faithful to our human dignity more manifest and compelling. In the words of O’Connor, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and to the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”32 It will suffice to recall Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech to make it plain that the moral obligation underlying his writing is equally potent and formidable: I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.33

Needless to say, McCarthy’s moral vision is far from being this distinct or transparent. If his books indeed help us to “endure and prevail,” it is only by negating all our comfortable assertions about reality and about ourselves and proposing instead an intimidating and foul darkness which bewilders us with its total lack of any discernible rules and guidelines.

Outline of the Study I begin my study with a possibly thorough (and roughly chronological) presentation of those philosophical and theological theories regarding the notion of evil that proved to be the most influential in the broadly understood Western culture. The thinkers whose ideas I examine (among others: St. Augustine, Paul Ricoeur, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alan Badiou) consider certain fundamental queries. Is evil merely a lack of the good, or does it possess its own autonomous ontological identity? Is evil a metaphysical category, or should it be regarded only with reference to its purely external, material 31

Ditsky, “Further Into Darkness,” 1. Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in The Living Novel: A Symposium, Granville Hicks, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 162-63. 33 William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Accessed February 21, 2012. http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html. 32

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outcomes? Is suffering in itself evil? Can we speak of an evil that is pure and absolute, perpetuated for its own sake, only and precisely because it is evil? All these ruminations are meant to delineate a theoretical background which would provide tools necessary for a substantiated discussion of the problem of evil in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. The arrangement of the subsequent chapters of my book was planned so as to exemplify delving into a more and more in-depth analysis of the issue in question. Chapter Two, “Evil as Excess: Visualizing Violence,” deals with the purely visual presentations of violence in McCarthy’s landmark Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, which is unparalleled in its hyperrealist imagery and minutely detailed descriptions of the most gruesome human acts. Initially, I attempt to account for the cultural circumstances in which the novel was written and point to analogies between the images it contains and the scenes of violence present in current news items about the Vietnam War. I then regard the vision of the West that Blood Meridian conveys and demonstrate how far it deviates from the highly mythologized ideas deeply rooted in American culture. Another issue I discuss is the concept of representation and of the relation between originals and their copies as it is exemplified in the imagery of Blood Meridian. Finally, I employ the notion of the grotesque as a key tool in the analysis of the novel’s visualizations of violence. I conclude the chapter with a presentation of those scenes and episodes from McCarthy’s books that testify to his deep skepticism about the role of the sense of sight in an authentic cognition of reality. Hence the need to go beyond the purely visual and external, beyond the mere appearance of things. Chapter Three, “Evil as Fate,” deals not so much with what is seen but with what is experienced, told, and spoken. It appears that those of McCarthian protagonists who have a deeper sense of self-awareness and a need for more intent reflection tend to view their own past, present, and future as closely interconnected and determined by forces outside of human control. Referring to the perspective adopted by Kant and Ricoeur, I therefore examine evil experienced as an external compulsion, as a thing “already there,” always preceding our conscious decision. I then mention a number of figures which populate McCarthy’s novels and, with some degree of simplification, categorize them into “active” and “passive” protagonists. The second part of the chapter regards the notions of repetitiveness, circularity, and cyclical forms which are presented as ideas exemplifying the assertion that human fate is not only inescapable and irrefutable but also invariably linked to evil and suffering. I round up

xx

Preface

Chapter Three with the concept of evil as the most atavistic and primeval alternative which we tend to choose in our instinctive and mindless acts. Chapter Four, “Evil as the Legacy of Metaphysical Desire,” is an attempt to take the analysis another step deeper by accounting for the metaphysical references present in McCarthy’s work and directly facing the question of the nature of evil they regard. I first describe the approach adopted by contemporary social psychology as a stance that seems to be the closest to our common understanding of the problem of evil and its manifestations in everyday life. In their analyses of wrongdoing, social psychologists tend to focus not so much on the personality and disposition of the individual but on the external circumstances and the vaguely defined “system” as the sources of evil. I subsequently juxtapose this perspective with the presentation of evil that is proposed in McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road. I also once more recall Alan Badiou’s distinction between evil as “a possible dimension of truths,” belonging to the sphere of the ethical or spiritual, and evil as “the violence that the human animal employs to persevere in its being,” as a set of purely instinctive and thoughtless behaviors.34 Another concept I refer to in Chapter Four is René Girard’s stimulating idea of mimetic violence and of the close links between the notions of desire, divinity, and precisely violence. I also mention his theory of the sacrificial “all-against-one” mechanism which is, as Girard claims, employed by Satan to play a key role in the process of the origination of evil. I then apply the concepts of both Badiou and Girard to the analysis of several of McCarthy’s novels, most notably of his masterpiece, Blood Meridian. The final chapter of my book, entitled “Glimpses of the Metaphysical: Biblical Themes in Cormac McCarthy’s Novels,” endeavors to trace the most crucial biblical motifs and allusions that are dispersed throughout all of McCarthy’s writing. I predominantly focus on the theme of the relation between father and son, which I examine first with reference to the Bible and subsequently with regard to several of McCarthy’s novels. In the second part of the chapter, I analyze Outer Dark and its rooting in the parables told by Jesus, as well as The Road, viewing it as an example of apocalyptic prose, akin to the visions depicted by St. John the Evangelist.

34

Alan Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London, New York: Verso, 2002), 60, 61,66.

ABBREVIATIONS

AP BM CG COP TC NCFOM OK OD TR S

All the Pretty Horses Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West Child of God Cities of the Plain The Crossing No Country for Old Men The Orchard Keeper Outer Dark The Road Suttree

CHAPTER ONE FROM AUGUSTINE TO BADIOU: GRAPPLING WITH THE CONCEPT OF EVIL

Before I go on to a systematic analysis of different interpretations of the phenomenon of evil, I must, at the very outset, clarify one absolutely basic issue. Theoretical pondering on evil somewhat resembles an academic study of the problem of ideology. For scholars preoccupied with either of these issues, it is very tempting, even seemingly imperative, to place themselves outside, beyond the scope of their ascendancy, therefore obtaining the necessary “detached” and “disinterested” perspective.1 I wish to express my strong suspicion towards this kind of “detachment” and assert a willingness to examine the subject from within, openly acknowledging my immutable, though exceedingly “unacademic” entanglement. Obviously, there is no other way, yet I believe it makes a considerable difference if such a pronouncement is consciously and openly verbalized. Nevertheless, despite the skepticism of a number of thinkers,2 I do believe that a purely theoretical discussion of the problem of evil–of its ontological status, its discernible manifestations and literary expressions– is possible and not altogether futile; that it can, without aspiring to expound and clarify evil in its whole multiformity or to pronounce its universal, systematic definition, lead to a more conscious awareness of a phenomenon that is as commonly experienced as it is reluctantly stipulated.

1

Compare Bercovitch’s exhortation to stay within the problem of ideology and cease the attempts to analyze it from without: Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 376. 2 See, for instance, Paul Ricoeur, Záo: Wyzwanie Rzucone Filozofii i Teologii [Evil: a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology], trans. Ewa Burska (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1992) or Jacek Filek, “Záo, które czynimy” [“The Evil that We Do”], Znak 5 (1998): 79-83.

2

Chapter One

“Evil” is obviously a metaphysical category, and, therefore, quite commonly pronounced passé. It tends to be not only relativized and viewed as utterly subjective, but also otherwise termed and defined solely through its specifically contextualized (i.e. practical) manifestations. This is the first and most fundamental impediment one stumbles upon when attempting to theorize about evil. And yet the experience of evil as something external, a reality existing outside and, to some extent, despite the individual, is quite commonplace and familiar. Such an experience is, obviously, by definition subjective, though in itself it does render evil’s very existence as, in a sense, objective. This section of my study, presenting a variety of theoretical conceptualizations of evil, proceeds in a roughly chronological order. It begins with an explication of the Augustinian tradition and its definition of evil as privation of being and of the good, which, in time, came to be an assumption widely accepted in mainstream Christian thought. I then go on to a discussion of the output of Paul Ricoeur and his insistence on the need to commence not from abstract intellectual expositions but from evil as it is presented in ancient myths and symbols. And the evil that emerges from these inconceivably rich and multidimensional illustrations of the kernel of our tradition not only functions as a substantial embodiment of an outer force, but it also compels us to consider the undeniably tragic note that permeates the myths Ricoeur analyses. Next, I attempt to deal with chosen texts of Friedrich Nietzsche, presenting his concept of the “death of God” and his summons to a “transvaluation” as a kind of caesura, after which the discussion of evil as a metaphysical notion became especially problematic. I then proceed to an intentionally thorough demonstration of Georges Bataille’s highly metaphysical (though extremely mystifying) ideas of “pure Evil” as a genuine mystical experience and the highest point of all moral searching. I also mention Jean Baudrillard’s latest attempts to “remythologize” evil in the context of terrorism and globalization, presenting his peculiar concept of the necessary equilibrium between Good and Evil. What follows is a discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the malignant sublime as well as of his problematic equation of evil with the suffering of the Other and therefore of the Other with a victim. Finally, I consider Alan Badiou’s partial answer to the Levinasian concept of evil (and of ethics in general), presenting his own theory as an attempt to reconcile the idea of a universal nature of evil (as well as of good and of truth) with an insistence on its decidedly situational character. What this whole theoretical variety is to serve, is to ensure a comprehensive background for the discussion of evil as it is presented in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. It seems that in most of them evil is one

Grappling with the Concept of Evil

3

of the major concepts underlying the narrative structure, and yet it is never mentioned by name, never defined, or ascribed to a particular character, event, or action. Still, evil here is so basic, exhaustive, and all-embracing, that each of the theories presented below may at some point claim to have found in McCarthy its perfectly relevant illustration.

Evil as Privatio Boni: the Augustinian Tradition Evil “is perfectly superficial, totally hollow, ‘nihil’, vacous in every respect (…). Evil offers no purchase for reflection; it is wholly frictionless to thought.”3

Within the mainstream Christian paradigm, derived from the Augustinian tradition, evil is ontologically conceptualized as nothing more than a lack, a privation of being and goodness. The roots, origins of evil are, on the other hand, traced back to the sinful perversion of human’s good nature, leading to a formulation of an anthropology in which man alone is burdened with the responsibility for his thorough corruption. With regard to the Augustinian ontological project, which is of more relevance at this point, the argument is as follows: Since all beings are derived from goodness, evil cannot be a being, it cannot be an existing thing but rather the absence of existence, an “ontological shortcoming.”4 Within this classically metaphysical perspective evil is an inadvertent void, a kind of accidental flaw in the otherwise circumspect process of becoming, of being. Therefore, the more good is within us, the more we ourselves exist, and to the extent that we are evil, to that extent we exist less.5 For Dionysus the Areopagite, who carried the argument even further, evil is neither a being nor a nonbeing, since nonbeings do exist: God, wholly transcendent and beyond all existence, all which can be thought, imagined, or comprehended, cannot be dependent upon being and therefore is by Dionysus termed precisely a nonbeing. This purely abstract theological concept of evil as privation has at least one crucial and very tangible implication: the only possibility for evil to somehow participate in existence is by its association with goodness. Therefore, all the evil we ourselves may participate in is not wholly evil, 3

Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 237. 4 Mathewes, Evil, 6. 5 See Jacek Salij OP, Rozmowy ze ĝwiĊtym Augustynem [Conversations with St. Augustine] (PoznaĔ: W drodze, 1997), 34.

4

Chapter One

but, at least in part, good–the wheat inevitably grows along with the tares (Matthew 13:24-30). Even such traits as “irrational rage, thoughtless lust, or precarious delusions” cannot be “evil by nature,” since they may, for instance, serve animals by enabling their survival.6 From this premise highlighting evil as devoid of any objective existence, it does not seem far to an assertion of its purely subjective, relative, and strongly contextualized interpretation. Charles Mathewes, in his exceedingly systematic account of the Augustinian tradition in relation to the problem of evil, points to two basic counterarguments against Augustine’s concept of evil as privatio boni.7 The first one, which he terms “optimist” and associates with the “Irenaean” position, claims that the said notion puts a limit on God’s omnipotence by removing evil from the range of His sovereignty and viewing it rather as an “accident” than a “necessary aspect of God’s providential order.”8 For these “optimists,” whose stance is most clearly expounded by John Hick,9 evil is not against the will of God, but should be viewed as part of His perfectly, if illegibly, designed plan. Being in the end converted by His grace into an even greater good, evil serves our spiritual maturation and final salvation. This perspective is close to the conviction expressed by Spinoza, stating that what we perceive as evil is merely an illusory effect of our inexorably fragmentary and limited comprehension of reality; what we view as chaos, absurdity, and uselessness in fact composes a perfectly sensible, harmonically ordered whole.10 The “pessimists,” on the contrary, defy the Augustinian proposals because of their assertive intellectualism which can only lead to an illusion of theoretical mastery over the reality of evil. In truth, they maintain, “evil is so profoundly, troublingly vexing that it inevitably frustrates our intellectual attempts at control.”11 These “pessimists” therefore, on the one hand, advocate a more practical approach to the problem of evil, demanding a radical transformation in the disposition of the scholar who probes into it, a fundamental conversion from self-centered thought to a renunciation of this kind of egocentrism and to disinterested and sacrificial 6

Dionysus the Areopagite, Pisma Teologiczne [Theological Writings], trans. Maria Dzielska, (Cracow: Znak, 2005), 266; trans. into English HB-M. 7 See Mathewes, Evil, 92-100. 8 Mathewes, Evil, 94. 9 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London : Macmillan, 1966). 10 Max Scheler, Problemy Religii [The Quandaries of Religion], trans. Adam WĊgrzecki (Cracow: Znak, 1995), 190. 11 Mathewes, Evil, 96.

Grappling with the Concept of Evil

5

action. On the other hand, expressing their scepticism towards traditionally ontological classifications of evil, they turn to alternative, more descriptive and subject-oriented methods. One of the most insightful texts qualified by Mathewes as representative of the “pessimist” stance had been presented by Paul Ricoeur. His observations concerning evil, comprised in the study The Symbolism of Evil as well as in the essay (issued in book form) Evil: a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, are by many considered to belong to the best philosophical analyses of the subject.12 They therefore require a more detailed discussion.

Paul Ricoeur: from Symbols of Evil to Its Experience “Evil is not nothing, it is not a common error, lack of order; it is a dark power that is ‘constituted’ by something.”13

Questioning the possibilities of traditional logic and purely rational analysis in confrontation with the radicalism of evil (always indissolubly linked to suffering14), Ricoeur still expresses a basic trust in the semantic potential of language. Since he believes all language, even in its most colloquial, “demythologized” forms, to be fundamentally symbolic, he postulates a turning toward “creative interpretation” of the “significance” of symbols. Although at the cost of “severing reflective continuity,” this kind of persuasive hermeneutics, according to Ricoeur, leads to a “secondary directness” of experience and to an understanding which, although necessarily fragmentary and always provisional, may become the “postcritical equivalent of precritical hierophany.”15 We should therefore not only attempt to comprehend symbols in their relevant archaic forms, but also individually adopt a personal, engaged, and critical stance towards each; only then are we bound to enter the “hermeneutic circle” leading 12 See for instance ElĪbieta Wolicka, “Záo WyobraĪone–Záo Rzeczywiste” [“Imagined Evil–Real Evil”], Znak 5 (1998): 41. 13 Paul Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa [Symbols of Evil], trans. Stanisáaw Cichowicz and Maria Schab (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1986), 147; trans. into English HB-M. 14 On the relation of evil to suffering and the ambiguous differentiation between the perpetrator and the victim, see Ricoeur, Záo: Wyzwanie rzucone filozofii i teologii [Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology], trans. Ewa Burska (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1992), 15-16. 15 Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 12, 328-329, trans. HB-M..

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Chapter One

from understanding to faith and vice versa. This line of thought, with its origins in symbols and notional archetypes, is indigenously religious, it therefore inevitably leads to a confrontation with the equally disconcerting and mystifying idea of the Absolute and its status with regard to the existence of evil. Resigning futile deliberations on questions such as man’s personal responsibility for evil or evil’s ontological status (questions that can be qualified as typical aporias, that is, necessarily remaining in suspension), Ricoeur by way of meticulous analysis of archaic symbols present within the Mediterranean tradition distinguishes four “morphological types” of mythical images of evil. The first type is connected with cosmogonic myths, in which evil appears as a correlative in the “drama of creation,” as an element of chaos in opposition to and constantly opposing the element of order and hierarchy. This archetype of cosmological evil, present in the Accadian myth of Sumerian-Babylonian culture, presents evil as primary to good and its origins as identical to the beginnings of creation as such. “The creative gesture is inseparable from crime,” since creation necessarily corresponds to destruction.16 Various elements of the Cosmos are formed from the mutilated corpse of a murdered goddess, the primordial mother Tiamat, whereas man is brought into being with the use of the blood of a slaughtered god. The second type is best represented by Greek tragedy, which came to be a classical expression of the archetype of tragic human destiny. Here again, as in the case of the Accadian myth, the principle of evil is equally primary as the principle of good, yet tragedy locates both of these principles in one and the same representative of divine power. The polarization into good and evil fails to take place and the same deity becomes both the source of good advice and the dictum of man’s destruction. Tragedy, in its proper signification, appears only when this predestination towards evil is confronted with man’s invincible will and his heroic grandness.17 The third morphological type distinguished by Ricoeur is associated with the myth of the “soul in exile.” As in the cosmic symbolism of the “drama of creation,” in this case we are also dealing with a kind of dualistic scheme of endless cyclic repetition (evil-good; creationdestruction). In its platonic transformations the myth of the “soul in exile” is embedded in the idea of “secondary evil,” of which man is both the 16 17

Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 168, 172, trans. HB-M. Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 201-205.

Grappling with the Concept of Evil

7

perpetrator and the victim (as in the Greek myth of Sisyphus or, in a sense, the biblical story of Job).18 The fourth type, illustrated in the biblical myth of the fall, is of special interest not only because of its cultural prevalence and religious momentousness in the tradition of the West but also due to its own unique archetypal quality, which lies in its potential to revalorize all the remaining types of symbolism of evil. In the story of Adam and Eve evil is neither the outcome of the scheming of some malicious demiurge nor is it autonomously initiated by man, who eventually submits to its lure. In contrast to the previously mentioned types of mythological accounts of the origins of evil, the Bible makes a radical division between the “history of evil” and the “history of creation”: “The intention of this myth was to grant cohesion to the radical source of evil, which would be something other than the more primary source of the good being of all things.” Since Yahweh is wholly Good and absolutely Divine, evil had to enter the world in consequence of some “catastrophe in the very bosom of creation.”19 Evil therefore begins with the history of man, yet the drama involves a third party: the mysterious snake–the Tempter. The role of the human is ambiguously both active and passive: the evil to which he submits deliberately is initiated by a patently external source and has consequences which, as such, he could neither expect nor desire. The mechanism of the luring entails a transposition of the commandment which hitherto functioned as a guidepost, an indicator of the required direction, into an “Other” to human will and freedom, a hostile negativity which must be discarded (“Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”20). As such it implies an unbearable “finiteness” the human painfully yearns to surpass, thereby acceding to the snake’s promise of autonomy and infinity, which turns out to be the infinity of evil. This promise in a way marks the beginnings of the lot of humanity which is from then on constantly led from one illusion to another in a vicious circle of the pseudo.21 From the Biblical myth of the fall Ricoeur derives the paradoxical notion of “unfree will,” a notion that is in itself inconceivable, impossible to think or to endure, since “will” is, by definition, self-governing and autonomous. And yet, because the choice of our will is frequently prior to cognition, that is (as in the case of Adam and Eve) we learn about what we have chosen ex post, after the decision was already made, we perpetually 18

Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 264-274. Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 220, 226, trans. HB-M. 20 Book of Genesis 3,1 (Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition). 21 Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 239-241. 19

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Chapter One

choose as if against ourselves and end up with solutions we never actually wished for. The impenetrable gap between the order of expected goals and the achieved effects, between intentions and the outcomes of our undertakings, between our desires and their fulfillment, or rather a constant lack of fulfillment, will forever haunt us as an experience of intransgressible confines and insurmountable limitations. In fact, Ricoeur detects the symbol of unfree will in myths more archaic than the Biblical story of the fall and concludes its analysis with an explication of its consequences for the understanding of evil. Therefore, unfree will presumes, first and foremost, the “positivity” of evil: evil is not nihil, it is neither a simple error nor a lack of order, but a substantial power of darkness, something that needs to be “taken away” (“Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world”). Secondly, evil is an external force, an “Other” to my freedom, man is therefore always a secondary figure in the schema of evil; he is “led into temptation.” From this premise of externality, Kant derives the conviction that man cannot be considered evil in absolute terms–he cannot be the embodiment of evil. What is more, evil is always experienced as something “given,” something “already there,” of which no one ever was an absolute beginning. “Evil is a thing prior to itself, as if it always and forever preceded itself; as if it were something that everyone finds and continues, beginning anew.”22 And finally, the notion of unfree will presents evil as self-constraining, as a punishment in itself. And yet, it is not a power symmetrical to the force of good, it is not equally primary (the myth of the fall reveals its plainly “historical” character) and cannot function as the equivalent of good. It has no potential to destroy humanity, since in the end it “cannot make of man anything other than man himself.”23 Evil therefore does, for Ricoeur, have substance and an independent existence, though in no way proportional or commensurate to goodness. This incompatibility is not necessarily rooted in differences concerning the ontological status of the two concepts (as was established by the Augustinian tradition) but rather in distinctions extending to their individual reception, to tangible experience embedded in archaic symbols and mythical stories. Nevertheless, both the notion of the essentiality of evil as well as that of “unfree will” confer a marked tragic note on Ricoeur’s thought. Man is “destined” to good but “prone” to evil. And yet a tragic theology which would acknowledge evil as an inexorable constituent of the wretchedness of our very condition is inconceivable, 22 23

Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 244, trans. HB-M. Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 149, trans. HB-M.

Grappling with the Concept of Evil

9

“impossible to profess.” As Ricoeur puts it, the tragic element is “invincible on the level of man,” yet it is “unthinkable on the level of God.”24

The Inevitability of Evil and the Tragic Nature of Existence This necessary coexistence of good and evil is quite a common theological assumption, yet it leads various thinkers to conclusions that are not altogether mutually consonant. Mainstream Christian theology which traces its roots to Augustine and Aquinas tends to emphasize the hope that this tenet entails: if evil cannot acquire any tangible being unless it is attached to goodness, then the forces of good can never be totally destroyed; they will always propagate on the same soil, as if despite the evil that is already thriving there. Therefore, various specific instances of evil may, in the end, turn out to have been necessary precisely because of having granted the opportunity for the spreading of goodness. “Eventually, reflecting on evil leads us to the assertion of an even greater good.”25 Yet some theologians and philosophers are, from the same premise of the relatedness of good and evil, led to an awareness of an inescapable tragic element in all being. For instance, the phenomenologically oriented Max Scheler, who distinguishes between Weltübel (the evil of this world, such as illness and death), Böse (human evil), and Übel (evil in general, as the whole of extramoral values), claims that the necessary association of good and evil (both Übel and Böse) is experienced by humans as a sense of the inexorable tragic nature of all existence. This tragic necessity of the blend of good and evil in the reality we ourselves recognize is in itself the greatest evil (Übel) of all, it therefore precludes locating the source of evil (Übel und Böse) either in the principle of reality or merely in the human. As such, the said tragic inevitability attests to the fact that evil “must have its place in a metaphysical intermediary sphere between them both [i.e. between reality and humanity], in free rebellion against God, rebellion stirred up by a person that has power over the world.”26 The same premise, according to Scheler, also leads us to another metaphysical truth, namely that of the need of redemption–redemption of the world and of man, which man cannot spontaneously attain by himself. 24

Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 309, trans. HB-M. John Paul II, PamiĊü i ToĪsamoĞü [Memory and Identity] (Cracow: Znak, 2005), 24, trans. HB-M. See also 11-21. 26 Scheler, Problemy Religii, 192, trans. HB-M. 25

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These, so to speak, “tragic” notes resounding in the texts of various theologians and philosophers of religion draw them closer to the tradition of negative theology, which continually stresses the helplessness of man, his inevitable submersion in evil, as well as his total dependence upon a wholly transcendent and unfathomable God. The more “negatively” oriented thinkers frequently attack the idea of the “banality” of evil popularized by Hannah Arendt. On the basis of a meticulous psychological analysis of the motivation and frame of mind of a rank-and-file fascist official jointly responsible for the death of thousands of people, she concluded that evil, to a great extent, originates from thoughtless routine, mediocre personality, and commonplace stupidity. It “is never ‘radical’, but only “extreme,” and it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension.” What struck her about Eichmann, was “a manifold shallowness . . . that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace and neither demonic nor monstrous.”27 Arendt therefore presents Eichmann not as a diabolic superbeing whose powers arouse fear, but rather as a mediocre executive who possessed a “grotesque silliness,” a “curious quite authentic inability to think,”28 and who altogether thoughtlessly carried out the orders he was receiving. And yet, as Barry Clarke, a major critic of Arendt’s thought remonstrates, her insistence on divorcing Eichmann’s “life of the mind” from his actions and on attending only to his “appearance of banality” undercuts the basis on which we could make “a moral assessment” of him.29 Clarke demonstrates that while Eichmann might not have been fully autonomous, he certainly was free, and in the thorough freedom of his intention he deliberately chose “choicelessness,” surrendering his own will to the will of his superiors.30 His evil should therefore be designated not so much as “banal” (implying that his thoughtlessness rendered him incapable of feeling or knowing that he is doing wrong),31 but rather as “heteronomous,” that is positioning his guilt not in the incapacity to think but in an act of abnegation. From the premise that “the faculties of thinking, willing and judging may be freely abnegated or the opportunities available to cultivate and develop them freely passed by,” Clarke concludes that “even those who ‘will not to will’ 27

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. I (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1977), 4. Arendt quoted in Mathewes, Evil, 167. 29 Barry Clarke, “Beyond 'The Banality of Evil,'” British Journal of Political Science 10:04 (1980): 433. 30 Clarke, “Beyond,” 438. 31 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1963), 276. 28

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11

are responsible for their inaction.”32 Evil should therefore never be considered as “banal,” even if it convincingly presents itself as such. Its origins always involve a conscious act of choice, which, however naïve or mindless it might seem, by nature contains a demonic element, as it entails a deference to people who willingly and viciously adopt evil maxims.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Evil Demythologized and Relativized “Hatred of the good is … justified as the proper condition of freedom.”33

We have, by now, strayed quite far from the Platonian-Augustinian concept of evil as privatio boni. Those who conceive of evil as a substantial reality in itself, a reality which may in fact seem more “real” than that of good (since, for instance, good can be dissimulated, whereas the feigning of evil is already evil in itself if I pretend to hurt someone, I am actually, by that very fact, hurting him34)–those thinkers regard the idea of evil as lack of good either as naïve optimism or else as a purely abstract ontological stratagem which in fact changes nothing. It was needed only to validate good as a wholly different quality, in no way equivalent or comparable to evil, and one that will certainly, in an eschatological perspective, prove to have the final say. And yet, the problem with discussing the issue of evil in the postmodern context is certainly of a far more basic nature than merely the distinction between this or that theological concept. Postmodernity is concerned not so much with the quandaries of the theodicy (the apparently illogical coexistence of a just, loving, and omnipotent God on the one hand and premeditated evil as well as undeserved suffering on the other) as with the justification of the usage of such metaphysical categories as “evil” in the first place. This fundamental difficulty obviously cannot be ignored and I believe that now, with the background of classical theory at least provisionally established, we may attempt to briefly enquire into its character and its causes. At this point, Friedrich Nietzsche inevitably turns up as a kind of caesura with his two notions which are unquestionably principal with regard to the issue of evil: his renowned proclamation of the “death of God” and his summons to “transvaluate” all values. “God is dead, God 32

Clarke, “Beyond,”425. Georges Bataille, “O Nietzschem” [“On Nietzsche”], trans. Tadeusz Komendant, Literatura na ĝwiecie 10.171 (1985): 170; trans. into English HB-M. 34 See Ireneusz Kania, “Moje Pierwsze Unde Malum?” [“My First Unde Malum?”], Znak 5 (1998): 13-15. 33

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remains dead. And we have killed him.” As Nietzsche himself realized, “This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.”35 With the death of God, the West gradually lost the common center that for centuries constituted the core around which its whole tradition had been built. For many years the belief in man persisted, with the autonomous reflecting self as a stable and unfaltering foundation, and in the modern era took the form of, to use Mark Taylor’s designation, “humanistic atheism.” “By denying God in the name of man, humanistic atheism inverts the Creator/creature relationship and transforms theology into anthropology.”36 Certainty about the thinking self as the central subject turns all perceived things (including God) into objects existing just to the extent of their being reflected in the ego. It is only in postmodern deconstructive theory that the death of God comes to be realized as an instrinsic correlative of the death of the self–a recognition which leads to the inception of “posthumanistic a/theology.”37 Demonstrating how the Western interpretation of subjectivity evolved from Augustine’s Confessions to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Mark Taylor quite unconventionally ascribes the eradication of the self to our gradual disillusionment with the nature of Time. The primary prerequisite of possessing a stable identity is its perception as “identical” in past, present, and future; in the words of Søren Kierkegaard–the “ennoblement of the successive within the simultaneous.”38 And yet, Augustine’s realization that the present is not a simple, transparent revelation but rather an intricate composite of “a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future” already in part undermined the sense of identity as constant in time. “The ‘omnipresence’ of past and future within the present uncovers an ‘original’ nonpresence at the very heart of the present.”39 The present therefore, to be experienced as such, must necessarily be permeated with absence just as identity is inextricably bound with difference. The present is “present not as total presence but as trace.”40 Time is forever transitional, always in passing, and, since “the real presence of Time in the World is called Man,” since “time is Man and Man is Time,”41 the same may be said of the subject: it has no permanent 35

Nietzsche qtd. in Mark C. Taylor, Erring. A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 20. 36 Taylor, Erring, 6. 37 Taylor, Erring, 20. 38 Kierkegaard, qtd. in Taylor, Erring, 34. 39 Taylor, Erring, 49. 40 Derrida, qtd. in Taylor, Erring, 50. 41 Kojève, qtd. in Taylor, Erring, 50.

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existence apart from that of a trace. In this way the “death of God” must ineluctably call forth the “death of the self.” If God is dead and the self eradicated, there is no reality beyond purely material being (no meta-physical reality) to which our experience could be related. We are left with sheer empirical impressions without any hermeneutical tools to their decoding, without even the conviction that such a deciphering would be at all legitimate. Myths and symbols have lost the alleged prevalence and momentousness that Ricoeur had ascribed to them. Evil is therefore likewise “demythologized” (the obliteration of God obviously results in the excision of Satan); the hope or at least presentiment that it is not a final and ultimate reality in itself, that we are not the only ones who ought to be held responsible–this hope seems deprived of all its hitherto plausible justifications. Obviously, such a burden of exclusive responsibility would be unbearable; we therefore readily and quite commonly endorse the convenient rationalization of evil propagated by nineteenth century social sciences. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economy proposed to suspend the usage of such categories as “good” and “evil,” since, as the newly established disciplines attempted to validate, the whole of human motivation and action results from circumstances, on which we frequently have not the slightest influence. Gods and demons tend to be regarded as mere figments of the human psyche; we are monitored by the social environment, it is therefore rather the “system,” the “establishment,” and not the individual, that can be held accountable for most of the iniquity, misery, suffering, and affliction that we continually experience.42 Moral disquietude and the tragic sense of ethical responsibility, which I have been discussing in the context of Ricoeur and Scheler, from this perspective may be viewed as irrational or even oppressive. The problem of punishment and doing justice can be entirely ceded to federal courts and to the code of law, validating the myth of evil as a purely arbitrary and basically dismissible inconvenience.43 Apart from such endeavors to “neutralize” evil, there are also diversified attempts at a kind of its secondary mythologization–I will refer to them later on in this chapter.

42 See the interesting argument presented by Amos Oz in his speech delivered on the occasion of receiving the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt on the Maine on August 26, 2005 (fragments reprinted in Plus Minus, Rzeczpospolita, Sept. 17-18, 2005, 7, trans. Danuta SĊkalska). I come back to “systemic” explanations of evil offered by social psychologists in the fourth chapter of my study (in “Social Psychology: the Vinegar Barrel”) 43 See Wolicka, , “Záo WyobraĪone,” 53.

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The second issue which I mentioned with regard to Nietzsche and his relevance to the notion of evil is his insistence on the “transvaluation” of all values. “What is good?–All that enhances the sense of power in man, the will to power, indeed–power itself. What is mean and miserable?–All that originates from weakness.” And the worst misdeed, the most pitiful offence in the history of humanity is Christianity with its “resentiment,” its active sympathy with all the weak and desolate of this world.44 Accusing Christianity of the perpetuation of nihilism, negation, and nothingness, Nietzsche muses how it has been possible that “one will dominated Europe for eighteen centuries, the will to make of man a sublime abortion.”45 This will lead to decadence, to the corruption of all values which support the human instinct of self-preservation, characteristic of powerful being. By denying this kind of being, indeed life itself, Christianity becomes the practice of nihilism, endorsed by man solely because of his weakness and failure to yield to his inherent “will to power.”46 Nietzsche therefore, at the peak of his fervent wrath, calls for a transvaluation of values commonly (and rather mindlessly) accepted in the Western tradition as noble and sublime–a revaluation which in fact is nothing more than a restoration of proper designations and the realization that what we have been calling “good” is actually the greatest “evil,” and vice versa. We are encouraged to go even further, to transgress “beyond good and evil,” and adopt the agnostic position of Pilate (whom Nietzsche praises as the only figure worthy of respect in the whole New Testament). Asking “What is evil?” we should be guided only by that which serves us, which increases our might and reinforces our spiritual power. After the “death of God” and the “transvaluation” of all values, evil is therefore rendered purely subjective and stripped of its mythical and mythological depth. Nevertheless, some thinkers, with diversified instigations and assumptions, all, however, grounded in a basic skepticism towards the neutralization of evil, attempt its “secondary” mythologization. Two of them, Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard, offer presumptions of especial interest and exceptional momentousness.

44

Friedrich Nietzsche, AntychrzeĞcijanin: PrzekleĔstwo ChrzeĞcijaĔstwa [The Anti-Christ], trans. Grzegorz SowiĔski (Kraków: Nomos, 1996), 38; trans. into English HB-M. 45 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Encyclopedia Britannica (43) (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1994), 489. 46 Nietzsche, AntychrzeĞcijanin, 39-41.

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Georges Bataille: Evil as a Mystical Experience “Sacrifice is the remedy to a world devoid of transcendence.”47

Although Bataille is concerned rather with metaphysics or even mysticism than with ethics and morality, what he has to offer in his Theory of Religion seems to be a version of Nietzsche’s “transvaluation.” Bataille also turns common concepts “up side down,” challenging our intrinsic habits of thought. He proposes a transformation which he refers to as the “transgression” of evil: evil, because of its conspicuousness and irrevocability, can be of service to man’s development only when it is “transgressed” by way of endowing it with the grandeur and sanctity of the sublime. The conclusions he arrives at (that the moral divine is ultimately weaker than evil48) appear to be, in pragmatic terms at least, equivalent to those of Nietzsche; however, Bataille’s argumentation is restricted to the realm of the sacrum. Delineating the evolution of the inherently human religious impulse from “animality” to “industrialization,” he identifies the crucial “shift” in the conceptualization of divinity, benevolence, and malevolence which took place during the development of ancient religions toward the paradigm of dualism. Originally, divine forces were regarded as both good and evil; the realm of the sacred reflected the entire, complete range of human experience. Beneficent powers were, paradoxically, viewed as those that are more dangerous (with their routine employment of violence) and, simultaneously, less sacred (because of their responsibility for mediating with the profane) than the forces of evil. Divinity demanded sacrifice, yet sacrifice itself was considered a benediction for the victims (plants, animals, slaves), who were thereby liberated from the alien world of things and generously returned to the intimate order they were initially destined for. Sacrifice as such necessarily involves violence; its “principle” is “destruction.” It must deny the victim’s objective reality and thus destroy it as a thing to free it from all ties of subordination, to rescue the offering from its utility (the thing offered must, by definition, be useful) and finally grant it access to intimate reality. Therefore, the destruction realized in sacrifice is, in the end, by no means utterly negative: “Death reveals life in its plentitude and dissolves the real order.” However, sacrifice in fact does not necessarily 47

Bataille qtd. in Taylor, Erring, 144. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 81. 48

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involve death as such–“to sacrifice is not to kill but to relinquish and give.”49 Sacrifice is complete and thoroughly serves its intended goal only if it is self-sacrifice. Sacrifice of the self is nothing more than a negation of one’s limitations, of the obvious “boundaries of selfhood,” of human misery and deficiency; in other words, a negation of our innate negations. This double negation can result only in an ultimate affirmation, just as (according to the death of God theology) the negation inherent in the “death of God” by negating transcendence, which is by definition in itself negative, necessarily leads to affirmation, to Parousia, immanence, and finally to pantheism–the total presence of Being here and now.50 The useless consumption of sacrifice and its “radical contestation of utility” have been, however, decidedly rejected by the military order, which completed the mentioned “shift” by replacing violence from within by a violence that was wholly external. We have come to be afraid of the destruction exerted by intimacy since it “has the passion of an absence of individuality,“ and cannot be reconciled with the order of things or with “the positing of the separate individual.” We have therefore replaced sacrifice by law and morality based on reason and on principles that have been granted the status of “universality.” Morality guarantees both duration (opposed to the “moment” of intimacy) and utility (withstanding the “useless consumption” of sacrifice). What is more, it presupposes the sanction of the divine, yet this divine is conceptualized as utterly “white,” benevolent, and in a way subordinated to the real, to the order of things.51 Divinity is thereby “rationalized and moralized,” while morality and reason are “divinized,” delegating spiritual evil wholly to the sphere of the profane. Features originally ascribed to the sacrum (“unstable,” “dangerous,” “not completely intelligible,” driven by “chance” and “violence”) are now projected onto the world of matter, whereas the sovereign order of the intellect is rendered absolutely transcendent and inaccessible. The archaic divine was “transcendent only provisionally” since man “was continuously being restored to the intimate order” by means of a variety of rituals; in dualism, the intelligible world is immeasurably supreme and forever separated from the world of the senses.52 49

Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43-49. Mark C. Taylor, “Reframing Postmodernisms,” in Shadows of Spirit. Postmodernism and Religion Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, eds. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 19. 51 Bataille Theory of Religion, 50-52, 70-72. 52 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 72-74. 50

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Yet the dualism of transcendence evolved still further into a dualism without transcendence, which poses a division between two equally temporal principles: the good and the mind on the one hand and evil and matter on the other. The violence which dualism rejected, granting it only a “negative place,” turned against it and “open[ed] the mind to the sovereignty of evil”–evil which actually never lost its divine value. Now violence is either considered irreducible or else regarded as the implication of “a complete opening to evil with a view of subsequent purification.”53 The only choice we are left with is between the acceptance of tragedy and the incorporation of Hegel’s “creative negation,” in which all moral evil is regarded as an encouragement to new, positive development.54 Why has dualism led to the rejection of transcendence, to the “death of God”? Precisely because of its failure to offer a “legitimate place for violence,” its refusal to acknowledge the necessary coexistence of good and evil (the more so of the essential supremacy of evil over good) within the realm of divinity. And, according to Bataille, religion (intimacy) without violence is not possible: “The god of goodness is limited by right to the violence with which he excludes violence.” He is divine only to the extent that he maintains the potential of violence within him; in this sense, the moral divine is weaker than evil. Violence (evil) is a necessary mediation of divinity, since God excludes violence employing violence Himself; in this sense, “The divinity remains divine only through that which it condemns.” Divinity itself had to submit to external violence so that the intimate order could be maintained; the order was “lifted through a destruction” in which “the offered victim [was] itself the divinity.”55 Recognizing human longing for intimacy, Bataille demonstrates that it cannot be attained without the acknowledgment of evil as a crucial prerequisite of genuine religious experience. Needless to say, Bataille’s evil is deeply mystical, decidedly independent, and ultimately substantial; it therefore obviously stands in radical opposition to the Christian concept of evil as privatio boni. This does not mean that Bataille altogether evades the transposition of his “mysticism of evil” into the realm of morality. In his text “On Nietzsche,” he explicitly advances evil as the “highest aim of moral searching,”56 enabling liberation from the restraint and destructiveness of good, just as “nonsense” offers emancipation from the confinement of “sense,” while excessive eroticism frees the subject from its “relatedness to the I” and makes room for reestablished “continuity of 53

Bataille, Theory of Religion, 77-80. See Scheler, Problemy Religii, 190. 55 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 80-84. 56 Georges Bataille, “O Nietzschem,” 170. 54

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Being.”57 It was only through the achievement of extreme evil in the crucifixion of Christ that man ceased to be detached from God rendering the “communication between beings”58 attainable. Nevertheless, Bataille’s discourse on evil is profoundly inconsistent; while the term itself (in his earlier texts perpetually spelled with the capital “E”) is obviously crucial to his thought, he does not make conspicuous attempts to grant it a unequivocal, coherent ontological status. If, in Theory of Religion, Bataille arrives at the conclusion that good is subordinate to evil because it necessarily, in order to preserve itself, makes use of evil (here equated with violence), this assumption is contradicted in “On Nietzsche,” where evil is presented as a concept radically opposed to “violence,” associated rather with artistic passion, self-sacrifice, and disinterested obsession denying the coldly calculated social utility of art; in other words, evil which is, in itself, inflicted principally for the sake of a kind of “good”–of human development and the richness of our inner experience.59 Perhaps, therefore, Bataille is concerned not so much with “evil” as with the breaking of all taboos, transgressing all acknowledged boundaries, and overcoming all social and psychological barriers–with something that he elsewhere refers to as “hypermorality.”60 Only this kind of liberation can lead to the achievement of an authentically “full” existence, to, in the words of Nietzsche, a “powerful life.” But if for Nietzsche the supreme good and therefore the ultimate aim of human existence is “everything that enhances the sense of power in man, the will to power, indeed–power itself,” the goal for Bataille is a mystical communion with the Other, deep and intense “communication” which would shake us out of our vain independence and enable the continuity of Being. “Evil” (as transgression, excess, defiance) would thereby be merely quite an arbitrary signifier designating the means necessary for the achievement of a paramount good. If such a conclusion could be legitimately drawn from “On Nietzsche,” it is, again, plainly at variance with Bataille’s 1957 study entitled Literature and Evil. Analyzing Emily Brontɺ’s Wuthering Heights, he argues that evil cannot be genuine (cannot actually be regarded as true Evil) if we “expect something from it other than Evil itself–if, for example, we expect some advantage from it.” Authentic evil must be 57

Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Fredrick G. Lawrence (Boston: MIT Press, 1998). 58 Bataille, “O Nietzschem,” 181. 59 Bataille, “O Nietzschem,” 170. 60 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 10.

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utterly selfless, perpetrated for its own sake, with a “pleasure” derived from “contemplating destruction,” and with “a disinterested attraction towards death.”61 It would therefore be evidently futile to attempt to infer a consistent demarcation of the concept of evil in Bataille; such efforts would also probably go against Bataille’s own intentions. He was not so much concerned with arriving at a clear-cut definition, as with what he believed to be an extreme “point in the mind,” at which all contradictions blend, where oppositions no longer exclude one another, and concepts such as “life and death,” “the real and the imaginary,” “the past and the future,” “the communicable and the incommunicable,” “Good and Evil,” “pain and joy” achieve a perfect uniformity. This point can by no means be equated with the postmodern deconstruction of traditionally Western binary oppositions as mere cultural constructions–Bataille rather regards it as a state of mind which is absolutely exceptional and reserved for “the chosen few.” “This point,” he argues, “is indicated both by violent literature and by the violence of a mystical experience.” Those who achieve it, gain an extraordinarily clear comprehension of the fact that “Since death is the condition of life, Evil, which is essentially cognate with death, is also, in a somewhat ambiguous manner, a basis of existence.” And, in the end, it is only that point which truly matters.62

Jean Baudrillard: the Global Evil “Seemingly, no one understands that Good and Evil grow in power simultaneously, according to the same pattern.”63

Jean Baudrillard, in his 1970s “sociological” stage, was deeply influenced by Bataille’s theory of “symbolic exchange.” According to Bataille (as well as Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry), the “cultural” values of expenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction are more naturally and intrinsically human than the values of utility, profit, and economy promoted in capitalist societies. Following Bataille, Baudrillard championed “aristocratic” excess and dissipation, which grant the individual authentic independence, freedom, and sovereignty, as opposed to “bourgeois” efficiency and thriftiness inextricably bound up with 61

Bataille, Literature and Evil, 5, 16. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 15, 16. 63 Jean Baudrillard, Duch Terroryzmu. Requiem dla Twin Towers [The Spirit of Terrorism : And Requiem for the Twin Towers], trans. Renata Lis, Warsaw: Sic!, 2005, 16 ; trans. into English HB-M. 62

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dependence, limitation, and meagerness.64 Baudrillard therefore, similarly to Bataille, arrived at a valorization of death and sacrifice as ultimate actualizations of the said noble plethora. Nevertheless, he was not concerned with the religious (or “intimate”) significance of sacrifice (since he, allegedly, altogether rejected metaphysics for the sake of Jarry’s “pataphysics”), but exclusively with its symbolic function. Another crucial difference between Bataille and Baudrillard is that while the former denounced dualism for introducing fictitious, superficial, and ultimately destructive distinctions, the thought of the latter is avowedly dualistic, or even at certain points Gnostic and Manichean. Baudrillard’s validation of the traditionally Western series of dichotomies is, however, openly subversive: with reference to each pair of opposites, he is explicit in siding with that pole which has generally been considered inferior: with “illusion” as opposed to “reality,” with “appearance” as opposed to “truth,” with “object” as opposed to “subject,” with “woman” as opposed to “man,” and “evil” as opposed to “good.” This kind of provocative dualism is conspicuous in one of Baudrillard’s most recent books, The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers, which is also particularly meaningful with reference to his thought on evil. Arguing against the quite commonly acknowledged “clash of civilizations” concept as an exhaustive rationalization of the 9/11 attacks, he points to the West’s fascination with the event and with the peculiar sense of relief that followed it. Yielding to his dualistic inclinations, Baudrillard presents a unique theory of (metaphysical?) balance or equilibrium between the forces of “Good” and the powers of “Evil.” He maintains that Good and Evil develop side by side, according to analogous patterns, and that each is dependent upon the existence and augmentation of the other. Since the end of the Cold War marked a symbolic triumph over evil, the era of an alleged hegemony of Good was professed, thereby disturbing the desired equilibrium. The systematic, topdown elimination of all negativity relegated evil to an autonomous, selfcontained area of influence inevitably leading to its radical outburst. 9/11, according to Baudrillard, marked a point when the exclusive reign of Good became unbearable, when its will to power grew to such proportions that the equivalent will to destruction materialized itself in the terrorist attacks. In this sense, the events of 9/11 were self-inflicted and can be regarded as a suicide of the West merely triggered by the suicide of the Muslim terrorists.65 64

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Accessed February 23, 2012. www.plato.stanford.edu. 65 Baudrillard, Duch Terroryzmu, 16-22, 46.

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Clearly, for Baudrillard himself, the ultimate evil is embodied by Western imperialism (not only cultural and socio-political but moral as well) and globalization (which, in the mode of Bataille’s divine, uses violence as a means of eliminating violence). Indeed, his most provocative and subversive claim is that the only chance for the termination of globalization is offered not by anti-globalist movements (with their hypocritically imperialist insistence on the universality of human rights) but precisely by terrorism with its abuse of freedom to the point of death– death of others as well as death of the self.66 Baudrillard’s superficial and repetitive argument presented in The Spirit of Terrorism plainly lacks the appeal of Bataille’s ideas. Yet it is worth mentioning as an instance of a kind of peculiarly postmodern, perverse re-mythologizing of the concept of evil–a re-mythologizing based on the belief that submission to most extreme forms of evil is, especially nowadays, the only possible means of achieving the purification we all long for. The ironic curse of our culture of consumption is, according to Baudrillard, that all our desires have been fulfilled, while we have been simultaneously deprived of all possibility of sacrifice, of all kinds of symbolic remuneration. Hence our profound attraction towards terrorist acts, which are not any kind of objective evil but, in their “absurdity and nonsense,” they function as “our society’s own judgment and penalty written out on our foreheads.”67

Emmanuel Levinas: the Malignant Sublime Evil is “the nonsynthesizable, still more heterogeneous than all heterogeneity subject to being grasped by the formal, which exposes heterogeneity in its very malignancy.”68

I would like to conclude my presentation of the assemblage of diverse views and perspectives on the problem of evil by demonstrating the major contribution that Emmanuel Levinas made to the matter in question. I will also confront some of his ideas with those of Alan Badiou, another

66

Such “abuse” is, according to Lichtenberg, actually the most accurate and genuine use of freedom; see Baudrillard, Duch Terroryzmu, 73. 67 Baudrillard, Duch Terroryzmu, 107. 68 Emmanuel Levinas quoted in Richard Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 266.

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renowned French thinker whose radical proposals were, in part, formulated in opposition to those of Levinas himself. In his essay entitled “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” Richard J. Bernstein makes a powerful claim that Levinas’s whole philosophical output may be considered as an attempt to confront the problem of evil as it has potently manifested itself in the atrocities of the twentieth century.69 Treating all forms of theodicy as a temptation to establish some sort of justification for and reconciliation with evil, Levinas proposes an ethical response to evil as the only reaction which entails respect for the mystery and scandal of the Other’s suffering. In “Transcendence and Evil” Levinas detects three moments of the phenomenology of evil. The first is the acknowledgement of evil as “excess” surpassing and exceeding all that we are able to recognize, familiarize, or accept. This excess concerns not only the quantity of evil, its intensity, or the degree of its radicalness and bestiality, but also its very essence and quality: “Evil is an excess in its very quiddity.” In Levinas’s treatment, evil thereby emerges as a kind of malignant sublime, surpassing all categories of reason and understanding, appearing as “not only the nonintegratable” but also “the nonintegratability of the nonintegratable.”70 The second moment in the phenomenology of evil is its intentionality: we experience evil not as a vague, impersonal force but rather as a quality personified in some subject of malice. In this sense, the ethical distinction between good and evil precedes, according to Levinas, all ontological differences: evil is as if beyond being (hence Levinas’s lifelong controversy with Heidegger). The third moment is constituted by the “hatred or horror of evil” which is so scandalous and outrageous that it demands my immediate riposte. And it is precisely in this ethical response (which resists the temptation of theodicy by acknowledging the transcendent and unfathomable quality of the evil I am witnessing) that evil is elevated to the good–“a good that is beyond Being, a good which is not to be understood as the dialectical negation of evil.”71 This good does not bring self-satisfaction but compellingly arouses my sense of responsibility; it does not “please,” but it “commands and prescribes.”72 What immediately strikes us in Levinas’s discourse on evil (and what such an attentive reader of Levinas as Richard Bernstein could not fail to note) is its affinity to the language he uses to describe the total incomprehensibility and absolute alterity of the Other: 69

Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 253. Levinas quoted in Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 260. 71 Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 262. 72 Levinas quoted in Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 263. 70

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In the appearing of evil, in its original phenomenonality, in its quality, is announced a modality, a manner: not finding a place, the refusal of all accommodation with–a counternature, a monstrosity, which is disturbing and foreign of itself. And in this sense transcendence!73

The Other is in turn envisioned as someone who “opens the dimension of height, that is to say, . . . infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge.”74 Understanding the Other, encompassing him with our consciousness is already an act of violation, an attempt to subordinate him to the Same. As Levinas insists in “Transcendence and Height,” “Instead of seizing the Other through comprehension and thereby assuming all the wars this comprehension presupposes, prolongs, and concludes, the I loses its hold before the absolutely Other, before the human Other (Autrui), and, unjustified, can no longer be powerful.”75 Evil therefore appears to be equally impenetrable and resistant to being mastered and subdued as the Other. That is why theodicy as an attempt to rationalize, assimilate, and familiarize evil should be opposed just as we are ethically obliged to resist the dialectic of the same and thinking in terms of totality. And yet the very feasibility of such an analogy presupposes a specific and limited perspective, which is not in any explicit way defined either by Levinas or by Bernstein. I would describe this perspective as that of an empathic bystander–one who is not directly involved in the act of evil but feels compelled to sympathize with the victim and therefore identifies evil with the suffering of the Other. From this stance, referring to evil as a scandal, a monstrosity, and an absurdity in the face of which we are utterly desolate and helpless seems quite plausible and convincing. The temptation to justify the suffering of the Other (Job’s companions are classic examples of those who succumbed) by vindicating it as a punishment, a lesser good, a trial bestowed only on the fittest and the most faithful (Seneca), or an exceptional opportunity for creative development (Leibniz) does seem to be a devious pitfall of theodicy. “The justification of the neighbor’s pain” is, for Levinas, “the source of all immorality.”76 This claim gains force and becomes even more compelling once Levinas grounds it in the reality of the apartheid, the senseless and totally outrageous suffering of twentieth century Jews. This “supreme negative 73

Levinas quoted in Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 260. Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adrian Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernstein (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), 12. 75 Levinas, “Transcendene,” 17. 76 Levinas quoted in Bernstein, “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 258. 74

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example” and “measure without measure,” as Alan Badiou terms it, serves as an impassable limit, which plays a role analogous to that of Levinas’s “Altogether-Other”: Just as Levinas eventually makes the originality of the opening to the Other depend upon the supposition of the Altogether-Other, so the upholders of ethics make the consensual identification of Evil depend upon the supposition of a radical Evil.77

Once we adopt the Nazi extermination of the European Jews as the measure of evil, we will most probably be impelled to acknowledge evil’s transcendence and absolute impenetrability. Apart from the doubtfulness of the equation of evil and suffering as such,78 the perspective adopted by Levinas arouses one basic question: what if I am not a bystander but a victim, and the Other is not the one who suffers but the one who inflicts pain on me? It seems to be a given in Levinas’s writings that the Other is one who looks at me with “defenseless eyes” in his “nakedness and destitution,” who “challenges me from his humility and from his height.” “The Other is the poor and destitute one, and nothing which concerns this Stranger can leave the I indifferent.”79 An ethical answer to evil which presupposes my absolute responsibility for it and which refuses to give easy consolation, to domesticate or explain evil away is quite legitimate and conceivable if the Other is the victim. But if he is the perpetrator? Am I also compelled to give myself up to the Other’s radical alterity, to totally abandon my identity and search for an authentic subjectivity in the substitution of my own self for the self of the Other? Levinas does not seem to give any straightforward answers to these questions; his ideas may therefore be an exceptionally valuable contribution to our perception of suffering, but only a partial one with reference to our understanding of the problem of evil as such. Yet there is another problem with the ethical response to evil posited by Levinas, and it concerns not so much the accuracy of identifying the Other as a victim but the doubtful ethical nature of such an association. 77

Alan Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London, New York: Verso, 2002), 62. 78 On this topic see a very interesting essay by Tadeusz Gadacz, “Enigma Cierpienia” [“The Enigma of Suffering”], Znak 5 (1998): 29-40, in which he expounds his own reasons for rejecting this kind of equivalence and grants suffering the status of a (Levinasian!) trace, an “enigma” that is “beyond good and evil.” 79 Levinas, “Transcendence,” 16, 17, 18.

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This quandary is given particular emphasis by Alan Badiou, who presents it as a consequence of the customary supposition that evil is prior to good, that we may arrive at a recognition of the latter only by way of an active, ethical resistance to the former. What follows is that we assume we may acknowledge the human subject only by means of identifying the evil that is done to him, that is by recognizing him as a victim. This definition of man as a victim is, for Badiou, an axiom that has been generally accepted in what we term “ethics” (including its contemporary strain embodied in the human rights movement), and yet one that is deeply unethical in itself. Badiou therefore bases his own ethical project on refuting this commonly endorsed theorem, claiming that it “equates man with his animal structure” and “reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple.” If we perceive the Other as a victim, we deny his immortal nature and deprive him of all that distinguishes him from “the varied and rapacious flux of life.” And the truth is that man, being undeniably part of mortal and predatory animal life, becomes a subject when he acts with fidelity to the “Immortal” and “Infinite” in him. However metaphysical these terms may seem, Badiou openly extracts them from their religious context and once again (despite his whole critique of the application of the “measure without measure”) grounds them in the context of totalitarian extermination camps. On the example of Varlam Shalamov’s Stories of Life in the Camps, he shows that only those who remained faithful to their identity as immortal human beings were able to resist the torturers’ and bureaucrats’ equating them with victims, with “animals destined for the slaughterhouse.”80 It is therefore not through my subordination to the Other but rather by way of my resistance to him (and to his customary treatment of myself as a victim) that I gain authentic subjecthood. Interestingly, going against the current endorsement of the concept of the Other, Badiou is manifestly distrustful of its philosophical sincerity. Referring to Lacan’s idea of the mirror-effect, according to which my sense of independent subjectivity is always constructed on the basis of my reflection as it is given back to me by other people, Badiou claims that what we cherish as the “Other” is in fact “me-myself-at-a-distance which, precisely because it is ‘objectified’ for my consciousness, founds me as a stable construction, as an interiority accessible in its exteriority.”81 I therefore gain both a sense of a fairly solid identity and a particularly ennobling kind of moral self-satisfaction rooted in the conviction that I view the Other as prior and superior to myself. If the concept of the Other 80 81

Badiou, Ethics, 10-12. Badiou, Ethics, 21.

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is to be more than a concealed form of fulfillment of my narcissistic desires, it has to be transferred to a purely religious plane: In order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience. Levinas calls this principle the ‘Altogether-Other’, and it is quite obviously the ethical name for God.82

If we fail to acknowledge the religious basis of Levinas’s thought, we not only “betray the intimate movement of this thought,” but we also risk conceiving the Other’s finitude as resemblance or imitation–a viewpoint which would assuredly lead us “back to the logic of the Same.”83 And yet Badiou explicitly rejects an ethics which would be bound to theology (that is one which would be based upon the recognition of the Other); in fact, he postulates the need to abandon “ethics in general” altogether. The best we can do is to be faithful to a purely contextual “ethics of processes” and particular situations, treating each of them as a unique condition on its own. Since “there is no God,” there is also no Other as One, but only “the multiple ‘without-one’–every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples.” And it is only in this sense that Badiou speaks of infinity, immortality, and transcendence: “the infinite … is actually only the most general form of multiple-being [êtremultiple].” Nevertheless, the author of “An Essay on the Understanding of Evil” emphatically distances himself from an ethical system which would embrace cultural relativism and prefers to speak of truth (or rather “truths” in the plural) as the only concept that is “indifferent to difference” and one which by nature tends towards a unification and a universalization (“This is something we have always known, even if sophists of every age have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a truth is the same for all.”).84 We therefore have in Badiou quite a peculiar concoction of a conservative insistence on sameness and universality on the one hand and a “post-postmodern” or ultra-leftist rejection of the “impotent morality” of political correctness and human rights as a covert and hypocritical version of imperialistic inclinations on the other. His attempts to define evil are similarly inconsistent and equally mystifying. Evil, according to Badiou, cannot be recognized a priori on the basis of a consensual agreement, nor can it be acknowledged as prior to the Good. It is rather a “(possible) effect of the Good itself … and thus a possible dimension of a truth82

Badiou, Ethics, 22. Badiou, Ethics, 22. 84 Badiou, Ethics, 16, 25, 27. 83

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process” in its whole uniqueness and the singularity of its historical, political, economic etc. circumstances. Yet evil is not purely random or situational since it is “a category not of the human animal, but of the subject,” existent “only to the extent that man is capable of becoming the Immortal he is.” In Badiou’s conceptualization of evil we can, therefore, again sense the attempt to reconcile some kind of all-inclusive universality with an insistence on contextuality and the constantly changing frame of reference.85 Badiou gives “three names” to evil: evil as a “simulacrum of truth,” of the “presumed substance” of a situation; evil as “betrayal” of the Immortal in me, of the truth of the “becoming-subject in myself”; and, finally, evil as an identification of a certain truth with total power, as forcing the “naming of the unnameable,” that is the “pure real of the situation” which presides beyond any truth.86 These “three names” are consistent with Badiou’s overall venture to accommodate both uniformity and relativism: it is evil both to betray or simulate an event which has its own unique truth (unique but one which is simultaneously “the same for all” and which “shall endure eternally”) and to totalize the power of this truth disregarding its situational character. With all these theoretical notions in mind, I will now proceed to a discussion of evil as it is dealt with in the novels of Cormac McCarthy– evil as a most fundamental substantiality infiltrating all major plots and characters of his texts and yet a reality that is rarely referred to in explicit terms and never definitely conceptualized or distinctly established. It may initially seem that McCarthy’s evil has something in common with each of the above discussed theories. On the one hand, it is very substantial and tangible, often embodied in a particular character (like the bearded leader of the dark trio in Outer Dark, the cynical Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, or the psychopathic serial killer Chigurh in No Country for Old Men); on the other hand, it has something of the hollowness, vacuousness, and senselessness underscored by the Augustinian tradition of evil as a lack. There is certainly in McCarthy something of Bataille’s pure evil perpetuated only for its own sake and for the sake of the pleasure that can be derived from the sight of blood, dismembered bodies, and the helpless suffering of the victims. And, simultaneously, this evil is in certain instances somehow bound to the good, which again takes us back to Augustine (Lester Ballard in Child of God, for instance, kills people and collects their bodies not only for the exhilaration it gives, but also because 85 86

Badiou, Ethics, 71, 61, 67. Badiou, Ethics, 71, 73, 79, 86.

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it is the only way he can actually be with others, the only way he can arrive at a perverse kinship or communion with them). There is, in McCarthy’s evil, extreme monstrosity (necrophilia, incest, infanticide, suicide, cannibalism, brutal torture, and barbarous murder), but there is also a kind of disinterested detachment, on the part of both the characters and the narrator. What is more, evil is quite obviously triggered by social circumstances such as a traumatic childhood or severe poverty, and yet it is by no means justified through them–the characters are never granted any kind of exoneration or acquittal. Finally, evil in McCarthy is exceedingly mundane and carnal (consider, for example, the permeating stink of flesh and blood in Blood Meridian), being at the same time granted a kind of grandeur, sublimity, and otherworldliness (again, the three above mentioned figures of evil incarnate come to mind). I hope that my analysis of McCarthy’s plots, characters, and narrators will shed more light on his seemingly all-encompassing treatment of the problem of evil, and enable its more precise positioning on the theoretical continuum leading from the banality of evil as privatio boni to a respiritualized evil as an ultimate metaphysical experience.

CHAPTER TWO EVIL AS EXCESS: VISUALIZING VIOLENCE

The Envisioning of Violence I would like to begin with the mundane and carnal aspect of evil, with its most conspicuous and poignant yet at the same time most superficial level, as it is thematized and visualized in the writings of Cormac McCarthy. The book that seems to be the most relevant in this context is Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, which was published in 1985 and since that time has aroused more academic interest than any other of his, by now, ten novels. As it closes the series of McCarthy’s Southern (or Appalachian) works and immediately precedes his renowned Western Border Trilogy, it tends to be considered as his most genuinely “South-Western” book and may in itself be provisionally designated as a “quasi-Western.” In this chapter I will be focusing on a variety of issues linked with visuality and representation on the one hand and the problem of evil and violence on the other. After providing some basic information about Blood Meridian, I will deal with its references to the context of the postVietnam era and discuss McCarthy’s unique presentation of the West not as a regenerative frontier but as a blood-soaked land which claims human lives and obliterates all their traces. I will subsequently go on to an analysis of the idea of representation and the relationship between originals and their copies as these are treated in the novel. Finally, I make an attempt to apply the notion of the grotesque, with its focus on the distorted body and its use of the tension between delight and disgust, in the examination of the visual aspects of violence in McCarthy’s book. Blood Meridian is set on the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, its action beginning directly after the end of the MexicanAmerican war. It recounts the bloody passage of the–historically factual– Glanton gang of grimly brutish and inhumanly violet outlaws and scalphunters who have a contract with local governors to provide the Mexicans with the scalps of the daunting Apache who terrorize isolated borderland

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villages and towns. They therefore simply butcher, in a most forbiddingly cold-blooded and merciless manner, all Apaches they encounter on their way, with time actually developing the habit of killing all, peaceful Indians and Mexicans included, whose scalps they can exchange for pesos. And so the general impression that we get after the first reading of the novel is overwhelming repugnance and irrepressible nausea caused by the excess of surging blood, sizzling brains, pulsating viscera, and the reeking odor of dismembered and rotting bodies. As one critic put it, “One gluts upon a baroque of thieving, raping, shooting, slashing, hanging, scalping, burning, bashing, hacking, stabbing...”1 The scene of a massacre carried out by the Comanche Indians who attack the “Saxons,” as they are referred to, early on in the novel may give a notion of McCarthy’s idiom and manner of depicting violent events: … they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.2

Whether the figures who are presented in Blood Meridian may be called “protagonists” is a claim of disputable nature since the narration consistently avoids delving into their psychological disposition, their potential motivation, and their past in general. The narrator seems to treat them as part of the surrounding barren landscape, describing with equally minute details and equally detached impartiality their rotting and reeking wounds, their saddles and weapons, as well as the desolate sands and rocks of the desert they cross. Nevertheless, two of these figures deserve 1

Peter Josyph, “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian,” in Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 1995), 170. 2 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 54.

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closer attention. One of them may be said to function as the “main protagonist” though he, indicatively, does not have a name and is first referred to as the “kid” and then, when the action skips almost thirty years into the future to give an account of the last years of his life, he is labeled the “man.” Yet if he is the thread that binds the succeeding events, it is a thread of a very feeble and tattered kind since he is put forward as the focalizer only occasionally, and his own utterances are practically limited to hostile grunts or shrugging and spitting into the dirt. Judge Holden, the second major character in the novel, is in turn a definitely more developed and compelling personality; with his dreadful savagery combined with an extraordinary intellectual capacity, with his enormously tall body with not a single hair on it, his “strangely childlike” face,3 and surprisingly small hands and feet, he is often alluded to as a figure from another world.

The Western Frontier after Vietnam One of the significant attributes of McCarthy’s novel is its rooting in the mid-nineteenth century history of the American South-Western frontier. Critics have taken pains to retrace the numerous historical sources McCarthy most probably used to authenticate the episodes depicted in Blood Meridian.4 Obviously, the novel is not a simple, straightforward reenactment of factual events, and I refer to its intricate relationship to the sources that seem to have contributed to its making in the third chapter of my book.5 At this point, it is only important to note McCarthy’s apparent willingness to associate Blood Meridian with a broader, extra-literary context. Some critics, adopting a more culturally or historically oriented approach, tend to view the book as part of the revisionist trend in American historical writing, filmmaking, and fiction of the last three decades of the twentieth century.6 McCarthy certainly does question the 3

McCarthy, BM, 6. The most extensive record of McCarthy's sources is provided by John Emil Sepich in “’What kind of indians was them?’ Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 93-110. 5 See subchapter “Books ‘made out of books’” in Chapter Three. 6 See for instance Robert Rebein, Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism (Lexington, Kentucky: The UP of Kentucky, 2001), especially the chapter entitled “New West, or, the Borderlands”; Christopher Douglas, “The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45:1 (2003): 3-24; Neil Campbell, “’Beyond reckoning’: 4

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western myth of progress, the trust in frontier heroes who fight for the expansion of civilization, freedom, and democracy into the remotest corners of the continent. We witness the violence but not the “regeneration” towards which it was believed to lead. McCarthy’s West is not the restorative and regenerative land Frederick Jackson Turner aggrandized, but an “evil terrain,” “ancient and naked,” barren and hostile, where even the sun “burn[s] like a white hole” only to set on the bloody western sky behind “crumpled butcherpaper mountains,” granting the landscape an even more gory make-up (“in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood”).7 On this inimical terra damnata human senses are not to be trusted since nature constantly plays wry tricks on man, deceiving him with visions of things inexistent: They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke.8

Similarly, when the kid watches the Western landscape with his early companion, Sproule, he sees “an immense lake,” “trees that shimmer in the heat,” and a “distant city very white against the blue and shaded hills.” Yet when they wake up on the same spot after sleeping “among the rocks face up like dead men,” they rise to see that in truth there is “no city and no trees and no lake only a barren dusty plain.”9 McCarthy’s West is also the arena of even stranger natural spectacles, where one can hear “the dull boom of rock falling somewhere far below [...] in the awful darkness inside the world,” where the raiders are unexpectedly “visited with a plague of hail out of a faultless sky” or are blinded by the sun reflected in “a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies [leave] Cormac McCarthy's Version of the West in Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39:1 (1997): 5565; Neil Campbell, “Liberty Beyond its Proper Bounds: Cormac McCarthy's History of the West in Blood Meridian,” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 217-26; Jason P. Mitchell, “Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and the (De)Mythologizing of the American West,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41:3 (2000): 290-304. 7 McCarthy, BM, 89, 138, 152, 105, 187. 8 McCarthy, BM, 120. 9 McCarthy, BM, 62.

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no track upon it” where the “shadow of horse and rider alike [are] painted upon the fine white powder in purest indigo.” It is a ground on which man not only must strain to save himself from numerous hostile marauders and wild animals, from tornados, falling rocks, from the heat and the cold, but also has to struggle against the destructive power of the land itself–the land which leaves men “silent and speculative” or devoid of “wits” altogether.10 The West in Blood Meridian is not the key to American development, as Frederick Jackson Turner had it, it is not the melting pot in which the unique American character is forged, but a place where man is denigrated to the point of total insignificance: They diminished upon the plain to the west first the sound and then the shape of them dissolving in the heat rising off the sand until they were no more than a mote struggling in that hallucinatory void and then nothing at all.11 (BM 113)

McCarthy’s novel therefore stands in obvious opposition to the “connectedness,” “wholeness,” and “unity”12 so forcefully advocated by Turner and so eagerly endorsed by most Americans who continued to wave “the brave flags of consensus ideology”13 well into the twentieth century. And yet, Blood Meridian lacks the moral overtones typical of revisionist novels; in fact, a number of critics are deeply disturbed by its patent amoralism, and they grieve that such a “highly charged, richly textured novel driven by some of the most impressive American prose of this century features no major figure who is not, quite literally, a slaughterer, and offers scarcely a single act to inspire hope for the race…”14 McCarthy’s Indians are not noble savages who are in the end appreciated for their intimacy with nature and for their fidelity to certain tribal principles. They are instead “a legion of horrible” and “a horde from hell,” equally violent and barbarous as the “white” Americans. They do not function as the Other whose habits, beliefs, customs, or even appearance could be contrasted with that of the Saxons; on the contrary, the latter employ the same brutal modes of dealing with their enemy (like collecting scalps) and are described more like savages than representatives 10

McCarthy, BM, 111, 152, 111, 248, 306. McCarthy, BM, 113. 12 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 13. 13 Barcley Owens, Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels (Tuscon, Arizona: U of Arizona P, 2000), 19. 14 Josyph, “Blood Music,” 170. 11

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of civilization or progress: “... they appeared in the streets tattered, stinking, ornamented with human parts like cannibals,” blackened by the sun, the filth and the dust as well as the “caked blood” of their adversaries.15 The Indians and the Anglo-Saxons are typically antagonists who, while fiercely opposing one another, in the course of that very defiance come to be increasingly identical.16 Violence in McCarthy’s novel is neither a matter of racial conditioning nor a shameful supplement of imperialistic conquest; it is rather an inherent and deeply rooted element of human evolution. Blood Meridian therefore resists comfortable classification into the revisionist Western history camp since, as Timothy Parrish and Elizabeth Spiller phrased it, his novels recycle the violent history of the Southwest “not to indulge in the compensatory pleasures of self-accusation but to remind us of how particularizing versions of history necessarily deny how we have become to be who we are.”17 In a sense, McCarthy’s novel may be read as a product of the postVietnam era, a time when Americans necessarily grew accustomed to very vivid images of violence and brutality they witnessed on their TV screens on a daily basis. Barcely Owens traces some convincing parallels between certain scenes in Blood Meridian and factual incidents which took place in Vietnam and were, for the first time with such uncensored immediacy, broadcasted to the American public. The U.S. soldiers’ escalating ferocity, directed towards not only Vietcong troopers but also innocent villagers, whom, as it became apparent in the early 1970s, they “routinely tortured, killed, and maimed,” as well as their custom of collecting the ears, thumbs, or even scalps of the dead Vietnamese as proof of success in war indeed bear close resemblance to the ways and practices of the Glanton gang as they are related in McCarthy’s novel.18 Significantly, the reception of the Vietnam war was not only exceptionally broad and collective, but it was also uniquely visual and, to a radically greater extent than during military conflicts in the past, unmediated by the state and devoid of “the veil of military censorship.” As never before, Americans could witness first line operations sitting in their living rooms and watching the firefights, “with panicked reporters broadcasting live in the middle of 15

McCarthy, BM, 52, 53, 189, 165. See René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 34, where he describes this antagonism, referring to it as the “contest of alter egos.” 17 Timothy B. Parrish and Elizabeth A. Spiller, “A Flute Made of Human Bone: Blood Meridian and the Survivors of American History,” Prospects 23 (1998): 461. 18 See Owens, Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels, 20-25. 16

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gunfire and mortars.” These images of violence were so terrifyingly compelling that “the official rhetoric of necessary intervention, the distancing, abstract metaphor of nations lined up like political dominoes” seemed bleak and remote.19 The time when McCarthy was working on Blood Meridian was, therefore, for most Americans a period of intensified exposure to visual violence. The images of carnage in Vietnam were paralleled by not much less vehement scenes in the country: the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, demonstrations of students and university professors. In reaction to the public’s need of a cathartic re-experiencing of the violence they were forced to witness, numerous filmmakers produced very realistic pictures of murderous conflicts and bloody battles (such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, or Richard Mulligan’s Little Big Man). Tellingly, the violence of Blood Meridian is by many critics described as “vivid” or “graphic,” much resembling a motion picture with its technique of detailed close-ups followed by a distancing of perspective and a broadening of the picture span. And it is precisely the novel’s underscoring of the visual, the “spectacular” we may say, aspect of evil that can be identified as a source of its powerful effect on the reader. Interestingly, the theme of vision, of seeing and perceiving, of sketching and copying is a motif that recurs on different levels of the novel. I will now proceed to the discussion of the problem of perception, reception, and representation in and of Blood Meridian as it is most cogently conceptualized in the figure of Judge Holden and his problematic attitude to the relationship between originals and their copies.

The Ideology of Representation in Blood Meridian One of the numerous talents the judge has been granted (“The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself,” the expriest Tobin bitterly observes20) is a flair for artistic creation. His aesthetic production embaces not only his extraordinary linguistic performances (he repeatedly delivers elaborate speeches on a variety of grandiose topics, such as law, art, metaphysics, war, the cosmos, archeology, or geology, which present a startling contrast with the apish grunts and mumbles of the rest of the gang) but first and foremost the 19 20

Owens, Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels, 22, 23. McCarthy, BM, 123.

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notes and sketches he constantly makes in his ever-present “leather ledgerbook.” As they crossed the desolate mountains and deserts, the judge’s habit, even in the most calamitous circumstances, was to stop and collect miscellaneous artifacts with the purpose of copying them into his “little book” and subsequently destroying the originals, so as to “expunge them from the memory of man.” He used to stop “watchin the bats,” “botaniz[ing]” and “pressing leaves into his book.” When they came upon the ruins of a three-century-old Indian settlement, he “roamed through the ruinous kivas picking up small artifacts” and then “sat upon a high wall and sketched in his book until the light failed.”21 With a telling change of tense (according to my calculations, the narration in Blood Meridian changes to the present tense only four times–at the outset and at the ending as well as in the description of two images in the middle, one of them concerning the kid, the other one concerning the judge), the narrator reports: In his lap he held the leather legderbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book with nice shadings, an economy of pencil strokes. He is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his companions in arms or at the night beyond.22

When he finished, he “pitched” the artifacts “into the fire.” Similarly, when some time later they camped at “the Hueco tanks, a group of natural stone cisterns in the desert,” the walls of which were covered with “hundreds” of “ancient paintings,” the judge “went among them with assurance” and traced them into his book. “Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been.”23 As Webster, one of his unschooled companions coarsely points out, “them pictures is like enough the things themselves.” Although he highly regards the judge’s capacity of faithful representation, Webster forcefully asserts, “But dont draw me . . . . For I don’t want in your book.” He cannot exactly explain the cause of his strong resistance, yet the judge receives it with understanding and tells his comrades gathered around the fire how 21

McCarthy, BM, 140, 126, 127, 139. McCarthy, BM, 140. 23 McCarthy, BM, 173. 22

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“he’d once drawn an old Hueco’s portrait and unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness. For he could not sleep for fear an enemy might take it and deface it and so like was the portrait that he would not suffer it creased nor anything to touch it…” The Hueco finally set out on a long journey in search of the judge, found him, and begged him for help. Together they ventured “deep into the mountains and they buried the portrait in the floor of a cave where it lies yet for aught the judge knew.”24 Judge Holden’s strategy of devising exact copies with a subsequent annihilation of their originals is a conscious, carefully calculated scheme which is to grant him a continually expanding orbit of power over nature. As he later on explains in his characteristic forcefully prophetic idiom, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” And the judge’s struggle, in which it is either man who may take “charge of the world” through his power of cognition, or nature, the “smallest crumb” of which “can devour us” if we do not subordinate it first, is a perfectly justified contest considering Blood Meridian’s “optical democracy.”25 The narration of the novel seems to refuse singling out human beings as subjects superior in significance to the landscape of mindless objects that surround them: In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.26 (BM 247)

Mark Eaton refers to McCarthy’s style as “paratactic,” placing all events and objects at the same distance from the reader without giving preference to any of them or indicating progress to any kind of climax.27 Dana Phillips’s conclusion is even more radical: My argument is that this competition [between narrative and description and between human beings and the natural world] has been decided in 24

McCarthy, BM, 141. McCarthy, BM, 198, 199, 247. 26 McCarthy, BM, 247. 27 Mark Eaton, “Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 49:1 (2003): 165. 25

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Yet Judge Holden apparently triumphs in his attempts to overcome this uniformity; it is his enormous hairless figure that catches the eye of the inhabitants of the towns they cross (“… none could take their eyes from the judge who had disrobed last of all and now walked the perimeter of the baths with a cigar in his mouth and a regal air”); when they sit around the fire, each member of the gang finds it difficult to resist the desire to watch him (“All listened as he spoke, those who had turned to watch him and those who would not”); and he is the one that is deliberately conspicuous and rivets the attention of those who witness their passage (“Foremost among them, outsized and childlike with his naked face, rode the judge. His cheeks were ruddy and he was smiling and bowing to the ladies and doffing his filthy hat”).29 He clearly finds pleasure in wearing well designed clothes and exquisite hats conceived especially to fit his enormous head, and he is always careful to make an effective entrance, as when the scalp hunters are invited by the Chihuahua governor, Angel Trias, to a dinner held in their honor: The judge arrived last of all, dressed in a well-cut suit of unbleached linen that had been made for him that very afternoon. Whole bolts of cloth exhausted and squads of tailors as well in that fabrication. His feet were encased in nicely polished gray kid boots and in his hand he held a panama hat that had been spliced together from two such lesser hats by such painstaking work that the joinery did scarcely show at all.30

Holden is the artist-annihilator, the master of life and death, as he exterminates objects and humans with equal determination, ease, selfassurance, and contentment. He is the proper “suzerain of the earth,” creating exact copies of the Real, signifiers which come to replace their signifieds, signs which are fully mastered by way of eliminating their referents. Although his sketches could be read as anthropological writing, which, “in its most traditional sense [...] is understood as a way of preserving, maintaining, collecting, and structuring that which is 28

Dana Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 446. 29 McCarthy, BM, 167, 245, 79. 30 McCarthy, BM, 169.

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disappearing or has disappeared,”31 the judge equates his own creation with destruction and erasure. The idea that writing “in fact negates the very existence of the ‘original’” is well phrased by Maurice Blanchot: Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing, more definitively than one disappears in the tomb, or again, to destroy, to destroy invisibly, without the uproar of destruction.32

The Judge’s “philosophy of representation,” if we may call it so, seems to be a radically perverse version of the model of representation which has been termed “Mallarméan” by Michaá Paweá Markowski in his brilliant study, Pragnienie obecnoĞci. Filozofie reprezentacji od Platona do Kartezjusza [Longing for Presence: Philosophies of Representation from Plato to Descartes].33 Markowski, describing the Mallarméan paradigm as one which treats representation as a substitution of the represented object, as its replacement, its “absenting,” contrasts it with the “Proustian” model, which, in turn, uses representation as a means of making present that which is at the moment absent, as a chance to participate in the Real that has by now been lost. These two concepts, according to Markowski, lead to two radically diverse notions of literature: literature as an autonomic play of words and literature as a desire to revive reality, and to two contradictory ways of thinking about art in general. Yet both of them presuppose the absence of the represented object (otherwise we would be dealing not with signs but with the things themselves). At the same time, each type of representation would not be possible without an absolutely basic desire, the “longing for presence.”34 We may risk the supposition that in the case of Judge Holden this “longing for presence,” which for Markowski constitutes the grounds of all art, is lacking since it has been wholly superseded by his longing for power. His art is a “play” in which the “original,” autonomous “players” are eliminated and replaced by their copies absolutely subordinate to the judge’s agency–not only metaphorically, as in the instance of all types of 31

Joshua Masters, “’Witness to the uttermost edge of the world’: Judge Holden's Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40:1 (1998), 31. 32 Blanchot quoted in Masters, “Witness,” 31. 33 Michaá Paweá Markowski, Pragnienie obecnoĞci. Filozofie reprezentacji od Platona do Kartezjusza [Longing for Presence: Philosophies of Representation from Plato to Descartes] (GdaĔsk: Sáowo/ obraz terytoria, 1999). See especially pages 7-11. 34 Markowski, Pragnienie obecnoĞci, 21.

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writing, especially of texts forthrightly employing intertextuality, but also quite literally and explicitly. Apart from being a gifted draftsman and speaker, the judge is also, tellingly, an excellent fiddler, and the others unknowingly dance to his tune: By now many of Glanton’s men were naked and lurching about and the judge soon had them dancing while he fiddled on a crude instrument he’d commandeered…35

In his final divulgence which he presses upon the puzzled kid (now the “man”), he repeatedly uses the metaphor of the dance: As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well.36

The judge is not interested in the dancers themselves as long as their performance observes the rules he himself established. He is therefore a kind of postmodern artist-writer, conscious of the intertextuality of his discourse and the necessarily imperialistic practices inscribed into his creative activity. Interestingly, the narration in Blood Meridian frequently highlights the impression that what we are witnessing are only secondary copies of the Real, mere vestiges of “things in themselves.” When, early in the novel, the kid as a prisoner is taken out into the somnolent streets of Chihuahua, he observes two copulating dogs. Two other dogs sat a little apart, squatting loosely in their skins, just frames of dogs in napless hides watching the coupled dogs and then watching the prisoners clanking away up the street. All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things in themselves had faded in men’s minds.37

When the kid joins Glanton and his companions, the members of the gang are repeatedly described as devoid of corporeality, as nothing more than outlines or shadows of phenomena that perhaps once existed for real:

35

McCarthy, BM, 241. McCarthy, BM, 329. 37 McCarthy, BM, 75-6. 36

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Crossing those barren gravel reefs in the night they seemed remote and without substance. . . . A thing surmised from the blackness by the creak of leather and the clink of metal.38

What is more, the traces of the Real quickly fade and soon vanish, making it virtually impossible to witness the “things in themselves” at first hand. After their most barbarous massacre carried out in a village of peaceful, unsuspecting Tigua Indians, where they unswervingly hack “women rising up from their tasks,” “old people flinging up their hands,” and “children tottering and blinking in the pistolfire,” members of the gang leave the ruins of the settlement covered with bodies of the dead who “lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon.”39 Yet the narration, shifting into a not so distant future, forecasts that this ghastly horror experienced by so many innocent people will, before long, be remembered by virtually no one: In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.40

Near the ending of the novel, after the gang is scattered in a massacre perpetrated by Yuma Indians, the wounded kid together with the “expriest” Tobin hide away from the judge. The kid uneasily glances at the tracks they left on the sand fearing the judge will follow them. “He looked at the tracks. Faint shapes that backed across the sands and vanished.”41 Since traces disappear so quickly, and since “memories are uncertain,” as the judge cynically observes,42 there is no fixed and stable, unquestionable past we may go back to. And yet, paradoxically, Blood Meridian takes us back all the time, putting exceptionally strong emphasis on the primitive, primeval nature of its protagonists and events. The result is a state of permanent homelessness, a kind of nomadic uprooting which seems to be nothing modern or postmodern but rather absolutely basic and elemental to our species.

38

McCarthy, BM, 151. McCarthy, BM, 174. 40 McCarthy, BM, 174. 41 McCarthy, BM, 298. 42 McCarthy, BM, 330. 39

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In terms of the idea of representation, McCarthy’s novel therefore seems to be a unique blend of the Proustian longing to recover the Real and the Mallarméan desire to replace it with its possibly vivid image. The narration of Blood Meridian at times functions as an icon which makes visible that which is by nature invisible and summons our gaze to go beyond the merely perceptible; at other moments it takes on the features of an idol which stops our gaze on itself and its own baroque extravagance and precludes it from going any further or deeper.43 On the one hand, we sense the revisionist urge to revive the truth about the American past, to remember the “dis(re)membered bodies” of the dead44 and acknowledge the uncomfortable shadow they cast upon the national mythos. Yet, on the other hand, this venture seems to be constantly troubled with the narratorial consciousness of how fleeting and ephemeral the Real actually is, the awareness of fading traces, dispersing remnants, and evanescent vestiges. The narrator’s reaction is to produce minutely graphic, extremely palpable images, to turn words into almost physical entities, to speak “in stones and trees, the bones of things” which do not lie.45 With a gravity wholly devoid of Holden’s mocking cynicism, the narrator in effect replaces the intangible and ethereal Real with acutely substantial and fleshy copies. The narration of Blood Meridian very explicitly illustrates the paradox inherent in the rhetorical figure the ancient Greeks termed hypotyposis. This designation refers to a representation used in speech which is so vivid, dynamic, and animated that the listeners experience a sensation of actually seeing that which they can only hear. The effect of hypotyposis consists in a fundamental conflict between the desire to display, to expose the object to the recipient and the tendency to place the description itself in the foreground and therefore actually conceal the presented object beneath the presentation as such.46 Paradoxically, the more refined, genuine, and authentic the depiction, the more it draws the receiver’s attention to its own self and not necessarily to what is being depicted. Yet, while the representations produced by Judge Holden are in themselves wholly devoid of the “longing for presence”–their aim is an explicitly verbalized 43

On idols and icons see especially Jean Luc Marion, Bóg bez Bycia [Dieu sans l’être. Hors-texte], trans. Maágorzata Frankiewicz (Kraków: Znak, 1996), 27-48. 44 According to Mark Eaton, “Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses take on the important task of remembering the dismembered bodies of those who died in the struggle for survival and territory in the US borderlands” (“Dis(re)membered Bodies,” 160). 45 McCarthy, BM, 117. 46 Markowski, Pragnienie obecnoĞci, 12-13.

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urge to eliminate the authentic objects–the yearning defined by Markowski, and the tension it produces is definitely felt in the way the narration of the novel goes about portraying reality. As Steven Shaviro phrased it, The language of Blood Meridian [...] is [...] continually outside itself, in intimate contact with the world in a powerfully nonrepresentational way.47

McCarthy’s novel, therefore, does not invite us to a “celebration of simulacras” in the manner of Baudrillard; it rather depicts the desire, perhaps even the necessity of searching for the “things in themselves” without evading the paradoxes and tensions that such a desire produces. And even if the traces of past violence and sorrow quickly vanish leaving the oblivious reality stubbornly unaffected, the traces in people remain. When he finally reached San Diego and was put to prison, the kid began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated.48

We are told that in all his subsequent wanderings he “was treated with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for.”49 The violence he took part in changed him to such an extent that the people he encountered could read its traces in the features of his face. As the old Mexican told the companions gathered in a Janos cantina, “When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you dont wake up forever.”50 Significantly, it is only the judge who persists in being untouched by all the “acts of blood” he witnessed or himself perpetrated. Despite the burning desert sun, he always stays strikingly white and pale, and when the man meets him for the very last time in the town of Griffin, he seems “little changed or none in all these years.” Holden is indeed “some other sort of man entire”51; he is the master of traces as he is the overlord of representations devoid of their referents. Yet the reader, as the kid, cannot remain unaffected. In the words of Steven Shaviro,

47

Steven Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 117. 48 McCarthy, BM, 305. 49 McCarthy, BM, 312. 50 McCarthy, BM, 103. 51 McCarthy, BM, 325.

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Chapter Two The scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one.52

The novel leaves us not only deeply disturbed but also acutely troubled by our own reactions.

The Effect of the Grotesque Searching for critical tools which could be helpful in assessing the effect Blood Meridian has on its readers, some commentators turn to the theory of the grotesque.53 The phenomenon of the grotesque is as antique as cavemen’s paintings, diabolical masks, and shaman’s costumes, yet the term itself was coined in Renaissance Italy to refer to certain bizarre ornaments which were discovered in a chamber once inhabited by Nero. The “grottesche” (a word which derivates from the Italian “grotto,” that is “cave”54) therefore originally designated a type of painting of a purely decorative function. The Renaissance grottesche reproduced very characteristic, recurrent motifs, such as strange plants, twisted weeds, hybrid animals, and odd devilish creatures, which were all placed around one central image–painted, written, carved in stone, or modeled in terracotta. Interestingly, these ornamental images grew increasingly fantastic and extraordinary, amalgamating not only animals with plants but also with human forms, often assuming explicitly obscene poses and gestures. Since they were also typically included as decorations in psalm and prayer books used by friars, they soon began to arouse protests of the clergy (Bernard from Clairvaux being the most outspoken in this matter). Obviously, grottesche drawings were initially designed to succor prayer and intensify piety by heightening the fear of sin and the disgust at debased human nature, yet their growing intricacy and elaborateness were

52

Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness,’”119. See for instance Wade Hall, “The Human Comedy of Cormac McCarthy,” in Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995, 49-60); or Owens, Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels, 51-62. 54 “Grotto” is a term which actually appears in one of the most grotesque moments in Blood Meridian: after white Jackson is beheaded by his black namesake, he is said to be seated “as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone,” 107, emphasis added. 53

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coming to pose a threat to the allegedly central work, to function rather as its rival than its mere dark shadow. In the words of Geoffrey Harpham, With elaborately worked initials, with figures twisting in and out of the text, and other ingenious methods, artists made an aggressive claim for the reader’s attention.55

Harpham’s book is one of the most elaborate attempts to apply poststructuralist theories and deconstructive strategies to the grotesque. At the same time, it is an irreplaceable source of information about the Renaissance grottesche. The grotesque, as we know it today, is therefore a marginal text that gradually came to be central, a surplus additive which became in itself the indispensable primary quality. The notion of the grotesque has undergone numerous transformations since the Italian Renaissance and various scholars made attempts to arrive at some kind of its stable definition. Some, like Michail Bakhtin, associated it with the joyous, festive, and democratic spirit of medieval carnival, whereas others, like Wolfgang Kayser, treated it as an essentially dark and obscure phenomenon, the “nocturnal and inhuman sphere”56 resembling the psychoanalytical id, which we both long for and apprehensively repress. Still others, like John Ruskin, ventured to join these two attributes, dividing the grotesque into its lighter, sublime form and its darker, more grim and bodily counterpart. Most recent critics therefore agree that the term itself is “anything but clear”; while “it is relatively easy to recognize the grotesque ‘in’ a work of art,” it is at the same time “quite difficult to apprehend the grotesque directly.”57 According to its most traditional definitions, the major quality of the grotesque is its paradoxical blending of horror and delight which consists in the incongruity between the appalling substance and its matter-of-fact description. The experience of this tension is intensely disquieting since we feel that what we are witnessing is “indecent and indicative of a warped mind–but we are unable to shake off the profoundly disturbing effect which it has on us.”58 The human tendency to succumb to an exceptionally strong fascination with the horrific, which, according to Bernard McElroy, is the very source of all that is grotesque in art and 55

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 35. 56 Wolfgang Kayser quoted in Harpham, On the Grotesque, 71. 57 Harpham, On the Grotesque, xvi. 58 Philip Thomson, “The Grotesque,” in The Critical Idiom Series, ed. John D. Jump,Vol. 24 (London: Methuen, 1972), 8.

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literature,59 is something we are essentially ashamed of and therefore liable to suppress. Our most instinctive defense mechanism, which in the end proves redemptive, is to discharge this disquietude by “laughing it off,” and it is precisely this liberating laugh, this psychological exorcism of what horrifies and disgusts, that is the ultimate aim of the grotesque. Although with reference to other aspects of the grotesque (such as its relation to reality, its experimental, playful, or even frivolous nature, or its affinities with the uncanny) its numerous theorists tend to vary, the majority of them underscore its physicality, corporeality, and substantiality. This element is most compellingly emphasized by Michail Bakhtin, who practically limited the grotesque to the body–to bodily excess and deformation celebrated in an essentially joyous, carnival fashion. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin points to crucial sources of the bodily grotesque in the sensibility of the Middle Ages, such as medieval mystery with its typical theme of dismembered bodies, their roasting, burning, and tearing apart, as well as the medieval cult of relics which were most frequently parts cut off from corpses of the saints.60 The Middle-Age grotesque was also meant to epitomize the unity of body and soul and represent human physicality as a stratum which draws together the most remote phenomena and forces of the cosmos.61 Other critics also point to presentations of corporeal deformity as a crucial means of arousing in the recipient the intended tension between disgust and amusement. In the words of Paula Uruburu, “The violation of the human body, which is the core of human vulnerability, is a powerful weapon in the hands of those writers who wish to assault our senses and sensibilities.”62

Grotesque Images in Blood Meridian Scenes of violence in Blood Meridian are saturated with graphic, minutely detailed depictions of gross human bodies, of their distortion and dismemberment, their wounds, scars, and irregularities. The members of

59

Bernard McElroy, “Groteska i jej wspóáczesna odmiana” [“The Grotesque and its Modern Development”] in Groteska [The Grotesque], ed. Michaá GáowiĔski (GdaĔsk: Sáowo/obraz terytoria, 2003), 125-167, 125. 60 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 347-350. 61 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,364-65. 62 Paula Uruburu, The Gruesome Doorway: An Analysis of the American Grotesque (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).

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the Glanton gang, men of all breeds and of miscellaneous origin, are in themselves a grotesque assembly of marred and disfigured human shapes: They moved on to the public baths where they descended one by one into the waters, each more pale than the one before and all tattooed, branded, sutured, the great puckered scars inaugurated God knows where by what barbarous surgeons across chests and abdomens like the tracks of gigantic millipedes, some deformed, fingers missing, eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles requiring inventory.63

These freakish, distorted bodies are a sight the onlookers cannot “take their eyes from”–both fascinating and fearful, spectacular and hideous. What the scalp hunters encounter in the slumberous, half deserted Mexican towns they mindlessly cross on their way are also mere remnants, just ragged shadows of human beings. In the streets of Chihuahua they pass . . . maimed beggars sad-eyed in their rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking their dreamless faces . . . lepers moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting in the gutters over charcoal fires where blackened strips of anonymous meat sizzled and spat . . . small orphans . . . like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis.64

When they ride into “the town of Ures, capital of the state of Sonora,” they are welcomed and followed by a “rabble unmatched for variety and sordidness by any they had yet encountered, beggars and proctors of beggars and whores and pimps and vendors and filthy children and whole deputations of the blind and the maimed and the importunate all crying out por dios.”65 The biblical overtones with which this description resonates, bearing associations with the “weary and burdened” (Matthew 11, 28) who accompany Jesus, obviously grants the passage an even more grotesque or even satiric quality. Yet the most distinctly grotesque images in the novel are embedded in the endless depictions of bizarrely fragmented and atrociously tattered bodies of the dying and the dead. Scalping the wounded and the lifeless 63

McCarthy, BM, 167. McCarthy, BM, 72-3 65 McCarthy, BM, 200. 64

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alike, the Comanches leave the American warriors on the battlefield with “wet and naked heads . . . with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone,” resembling “maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust.”66 At another time, striding through the desert, the kid and his companion, Sproule, encounter a bush that was hung with dead babies. . . . These small victims, seven or eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being.67

When Glanton and his men cross the del Norte and ride south “into a land more hostile yet,” they come upon a collection of massacred bodies: Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from their grinning mouths. In their wigs of dried blood they lay gazing up with ape’s eyes at brother sun now rising in the east.68

The macabre sardonic smile on a dead apishly gaping face is indeed a striking example of revolting horror at which, despite the nausea that overwhelms us, we cannot stop staring. The most frequently recurring grotesque image in Blood Meridian is that of the human head cut off from its corpus. On a bazaar in one of the Mexican towns, among “vipers,” “limegreen serpents,” “beaded lizards with their black mouths wet with venom,” and “handfuls of tapeworms” a “reedy old leper” holds up from a jar, the kid is presented with “a glass carboy of clear mescal” in which “with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face sat a human head.”69 The scene is the more macabre as the head is actually recognized by the kid as his former leader, Captain White. Yet, in the manner of Simon Peter denying his affiliation with Jesus, the kid spits, wipes his mouth, and dispassionately states, “He aint no kin to me.”70 In a later scene, when the racially overbearing white Jackson is beheaded by his dark double, the black Jackson, we witness “two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender” rise “like snakes from the stump of his neck.” In a repulsively graphic depiction we are shown how 66

McCarthy, BM, 54. McCarthy, BM, 57. 68 McCarthy, BM, 153. 69 McCarthy, BM, 69. 70 McCarthy, BM, 70. 67

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the head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest’s feet where it lay with eyes agast. . . . The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled. He sat as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers.71

The whole event takes place in total silence; the rest of the company only rise and move away, probably in an instinctive gesture to avoid becoming smudged in the blood. When they leave the camp the next morning, “the headless man” is still sitting unmoved by the ashes of the fire; someone had only “taken his gun.”72 Fighting the Indians, Glanton’s men not only take scalps as “receipts” of their victory but they also cut off the heads of the more prominent warriors. After the massacre of the peaceful Gilenos, one of the Delawares from the gang assembles a whole “collection of heads like some strange vendor bound for market, the hair twisted about his wrist and the heads dangling and turning together,” while Glanton himself mounts the chief’s head on a lance where it “bobbs” and “leers” “like a carnival head.”73 The grotesqueness of the human head devoid of its foundation, mute and lifeless yet staring us expressively in the eye is therefore at times explicitly suggested by Blood Meridian’s narrator. It evokes the carnival mask with a perverse countenance and unnaturally exaggerated features, horrifically bizarre but familiar enough to induce in us the sensation of the Unheimlich, the recognition of that which we wish to detach from our sense of reality but which we nevertheless experience as very much real in itself.74 Another typically grotesque motif in Blood Meridian are animals and humans deformed from birth, often shown to the public for money. Such aberrations are typically present in the grotesque as images which question the accepted divisions between male and female, gendered and asexual, animal and human, and, consequently, between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth.75 “See The Wild Man Two Bits” reads a sign pinned to the cage of an “imbecile” by his brother, both of whom joined the gang wishing to reach “Californy.” “The idiot was small and misshapen and his face was smeared with feces and he sat peering . . . 71

McCarthy, BM, 107. McCarthy, BM, 107. 73 McCarthy, BM, 157, 159. 74 See McElroy, “Groteska,” 130-134. 75 See McElroy, “Groteska,” 138. 72

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with dull hostility silently chewing a turd.” After the attack of the Yumas in which most of Glanton’s men, himself including, perish, the idiot is appropriated by the judge–the two of them resembling a “king” and “his fool,” both “creatures surpassing all description.” In Tucson a merchant offers “a litter of dogs one of whom had six legs and another two and a third with four eyes in its head.” Interestingly, every time Glanton is confronted with such innate deformity, he reacts with aggressive impatience. “Glanton warned the man away and threatened to shoot [the dogs].”76 When they meet another imbecile in the ruins of a deserted church, he feels that such a bizarre freak of nature should also be shot. “I dont like to see white men that way,” he admits. “Dutch or whatever. I dont like to see it.” “Visible frailty” always seems to “incite something in Glanton”77; he is clearly distressed with images of vulnerability and impotence–the grotesqueness that he is constantly confronted with and which, we may assume, is an irksome reminder of his own weakness and fragility. Apart from debilitated humans, distorted dogs, and grossly swollen horses,78 a recurrent image in Blood Meridian is that of the bat which, with its ugly puckered face, sharp protruding teeth, freakish grin, and oddly large ears, tends to be regarded as the most stereotypical grotesque animal.79 Bats are of especial interest to the judge who stops in caves to “look up at the little animals” and study their peculiar behavior, or watches them appear “from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths of [...] flowering yuccas.”80 In the most telling scene, a huge bloodbat attacks the wounded Sproule: they slept like dogs in the sand and had been sleeping so when something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on Sproule’s chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it walked upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a horrible smile and teeth pale blue in the starlight. It leaned to him. It crafted in his neck two narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood.81

76

McCarthy, BM, 233, 282, 239. McCarthy, BM, 226, 181. 78 McCarthy, BM, 115. 79 See McElroy, “Groteska,” 137. 80 McCarthy, BM, 127, 148. 81 McCarthy, BM, 65-6. 77

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According to McElroy, the spider is another example of a creature whose mere sight arouses in us a peculiar kind of instinctive aversion (a sensation which Freud attempted to explicate with the use of sexual symbols and the innate fear of the father), and therefore belongs to those animal images that are most eagerly employed by artists of the grotesque.82 The moment in which we encounter a bizarre reference to an “enormous spider” in Blood Meridian is also worth relating for its straightforward affinities with precisely this type of art: . . . minutes later Brown on his way back from the bar poured a pitcher of aguardiente over a young soldier and set him afire with his cigar. The man ran outside mute save for the whoosh of the flames and the flames were pale blue and then invisible in the sunlight and he fought them in the street like a man beset with bees or madness and then he fell over in the road and burned up. By the time they got to him with a bucket of water he had blackened and shriveled up in the mud like an enormous spider.83

Obviously, such metaphors as these are not meant to evoke any kind of symbolic, esoteric reality concealed beneath the text. Similarly, when the Saxons scalped by the Comanches are compared to “maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust,” or when the slaughtered Tiguas are said to resemble “polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon,”84 it is not because “monks,” “polyps,” or “melons” comprise particular figurative potential but simply because they allow us to visualize the scenes more veraciously and powerfully. To quote Dana Phillips once more, “The similes seem designated to increase the intensity and accuracy of focus on the objects being described rather than to suggest that they have double natures or bear hidden meanings.”85 They are part of Blood Meridian’s “immanent, material language,” as Steven Shaviro terms it, “a speaking inscribed in the rocks and in the sky, in the very physical body of the world,” “an erotics of landscape.”86 This physicality of language links McCarthy’s grotesque with jouissance, with textual play in which the perspective easily skips from concrete to cosmic, from minute depictions of the Western sky to equally detailed and dispassionate portrayals of awfully mutilated human bodies. What is more, these observations are not rendered by any stable authorial voice which would belong to a clearly stipulated narrator or to one of the characters. What we 82

McElroy, “Groteska,” 137. McCarthy, BM, 268. 84 McCarthy, BM, 54,174. 85 Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts,” 450. 86 Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness,’” 117, 118. 83

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instead witness is “an incessant fluid displacement, a flux of words and of visions and palpations, indifferent to our usual distinctions between subjective and objective, between literal and figurative or between empirical description and speculative reflection.”87 Interestingly, this jouissance takes place not only on the purely linguistic, textual level but also in the more straightforward realm of the plot itself. Bearing in mind the traditionally close affinities between the grotesque and play (whether it is the carnivalesque type of revelry in Bakhtin or playing with the absurd in Kayser88), it is worth noting that “play” and “game” are in themselves categories which are recurrently employed in McCarthy’s novel. In his typically totalizing idiom, the judge at some point uses the notion of “game” as a construct which best describes man’s major preoccupation as well as a comprehensive metaphor of order and agency presiding over all living things: “Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard.” Since in the case of war this value is the highest–what is at stake is “at once the game and the authority and the justification”–Holden concludes that “war is the ultimate game,” “the truest form of divination,” and indeed “god” himself.89 The narrator seems to endorse the trope applied by the judge depicting the members of the gang as they “mounted, pistols in hand, saps of rawhide and riverrock looped about their wrists like the implements of some primitive equestrian game.”.It is obviously a game governed by its own unfathomable rules which bear “decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not”–decisions which are reached without our mediation.90 Yet it is a game constantly verging on the grotesque–although the body count rises with every page and we ourselves grow increasingly appalled, we cannot resist being submerged in its manoeuvres, and, as Shaviro put it, “once we have been swept up in the game, there is no pulling back.”91

The (Southern) American Grotesque Numerous critics have noted the particular proneness of American literature towards the category of the grotesque. In his classic essay from 87

Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness,’”118. See McElroy, “Groteska,” 127. 89 McCarthy, BM, 249. 90 McCarthy, BM, 155, 250. 91 Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness,’”119. 88

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1962 tellingly entitled “The Grotesque: an American Genre,” William Van O’Connor advanced the thesis that American literature “is filled with the grotesque, more so probably than any other Western literature.”92 One author who has pressed this claim more recently is Leonard Cassuto, who also inseparably links the grotesque with the human body–in this case the colored body.93 Locating the grotesque in the liminal space between two categories which are commonly considered to be permanently divided, Cassuto points to human objectification as the very source of the most powerful (and the most disrupting at the same time) type of American grotesque, namely the grotesque based on the mythical category of race. Because of the ongoing attempts to objectify the racial Other, to prove him a thing rather than a human being–attempts which were in fact present in American writing from the early Puritan times, “the American literature of race is, on the most basic and fundamental level, a continuing story of the encounter with the grotesque.”94 Since our inherently anthropomorphic perception constantly counters the will to perceive ourselves as superior to the dehumanized Other, the process of racial objectification is ultimately never completed; the colored body, even if it is mutilated or deformed will always remain somewhere between the categories of “it” and “thou.” “Human objectification never fully succeeds; that is, a person never actually becomes a thing. Instead, the attempt to objectify a person places him into an ontological netherworld, part human and part thing.”95 This inbetweeness is, according to Cassuto, precisely what constitutes the grotesque. Although Cassuto’s broad treatment of the grotesque blurs the boundaries of the concept even further (echoing at times Geoffrey Harpham, whose tendency to perceive all ambiguity, all crossing of categories, and all contradiction as grotesque is also quite apparent), his analysis is useful for my purposes at least in one aspect. Tracing the ambivalent treatment of the colored body back to New England Puritan writing, Cassuto provides some highly interesting examples of extremely detailed descriptions of bodily deformations. Since John Winthrop’s report of 1638 depicting the body of the “monster” born to the Antinomian Anne Hutchinson is particularly telling in this respect, I will quote it in full:

92

William Van O’Connor, The Grotesque: an American Genre and Other Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1962), 3. 93 Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1997). 94 Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 28. 95 Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 16.

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Chapter Two It had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp; two of them were above one inch long, the other two shorter; the eyes standing out, and the mouth also; the nose hooked upward; all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales, like a thornback; the navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be, and the back and hips before, where the belly should have been; behind, between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.96

Obviously, the grotesque monstrosity of the child’s body was, in the minds of the Puritan elders, inextricably associated with its mother’s “perverted” religious beliefs. And even though the body Winthrop describes is white, its employment as a prodigy echoes, as Cassuto points out, the vocabulary used to depict the bestial and “savage” Indian body presented in early captivity narratives. When Mary Rowlandson writes how she has been “in the midst of (...) roaring lions and savage bears that feared neither God nor man nor the devil,”97 she is using categories similar to the ones applied by Winthrop, who perceived the baby “freak” as an “ape” and a “fowl.” And yet, as the same captivity narratives implicitly demonstrate, the Native Americans upon closer contact typically turned out to be neither as bestial and alien nor as hostile and despicable as they had initially seemed. In fact, numerous writers of these narratives acknowledge not only the humanity and kindness of the Indians but the fact that their customs and cultural practices seem increasingly luring and attractive to someone who is given the chance to experience them firsthand. Rowlandson turns the Indians into monsters, but the transformation doesn’t take. Instead, it is followed by a peculiar ambiguity: once she objectifies the Indians, she proceeds to interact with them as human beings. She never resolves [this] tension.98

After some time she even acknowledges her “wolfish appetite” and openly admits that she never tasted anything better than the bloody horse liver grilled on coals in the Indian fashion. 99 96

John Winthrop quoted in Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 44. Mary Rowlandson quoted in Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 65. 98 Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 51. 99 Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 53. 97

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It therefore seems that the conflating of the peculiarly deformed and the savage colored body was a mental scheme applied by white Americans early on, and that it was always imbued with ambivalence, entailing both a basic repulsion and a strong attraction, both the need to detach oneself from it and a desire to become its familiar part. It thus bore especially strong affinities with the grotesque. Interestingly, in the case of Blood Meridian, the said human objectification often assuming explicit forms, for instance when the protagonists are referred to as “apes,”100 does not seem to be ethnically or racially charged. The contiguity between humans and their evolutionary ancestors is not used as a means to objectify one group of people and thereby aggrandize another but is rather treated as a universal claim which is continuously supported both on the level of the plot and on the level of narration. It has also been repeatedly pointed out that the American literature of the South “has produced more than its share of the grotesque.” William Van O’Connor, analyzing the works of such writers as Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, lists the social circumstances which could be identified as the source of the Southern predilection for the grotesque: “the old agricultural system depleted the land and poverty breeds abnormality,” “people were living with a code that was no longer applicable, and this meant detachment from reality and loss of vitality.” Yet with his basic assumption that “The American writer is a human being before he is an American,” Van O’Connor dismisses these regional determinants as ultimately subordinate to the longing and desire we all share and treats the grotesque as the only genre “our age” offers as a means for the seeking, “seemingly in perverse ways,” of the sublime.101 Flannery O’Connor, who tends to be treated as the icon of the Southern grotesque, was more liable to acknowledge its local conditioning. In her typically pertinent lecture reprinted as “Some Aspects of the Southern Grotesque,” she confidently testified: Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the 100

McCarthy, BM, 4, 90, 153, 200. William Van O’Connor, The Grotesque, 3, 6, 20. Here O’Connor echoes Thomas Mann whom he also quotes: “[Modern art] sees life as tragic-comedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style – to the extent, indeed, that today that is the only guise in which the sublime may appear.”

101

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Chapter Two whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. . . . I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.102

What Van O’Connor sees as the Southern “detachment from reality,” she acknowledges as genuine realism per se, a realism that “leans away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected” and that is meant to open the eyes of those who “learned to be dispassionate about evil.”103 Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque, like the grotesque employed by the “American” but first of all “human” writers analyzed by Van O’Connor, is ultimately redemptive, and, despite its “seemingly perverse” maneuvers, it in the end rightly fulfills its cathartic aim. Obviously, this can hardly be said of Blood Meridian.

The Grotesque–the Absurd–the Existential Since the grotesque is essentially subversive, in its very assumptions questioning the commonly accepted view of the world and persistently uncovering that which the dominant ideology would rather keep hidden, it seems to be a sensibility very consonant with our postmodern needs and tastes. It is therefore considered to be typical not only of American literature to date but also of the contemporary novel in general. To quote Harpham once more, . . . having existed for many centuries on the disorderly margins of Western culture and the aesthetic conventions that constitute that culture, [the grotesque] is now faced with a situation where the center cannot, or does not choose to, hold; where nothing is incompatible with anything else; and where the marginal is indistinguishable from the typical. Thus the grotesque, in endlessly diluting forms, is always and everywhere around us.104

According to Bernard McElroy, it should even be regarded as the most typical means of expression in our times–as tragedy in the Greece of the 5th century BC or as satiric comedy in 18th century England. The most prevalent form of modernist and postmodern grotesque is the play with the absurd. Writers such as Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Jean 102

Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Southern Grotesque,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969), 44. 103 Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Southern Grotesque,” 40. 104 Harpham, On the Grotesque, xxi.

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Paul Sartre, or Günter Grass create implied realities in which man can turn into a maggot and a child’s tin drum may have magical properties. We as recipients often therefore feel that we are being confronted with compelling actualities which we do not necessarily wish to face, dismissing them as fantastic, irrational, and distasteful. We read about protagonists who are persecuted by an insane reality which is able to subdue them with phantasmagoric visions, and we sense that what seems to be mundane and prosaic in fact conceals overwhelming dread. This impression of powerlessness in the face of estranged, absurd surroundings obviously leads us to inferences of an existential nature. According to Kayser, the recent application of grotesque strategies is ultimately aimed at presenting “the gradual displacement of the individual, a continuous process without climax.”105 The modern grotesque is therefore meant to not only question the predominant view of the world at large but also challenge our most deeply instilled notions concerning human identity and our ascendant status in the universe. In order to better suit this intention, its source has shifted from external forms and phenomena to internal, subjective anxieties, fantasies, mental disturbances, and sense of guilt experienced by the individual.106 The estranged reality, the play with the absurd, and the dislocation of the human subject are all attempts to “invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world,”107 to exorcise that which we sense but do not want to acknowledge fearing our own disintegration. The id is revealed and named, its alien force subdued and successfully incorporated into the ego. Yet in the case of McCarthy’s novel, this cathartic, therapeutic effect seems to be altogether absent. “The scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one.”108 And it is not merely a superficial psychological effect but an impact which infringes on our basic existential assumptions concerning ourselves as humans. Although we tend to dismiss McCarthy’s bloodthirsty brutes as macabre exaggerations, we cannot resist the sense that they in truth somehow confirm our deepest and most distressing anxieties and misgivings. And the urge to “laugh it all off,” which does appear after a few subsequent rereadings of the novel, 105

Wolfgang Kayser quoted in William Prather, “’Like something seen through bad glass’: Narrative Strategies in the Orchard Keeper,” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach ( Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 40. 106 See McElroy, “Groteska,” 155. 107 Kayser quoted in Prather, “’Like something seen through bad glass,’” 38. 108 Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness,’” 119.

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does not put us in a more psychologically comfortable position. On the contrary, sensing that we not only have something primarily constitutional in common with the beast-like protagonists of Blood Meridian but that we also feel like laughing when we witness the multiple massacres they carry out, we are driven to even more upsetting conclusions concerning our own capabilities.

Approaching Camp Concluding my discussion of Blood Meridian in the context of the grotesque, I would risk the observation (however inappropriate it may initially seem) that McCarthy’s dismembered bodies, and the cut-off head notably, are not wholly devoid of associations with kitsch or camp109– connotations, which may be regarded as a testimony to the novel’s affinities with postmodern aesthetics. The excess of bubbling blood, of sizzling brains, and of scalped skulls “like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon”110 at some point, especially after a few rereadings, leads to an impression that we are dealing with deliberate overstatement and a kind of macabre extravagance. Particularly in McCarthy’s more recent novel, No Country for Old Men (2005), when we read such passages as the one in which Chigurh strangles the deputy (“Chigurh only hauled the harder. The nickelplated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy’s right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it.”111), it is difficult to resist the sense of the blood being colored paint and the protagonists mere actors in a second-class thriller. In one of the first attempts to “edify” the notion of camp, Susan Sontag described it as a “sensibility (as distinct from an idea),” which is contained predominantly in the receiver’s reaction to a given work, object, situation, or person–which therefore lies chiefly (though not exclusively) “in the eye of the beholder.”112 It is not that something simply is camp, but 109

Michaá GáowiĔski notes that while in “major works of art” the grotesque is designed to be an antithesis of kitsch, within mass culture it has actually come to be closely associated with it; see “Groteska jako kategoria estetyczna” [“The Grotesque as an Aesthetic Category] in Groteska [The Grotesque], ed. GáowiĔski (GdaĔsk : sáowo/obraz terytoria, 2003), 15. 110 McCarthy, BM, 174. 111 Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 6. 112 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell Publishing, 1966), 275-77.

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that it allows itself to be “experienced as Camp.” This experience, as in the case of the effect produced by the grotesque, contains elements of both enchantment and revulsion. “I am strongly drawn to Camp,” Sontag admits, “and almost as strongly offended by it.” The sensibility of camp, as that of the grotesque, entails a peculiar kind of ambivalence towards extravagance or exaggeration which was intentionally devised as “dead serious” but “cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”113 Some readers of Blood Meridian actually report arriving at a curious state of cynical indifference, a numbing detachment in reaction to the baroque excess of its idiom. Mark Winchell, for instance, notes that “sustained and senseless violence (...) can shock for only so long before it begins to numb” or even lead to a kind of “boredom”;114 at this point one may begin to “ask questions about that talent and to wonder whether one is perceiving it rightly and judging it fairly.”115 Although I find the notion that McCarthy’s prose at moments comes close to campy sensibility appealing and stimulating, it must be clearly stated that his novels cannot be read as examples of camp per se (at least not according to Sontag’s “orthodox” definition). They lack a number of crucial attributes such as the quality of urban artifice, the inclination towards the sentimental, as well as the tone of purely aesthetic playfulness and detached elite dandyism. Most critics of Blood Meridian in fact praise it for qualities wholly incompatible with typically campy ones, that is, its authenticity and intense naturalism, its philosophical gravity and its expansive, epic mode. Therefore, perhaps McCarthy’s novel is rather an example of a work that “comes close to Camp” but does not “make it, because it succeeds.” Like Blake’s drawings or Eisenstein’s films, “despite all [its] exaggeration,” it cannot be fully identified with camp because it tends to be viewed as genuine and ultimately saying what it had at the outset meant to say.116 Yet the fact that an excess of minute, “hyperreal” cruelty towards the human body may, in spite of its depressing, gruesome dreadfulness, evoke a response that somewhat resembles our reaction to camp, underscores the supposition of the “unclassifiability” of McCarthy’s writing, of its resistance to distinct pigeonholing, of its always lingering on the border of diverse, often contradictory qualities.

113

Sontag, “Notes,” 276, 281, 282, 284. Mark Royden Winchell, “Inner Dark: or, The Place of Cormac McCarthy,” Southern Review 26 (1990): 308. 115 Josyph, “Blood Music,” 170. 116 Sontag, “Notes,” 284. 114

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Beyond the Visual McCarthy’s West is indeed a hostile place. It espouses the judge in his efforts to eradicate all traces and fittingly inscribes itself into the “optical democracy” which unceremoniously levels the human with the nonhuman. Its reading in terms of the grotesque does not offer much consolation, either. Nevertheless, the traces of past events remain in the people themselves; they continue to haunt human memories and dreams (as the judge visits the dreams of the kid). “When even the bones is gone in the desert,”117 something in us prevails. Yet at this point we must go beyond the purely visual. Despite its strong focus on exaggerated images, on presenting and representing violence as an exclusively visual phenomenon, as something we may witness, look or stare at, McCarthy’s narrators do seem to acknowledge the limitations of visuality. As any attentive reader of McCarthy will notice, his novels repeatedly underscore the deceitfulness of vision and sight, treating this allegedly most objective of all the senses as in fact highly limited and charged with individual constraints. The major observer in all of McCarthy’s novels is Lester Ballard, the protagonist of Child of God (1973). He is frequently presented as one who peeps, looks, gazes, inspects, and stares at female bodies (both live and dead), at couples making love, at his neighbors preparing supper, at trees in the forest, and at the falling snow. Ballard’s main preoccupation is murdering subsequent women and collecting their dead bodies for coitus and for inspection, and both the homicides he commits as well as his continuous intent gaze are clearly reflections of his deep desire to control and master change. Yet Ballard’s gaze does not grant him the power he longs for–with the typical disposition of what psychiatrists term a “voyeur,” he is more interested in seeing than in acting, in watching people rather than in socializing with them. At the end of the novel, Ballard is presented as a helpless, impotent, gnome-like figure, a “weedshaped onearmed human,” who deliberately turns himself in appearing at the county hospital “swaddled up in outsized overalls and covered all over with red mud” like a powerless and wholly dependent newborn baby.118 This way, Child of God runs counter to traditional Western imagery, in which the observing eye is a symbol of power and all-knowing omnipotence.

117 118

McCarthy, BM, 310, 103. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (London: Picador, 1989), 192.

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Interestingly, many of McCarthy’s books contain a number of scenes which offer exceptionally detailed descriptions of deformed eyes–eyes taken out of their sockets, eyes unnaturally blinking and nictitating, or eyes exuding some sickly liquid–images which, on the one hand, take us back to grotesque aesthetics and on the other, undermine our confidence in the reliability and genuineness of the sense of sight. In one of the most disturbing episodes in McCarthy’s whole output, Culla Holme, the main male protagonist of Outer Dark, comes upon three mysterious gruesome men who turn out to be in possession of his son. The child “was naked and half coated with dust so that it seemed lightly furred and when it turned to look up at him he saw one eyeless and angry red socket like a stokehole to a brain in flames.” When Culla (“the child . . . watching him”) asks what happened to the boy’s eye, the leader of the dark trio cynically answers, “I reckon he must of lost it somewheres. He still got one. . . . Some folks has two and cain’t see.”119 The deeply disquieting stare of the naked socket, a gaze that seems to reach one’s profound inner self, appears also in Suttree. When the title protagonist goes to visit his ill degenerate friend, Ab, the door is opened by Ab’s grief-stricken wife who barely manages to stammer out that her husband has died. Yes. He’s out. The Lord taken him out. She began to cry, standing there in her housecoat and slippers, holding her shoulders. The tears that ran on her pitted cheek looked like ink. She had her eye closed but the lid that covered the naked socket did not work so well anymore and it sagged in the cavity and struggled up and that raw hole seemed to watch him with some ghastly equanimity, an eye for another kind of seeing like the pineal eye in atavistic reptiles watching through time, through conjugations of space and matter to that still center where the living and the dead are one.120

In the same novel, the foolishly naive yet ingeniously inventive delinquent Gene Harrogate finds a human eye still attached to its muscle in a wrecked car in the junkyard. McCarthy’s fascination with the deformed eye (not altogether alien to the idée fixe of George Bataille’s renowned Story of the Eye121) continues throughout his subsequent books. In The Crossing he offers another extremely dismaying description, this time concerning an appallingly 119

Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (New York: Vintage, 1993), 231-32. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (New York: Vintage, 1992), 447. 121 See Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (London: Penguin, 2001, which is the latest edition containing commentaries by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes). 120

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grotesque act of blinding as such. A Mexican revolutionary is punished for spitting in the face of a German officer who was walking among the rebels and insulting them to his own amusement as they waited for their turn to be shot to death. The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and . . . what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cods wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks. . . . He cried out in despair and waved his hands about before him. He could not see the face of his enemy. The architect of his darkness, the thief of his light. He could see the trampled dust of the street beneath him. . . . He could see his own mouth. . . . No one had ever seen such a thing. They spoke in awe. The red holes in his skull glowed like lamps. As if there were a deeper fire there that the demon had sucked forth. They tried to put his eyes back into their sockets with a spoon but none could manage it and the eyes dried on his cheeks like grapes and the world grew dim and colorless and then it vanished forever.122

In Cities of the Plain the beautiful girlish prostitute Magdalena, with whom John Grady falls in love, is attended by an old criada who, again, has only one eye. When this “solitary eye” blinks grotesquely, “the wrinkled lid flutter[s] over the pale blind eye,” and “she appear[s] to be winking in some suggestive complicity.”123 Also, one of the mares on Mac’s ranch, where John Grady and Billy Parham work, has only one eye since the other had been “knocked out with a stick” by the man who had previously owned her.124 In McCarthy’s more recent book, No Country for Old Men, the old Uncle Ellis whom sheriff Bell comes to visit in search of some existential wisdom, also has “one clouded eye from a cholla spine where a horse had thrown him years ago.”125 The theme of blind, often not altogether sane preachers and maestros is another motif which reappears time and again in a number of McCarthy’s novels (Outer Dark, Suttree, Cities of the Plain), obviously being an allusion to, among numerous other works employing this recognized image, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

122

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage, 1995), 276-77. Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (New York: Knopf, 1998), 73, 182, 101. 124 McCarthy, COP, 74. 125 McCarthy, NCOM, 263. 123

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in which a counterfeit preacher pretends to have blinded himself in order to gain credence among his “disciples.”126 The sense of sight, McCarthy seems to suggest, is not to be fully trusted; we may be deceived by what our eyes appear to behold. I have already pointed to those scenes in Blood Meridian in which people and inanimate objects alike are presented as “shimmering” and “dissolving” in the heat, as if they were mere “likenesses” of things in themselves. The narration of The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy’s first novel, renders a similar impression of a reality in which human and inhuman forms merge into a hostile, indistinguishable, bleak substance in which man’s position is uncertain and insecure: For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky. He [Kenneth Rattner] walked slowly in the dust, stopping from time to time and bobbling on one foot like some squat ungainly bird while he examined the wad of tape coming through his shoe-sole. He turned again. Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had emerged and was struggling toward him. It loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and solidity of a pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the same liquid shape by which it came.127

The already mentioned blind soldier of the Mexican Revolution whom Billy Parham encounters during his journey in The Crossing explicitly declares that a liberation from sight may actually open up the possibility of a more direct experience of reality: He spoke of the very first years of his blindness in which the world about him awaited his movements. He said that men with eyes may select what they wish to see but for the blind the world appears of its own will. He said that for the blind everything was abruptly at hand, that nothing ever announced its approach.128

Those who do not see are therefore, paradoxically, somehow closer to possessing the truth about the world and to acknowledging its eternal gloom:

126

See Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). 127 Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper (London: Picador, 1994), 7. 128 McCarthy, TC, 291.

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He said that the light of the world was in men’s eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see. He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men’s imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen. . . . What can be touched at best . . . are only tracings of where the real has been. Perhaps they are not even that. Perhaps they are no more than obstacles to be negotiated in the ultimate sightlessness of the world.129

Similarly, the blind man encountered by Culla Holme in Outer Dark– “ragged and serene, who spoke to him a good day out of his constant dark,” seems to be deeply reconciled with the surrounding reality. He is not a figure signifying lack of any kind but rather one who has much to offer to others: Holme spat. I got to get on, he said. Yes, the blind man said. Is they anything you need? Need? Anything you need. I don’t need nothing. I always like to ast.130

The Reverend, another preacher-figure appearing in Outer Dark, although judgmental and overly schematic, delivers a clichéd sermon explicitly dwelling upon the notion of blindness as not so much a lack but rather a merit in the eyes of the Lord: They’s been more than one feller brought to the love of Jesus over the paths of affliction. And what better way than blind? In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most. I believe it’s got a good deal to recommend it. The grace of God don’t rest easy on a man. It can blind him easy as not. . . . And who did Jesus love, friends? The lame the halt and the blind, that’s who. . . . Ever legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God. Amen.131

As Arthur Ownby–old “Uncle Ather” mentions near the ending of The Orchard Keeper, “Knowed a blind man oncet could tell lots of things afore they happen.”132 Scenes of graphically depicted bodily violence are 129

McCarthy, TC, 283, 294. McCarthy, OD, 240. 131 McCarthy, OD, 226. 132 McCarthy, OK, 225. 130

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therefore not the only means McCarthy uses to deal with the evil his protagonists take part in. Interestingly, the limitations of visuality in themselves also seem to be inscribed into the theoretical assumptions underlying the concept of the grotesque. If we treat grotesque representations as essentially subversive, meant to destabilize our peace of mind and our secure notions about ourselves and the surrounding reality, we acknowledge the fact that they point beyond the purely visual. In the manner of negative theology, grotesque images may be perceived as “screens” which, according to Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite (the chief medieval theoretician of negative theology), “present us with images of God, designed to be imperfect, distorted, even contradictory” since our frail intellect is not capable of facing God directly, without any mediating representations. This imperfection and mutual contradiction, apparent even to our minds, is to kindle in us the desire to ascend from a world of mere shadows and images to the contemplation of the Divine Light itself. Thus, it is, paradoxically enough, by evading us that God becomes gradually manifest; He conceals Himself before us in order to be revealed!133 The subversiveness of the grotesque may be therefore said to extend not only to existential but also to strictly metaphysical issues. Their ugliness (with which we feel such awkward kinship since it is, in the end, a reflection of our own corruption) and the uneasy laughter they provoke “remind us that unity is beyond our grasp. Their meaning is that they do not mean; we understand them by failing to understand.”134 By generating the unsettling experience of a profound lack, grotesque images may be said to point to divine reality as that which may grant us the beauty, clarity, peace, unity, and wholeness we so deeply long for.

133 134

Otto van Simson on Dionysus quoted in Harpham, On the Grotesque, 53. Harpham, On the Grotesque, 81.

CHAPTER THREE EVIL AS FATE

In the previous chapter, I discussed the notion of violence as a visual phenomenon–as actions which are presented to the reader in the form of graphic, often exaggerated images. Yet I also attempted to prove that McCarthy’s grotesque aesthetics is, in the end, meant to turn against itself and take us beyond the realm of the purely visual. The present chapter will therefore deal with the sphere that may be broadly referred to as the verbal since it involves narrating, telling stories, and viewing one’s life as a preplanned tale written by the hand of an unknown, distant, and obscure power. The more self-conscious of McCarthy’s characters tend to perceive their own past, present, and future as inextricably intertwined and predetermined by forces beyond human control. What is more, they often feel as if externally compelled to make certain decisions and undertake certain actions, often involving the hurting or murdering of others. It is as though they experienced evil as, to use Paul Ricoeur’s concept, “something already there,” as a thing “prior to itself” that “everyone finds and continues, beginning anew.”1 I would thus like to discuss evil viewed as the predetermined fate of all humans–both the evil that we unavoidably experience from others and the evil that we ourselves necessarily perpetrate. I will be using Kant’s notion of “radical evil” to which we are all prone as well as Ricoeur’s paradoxical concept of “unfree will”–free will limited by the impossibility to foresee the consequences of our “free” choices. As far as Cormac McCarthy’s writing is concerned, I will concentrate on the concept of determined fate as it is verbalized in the stories and speeches delivered by McCarthy’s protagonists, and attempt to present the various stances these protagonists adopt in confrontation with their own individual fate, from the passive acquiescence of most of McCarthy’s female figures to the determined self1

I have discussed Paul Ricoeur’s notion of evil in detail in Chapter One (see pages 5-9). The quotations come from his Symbolika Záa [Symbols of Evil], trans. Stanisáaw Cichowicz and Maria Schab (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1986), 244.

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will cultivated by Dueña Alfonsa from All the Pretty Horses and Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. I will also examine the notion of repetitiveness and circularity in McCarthy’s writings, viewing it as an illustration of his idea of the irrevocability of all that is to come. Finally, I will briefly return to Blood Meridian to present the concept of innate evil, which will function as a linking point between the discussion of evil as fate and the analysis of the nature of evil as such (the topic of the fourth chapter of my book).

Evil and the Freedom of the Human Will As I have mentioned in Chapter One to my book, Kant regarded evil as something external to man. He rejected both the notion of innate evil in which we indulge simply because our animal nature is naturally prone to it, as well as the concept of evil as privation, a lack of the good. The adoption of the first perspective leads, according to Kant, to an exculpation of man’s wrongdoing, and hence to an evasion of responsibility, whereas an adherence to the latter results in the enfeeblement of human freedom since evil is not put forward as a real, actual choice, equivalent to the good. Kant therefore claimed that while evil is an ontologically substantial reality existing independently of man, we may choose it in an act of free will (understood as practical reason) according to an analogous scheme that takes place when we choose to abide by the good. Yet this mechanism is valid only with reference to evil understood as the indulgence in self-love, the principle of which is the pursuit of individual happiness regardless of its costs for others. Kant terms this “radical” evil, not because it entails a particularly depraved or outrageous behavior, but because it is rooted in the very foundation of an individual’s will and involves a diametrical change in their disposition. The good, on the other hand, is defined in Kantian terms as fidelity to the purely rational maxims of morality governed by the categorical imperative. Therefore, the only form of evil that we perpetrate in a wholly deliberate manner (and, consequently, the only evil that we may be held fully responsible for), is one that is subjectively, and mistakenly, viewed as a form of the good (individual happiness). Kant argued that devilishness, or evil disinterestedly done for evil’s own sake, cannot stem from man’s rational free will but must be a form of externally imposed

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“compulsion to immorality which turns the agent into a wanton and nullifies the attribution of responsibility.”2 Regardless of the difficulty in applying Kant’s distinction between evil done for evil’s sake and evil perpetrated in order to achieve egotistically viewed happiness to practical real-life situations (as well as to the motivation of McCarthian protagonists), it is interesting to note that Kant associates conscious evil with compulsion and a kind of external determination. The source of this conviction, in Kant’s case, obviously stems from his idealistic concept of man as a rational and essentially moral being, yet the connotation of “pure” evil with enforcement and necessity is worth noting, as it reappears in other philosophical, theological, and psychological contexts. The idea that an individual’s choice of evil is never a fully conscious and deliberate one is also present in the writings of Paul Ricoeur.3 According to Ricoeur, the natural human propensity to exceed and transgress our limitations makes us particularly liable to succumb to various external temptations and illusions seemingly offering the fulfillment of this desire. As evil tends to deceitfully present itself as a form of the good, and since our innate limitations make it impossible to accurately foretell the outcomes of our decisions, our will is simultaneously “free” (because in the end we are the ones who make the actual choice) and “unfree” (because it is restricted by certain constraints which exceed the scope of our influence). Ricoeur’s concept of unfree will bears some affinity to Schopenhauer’s thought in that matter though the latter’s questioning of the freedom of human will issued from a more profound kind of skepticism. According to Schopenhauer, the mere fact that we choose in accordance with our own will is not in itself a manifestation of freedom because our will as such is not a matter of choice. In other words, we choose in compliance with our will, but we do not choose the will itself. Human will is therefore never free but always given; it is an irrational force that determines our preferences and inclinations. We can therefore speak about freedom only on the level of acting, not in the dimension of wanting or willing.4

2

Pablo Muchnik, “The Fragmented Will–Kant on Evil,” Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric and Power, September 2003: 5, accessed February 28, 2012, http://www.ars-rhetorica.net/Queen/VolumeSpecialIssue4/Articles/Muchnik.pdf. 3 See especially Ricoeur, Symbolika Záa, 144-49. 4 Hanna BuczyĔska-Garewicz, “Sens woli i wolnoĞci,” [“The Meaning of Will and Freedom”] in Wola [The Will], Hanna Arendt, trans. Robert Piáat (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1996), 10-11.

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The experience of evil as a compelling external temptation running counter to the inward moral law we wish to abide by is in fact deeply ingrained in the biblical tradition and most emphatically verbalized by Paul the Apostle in his renowned string of negations and counternegations: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I do what I do not want. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Epistle to the Romans 7: 15-19).5 We succumb to the temptation of evil as if against ourselves; we tend to do things we wish we had not done and not engage in those we wish we had actually undertaken. If on so many occasions we choose to act in contradiction to our authentic inclinations, is free will a mere illusion we abide by simply for the sake of maintaining the sense of control and influence so crucial to our sanity? In Kant’s view, “the mere fact that man is confronted with an ethical demand–the categorical imperative–(which involves a difference between the is and the ought) is . . . an indication of the freedom of the human will.”6 His answer to the problem of human will is therefore a transcendental one: our reason cannot accept the notion of determinism, the conviction that every cause is conditioned by some other previous cause, but in its constant innate search for “totality and the unconditioned” it arrives at the notion of a cause that “starts a chain of events without itself being the effect of another cause.” Therefore, the causal determinism that is present in nature does not rule out the “transcendental freedom” of an individual.7 The grounds of this kind of metaphysical deduction were, however, undermined already by Nietzsche’s assertion that our belief in the freedom of the will is an illusion of morality. Every event in reality is necessary and conditioned though the order of nature is hardly sensible or possible to predict. Therefore, Nietzsche claims that man cannot be made responsible for anything, neither for his essence, nor his motives, nor his actions, nor his effects. Thereby one must acknowledge

5

Quoted after the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVC), accessed April 5, 2009, http://www.geocities.com/sacra_scriptura/eng_bible_index.html. 6 Svend Andersen, “Determinism or Meaninglessness: The Philosophical Challenge of Science in Kant and Logstrup,” in Free Will and Determinism, eds. Viggo Mortensen and Robert C. Sorensen (Sydsats, Christiansfeld: Aarhus UP, 1987), 103. 7 Andersen, “Determinism or Meaninglessness,” 102-3.

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that the history of moral sensations is the history of an error, the error of responsibility. And this rests upon the error of the freedom of the will.8

The questions of the freedom of human will, of our responsibility for the choices we make, and of the extent to which we can influence our fate obviously belong to the most frequently debated issues of the Western philosophical tradition. In his elaborate study of Pascal, Leszek Koáakowski actually refers to the matter of the will as the “core of theological debate, the major issue which, from the theological point of view, more than any other divided churches, sects, and schools in Europe.”9 Lutherans and Calvinists, Arminians and Gomarists, Jansenists, Jesuits, and Thomists all differed primarily in their stance on the problem of predestination, the human will, and the grace of God.

An Indifferent God Weaving the World The issue of human fate and the extent to which we can actually shape it is also a major theme in the writings of Cormac McCarthy. The protagonists of his novels tend to involuntarily return to scenes and places they have already witnessed, they seem to experience reality as “given” and formed outside the scope of their personal influence, and, on various occasions, they explicitly discuss and argue the matter of destiny and determination. One of the most powerful images illustrating these issues appears in The Crossing in a story that Billy Parham hears from a hermit living alone in the church ruins of a desolate Mexican town. It is a story of a man who loses first his parents in an American invasion on Caborca and then, as a grown-up, his own little son in a natural disaster in the town of Bavispe, but is himself spared, “called forth twice out of the ashes, out of the dust and rubble.” He nevertheless experiences this unique election as a terrible curse and comes to function as “but some brevity of a being. His claims to the common life of men became tenuous, insubstantial. He was a trunk without root or branch.”10 It is then that he begins dreaming of God.

8

Nietzsche quoted in Andersen, “Determinism or Meaninglessness,” 106. Leszek Koáakowski, Bóg nam nic nie jest dáuĪny. Krótka uwaga o religii Pascala i o duchu jansenizmu [God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Note on the Religion of Pascal and the Spirit of Jansenism], trans. Ireneusz Kania (Cracow: Znak, 1994), 12. 10 McCarthy, TC, 146, 147. 9

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In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. . . . And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping.11

The protagonists of McCarthy’s novels recurrently arrive at the notion that the force which, at least to some extent, shapes and runs the world is a more or less explicitly pronounced and personalized God. “Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily,” the hermit tells Billy. “Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows and cannot be hid or fled from.” The major drama they experience is, therefore, not disbelief in a controlling, omniscient God but rather the steady process of coming to “believe terrible things of Him.”12 Throughout McCarthy’s texts we may trace various versions of the concept of a God who is so compulsively preoccupied with the task of devising the world that He can devote no time or attention to the pleas of His creation. In Blood Meridian, for instance, the wounded kid waiting in fever for an operation dreams about a “false moneyer,” “a coldforger who worked with hammer and die.” The kid cannot clearly see this “other man” who “seemed an artisan and a worker in metal” as he is “enshadowed” by the dominating figure of Judge Holden. The coiner, “an exile from men’s fires,” is hammering out “like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be”–for the day which will never come since “the night does not end.”13 The figure of the coiner also obsessively haunts Dueña Alfonsa from All the Pretty Horses. The dueña, the aunt and caretaker of Alejandra, John Grady Cole’s muse and lover, does not consent to their marital plans because she considers John Grady to be irrevocably consigned to bad luck. Her belief in inescapable fate is a standpoint she assumed from her father who used to relate a parable in which the coiner takes a “slug from the tray” and places it “in the die in one of two ways” thus performing the “act” from which “all else followed.” The coiner, “that anonymous small 11

McCarthy, TC, 149. McCarthy, TC, 148. 13 McCarthy, BM, 310. 12

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person at his workbench,” whom the dueña’s father considered to be a metaphor of “the connectedness of things” and of the “accessibility of the origins of things,” is for her more intransigent than fate. “I think that if it were fate that ruled our houses,” she says, “it could perhaps be flattered or reasoned with. But the coiner cannot.” That is why she prefers the image of the world as a puppet show managed by strings which “terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on.”14 Yet the assumption underlying the metaphor of the puppet show is essentially concordant with the outlook expressed in the parable of the coiner: it is the belief in a radical determinism that envisions the present as an incessant process of repetition. “What is constant in history,” Alfonsa proclaims, “is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God–who knows all that can be known–seems powerless to change.”15 As in the case of the “false moneyer” who visits the kid’s dream in Blood Meridian, the coiner-God professed by the dueña is likewise at some point impotent: His power and influence diminish in the face of the evil and violence perpetrated by humans. The God who is the addressee of the prayers and curses of the father in McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road (2006) also seems to be helpless in the face of the horrific global disaster which struck the earth. He remains unmoved by the pleas and oaths of the man, who is forced to passively watch his little son grow thinner, colder, and weaker with each passing day. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.16

If, therefore, the world is indeed a “puppet show,” as Dueña Alfonsa imagined, the plot of which has been minutely planned beforehand, it is not God who holds all the strings. During His uninterrupted preoccupation with devising “the best of worlds,” some issues down on earth simply seemed to have circumvented the scope of His control. Those “yet other puppets” who have taken over some crucial features of the show rather

14

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Knopf, 1992), 230-31. McCarthy, APH, 239. 16 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 10. 15

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represent some anonymous malignant force avid for men’s blood and their mutual destruction. The avowal that “What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ” is an assertion that is repeatedly proclaimed in Blood Meridian by the horrifically outspoken Judge Holden and accepted by the rest of the Glanton gang with their characteristically mindless indifference. The order of the universe, according to Holden, has been irreversibly devised by “gods of vengeance and compassion” who likewise “lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence.”17 A similar pronouncement is voiced by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Chigurh is a coldly cynical psychopath who kills everyone that has “ever had a cross word with him,” one who “doesnt have a sense of humor,” and therefore “the people he meets tend to have very short futures. Nonexistent, in fact.”18 Before he kills his victims, he dispassionately observes their growing panic and helpless despair, forming a final judgment of their life and inquisitively listening to their last thoughts. Then he calmly and sagaciously explains to them the inevitability of what he is about to perform. When he comes to kill Carla Jean, the wife of the man, already dead, who stole his money, Chigurh assures her that the moment of her death is just a minor link in the eternal chain of necessary causes and effects: I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. . . . A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. . . . This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.19

Chigurh, like Judge Holden, therefore views reality as a perfectly deterministic system in which one occurrence triggers another, and that one still another, thus forming a meticulously devised sequence of irreplaceable causes and their results which cannot be in any way prevented from being realized. And, once again, it is not necessarily God who is the sole author and agent of this ultimately fatal plan. This conviction explicitly surfaces in the conversation between sheriff Bell, 17

McCarthy, BM, 141, 330. McCarthy, NCOM, 153, 150. 19 McCarthy, NCOM, 259-60. 18

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saddened by the turn things have taken in his county, and his old uncle Ellis whom he decides to visit: You aint turned infidel have you Uncle Ellis? No. No. Nothing like that. Do you think God knows what’s happenin? I expect he does. You think he can stop it? No. I dont.20

Another recurrent motif of McCarthy’s novels is connected with attempts at fortune-telling, of which his protagonists are usually wary and skeptical. Whether these are readings of tarot cards as in Blood Meridian or of the palm as in the Border Trilogy, they know that whatever is written in them “could not be helped be it good or bad,”21 and that since all men’s common fate is death, no fortune-telling can be benign. Interestingly, they also sense that God does not wish them to decipher the particulars of their own destiny, that their ignorance and submissiveness in this matter perfectly suit His purposes: . . . if a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?22

In any case, most McCarthian characters more or less distinctly sense that time can bring only something catastrophic (“I look for real calamity afore this year is out,” says Arthur Ownby in The Orchard Keeper23), yet they make no efforts to change the dreadful future that awaits them and passively accede to all that each day brings. The only alternative to the anxiety aroused by the prospect of a coming disaster is a resort to meaninglessness and nothingness. This is most clearly seen in the dialogue between Billy Parham and his younger brother, Boyd, in The Crossing: Billy? 20

McCarthy, NCOM, 269. McCarthy, TC, 369. 22 McCarthy, TC, 407. 23 McCarthy, OK, 225. 21

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What. I had this dream. What dream. I had it twice. Well what was it. There was this big fire out on the dry lake. There aint nothin to burn on a dry lake. I know it. What happened. These people were burnin. The lake was on fire and they was burnin up. . . . It aint nothin. It’s just a bad dream. Go to sleep. It was real as day. I could see it. People have dreams all the time. It dont mean nothin. Then what do they have em for? I dont know. Go to sleep. Billy? What. I had this feelin that somethin bad was goin to happen. There aint nothin bad goin to happen. You just had a bad dream is all. It don mean somethin bad is goin to happen. What does it mean? It don’t mean nothin. Go to sleep.24

This is probably the longest conversation between the two brothers throughout the whole novel. Billy is unable to appease Boyd’s sense of upcoming dread since he in fact knows that his brother is not mistaken. The apprehension, which powerfully infects the reader, first materializes itself in the slaughter of the boys’ parents (an event of which the 14-yearold Boyd is the sole witness) and finally in Boyd’s own death, which Billy, despite his stance of fatherly protectiveness, is unable to prevent. “Many do not wish to see what lies before them in plain sight,” the primadonna of a traveling circus tells them. “The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears the shape but only the one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed.” McCarthy’s characters know that “Plans [are] one thing and journeys another”25; that is why many of them choose to simply have no plans at all and live with what each day offers.

24 25

McCarthy, TC, 35-6. McCarthy, TC, 230, 185.

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Women, Children, and “Idiots” This attitude of passive acquiescence of what life brings is especially manifest in McCarthy’s presentation of women, children, and the mentally disabled. It must first be acknowledged that the presence of girls and women on the pages of McCarthy’s novels is extremely rare. In fact, they “do not emerge from the androcentric narratives with attributes enough to define them as distinct personae.”26 Nevertheless, the phraseology he customarily uses in these scant descriptions is quite consistent and characteristically associates the female figures with inert, lifeless dolls.27 One of the first scenes of Outer Dark (1968) presents Rinthy Holme delivering her incestuous child, and it is a birth which is from the outset associated with death. Her brother Culla walking into the room thinks “she had died, lying there looking up with eyes that held nothing at all.” Having delivered their baby, she is unable to move and watches Culla with “doll’s eyes of painted china.” She can do nothing to prevent his taking the newborn “chap” into the woods and leaving it there to die. Her face remains “bland and impervious” even when she discovers that the alleged grave of her son in fact holds nothing but stones. From that moment she sets out on a hopeless journey in search of the baby boy, in the course of which the narration upholds her association with an inanimate doll. Preparing to leave their shabby cabin, Rinthy put on her dress, “pirouetted slowly in the center of the room like a doll unwinding,” and “with a piece of broken comb raked her dead yellow hair.” When she is invited to eat dinner with a family on whose door she knocks, her tired face resembles a “china mask.”28 Later on, near the ending of the novel, she stays for some time with a man who is taken aback by her passive indifference. He sat at the table . . . watching her move from the stove to the safe and back, mute, shuffling, wooden. . . . She started past him toward the door and he took her by the elbow. Hold up a minute, he said. She stopped and came about slowly, doll-like, one arm poised. She was not looking at him. Look here at me. Rinthy. 26

Patrick W. Shaw, “Female Presence, Male Violence, and the Art of Artlessness in the Border Trilogy,” in: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 256. 27 With regard to McCarthy’s presentation of female characters I have greatly benefited from Nell Sullivan’s essay “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God” (in Myth, Legend, Dust, ed. Rick Wallach, 6877). 28 McCarthy, OD, 14, 24, 53.

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Chapter Three She swung her eyes vaguely toward him. You ain’t even civil, he said. It ain’t civil to come and go thataway and not say nothin never. I ain’t got nothin to say. Well, damn it you could say somethin. Hello or goodbye or kiss my ass. Somethin. Couldn’t ye? I’ve not took up cussin yet, she said. Just hello or goodbye then. Couldn’t ye? I reckon. Well? Goodnight, she said.29

Yet Nell Sullivan argues that despite her doll-like apathy, Rinthy Holme does preserve “relative strength and dignity.”30 She herself makes the decision to set out on the journey “huntin her chap”; she also demonstrates her “power of yes and no” in her encounters with men who are not indifferent towards her femininity, especially the boy whom she refuses to date.31 Even though in the midst of her errand she is described as “ragged, shoeless, deferential and half deranged,” the narration underscores her “almost palpable amnion of propriety” and air of solemn “gravity.” This “sort of narrative kindness” towards the figure of Rinthy Holme, the “respect for her person remarkable in light of the horrors that happen to other bodies in the text”32 is upheld throughout the novel to the final scene in which she discovers the “charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage” of her long searched son, walking about them “in a frail agony of grace” and finally falling asleep among the ashes of the dead fire.33 If the doll-like Rinthy Holme retains a degree of integrity and selfdetermination, these powers are altogether denied to the women who appear in McCarthy’s next novel, Child of God (1973). The main protagonist, the necrophile sociopath Lester Ballard, after being rejected by the dumpkeeper’s “long blonde flatshanked” daughter, gratifies his sexual desires by copulating with the dead bodies of women he himself murders. He collects their corpses first in the attic of his dilapidated house, and then, after it burns down, in a huge cave on the outskirts of town, in

29

McCarthy, OD, 209-10. Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif,” 71. 31 Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif,” 71. 32 Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif,” 72. 33 McCarthy, OD, 74, 151, 211, 237-38. 30

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the very “bowels of the mountain,” resembling the hellish “innards of some great beast.”34 Ballard’s treatment of his victims is explicitly depicted as playing with grotesquely huge, human-size dolls. When he fetched the body of his first victim, a “young and very pretty” girl, “he took off all her clothes and looked at her, inspecting her body carefully, as if he would see how she were made.” Then “he went outside and looked in through the window at her lying naked before the fire.”35 He then decides to haul her body up into the attic to keep it safe out of sight of anyone who might chance to come near his desolate house. He ties a rope around her waist and pulls her up like a marionette: She rose slumpshouldered from the floor with her hair all down and began to bump slowly up the ladder. Half-way up she paused, dangling. Then she began to rise again.36

On the next day, Ballard makes an excursion to a lingerie store, in the window spots a “crude wood manikin headless and mounted on a pole,” and, with an agitated and chagrined excitement, buys the “blowsy red dress” the manikin is wearing and red “drawers” and a “slip” to go with it.37 When he reaches his house, he finds the girl stiff and “wooden” from the cold. “Goddamn frozen bitch,” swears Ballard and takes her downstairs again to thaw by the fire. It was past midnight before she was limber enough to undress. She lay there naked on the mattress with her sallow breasts pooled in the light like wax flowers. Ballard began to dress her in her new clothes. He sat and brushed her hair with the dimestore brush he’d bought. He undid the top of the lipstick and screwed it out and began to paint her lips. He would arrange her in different positions and go out and peer in the window at her. After a while he just sat holding her, his hands feeling her body under the new clothes.38

The female protagonists of Child of God are therefore perfectly passive; they never even have the chance of protesting against the fate which they have been assigned, as Ballard murders each of them out of surprise, firing at them with his rifle. The Lane girl, his only victim who 34

McCarthy, CG, 28, 135. McCarthy, CG, 88, 91-92. 36 McCarthy, CG, 95. 37 McCarthy, CG, 96-99. 38 McCarthy, CG, 102-03. 35

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does not die instantly, “was lying in the floor” and “seemed to be trying to get up.” Yet Ballard, who is at the moment the sole executioner of her destiny, has absolute power over her: “Die, goddamn you, he said. She did.”39 This kind of passive indifference and dispassionate acquiescence to what is to come is characteristic not only of most of the women present in McCarthy’s texts but also of the children and the “idiots,” as they are referred to, whose disturbing mute presence haunts most of his major novels. The children who appear in McCarthy’s texts are nearly always orphans–ragged, neglected, unalterably saddened and muted by the bitter knowledge they had been prematurely granted. Many of them are involuntary witnesses of the violent death of their own parents: the girl mentioned in Child of God watched how two men pulled her parents “out of bed and blowed their heads off,”40 Boyd Parham from The Crossing sees how his parents are murdered in their own house by an Indian, while the numerous Mexican and Native American children in Blood Meridian “totter and blink in the pistolfire” as their whole families are being hacked and slaughtered and their villages plundered and burned down by the American scalphunters.41 Even if the children themselves survive, they either enter an untimely adulthood with full awareness of the “meanness” of the world (as John Grady Cole, Lacy Rawlins, and Jimmy Blevins in All the Pretty Horses, as Boyd and Billy Parham in The Crossing, as the kid in Blood Meridian, or the group of boys he encounters near the ending of the novel who ask him about whiskey, tobacco, and whores42), or else they themselves soon die a violent death. What is the most striking in McCarthy’s depictions of these deaths is precisely the children’s indifferent, even serene, passivity. In Blood Meridian, the Apache boy whom Judge Holden appropriates after a massacre carried out by the Glanton gang is described as “a strange dark child covered with ash. Part of his hair was burned away and it rode mute and stoic watching the land advance before it with huge eyes like some changeling.” Holden apparently familiarizes himself with the boy, yet soon callously murders him and leaves his scalped body behind: . . . in the morning the judge was dandling [the Apache boy] on one knee while the men saddled their horses. Toadvine saw him with the child as he

39

McCarthy, CG, 119. McCarthy, CG, 166-67. 41 McCarthy, BM, 174. 42 McCarthy, BM, 318-22. 40

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passed with his saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it.43

All throughout this occurrence the child’s attitude remains invariably impassive and controlled as some of the men “gave it jerky and it sat chewing and watching gravely the figures that passed above it.”44 The unnamed “chap” in Outer Dark whom Rinthy Holme seeks all throughout the novel appears only twice: closely after his birth (“his old man’s face flushed and wrinkled, small fingers clenched”45) and just before his death, which he too accepts with astoundingly silent detachment. The bearded leader of the mysterious evil trio bent forward and picked up the child. It made no gesture at all. It dangled from his hands like a dressed rabbit, a gross eldritch doll with ricketsprung legs and one eye opening and closing softly like a naked owl’s. He rose with it and circled the fire and held it out toward the man. The man looked at it a moment and then took it with one hand by its upper arm and placed it between his feet. . . . He reached and drew from his boot a slender knife. . . . [He] took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. . . . A dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.46

Children in McCarthy’s novels are therefore invariably associated with premature death and with a despondently submissive endorsement of their miserable fate. Yet we somehow sense that they know more than they are able to articulate, that their lack of resistance is dictated not by thoughtless ignorance or puerile naiveté but rather by some kind of unspoken awareness that such a submission is the only just and proper stance they have at their disposal.47 In most of McCarthy’s books we encounter a minor protagonist who is mentally handicapped–a mute and passive witness of the ongoing events, who seems to play an analogous role to that of the children appearing in 43

McCarthy, BM, 160, 164. McCarthy, BM, 164. 45 McCarthy, OD, 15. 46 McCarthy, OD, 235-36. 47 The boy in McCarthy’s latest, Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Road, deserves separate treatment. As the book itself differs substantially from the whole of McCarthy’s earlier writing, the boy is also unique in his maturity, tautology, moral sensitivity, and the close bond he preserves with his father throughout the entire novel. I discuss the relationship between the father and the son in The Road in Chapter Five of my book (“The Road: Father and Son Reconciled"). 44

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his novels. These “idiots” are mostly presented as speechless, mindless, slobbering half-animals who inertly observe the horrible phenomena taking place around them. Billy, the imbecile child whose alleged sister (or perhaps mother) Lester Ballard elects as one of his victims, is first referred to as “the thing in the floor” and later on depicted as A hugeheaded bald and slobbering primate that inhabited the lower reaches of the house, familiar of the warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat, a consort of roaches and great hairy spiders in their season, perennially benastied and afflicted with a nameless crud.48

When Ballard brings him a small “half froze” robin to play with, Billy chews its legs off, sitting as before, “a gross tottertoy in a gray small shirt,” its mouth “stained with blood and . . . chewing.” Ballard grins “uneasily” and explains the child’s motivation: “He wanted it to where it couldn’t run off”–a desire which could obviously function as a possible clarification of his own atrocities.49 This kind of uncanny affinity between the mentally disturbed man and the retarded boy is implied once more when Lester comes to visit them again–this time to claim the girl: “Ballard squatted before the stained and drooling cretin and tousled its near bald head. Why that boy’s got good sense, he said. Ain’t ye?” When the girl disregards Ballard’s obscene remarks (“Why don’t you show me them nice little titties, he said hoarsely.”), he shoots her with his rifle, takes the body, and gathers newspapers and magazines to burn the house down. All this time “the idiot watched mutely.”50 Already the ceiling of the room was packed with seething tiers of smoke and small fires licked along the bare wood floor at the edge of the linoleum. As he whirled about there in the kitchen door the last thing he saw through the smoke was the idiot child. It sat watching him, berryeyed filthy and frightless among the painted flames.51

Ballard therefore seems to somehow intuit that the backward boy possesses a kind of deeper knowledge of things and that it is this awareness that is the source of his fearlessly vigilant passivity. The imbecile protagonist in Blood Meridian, a mute witness of unspeakable acts of brutality, is an equally uncanny figure. “The Wild Man,” as a sign on his cage reads, is shown by his brother to the public for 48

McCarthy, CG, 77. McCarthy, CG, 79. 50 McCarthy, CG, 117, 118. 51 McCarthy, CG, 119-20. 49

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money. “The idiot was small and misshapen and his face was smeared with feces and he sat peering [...] with dull hostility silently chewing a turd.”52 When he is released from the cage by a group of villagers who wash and dress him in clean clothes, the first thing he does of his own will is to walk into the lake in a clear attempt to drown himself. He is saved and appropriated by Judge Holden, who clearly has an acute interest in all “freaks” of nature, and ultimately ends up as one of the three sole survivors of the whole Glanton gang expedition. Again, as with Lester Ballard and Billy, there seems to be a peculiar kind of kinship between the cultivated and smoothly eloquent yet inhumanly brutal Holden and the apparently brainless, drooling imbecile. In fact, as the narrator implies, the idiot is the only being Holden fosters without in the end annihilating it. They are both referred to as “creatures surpassing all description,” the pair of them resembling a “king” accompanied by his “fool.” They are “like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large,” “like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.”53 Interestingly enough, when the whole expedition is over, the judge spreads the rumor that “the cretin had been a respected Doctor of Divinity from Harvard College as recently as March of this year”54–obviously a purely sarcastic comment, which nevertheless indicates that Holden was liable to acknowledge the idiot’s latent capabilities. Similarly, in Suttree there appears the image of a “supremely atavistic,”55 half-human half-animal imbecile who seems to possess a kind of “raw” knowledge of things. In one of his delirious daydreams, the title protagonist recollects a scene from his boyhood, remembering how he saw an idiot in a yard in a leather harness chained to a clothesline and it leaned and swayed drooling and looked out upon the alley with eyes that fed the most rudimentary brain and yet seemed possessed of news in the universe denied right forms, like perhaps the eyes of squid whose simian depths seem to harbor some horrible intelligence. All down past the hedges a gibbering and howling in a hoarse frog’s voice, word perhaps of things known raw, unshaped by the constructions of a mind obsessed with form.56

52

McCarthy, BM, 233. McCarthy, BM, 282, 283. 54 McCarthy, BM, 306. 55 Matthew Guinn points to the idiot as “McCarthy’s supreme atavistic man: even more debased than hominoids like the possumhunters, he seems more animal (squid, frog) than human.” (“Ruder Forms Survive: Cormac McCarthy’s Atavistic Vision,” in Myth, Legend, Dust, ed. Wallach, 113). 56 McCarthy, S, 427. 53

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Once again, the idiot’s underdeveloped mind is presented as the wellspring of a crude cognition of reality, of a direct experience unrefined by rational interpretation or logical analysis as much as in itself it is not subject to them. The third most conspicuous “idiot” figure in McCarthy’s writing appears in Outer Dark. Together with the bearded leader of the trio and his armed accomplice called Harmon, the speechless unnamed imbecile is again alluded to as a creature on the verge of the human and the animal: “the mute one seemed to sleep, crouched at the man’s right with his arms dangling between his knees like something waiting to be wakened and fed.”57 His role is quite difficult to define since the whole band of the three men is disturbingly bizarre,58 and we may only speculate that they are the perpetrators of the grim feats described in the supremely lyrical passages in italics randomly dispersed throughout the novel, such as this one: Three men mounted the steps and one tapped at the door. And who is there? A minister. Pale lamplight falling down the door, the smiling face, black beard, the tautly drawn and dusty suit of black. Light went in a long bright wink upon the knifeblade as it sank with a faint breath of gas into his belly. . . . His assassin smiled upon him with bright teeth, the faces of the other two peering from either shoulder in consubstantial monstrosity, a grim triune that watched wordless, affable.59

The bearded leader, resembling a grave minister and a devil at the same time, seems to know everything about Culla Holme when they meet, apparently accidentally, for the first time. He speaks to Culla in a chillingly authoritative and cynically accusing tone, deeply aware of the evil the latter is entangled in. We even have the impression that the black leader functions as Culla Holme’s dark double, circling his paths and coming upon him in the most unexpected moments and places. And again, the way the leader speaks about his imbecile confederate implies a kind of eerie kinship between the two of them: I like for him to set and listen even if he cain’t understand much. . . . I like for him to have the opportunity. . . . He might know something and him [Harmon] and me neither one know about it. . . . Asides I like for him to set there and listen and maybe mend the fire. . . . I wouldn’t name him because if you cain’t name something you cain’t claim it. You cain’t talk 57

McCarthy, OD, 234. I discuss the role of the grim trio from Outer Dark with the use of biblical analysis in Chapter Five of my book (The “Grim Triune” and the Nature of Evil). 59 McCarthy, OD, 129. 58

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about it even. You cain’t say what it is. . . . I keep studyin him. He’s close, but I keep at it.60

We can therefore once more trace the pattern of affinity between a sophisticated and, in a sense, otherworldly figure in power with an apparently totally senseless, speechless, and passive half-human, halfanimal protagonist. The leader prefers not to name his idiot companion sensing that such an explicit denomination would trivialize the profound mystery that he potentially carries within himself, and the dark minister wishes this enigma to remain unspoken.

To Be the Master of One’s Destiny As these three pairs of protagonists demonstrate, the submissive attitude to fate, epitomized by females, children, and imbeciles, is in McCarthy’s novels coupled with an altogether contradictory approach. This latter stance is represented by individuals who exert their power over others in a determined attempt to be the architects of their own fortune. It is not that they do not believe in the force of fate or in the chain of causes necessarily leading to certain predetermined effects; on the contrary, they have an exceptionally strong sense of the “connectedness of things” and of “agency and claimant alike.”61 Interestingly, these figures in power, the most conspicuous of them being the three counterpart mates of the imbecile protagonists I have mentioned, are all somehow bound up with the notion of evil. Clearly, they know more–not only about the potential capabilities of the idiots they appropriate but also about the order of the universe in its most general terms. It is as if in truth “the heart betrayed itself and the wicked often had eyes to see that which was hidden from the good,” as the Mexican woman tells Billy Parham in The Crossing.62 Nevertheless, despite the fact that these protagonists belong to the few McCarthian heroes who have some presentment of otherworldly matters, this deeper awareness is reified solely in destruction and annihilation. Judge Holden’s mockingly God-like desire to “tabernacle” all instances of autonomous life so that nothing “exists without [his] knowledge” is habitually connected with the extermination of each collected artifact.63 Lester Ballard “inspects” the bodies of his victims “carefully,” as if to see how they “were made,” yet in 60

McCarthy, OD, 175,177-78. McCarthy, APH, 230; BM, 330. 62 McCarthy, TC, 370. 63 McCarthy, BM, 198. 61

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the end the corpses he assembles rot into an indeterminate “pale gray cheesy mold.”64 The bearded leader of the mysterious threesome in Outer Dark is aware of things he could have hardly learned in naturally human terms (“You seem to know everybody’s business,” Holme tells him), but he exerts his power in the most morbid manner by slaying his haphazard victims with a knife and, as we may infer, consuming their “mummified” meat.65 These powerful protagonists are also the ones who ultimately prevail, which is a regularity that contributed to McCarthy’s designation as a nihilistic writer. Blood Meridian most manifestly ends with the scene of Holden’s disquietingly cynical victory dance and his brags the he “will never die.”66 In Child of God, when Lester Ballard nearly drowns during an early spring thaw, the narrator directly addresses the reader (a rare case in McCarthy’s writing), appealing to our sense of justice: “You could say . . . why will not these waters take him?” Yet he survives, only to murder further victims. Despite his strong suspicions, the county sheriff Fate (sic!) Turner is unable to find proof of Ballard’s crimes, and in the end it is Lester himself who turns up in the hospital with the resolute announcement, “I’m supposed to be here.”67 Similarly, the ending of Outer Dark suggests that the traces of the bearded man’s victims all fade with time: Until wind had tolled the tinker’s bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and alone his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.68

Yet he himself prevails without incurring any kind of loss or having to assume responsibility for all he has done. Another protagonist who represents an analogous line of reasoning is Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. Chigurh also seems to be obsessed with the predetermined and meticulously devised order of things, and he strongly believes that “the shape” of each “path” is “visible from the beginning” since it is a fastidiously contrived chain of foreseeable causes and effects. He himself feels responsible for implementing the schemes he discovers, since, as he explains to one of his victims, he cannot “second say the world.” When Carla Jean pleads for his mercy, 64

McCarthy, CG 91-91, 196. McCarthy, OD, 234, 171-72. 66 McCarthy, BM, 335. 67 McCarthy, CG, 156, 192. 68 McCarthy, OD, 238. 65

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Chigurh shakes his head and calmly answers, “You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases.”69 The destiny of each of us is inevitably set, yet only those who are sufficiently determined and ruthless may take up the role of active agents who execute its workings. Power and the desire to act out one’s own fate are therefore in McCarthy inextricably linked not with creation but with destruction. The active figures feel that if they were in the position of God, they would have devised a better, more refined world. Walking through the winter forest, Lester wonders at the disorder and “upheaval”: “trees down, new paths needed.” In one of the rare insights into the protagonist’s mind, the narrator asserts: “Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.”70 Yet assuming the position of God is always a pitiful imitation on the part of man, and it cannot lead to anything that would be of a durable value. As Barcely Owens put it, “Every credit [is] undone by a destructive debit, negating all efforts towards progress.” McCarthy’s protagonist can therefore never “firmly grasp what he reaches for. The genetic violence of his left hand always destroys the civilized production of his right hand, and his quest for a better life becomes the paved road to mutual destruction.”71 If we were to attempt a philosophical expounding of the two discussed attitudes towards fate and free will, with some degree of simplification designating them as the “passive” and the “active” one, we could probably resort to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Those McCarthian heroes who are persistent in their yearning to shape their own fate, especially Judge Holden from Blood Meridian and Dueña Alfonsa from All the Pretty Horses, the two who are the most outspoken with regard to their own principles, can be said to adopt the Nietzschean outlook on human will. On the one hand, they consider the notion of free will as a kind of necessary illusion for the meek and timid–those who have chosen what is merely a necessary link in the everlasting chain of causes and effects and 69

McCarthy, NCOM, 259. McCarthy, CG, 136. This sentence from Child of God bears a marked resemblance to the renowned statement delivered in the 13th century by Alfonso X, king of Castile: “If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.” Quoting Alfonso’s declaration, Susan Neiman claims that “This little sentence, or some variation of it, expressed the essence of blasphemy for close to half a millennium.” Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2002), 15. 71 Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 57. 70

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mistake their choice for a free, autonomous decision. We all wish to believe that we ourselves are the coiners who decide about the shape of our future. As Dueña Alfonsa tells John Grady Cole bringing her long speech to a close: “Sometimes I think we are like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.”72 On the other hand, characters such as Alfonsa or Holden believe that some individuals can in fact adopt the position of the coiner– these are the chosen few who truly possess the Nietzschean “will to power”–and sustain the will which desires and constantly reaffirms itself.73 “That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate,” Judge Holden tells Toadvine.74 Yet such “taking charge” requires a readiness to reject (as the dueña rejects John Grady Cole), to kill, and to exterminate (as the judge kills and exterminates everything he himself saves, while Chigurh murders all those who somehow stand in his way); in short, an aptness to enter into intimate synergy with the forces of evil. This prerequisite of unrelenting ruthlessness is probably the reason why in the active-passive pairs of protagonists it is usually the submissive figure (who usually dies a violent and premature death) that wins the favor of the reader. The heroes in power are indeed effective and events take the course they have themselves desired and foretold. The narration underscores their authoritative influence both in certain minute details of the plot (“Ballard . . . told the snow to fall faster and it did”75) and in grand episodes concerning matters of life and death (“Drink up,” says Holden to the man in the final scene in the Griffin inn, “Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee,”76 and thus pronounces a sarcastic prophecy which he himself fulfills by taking the man’s life). Although the passive protagonists are disturbingly inert, helpless, and on the whole pathetic, as I have tried to indicate, McCarthy conducts his narrative in such a way that these pitifully impotent figures become paradoxically endowed with a kind of profound dignity and solemn grandeur. Perhaps, therefore, their stance should be designated not so 72

McCarthy, APH, 241. On the connections between Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power and free will, see Hanna BuczyĔska-Garewicz, “Sens woli i wolnoĞci,” 12-17. 74 McCarthy, BM, 199. 75 McCarthy, CG, 139. 76 McCarthy, BM, 327. 73

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much as thoughtless compliancy or malleable resignation but rather as Schopenhauer’s resolution to “let being be” and to “will unwillingness.” The author of The World as Will and Representation maintained that we may indeed choose with accordance to our will, yet since the will itself is not a matter of choice but something that we find given, it functions as a force that subordinates rather than liberates us. In this situation, the best we can do is suspend all willing and find composure in serene passivity and tranquil surrender. As BuczyĔska-Gierowicz points out in the introduction to Hannah Arendt’s book, Heidegger proclaimed a similar suspension of the will as a necessary prerequisite of our opening up for other truths than those supplied by pure science. Only in this state of reposeful non-will can we truly abandon manipulation for the sake of contemplation, and domination and conquest for the sake of submissiveness to and admiration of nature.77 I would therefore risk the conclusion that McCarthy wanted to picture the state of passive compliance with fate as a rather positive than a negative one. Most of his passive protagonists, however, do not endure since McCarthy has always been very far from imposing any kind of moralizing on the reader, and perhaps also because in the reality of his novels there is not much to live on for.

Circularity The issue of evil as fate is in McCarthy closely linked with the idea of eternal circularity of time and being. The plot of most of his novels is devoid of the traditionally realistic progress of events leading from a commencement of the story, through a discernible climax, up to its final resolution. We therefore gain the impression that McCarthy’s narration diverges from the contemporary commonsensical rendering of time as linear progression from past through present and towards the future and rather comes closer to the ancient idea of time as a cycle of endless repetition. In his accessible and lucid study entitled Time’s Arrows: Scientific Attitudes Toward Time, Richard Morris mentions a number of antique cultures which developed concepts of cyclical time, from the Babylonians, through the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the Chinese, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Nordic peoples. Morris quotes a telling passage from Aristotle’s Physics where the latter refers to

77

BuczyĔska-Garewicz, “Sens woli i wolnoĞci,” 10-11, 19-21.

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Observations of the cyclical patterns of nature–sunrise and sunset, seasonal agricultural rhythms, and recurrent movements of celestial bodies, naturally led the ancients to believe that the most obvious and rational attitude toward time was its treatment as a strictly circular phenomenon. This viewpoint was gradually abandoned under the influence of Judaism (with its insistence on certain historical events which happened once at an appointed moment in time) and Christianity (with its central concept of linear progression towards redemption), yet it has been repeatedly resurrected by certain modern philosophers–most notably by Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of the eternal return. According to Nietzsche, the universe is in a state of constant flux and unceasing changing and becoming. It is not heading towards any kind of final state which would grant permanence or equilibrium; therefore, the experience of unity, finality, or some kind of achieved endpoint is a mere illusion. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence seemed to have terrified Nietzsche, yet he assumed that only its acceptance could grant us relative stability and saneness. In the famous segment of Gay Science he hypothesized: The greatest weight.–What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence–even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I

78 Richard Morris, Time’s Arrows: Scientific Attitudes Toward Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 20.

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heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you.79

Only if we are able to acknowledge the prospect of such a return to the past; only if we are willing to re-live our life as it has been “once more and innumerable times more,” may we liberate our will from its conflicting relationship with that past. If we are ready to reaffirm what has been, it ceases to be an unbearable burden thwarting our will’s focus on the future. The issue of eternal recurrence is given a brilliant representation in Jorge Luis Borges’ story entitled “The Garden of Forking Paths,” whose protagonist, the sinologist Dr Stephen Albert searches for a book that would be “infinite.” “I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely,” Albert relates.80 He finally discovers the massive Garden of Forking Paths written by Ts’ui Pên, a novel in which time is not linear but bifurcates into an infinite number of alternatives none of which are altogether ruled out. The outcome is an enormous labyrinth, the paths of which are all chosen at once despite the fact that they continuously contradict one another. Elucidating his interpretation of the book to Ts’ui Pên’s great-grandson, Albert states: The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pên conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.81

Although McCarthy’s novels lack this typically modernist obsession with time, the concept of circularity does surface in them on (at least) three levels. I will list and subsequently discuss these, beginning with the most particular and ending with the most general one. In its most concrete and explicit form, circularity in McCarthy manifests itself in numerous descriptions, allusions, and pictorial metaphors which use the shape of a circle. On a somewhat more abstract level, the said concept is present in the structuring of the events which organize the plot–the constant 79

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 341. 80 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 123. 81 Borges, “The Garden,” 124.

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repetitions of analogous occurrences, coming-backs to the same places, and encounters with doppelgangers that the protagonists experience. On the third, most general and least representational level, circularity appears in McCarthy’s notion of innate evil–evil which haunts humans since the time of Adam and is hardly dependent upon external factors such as historical, social, or economic circumstances. Also, his concept of artistic production–reflected both in the ongoing destruction and recreation performed by Judge Holden82 and in McCarthy’s rare assertion concerning the reproductive nature of writing (“The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written”83)–is interestingly aligned with the idea of incessant circularity.

Circle metaphors McCarthy’s use of the circle seems to contradict its traditional associations with eternity (the wedding ring, Celtic stone circles, the Aztec calendar84) and refers to it rather as a representation of closure and necessity. Metaphors which employ the shape of the circle are particularly distinct in McCarthy’s western novels–those which most explicitly deal with the certainty of dark fate. One persistent motif which appears in these books is that of the round, constantly ticking clock–“the hands of the clock sweeping in circles” being, as Barcley Owens put it, “immutable fate, a fortune already decided.”85 When John Grady Cole sits contemplating the landscape not long before his death in Cities of the Plain, “the only sound” he can hear is “the clock ticking in the hallway.”86 The same sound persists in John Grady’s peculiar dream of the funeral of “a young girl in a white gauze dress who lay upon a pallet-board like a sacrificial virgin,” which is attended by an outlandish horde of carnival figures: obscene . . . painted whores with their breasts exposed, a fat woman in black leather with a whip, a pair of youths in ecclesiastical robes. A priest, a procuress, a goat with gilded horns and hooves who wore a ruff of purple

82

See Chapter Two of my book (Ideology and Representation in Blood Meridian). Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction,” New York Times, April 19, 1992, accessed May 4, 2009, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DA163EF93AA25757C0 A964958260&sec=&spon. 84 See Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 110. 85 Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 111. 86 McCarthy, COP, 203. 83

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crepe. Pale young debauchees with rouged cheeks and blackened eyes who carried candles.87

Music (“some ancient rondel”) is played, but it soon fades “until only the whisper of the stylus remains, the periodic click like a misset metronome, a clock, a portent. A measure of something periodic and otherwise silent and vastly patient which only darkness could accommodate.”88 The recurrent ticking of the clock and its constant circular movement is therefore closely linked with silence, darkness, and ultimately death. A very powerful connotation of the shape of the turning circle with dying also appears in the description of a young man’s funeral which is attended by Magdalena, the redeemed prostitute who becomes John Grady Cole’s lover, after she saw him for the very last time: The cart rattled past and the spoked wheels diced slowly the farther streetside and the solemn watchers there, a cardfan of sorted faces under the shopfronts and the long skeins of light in the street broken in the turning spokes and the shadows of the horses tramping upright and oblique before the oblong shadows of the wheels shaping over the stones and turning and turning.89

Obviously, the scene arouses in Magdalena a terrifying sense of upcoming dread and impresses her as an alarming anticipation of the death of the boy who promised to “love her all his life.”90 Finally, after Magdalena’s furious pimp Eduardo cuts her throat, John Grady is desperate to avenge her death. In the description of his fatal knife fight with Eduardo, “the deadliness of circles”91 becomes most explicitly apparent. The pimp constantly makes circular motions with his arm holding the knife and with his whole slick body: Eduardo was circling again, smiling . . . He stopped and crouched and feinted and moved on, circling . . . He stepped away and commenced his circling again . . . They circled. . . . The pimp pushed him away and backed, circling” (emphasis added).

87

McCarthy, COP, 103-05. McCarthy, COP, 104. 89 McCarthy, COP, 208. 90 McCarthy, COP, 206. 91 Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 112. 88

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The various forms of the word “circle” are altogether repeated seventeen times on the span of the six pages which comprise the description of the fight.92 The combat proves deadly for both John Grady and Eduardo, and when the anguished Billy Parham carries out the bloodied body of his dead friend, the forces running the universe seem unmoved by this wretched sight as they calmly return to their ongoing preoccupation with weaving the best of worlds: “all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world” for “a thing once set in motion has no ending . . . until the last witness has passed.”93 The shape of the circle is obviously also closely associated with the coin, which reappears in McCarthy’s novels as a symbol of a link in the perpetual chain of causes and effects. As the already mentioned Dueña Alfonsa from All the Pretty Horses says of her father, He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes.94

At some point in Blood Meridian, when the whole gang is sitting by the fire, Judge Holden uses the coin to perform an illusionist trick. He tosses it into the darkness of the night, whereupon it comes back right into his hand: “The judge swung his hand and the coin winked overhead in the firelight. It must have been fastened to some subtle lead, horsehair perhaps, for it circled the fire and returned to the judge and he caught it in his hand and smiled.” As he explains to his bewildered companions, “The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether . . . Moons, coins, men.”95 Everything is therefore turning in a recurrent circular motion, some elements of the universe destined to complete more circles, some of them appointed to perform less, and the judge, with his peremptory attitude towards reality, wishes to perform the role of the executor of that destiny.

92

McCarthy, COP, 248-53. McCarthy, COP, 262, 205. 94 McCarthy, APH, 230-31. 95 McCarthy, BM, 245-46. 93

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The coin reappears in No Country for Old Men where it is literally presented as the archetypal instrument for the execution of fate, an element deciding on matters of life and death. I have already described Anton Chigurh’s psychopathic treatment of his victims and his unmoved insistence on the harsh necessity of their position. In the course of two such confrontations, Chigurh decides to toss a coin in order to demonstrate how fate may explicitly speak for itself. At the beginning of the first of these scenes, he brazenly teases the owner of a roadside store: Will there be anything else? You’ve already asked me that. Well I need to see about closin. See about closin. Yessir. What time do you close? Now. We close now. Now is not a time. What time do you close. Generally around dark. At dark. Chigurh stood slowly chewing. You dont know what you’re talking about, do you? Sir?96

The dialogue continues in this mode for some time, slowly escalating the tension. Finally, when the reader senses that Chigurh is about to do something hideous, he takes out a coin and pressurizes the proprietor to “call it.” When he asks the bewildered man “what’s the most [he] ever saw lost on a coin toss,” it seems obvious that this time the stakes are the highest since the toss is to decide about the shop owner’s life. “You know what the date is on this coin?” Chigurh asks. “It’s nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And I’m here. And I’ve got my hand over it. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say it. Call it.” The man’s fate had been decided long before time began, yet he is forced to make decisions which will put that plan into effect and which involuntarily place him in the position of responsibility. He chooses heads and survives. Before eventually leaving the store, Chigurh delivers a puzzling speech about “small things” which determine the course of things: Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is 96

McCarthy, NCOM, 53-54.

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the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?97

Chigurh drives away with the lights turned off, leaving the disconcerted shop owner who “laid the coin on the counter and looked at it” and then “just stood leaning there with his head bowed” reflecting on the perplexing occurrence that has just taken place.98 The second victim who is given the opportunity to “call it” is the already mentioned Carla Jean, another totally innocent individual who just happened to be one of the pawns on Chigurh’s way. He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said. She looked at him, at his outheld wrist. What? She said. . . . Call it. This is your last chance. Heads, she said. He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails. I’m sorry. She didnt answer.99

Carla is therefore not as fortunate as the store keeper–the destiny that has been prescribed for her is different, and Chigurh is merely a coldly scrupulous executor of that fate “no line” of which “can be erased” (NCOM 259). Interestingly, in McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road, so much different from his earlier writing since it explicitly saves the most valuable human sentiments, coins altogether lose their significance. They are neither objects which can be used to purchase goods nor symbols of a predetermined chain of events. When the father and son come upon a dilapidated coke machine tilted over and lying beside the ruins of a supermarket, there are “coins everywhere in the ash” (TR 19). Having no material or symbolic value, they are totally useless remnants of the old and forever lost world. 97

McCarthy, NCOM, 57. McCarthy, NCOM, 55-58. 99 McCarthy, NCOM , 258. 98

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Returns, Recurrences, and Reappearances The theme of circularity in Cormac McCarthy’s novels is also present on the level of their story lines, when the protagonists return to places they have previously visited, and when the plot reiterates the occurrences that have already taken place. Three books seem to be especially relevant in this context, namely The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Suttree.

The Recurrence of Beginnings and Endings: The Orchard Keeper The Orchard Keeper (1965), McCarthy’s first full-length novel, tells the story of two men (Ather Ownby and Marion Sylder) and a boy (John Wesley Rattner) whose only connection to one another is constituted by their relationship to the rotting corpse of Kenneth Rattner, a local criminal and whiskey dealer. The aged Uncle Ather Ownby, an eccentric recluse living alone in the woods, tends the corpse which has mysteriously appeared in a spray pit near his cabin and tells stories about the mountains and forests of Tennessee to the fatherless boy, John Wesley Rattner. (Old Ownby also, indicatively, bequeaths to John Wesley his theory of the circularity governing “weather,” “game,” “and folks themselves if they knowed it,” according to which time flows in a cycle of “a lean year and a year of plenty every seven years.”100) Ather is obviously not aware of the fact that the body he is taking care of once belonged to the boy’s father. John Wesley, who promised his mother to avenge his father’s death, in turn comes to regard Marion Sylder, the local bootlegger, as a hero distinguished by uncompromising courage. Ironically, the boy is not conscious of the fact that it is precisely Sylder who killed his father when the latter attacked him in an attempt to steal his car. The narrative structure of The Orchard Keeper is purposefully nonlinear, the story line randomly skipping from past to future and back, and the focalization freely shifting from one protagonist to another. We may, nevertheless, identify a quite clear circular pattern which dominates the framework of the book. The novel begins with a typically McCarthian prologue, printed in italics and not connected with the rest of the story by any obvious thematic link. It describes the scene of three men cutting down a tree. Their efforts are, however, thwarted by the fact that a fragment of an iron fence has “growed all through the tree,” which is why

100

McCarthy, OK, 225-26.

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they “cain’t cut no more on it.”101 The final scene of the novel, apparently not far removed in time from the occurrence depicted in the prologue, seems to take place near that same fence which, as it turns out, encloses the town cemetery–this is where the grown John Wesley arrives to visit the grave of his mother. He sat there for a while, rubbing his foot abstractedly, whistling to himself. To the west a solid sheet of overcast sped the evening on. Already fireflies were about. He put on his shoe and rose and began moving toward the fence, through the wet grass. The workers had gone, leaving behind their wood-dust and chips, the white face of the stump pooling the last light out of the gathering dusk.. . . He passed through the gap in the fence, past the torn iron palings and out to the western road, the rain still mizzling softly and the darkening headlands drawing off the day, heraldic, pennoned in flame, the fleeing minions scattering their shadows in the wake of the sun.102

The ending of The Orchard Keeper therefore powerfully indicates the circularity which will come to govern a number of McCarthy’s subsequent novels. Not only is the final scene a recurrence of the initial one but its depiction itself is tellingly rich in allusions to the eternal reiteration of nature and to the impersonal blending of the human with the nonhuman in an all-encompassing, constantly turning circular pattern.103 When John Wesley walks from the abandoned ruins of his family home (which “was never his house anyway”) towards the cemetery, he sees an aged Negro . . . high on the seat of a wagon, dozing to the chop of the half-shod mule-hooves on the buckled asphalt. About him the tall wheels veered and dished in the erratic parabolas of spun coins unspinning as if not attached to the wagon at all but merely rolling there in that quadratic symmetry by pure chance.104

Clearly, McCarthy’s first novel already incorporates thematic motifs–that of the spinning coin and the turning points to their association with death–our dark, certain fate appears under the deceiving guise of “pure chance.” The 101

his central wheels, and which often dead in the

McCarthy, OK, 3. McCarthy, OK, 246. 103 The circular pattern of The Orchard Keeper and its “dialectic of the human and the unhuman” are especially stressed in Gerhard Hoffmann’s essay “Strangeness, Gaps, and the Mystery of Life: Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Novels,” Amerikanstudien / American Studies 42.2 (1997): 217-238. 104 McCarthy, OK, 244. 102

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cemetery, like the corpse of Kenneth Rattner which functions as an element binding the characters and events of The Orchard Keeper, lay “sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with the mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.”105

Wandering in Circles: Outer Dark When reading Outer Dark, we have an even more profound, and undoubtedly more disquieting sense of the overwhelming and ever-present pattern of recurrence and repetition. Although the narration is not as confused as in the case of The Orchard Keeper (it merely shifts from the perspective of Culla Holme to that of his sister Rinthy, with occasional disruptions in the form of short passages in italics recounting the crimes of the dark trio), the few protagonists of the book seem to constantly roam the same, topographically unidentified terrain, searching and perpetually missing one another. All of the figures who appear in Outer Dark are wretched and displaced outcasts, either idly lingering in their shacks of homes or else hopelessly trudging the local village roads, riverbanks, forests, and swamps. They come across one another from time to time, yet these encounters, always broken and superficial, never lead to any kind of affectionate bond or attachment. The first disturbingly powerful instance of recurrence in the novel takes place when Culla Holme takes his newborn son, the fruit of an incestuous relationship between him and his sister Rinthy, and abandons him in the forest. On his way back to the shabby cabin in which they live, Culla loses the way and, after long and desperate wanderings, he once again, to his own utter horror, stumbles upon the crying baby lying on the moss. The scene is recounted in exceedingly forceful imagery, striking the reader with unique insight into the obsessed and guilt-ridden mind of someone who wishes to obliterate one act of transgression with yet another crime thereby beginning to meander in hopeless circles. He knelt forward in the damp earth and covered it again and then rose to his feet and lumbered away through the brush without looking back. . . . The air was dank and stormy. Night fell long and cool through the woods about him and a spectral quietude set in. As if something were about that crickets and nightbirds held in dread. He went on faster. With full dark he 105

McCarthy, OK, 244-45.

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was confused in a swampy forest, floundering through sucking quagmires and half running. He did not come upon the river but upon the creek again. Or another creek. He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them. Long and long after he should have reached the river he was careering through the woods with his hands outstretched before him against whatever the dark might hold. Until he began to stumble and a old claw was raking upward through his chest. . . . He . . . began to run in the return direction and at a demented pace through the brush and swamp growth, falling, rising, going on again. . . . A far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky . . . transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.106

Rinthy, refusing to believe in her brother’s assertion that their baby died of natural causes, sets out in search of the child, suspecting that Culla traded it to the tinker who used to wander near their cabin. And, incidentally, it is the tinker who finds the boy and takes him into his cart. When Culla realizes that his sister had fled, he in turn embarks on “huntin” her. Apart from Rinthy, Culla, and the tinker, all of whom roam the same barren roads and desolate towns looking for one another, there is a second trio of incessant travelers–the already mentioned mysterious leader who wears a “shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that [is] small on him” and whose “beard and hair [are] long and black and tangled,” together with his two peculiar companions: Harmon, holding a rifle and constantly wearing a wry, cynical smile, and the speechless drooling imbecile who crouches at his master’s side “like something waiting to be wakened and fed.”107 The circular paths of each of these wayfarers intersect; they witness traces of each other’s doings, talk to the same people, and occasionally meet. What constitutes a particularly disquieting instance of repetition is Culla’s second involuntary meeting with the dark trio. Ironically, during their first encounter the three men probably save Culla’s life by helping him to moor the ferry which “busted loose” on the surged river, throwing the ferryman overboard.108 They reluctantly let him dry by their fire and listen to his account of what happened on the ferry. In a way that brooks 106

McCarthy, OD, 16-18. McCarthy, OD, 95, 234. 108 McCarthy, OD, 164-69. 107

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no argument, the bearded leader encourages Culla to help himself to the meat they are frying, which, as we may discern, is the meat of one of their human victims. Culla quickly senses the peculiarity of the situation and grows increasingly uneasy; nevertheless, he manages to survive the bizarre encounter, forced only to give away his boots. When he is lured by their fire for the second time, he recognizes them too late to turn back. Their appearance strikes him as a faint repetition of something he has already seen: He looked at them. They wore the same clothes, sat in the same attitudes, endowed with a dream’s redundancy. Like revenants that reoccur in lands laid waste with fever: spectral, palpable as stone.109

The bearded man repeats the same words Culla heard during their first encounter and suggests that their meeting did not take place by chance: Well, I see ye didn’t have no trouble findin us. I wasn’t huntin ye. You got here all right for somebody bound elsewhere. I wasn’t bound nowheres. I just seen the fire. I like to keep a good fire. A man never knows what all might chance along. Does he? . . . We ain’t hard to find. Oncet you’ve found us.110

This time Culla is made to witness the sacrificing of the child, whom he senses to be his own son, and mutely watches as the black leader cuts its throat and feeds its blood to his animal-like companion. The circle is fully completed when Rinthy, in her own lonely peregrinations, comes down “a footpath where narrow cart tracks had crushed the weeds” and reaches the same spot–the glade on which her son was sacrificed and where the tinker she has been searching hangs dead in a tree “all raised out” so that “he cain’t raise no more.” Rinthy “curiously” walks among the burnt remains left over from the frightful gathering, not knowing “what to make of [them].” She waits “all through the blue twilight and into the dark,” but no one returns. Finally, as if sensing that her quest has come to an end, that her meandering is over and the circle finally closed, the narrator reports: “and after a while little sister was sleeping.”111 All these intermittent repetitions, returns, and recurrences give the reader a disquieting sense of being trapped within an eternal cycle of 109

McCarthy, OD, 231. McCarthy, OD, 233. 111 McCarthy, OD, 235, 237-38. 110

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events which had been set upon their course before time even began. Man is a mere insignificant particle of this ongoing sequence, and the best he can do is to stand by as a passive observer placidly reconciled with all that is to come.

Repetition of the Self: Suttree and Child of God Another motif that is closely linked with recurrence and which resurfaces in a number of McCarthy’s novels concerns the protagonists’ obsession with double selves.112 Cornelius Suttree, the protagonist of McCarthy’s fourth novel (published in 1979), is a middleclass husband, father, and respectable citizen who abandons his ordinary existence to live on a houseboat, fish in the Tennessee River, and mingle with the displaced and outcast residents of the embryonic city of Knoxville. In his seclusion, in the manner of Henry David Thoreau, Suttree is determined to retrieve his authentic identity and unique self, which, as he feels, was irrevocably marked by the stillbirth of his twin brother. Suttree therefore grows obsessed with the idea of himself being a mere “Mirror image. Gauche carbon” of his twin; his own status reduced to that of an incomplete half, a chimerical fragment. His left-handedness, the birthmark on his left temple (which, as he imagines, is identical to the one his brother bore on the right side of his skull), and the fact that he has been diagnosed as dextrocardiac (with the heart abnormally positioned in the right side of the chest) reinforce Suttree’s belief in the existence of his phantom other, “an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree.”113 In an attempt to ward off the threat posed by the existence of this other self, he wears an ancient amulet, “a dark stone disc” which showed “two rampant gods addorsed with painted eyes and helmets plumed” who “bore birdheaded scepters each aloft.” Yet the constant memory of the “child with whom [he] shared [his] mother’s belly,” who neither spoke nor saw” since “perhaps his skull held seawater,” develops into a haunting idée fixe: “His subtle obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams. He saw his brother in swaddling, hands outheld, a scent of myrrh and lilies.” Suttree’s quest for identity therefore becomes a spiritual journey to “that still center 112 The use of the double self in Suttree is discussed by Thomas D. Young, Jr. in “The Imprisonment of Sensibility: Suttree,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne Luce (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999), 97-122 as well as by Douglas J. Canfield in “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” Contemporary Literature 44.4 (2003): 664-96. 113 McCarthy, S, 14, 28.

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where the living and the dead are one”–a search for unity which is epitomized by the river he lives on, the water being both an element sustaining life and a force that guarantees death to the suicides that jump off the bridge.114 At the same time, Suttree fears this unification since, as Canfield phrased it, “The oneness with nature is threatened by a collapse into oneness, an abject loss of the differentiation necessary to identity formation.”115 When he sets out into the mountain forests “in late October” and wanders for days without any food, he begins to see things “with a madman’s clarity.” “First in his dreams and then in states half wakeful” he comes to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who’d been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he’d be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghostly clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.116

Yet after he sustains the lonely days of trial, Suttree’s identity seems to substantiate itself. When he meets a deer hunter who deems him “lost or crazy or both,” Suttree is proud to assert, “At least I exist. . . . I’m not a figment.”117 He develops an even more assertive sense of unique existence after a severe attack of typhus during which he lies for days in feverish delirium, fancies his own eschatological trial, and nearly dies. He is finally ready to acknowledge the truth that “all souls are one and all souls are lonely,” and, after a final conversation with “the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling” which he imagines to be his other self, he “[blows] away the flame, his double, the image overhead.”118 When the hospital priest tells him he nearly died, Suttree affirms what he discerned while lingering in the liminal space between life and death, “I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only.” At the same time, as he confesses to one of the nurses, he has gained the awareness that “all souls are one and all souls lonely.”119 The Suttree who was “obsessed with uniqueness” and panic-stricken by duplication, who was deeply disquieted by the encounter with Vernon 114

McCarthy, S, 327, 14, 113, 447, 9. Canfield, “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” 679. 116 McCarthy, S, 281, 285, 287. 117 McCarthy, S, 288, 289. 118 McCarthy, S, 459, 414. 119 McCarthy, S, 461, 459. 115

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and Fernon, the grotesque twins who were so alike that their own mother could not tell them apart and so “they aint no tellin how many times [they] might of swapped,” and they are still able to “tell what one another is thinkin”; the Suttree who could prove his own existence only by a double assertion “I am, I am”–just like the twins greeted him with a repeated “howdy howdy,” this Suttree at the end of the novel seems no longer afraid to confront the repetitiveness of reality.120 In the last scene of the book, dressed in brand new clothes and ready to set out from Knoxville, he meets a young boy who offers him a drink of water. It seems to be the long-awaited waterbearer, who, as Suttree imagined while visiting the ruins of his family mansion, “does not come, and does not come” to serve the thirsty diners. Now he does finally appear, his “pale gold hair” lying “along the sunburned arms.” In his deep eyes, like “wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark, . . . blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea,” Suttree notices his own reflection, his doppelganger, yet he is no longer alarmed. He drinks, thanks the boy, and climbs into the car that stops for him though “he’d not lifted a hand.” It is therefore, paradoxically, a reconciliation with this constant flux of repetition, with the oneness and fluidity of the world where “nothing ever stops moving,”121 that may open up the possibility of a genuine experience of one’s exclusiveness. A similar motif of repetition, of doubling the self in the eyes of an incidentally encountered boy appears in Child of God. Although what Lester Ballard seems to be searching for is not so much his own uniqueness but rather some kind of basic kinship with other human beings, the moment of meeting the boy’s gaze is as epiphanic for him as it was for Suttree. As it is usually the case with McCarthy’s protagonists, we are granted a marginal and merely hypothetical explication of Ballard’s motives–one that points to some traumatic events which he witnessed in his childhood. After his house is auctioned and sold, the residents of Sevier County share rumors confirming that it would be difficult to find anyone who is even “a patch on Lester Ballard for crazy”: They say he never was right after his daddy killed hisself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run off, I don’t know where to nor who with. Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him down. He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hangin. We just cut him down, let him fall in the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never 120 121

McCarthy, S, 360, 129, 359. McCarthy, S, 136, 470-71, 461.

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said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time. The old man’s eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish and his tongue blacker’n a chow dog’s.122

Throughout the novel, the adult Lester is recurrently referred to as a neglected and disadvantaged child–one that developed into a “misplaced and loveless simian shape,” resembling rather a “thing,” a “groundhog,” a “rat,” an “ape,” or a “gothic doll”123 than a human being. As his crimes progress in severity and brutality, advancing from arson and voyeurism through rape to multiple murder, Lester himself seems to regress further and further back into his earliest childhood to finally go underground into a clearly womblike cave.124 The caverns and stone tunnels he descends are described as constantly wet and dripping: “Everywhere water dripped and spattered and the wet cave walls looked waxed or lacquered in the beam of light.”125 The deepest “tall and bellshaped cavern” in which Ballard keeps the bodies of his victims is explicitly compared to “the innards of a great beast”: “Here the walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and bloodred mud, had an organic look to them.” Yet since, as Sullivan repeats after Kristeva, the maternal body is not only powerfully attractive but also deeply horrifying,126 Ballard cannot feel entirely safe in “the bowels of the mountain.” He has “cause to wish and he did wish for some brute midwife to spald him from his rocky keep.”127 When he finally emerges from his underground caves, he resembles a newborn infant, “a weedshaped onearmed human swaddled up in outsized overalls and covered with red mud.”128 And this is precisely the moment of his epiphany–when he walks out into the road, he sees a “churchbus” going in the same direction and hides in the roadside bushes. The bus clattered past. It was all lit up and the faces within passed each in their pane of glass, each in profile. At the last seat in the rear a small boy was looking out the window, his nose puttied against the glass. There was nothing out there to see but he was looking anyway. As he went by he 122

McCarthy, CG, 22, 21. McCarthy, CG, 20, 154, 173, 155, 188, 184, 140. 124 The association of the caves Lester retreats into with the abjected female body is elaborated by Nell Sullivan (“The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God” in Myth, Legend, Dust, ed. Wallach, 68-77). 125 McCarthy, CG, 134. 126 Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif,” 76, where she refers to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. 127 McCarthy, CG, 135, 189. 128 McCarthy, CG, 192. 123

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The bus is gone, yet the image of the boy’s face in the glass remains. When Ballard attempts to recollect where he had seen it before, he realizes “that the boy looked like himself.” The encounter with his double, with the small rejected Lester, has a similar impact on Ballard as the analogous confrontation had on Suttree–he seems to reconcile himself with reality. He goes directly to the county hospital, “presenting himself” to the nightduty nurse with the words “I’m supposed to be here.” He is later transferred to a hospital for the mentally ill where he soon dies of pneumonia. His body serves medical students, who closely examine each bit of his “flayed, eviscerated, dissected” body to learn what man is actually “made of.”130

The Circularity of Innate Evil The third, most abstract level on which Cormac McCarthy’s writings deal with the issues of circularity and repetitiveness refers to both his alleged concept of artistic creation and his philosophy of human evil. In order to examine these matters, I will briefly return to McCarthy’s SouthWestern masterpiece, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. This book is in itself an instance of circularity per se, since it explicitly goes back to a particular period of the American past, uses specific historical sources, and, at the same time, reiterates the very foundation of the human nature.

Books “made out of books” In terms of its provenance, Blood Meridian is a unique case among McCarthy’s novels in that it is based on authentic historical sources. In one of the two full-time interviews Cormac McCarthy ever agreed to give,131 he said that “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,”132 which became a statement his critics held on to, justifiably or not, as the writer's credo. And Blood Meridian is certainly the novel with reference to which McCarthy’s assertion is the most relevant. It clearly refers to such 129

McCarthy, CG, 191. McCarthy, CG, 191, 192, 194, 141. 131 The second interview (and McCarthy’s first time on TV) was conducted by Oprah Winfrey after The Road received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. 132 Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction,” 1992. 130

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masterpieces as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (with a “kid” of similar age leaving an alcoholic father), Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (again a fourteen-year-old protagonist prompted to search the territory on his own), or Melville's Moby Dick (with Ahab's unscrupulous will to power somehow reflected in the figure of Judge Holden, who, for that matter, has in him something of the enormous white whale itself), with Faulknerian strings of adjectives and sentences running on for two pages without interval, as well as intense and minutely detailed lyrical passages in Twain's style. But Blood Meridian also directly refers to historical sources from the second half of the nineteenth century, especially to Samuel Chamberlain's personal narrative My Confession.133 Chamberlain was a soldier who deserted from the US army during the war with Mexico and joined a group of scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton; the leader of the gang in McCarthy's novel bears the same name. Another significant historical figure McCarthy seems to have drawn from My Confession is Judge Holden, whom Chamberlain introduces as “a man of gigantic size” who “stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy framull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression” and whose “desires was blood and women.”134 For the sake of comparison let me quote McCarthy's first mention of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: “An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in his height. . . ”135 Chamberlain also notes that “Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico,” but also that “a cooler blooded villain never went unhung.”136 McCarthy clearly builds the disposition of his own protagonist on this peculiar association of ruthless violence on the one hand and astounding erudition and eloquence on the other. Chamberlain is also apparently the source of certain specific episodes recounted in Blood Meridian, such as Glanton's drunken fit of rage, or instances in which the Judge turns out to be a child molester though no one ever dares to openly charge him with any assault.137 Collecting scalps or ears of the Indians as “proof” of their capture and a “receipt” on the

133

Samuel E. Chamberlain, My Confession (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press,) 1987. Quoted in John Emil Sepich, “’What kind of indians was them?’ Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 97. 135 McCarthy, BM, 6. 136 Sepich, “’What kind of indians was them?’” 97. 137 McCarthy, BM, 191, 118, 160, 191, 239, 275, 333. 134

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basis of which the raiders are paid is also a practice that both Chamberlain and McCarthy repeatedly dwell on. Apart from Chamberlain's Confession, critics have managed to identify several other historical sources which bear affinity to some of the characters or events described in Blood Meridian. These include John Russell Bartlett's Narrative, which mentions General Angel Trias, Governor of the State of Chihuahua, and describes him in terms very similar to McCarthy's characterization; John Woodhouse Audubon's Western Journal as the source of the Tarot reading tent show which appears in Blood Meridian to join the gang on their way to Janos; and George Fredirick Ruxton's Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains and his account of religious processions flooding the streets of small Mexican towns. The form of McCarthy's novel, with the chapter headings succinctly foretelling the recounted events also seems to allude to authentic chronicles of the period.138 And yet, McCarthy's use of all these sources is quite peculiar. First, Blood Meridian is decidedly not a historical novel though it does play with the convention by offering a wholly detached, unemotional, and indifferent account of events, practically devoid of authorial judgment or interpretation. Although he apparently put much effort into the study of narratives written by first-hand witnesses traveling in the mid-nineteenthcentury Southwest, we clearly sense that McCarthy is not interested in historical accuracy, in dates and factual details. The events he describes and their chronology are only loosely connected with what has actually been chronicled, and he seems to have made no attempts to familiarize the social, cultural, or political context, the whole milieu in which the events take place. In fact, the circle that McCarthy draws apparently takes us back not into the nineteenth century but to much older times, times before any kind of society, culture, or politics were shaped. The protagonists of Blood Meridian are not so much historical figures as “beings from an older age”: Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the renellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their ownloomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.139

138 139

All these sources are mentioned in Sepich, “‘What kind of indians…?’” McCarthy, BM, 176, 172.

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The characters that appear in the novel are repeatedly compared not only to primordial men unaccustomed to any designs of civilization but also to our more primal ancestors, apes.140 What is also extremely important in the discussion of Blood Meridian as a novel that “recycles” a specific moment in the American past is the fact that the history which McCarthy uses is rather unfamiliar to his average reader. He therefore cannot “allude” to it in a typically intertextual modernist manner, but he also does not seem interested in parodying his historical sources by pointing to the gaps and holes in their fabric and by exposing their ethnic bias or their cultural and political entanglement, as a paradigm postmodern novelist might be expected to. As Dana Phillips has argued, reading Blood Meridian as a parody would be a consolatory way of dealing with the book by making “its text more comfortable, safer, than it is,” while in fact, “the novel challenges our notions of history and literary history more strongly than ‘parody’ permits.”141 All in all, Blood Meridian does read like a book conscious of its having been “made out of other books,” and this awareness renders it more authentic, firm, and reliable, but the novel's relationship to its literary and historical sources is more intricate than it may initially seem. The myth that is revised is much older and more basic than that of the American West–we sense that it touches upon the very “bones of things.”142 The notion that is most strongly challenged early on and consistently throughout the whole novel is the Rousseauian (and Transcendentalist) belief in man’s innate goodness and innocence. At the outset of Blood Meridian we face the fourteen-year-old kid, “pale and unwashed,” who “can neither read nor write,” as he “crouches by the fire” and watches his father who “lies in drink” and “quotes from poets whose names are now lost.” His mother died while giving birth to him, and the kid does not even know her name. He soon runs away, first wandering west, then south into New Orleans. There he manages to survive a truly Darwinian selection deliberately fighting with sailors–men of “all races, all breeds,” men “whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes.” “They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives.” And yet, “the child’s face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent.” The “taste for mindless violence” that “broods” in him is triggered by the extreme neglect and lack of love he has experienced, but its roots are deeper and more primordial.143 140

McCarthy, BM, 90, 153, 200. . Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts,” 458. 142 McCarthy, BM, 116. 143 McCarthy, BM, 3, 4. 141

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The idea of man’s natural predisposition towards evil obviously recurs throughout McCarthy’s writing and may be aptly summed up in a passage from Child of God. When the deputy sheriff of Sevier County (with the telling name “Fate”), overwhelmed by the sudden escalation of murder cases in his tranquil provincial beat, asks the old man Wade whether he thinks “people was meaner than they are now,” the latter answers, “No, . . . I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”144 Evil is inevitably inscribed in our fate, and its recurrent, circular nature only confirms the unavoidability of things to come. We may attempt to counter it–to assume control over the “puppet strings” of human destiny, yet, as it has been the case with Judge Holden, the Dueña Alfonsa, and Anton Chigurh, the costs of such an enterprise will be immense. Those who wish to usurp such power must be ready to act according to the ruthless rules of the game–to sacrifice the happiness and the lives of others and to create and destroy with equal commitment, earnestness, and zeal. The only alternative McCarthy seems to be offering is a reflection upon our own agency and upon the doubtful influence we may exert on the shape of reality–a rumination in the manner of John Grady Cole who “sat a long time and . . . thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and . . . wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his own doing.” For in the end “there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only.”145 Evil is innate to our nature and, in fact, to use McCarthy’s own words, “the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea” since “there's no such thing as life without bloodshed.”146 Yet this assertion obviously does not exhaust the subject of evil as it is illustrated in McCarthy’s novels. The next chapter of my study will deal with the nature of McCarthy’s evil per se and will be an attempt to show that it definitely exceeds not only the purely graphic presentation of violence but also the reflection upon its destined necessity. I will try to demonstrate that McCarthy’s evil is by far a more complex construct, evading both the simplifications of modern psychology and the abstract, often futile controversies of traditional theology, yet not renouncing affinities with the metaphysical, the spiritual, and at times even the religious.

144

McCarthy, CG, 168. McCarthy, COP, 207, 286. 146 Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction,” 1992. 145

CHAPTER FOUR EVIL AS THE LEGACY OF METAPHYSICAL DESIRE

The second chapter of my book dealt with purely visual presentations of evil in McCarthy’s work, pointing to the possible application of the idea of the grotesque in the analysis of his elaborate graphic presentations of violence. Concluding with a brief analysis of those passages in McCarthy’s novels which may be read as evidence of deep skepticism as to the reliability of the sense of sight, in Chapter Three I examined the ways in which narrators and protagonists explicitly talk about issues connected with evil. The third chapter also investigated the manifestations of evil on the level of the plot or storyline, mainly focusing on its embodiment in the notion of dark fate and on the characters’ endeavors to endorse and enact or else reject and oppose it. The last two chapters are a final attempt at formulating some explicit and straightforward answers to the questions concerning the nature of evil that emerges from McCarthy’s novels: Is this an evil that is merely a lack of good or else an evil that has its own, ontologically independent existence? Is it evil that may be treated as a material phenomenon in which the external, palpable effects themselves testify to all that it stands for–evil which may be therefore equated with violence, a purely physical manifestation? Or maybe it is a force that has a deeper meta-physical existence and must be analyzed independently? Does McCarthy differentiate between natural evil on the one hand and man-made evil on the other? Are the issues of intentions and responsibility in any way addressed in his works? As I have attempted to demonstrate in Chapter One, the contemporary notion of evil is generally devoid of associations with the metaphysical. Although there are some modern philosophers and theologians who endeavor to reconstitute evil as a mythical (Jean Baudrillard) or metaphysical (Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille) concept, the layman’s presumption is largely dominated by the influence of present-day social psychology and its insistence on systemic explanations of evil. The systemic approach emphasizes the fact that it is not the individual human

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being or the situation he or she is confronted with that is responsible for man’s wrongdoing. It is rather the system which has been improperly construed and is therefore unable to satisfy the individuals’ needs, to alleviate their frustrations, or to provide the necessary surveillance.1 Blaming the more or less anonymous “system” is quite a convenient manner of dealing with responsibility, but it is obviously a far-fetched simplification. What Cormac McCarthy’s novels have to convey on the topic of human evil seems to be much more profound, more intricate, and at the same time more akin to the deepest experience of most of us. That is why I would presently like to elaborate precisely on what McCarthy’s writing is saying about the nature of evil, confronting it with our everyday casual usage of the term. I will begin with a closer examination of the most contemporary research in the field of social psychology and its conclusions regarding evil perpetrated by ordinary men and women–conclusions which, as I have mentioned, seem to be the most representative of our superficial understanding of the concept in question. I will also recall Alan Badiou’s distinction between evil as "a possible dimension of truths" and evil as "the violence that the human animal employs to preserve in its being,” the latter having nothing to do with the sphere of the ethical, not to mention the metaphysical or the religious.2 Subsequently, I will refer to René Girard’s exceptionally inspiring concept of “mimetic violence” and the all-against-one sacrificial mechanism, convincingly illustrating the workings of Satan and thus the process of the origination of evil. I will then consider the relevance of both Badiou’s distinction and Girard’s theory to McCarthy’s writings, most notably to his 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West as well as to the earlier Child of God (1973) and to his latest novel, The Road (2006). This way I will attempt to demonstrate how his writing opens up the possibility of a spiritual or religious interpretation of reality.

The Individual or the System? Interestingly, social psychologists do not refrain from using the quite obviously “unscientific” terms “good” and “evil.” Although some of them note the fact that especially the word “evil” tends to be “used inconsistently 1 The “systemic” explanation of evil (as opposed to “dispositional” and “situational” explanations–both allegedly false) is a key term in Philip Zimbardo’s recent book The Lucifer Effect: How Do Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). 2 Alan Badiou, Ethics, 60, 61.

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and far too loosely”3 in socio-psychological discourse, they generally acknowledge its practical functionality. According to Arthur G. Miller, the editor of the comprehensive The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, The term evil does not, in principle, seem less capable of ultimately achieving social-scientific status, at least comparable to that of its many terminological kin–for example, aggression, violence, hostility, anger, harming, hate, coercion–all of which have definitional problems of their own.

At the same time, Miller does recognize the “value-laden,” “grandiose,” and even “religious” connotations of the terms he advocates.4 Philip Zimbardo, one of the most celebrated American social psychologists, especially persistent in his efforts to popularize the recent findings in the field, regards it his mission to correct the layman’s intuitive understanding of evil as something residing in the individual. Since the Inquisition and the Witch Trials, claims Zimbardo, people have tended to identify the deed with the person who engages in it. All major religious and legal systems are based on the general assumption that those who perform good acts are in themselves good and are therefore entitled to a reward, while those who do evil things are, by nature, evil and deserve punishment. This common “pattern of causal [mis]understanding termed the ‘fundamental attribution error’” is contrasted with the “situational perspective” according to which contextual variables, not personal or dispositional factors, are the key determinants of our behavior.5 Zimbardo quotes the results of two classical experiments in which randomly chosen subjects were exposed to standardized stressful circumstances and assigned to situationally defined roles. In Milgram’s 1963 famous study on obedience, each volunteer performed the part of a “teacher” training a “pupil” (a factual coexperimenter) in memorizing simple pairs of words. For each incorrect answer the “teacher” was instructed to apply an increasingly powerful electric shock to the “pupil.” Despite the “pupil’s” dramatic protests and visibly hysterical (though of course feigned) reactions of growing pain and despair, 62,5% of the “teachers” felt compelled to apply the whole latitude of shocks increasing from 15 to 450 volts (the last switch tellingly marked ‘XXX’). All the volunteers experienced extreme stress and strongly 3

Berkowitz quoted in Arthur G. Miller, ed, “Introduction and Overview,” in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil (Guilford Press: New York, 2004), 3. 4 Miller, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, 3. 5 Miller, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, 2, 8.

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negative emotions; nevertheless, they considered it their obligation to carry the experiment to the end, as they initially agreed to. Personality questionnaires did not reveal any significant dispositional variations among the “teachers” nor any common temperamental factors which could be regarded as divergences from cross-population norms. The results of subsequent repetitions of Milgram’s experiment differed significantly from his original findings only in those cases when situational variables were modified; the identity of the volunteers taking part in the study seemed to be of no relevance. The second crucial experiment mentioned by Zimbardo is a simulation he himself conducted at Stanford University in 1971, referred to as the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this study volunteers were again assigned strictly defined roles, this time those of “prisoners” and “guards.” It appeared that such situational designations were sufficient to trigger whole reserves of aggression in the “guards,” who with time began to mentally and physically humiliate, abuse, and torture those who were by definition subservient yet at the same time hostile to them. The experiment, initially planned as a two-week simulation, had to be abruptly terminated after only six days since the conflicts between the “guards” and the “prisoners” got completely out of control.6 “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?”7 These are the fundamental (and quite explicitly metaphysical) questions that contemporary social psychology is attempting to answer. The response, fairly consistently phrased by scholars setting out from various assumptions and employing a diversity of experimental designs, is aptly summarized by Philip Zimbardo in a conclusion which he himself refers to as a “situational sermon”: While a few bad apples might spoil the barrel (filled with good fruit/people), a barrel filled with vinegar will always transform sweet cucumbers into sour pickles–regardless of the best intentions, resilience, and genetic nature of those cucumbers. So, does it make more sense to spend our resources on attempts to identify, isolate, and destroy the few

6

Philip G. Zimbardo, “A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People Are Transformed into Perpetrators,” in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, ed. Arthur G. Miller, 39-42. See also extensive descriptions and discussions of the experiments on http://www. prisonexp.org and www.new-life.net/milgram.htm, accessed November 14, 2007. 7 Philip G. Zimbardo, The Stanford Prison Experiment, accessed November 14, 2007, http://www.prisonexp.org.

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bad apples or to learn how vinegar works so that we can teach cucumbers how to avoid undesirable vinegar barrels?8

The rather demagogical quasi-religious discourse of Zimbardo’s concluding “sermon” becomes even more manifest in his recnet book entitled The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil. On a website created for its promotion, Zimbardo describes his publication as a summary of “more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a ‘perfect storm’ which leads good people to engage in evil actions.” “This transformation of human character,” Zimbardo explains, is what I call the ‘Lucifer Effect,’ named after God’s favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan.” He then invites his readers to “join” him “in a journey that the poet Milton might describe as making ‘darkness visible.’”9

The resolution of The Lucifer Effect is in substance a repetition of his earlier claims: the “Bad Apple” theory (endorsed by all religious, medical, economic, and political institutions) must be finally replaced by the “Bad Barrel” approach (or even better, according to Zimbardo, the “Bad Barrel Makers” supposition, which focuses on those who construed the evil “System”). Evil resides not in individual men and women but in the behavioral context, in powerful situational forces. We must therefore concentrate our efforts not so much on the punishment and rehabilitation of particular wrongdoers but on transforming the systemic regulations which shape the reality of prisons, schools, courts, and hospitals.10 The “situational” or “systemic” approach currently advocated by social psychologists seems appealing (since it is always more convenient to blame an anonymous “system” than to accuse a specific individual) and expediently in-line with the present-day dominant politically correct slogans voiced by progressive intellectuals. Nevertheless, it is quite obviously based on a far-fetched simplification–the steadfast conviction that an unsympathetic, deprived, and violent background must “always” provoke evil behaviors. Using the high-flown, metaphysically-laden term “evil” seems to further encourage such generalizations, helping to disguise various inconsistencies and substantiate empty sweeping statements. Although the last chapter of The Lucifer Effect is devoted to “heroes” 8

Zimbardo, “A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil,” 47. Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, accessed November 14, 2007, http://www.lucifereffect.com/. 10 Zimbardo’s unprinted lecture on The Lucifer Effect delivered in the PWN headquarters in Warsaw on May 11, 2007. 9

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(those rare individuals who manage to resist “evil” environmental pressures), and despite Zimbardo’s assertion that “throughout [his] book” he repeats “the mantra that attempting to understand the situational and systemic contributions to any individual’s behavior does not excuse the person or absolve him or her from responsibility in engaging in immoral, illegal or evil deeds,”11 contemporary social psychology fails to acknowledge crucial individual differences in human responses to evil. Attempting to answer the question “How do good people turn evil?” it altogether avoids posing the query that most logically follows the one aforementioned: “Why do equally destitute circumstances provoke diverse responses in different individuals; that is: why do some people turn evil, while others remain good?”

The “good guys” and the “bad guys” in The Road McCarthy’s The Road obviously does not explicitly pose or answer any straightforwardly phrased questions, but it can be read as an illustration of precisely the above outlined situation. The novel relates the story of how unthinkably extreme conditions, in which each survivor is equally deprived of the basic feeling of security, of clean water, food, warmth, and hope for the future, segregate all human beings into two distinct groups. From the child’s point of view, the division is clear and simple: those who eat other people are the “bad guys,” and those who do not and never will eat others “no matter what” are the “good guys,” the ones who are “carrying the fire.”12 Yet the boy needs constant reassurance; his conscience being surprisingly sensitive and exacting, he has persistent acute scruples and deepening doubts as to the ethical propriety of the dramatic choices he and his father are continuously forced to make. Did they really have to shoot the man who caught the boy and held a knife to his throat? Could they not somehow help the group of naked, wailing, and half-eaten people they stumbled upon in the basement of a house seized by the “bad guys”? Did they in truth have no other choice but to leave the burnt, dying man at the side of the road? Could they not give the old man they encountered a larger portion of their own supplies? Why was it not possible to take with them the “little boy” the child imagined he glimpsed in one of the windows of a house they passed? Is it truly fair to use the food and equipment assembled in a distant past by some people long dead 11

Philip G. Zimbardo, Preface to The Lucifer Effect: How Do Good People Turn Evil, New York: Random House, 2007, 7. 12 McCarthy, TR, 65, 70, 108-9.

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in a bomb shelter he and his father luckily found?13 However disputable it is to apply moral criteria to such extraordinary circumstances, all these questions pose profoundly disquieting and authentically painful queries for the boy, whose belief in the purposefulness and righteousness of their mission is deeply tempered with each ethically dubious decision they make. The journey of the man and the boy therefore becomes a dramatic struggle for the preservation of a sense of purpose; they both have the most fundamental doubts and misgivings, yet both of them feel they must reassure one another in the trust that it is still worth it to strive and stay alive. The man’s greatest concern is that “he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own,” and what causes his deepest distress is the fear “that something was gone” in the child “that could not be put right again.”14 There are rare moments when the boy explicitly phrases his uncertainty: He looked at his father. What are our long term goals? he said. What? Our long term goals. Where did you hear that? I dont know. No, where did you? You said it. When? A long time ago. What was the answer? I dont know. Well. I dont either. Come on. It’s getting dark. ... The boy looked away. What? The man said. He shook his head. I dont know what we’re doing, he said. The man started to answer. But he didnt. After a while he said: There are people. There are people and we’ll find them. You’ll see.15

The father does not have ready answers which would provide the boy with a facile sense of comfort. Yet the ultimate argument he resorts to is that “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up.”16 The distinct division into good and evil, into what the “good guys” 13

McCarthy, TR, 56, 65, 93-4, 42-3, 139, 72-3, 118, 123. McCarthy, TR, 130, 114. 15 McCarthy, TR, 135, 206. 16 McCarthy, TR, 116. 14

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do and what the “bad guys” fall back on is therefore in the end the only source of a frail sense of meaning and purpose. The situation, the circumstances, which are such a crucial criterion in socio-psychological research, must be somehow rendered secondary. In this way, The Road may be said to add a pivotal remark to the conclusions drawn by Zimbardo and other scholars in his field: the conditions we are compelled to endure are unquestionably a major factor influencing our judgments, decisions, and behaviors, yet in a situation of extreme deprivation, of the erasure of all meaningful features of the surrounding world, we are still left with a choice. Even if it entails a hopelessly constant and unbearably painful confrontation with death and hunger, with distrust, helplessness, and cruelty, with nothingness and shapelessness, with “the cold and the silence”–with a reality in which all is “uncoupled from its shoring,” “unsupported in the ashen air,” “sustained by a breath, trembling and brief,”17 this choice remains as the only chance of testifying to what is human in us.

The Essence of Evil in Blood Meridian “Mindless” Violence and Premeditated Evil I have attempted to establish that the alternative between “good” and “evil” is for the protagonists of The Road a crucial and most fundamental division. Nevertheless, the majority of critics dealing with McCarthy’s novels typically restrain from using the term “evil” and instead prefer to discuss “violence” as a more palpable category lacking any pretences to the universal or the metaphysical. Their general stance is that violence in McCarthy’s books exists purely for its own sake, that in the end it is wholly meaningless and devoid of either a tangible purpose or substantial consequences. In order to verify this prevalent claim, I will for some time return to McCarthy’s 1985 opus magnum, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West–the novel with reference to which the writer’s notions of wrongdoing, cruelty, and transgression have been most extensively analyzed. According to Steven Shaviro, “What is most disturbing about the orgies of violence that punctuate Blood Meridian is that they fail to constitute a pattern, to unveil a mystery or to serve any comprehensible purpose.”18 This “mindless violence”19 is, in the words of another critic, 17

McCarthy, TR, 9-10. Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness,’” 114. 19 McCarthy, BM, 3. 18

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“presented simply as one of the hard facts of frontier life.”20 In a similar vein, Dana Phillips argues that in Blood Meridian violence is just a “reiterated fact,” a “more or less objective truth of all human experiences.”21 Nevertheless, the point that I would like to make is that it is precisely the distinction between violence and evil, between destruction of a physical and of a meta-physical nature that constitutes one of the major themes of the novel. A division of this kind is proffered by Alan Badiou, a major contemporary French philosopher and controversial political activist, in his Ethics. Badiou, employing his characteristically mystifying idiom, insists on the existence of evil as “a form of multiple-being,” and “a possible dimension of truths” which must be recognized as radically different than “the violence that the human animal employs to preserve in its being, to pursue its interests - a violence that is beneath Good and Evil.” The former may be apprehended “only to the extent that man is capable of becoming the Immortal he is,” while the latter is a category merely of the “human animal” pure and simple.22 Judge Holden, the one character in Blood Meridian who distinctly diverges from the rest in terms of not only intelligence and eloquence but also the level of self-awareness and consciousness of aim and purpose, may be said to represent Badiou’s “Evil” perpetrated by the human subject. Among his speeches on legal matters, archeology, botanics, paleontology, and astronomy, the judge repeatedly talks of “agency,” “order,” and “destiny.” These talks seem the more peculiar and out of place if we consider the context of the ape-like mutterings of the rest of the gang, including the kid who, paradoxically, speaks the least of all, typically limiting his utterances to negative statements implying refusal to enter into any kind of verbal exchange (“I aint heard no voice”; “I aint studyin no dance”; “I aint with you”23). Members of the Glanton gang are usually compelled to listen to the judge’s obscurely powerful discourse, but they are hardly able to follow, the more to comprehend its import, half regarding the man insane, half fearing to “waken [in him] something that had better been left sleeping.”24 While their violence is mostly “mindless,” resembling the violence Badiou positions “beneath Good and Evil”–they initially kill for money but with time begin to violate and vanquish their own contractors as well, ravaging “the very order upon which they 20

Eaton, “Dis(re)membered Bodies,” 158. Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts,” 438, 439. 22 Badiou, Ethics, 60, 61, 66, 67. 23 McCarthy, BM, 124, 327, 328. 24 McCarthy, BM, 147. 21

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parasitically feed”25–the evil of the judge is minutely pre-planned and coldly calculated. He most of all wants to know; that is why he studies plants, rocks, ancient paintings, and people–both dead and alive, with equal attentiveness, scrutiny, and care for detail,26 as when he examines a local “idiot” shown to the public for money: The judge reached and took hold of the man’s head in his hands and began to explore its contours. The man’s eyes darted about and he held on to the judge’s wrists. The judge had his entire head in his grip like an immense and dangerous faith healer. The man was standing tiptoe as if to better accommodate him in his investigations and when the judge let go of him he took a step back and looked at Glanton with eyes that were white in the gloom.27

“Only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before [man],” Holden explains, “will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”28 Yet, as we know, the idiot’s instinctive fear is wholly justified, since after analyzing the artifacts he collects, the judge drafts their exact copies into his “ledgerbook” and subsequently exterminates the originals, scratching off the paintings, burning the bones, and scalping the children he has such a macabre interest in. He is the artist-annihilator, the master of creation and destruction, the lord of life and death. Each of his acts of transgression and destruction is connected with unconcealed contentment and self-affirmation, at times approaching delight or even exhilaration. He clearly derives pleasure from killing–his murderous acts are invariably accompanied by his hideous Cheshire cat smile; which, in the case of the children he repeatedly abducts and slays, is often pleasure of an erotic kind. The judge’s gruesome association of death and erotic exaltation very much resembles George Bataille’s ideas in that matter. Bataille, perceiving “sexual effusion” as “the negation of the isolation of the ego,” argued that its “intensity increases to the point where destruction, the death of the being, becomes apparent.” He considered such “Evil” to be of the purest, that is the most disinterested nature, performed solely for the delight it grants and not for any kind of material benefit one could gain by its means.29 Referring to Andre Breton, Bataille praised “violent literature” which reaches the “only point that matters,” that is the point 25

Shaviro, “’The Very Life of the Darkness,’” 119. See “The Ideology of Representation in Blood Meridian” in Chapter Two of my study. 27 McCarthy, BM, 238-39. 28 McCarthy, BM, 198. 29 Bataille, Literature and Evil, 4-5. 26

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“where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communable and the incommunable, are no longer perceived in contradiction to one another.”30 To Breton’s list Bataille adds “Good and Evil” and “pain and joy.” I suppose that it is precisely this extreme point that McCarthy indicates in the figure of Judge Holden.

The Satan Who Imitates God Holden can be very well conceptualized as an amalgam of clashing opposites, simultaneously embodying both extremes of Bataille’s binary oppositions. He is the most violent and cold-blooded character in the novel, yet at the same time, with his “pale and hairless” skin, his “serene and strangely childlike face,”31 he paradoxically resembles a newly born infant. The judge’s brutality is also contrasted with his ability to gently soothe those who can no longer cope with their inner rage, as when he appeases Glanton’s drunken fit of fury: By noon the day following Glanton in his drunkenness was taken with a kind of fit and he lurched crazed and disheveled into the little courtyard and began to open fire with his pistols. In the afternoon he lay bound to his bed like a madman while the judge sat with him and cooled his brow with rags of water and spoke to him in a low voice. . . . After a while Glanton was sleeping and the judge rose and went out.32

Holden is both a smooth-tongued sophisticate, a “mystery” as the expriest Tobin calls him, and at the same time “a simple man” as he repeatedly refers to himself;33 he is also the creator and the destroyer in one. His speeches, for that matter, often seem contradictory in themselves (at one point, for instance, he says that “books lie” and at another that “A false book is no book at all”34), as if they were merely playful exercises in rhetoric. As one of McCarthy’s critics notes, “The judge says things– terrible things–so beautifully that his own contradictions are likely to slide in one ear and out the other.”35 We are therefore never certain whether Holden actually means what he says; all the more so because he does not 30

Andre Breton quoted in Bataille, Literature and Evil, 15. McCarthy, BM, 335, 6. 32 McCarthy, BM, 191. 33 McCarthy, BM, 284. 34 McCarthy, BM, 116, 141. 35 Jay Ellis. "McCarthy Music." Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 164. 31

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refrain from deliberate mystification and from playing cynical tricks on his listeners: [God] speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.36

Most importantly, Judge Holden is both godlike and satanic, both the one who saves and the one who brings damnation. He seems superhuman in his ability to show up in the most unexpected places at the most unexpected moments, as when Glanton and his companions first encounter him in the middle of the desert, perched on a rock, without either food, water, or a horse. In Tobin’s account, . . . there he set. No horse, just him and his legs crossed, smilin as we rode up. Like he’d been expectin us. He’d an old canvas kitbag and an old woolen benjamin over the one shoulder. In the bag was a brace of pistols and a good assortment of specie, gold and silver. He didn’t even have a canteen. It was like... You couldnt tell where he’d come from.37

“He saved us all, I have to give him that,” Tobin admits.38 Holden is repeatedly granted various designations which allude to his “otherworldliness,” such as “some great pale deity,” “a great ponderous djinn” “native” to the fire element and “some other sort of man entire,” untouched by the passing of time, while his companions are referred to as “the disciples of a new faith” and “wardens of some dim sect.” Although he does indeed save the gang more than once thanks to his extraordinary instinct, his soothing ability, and his willingness to act as their representative in “all legal matters,” he is also someone who seems to have been “sent” among them “for a curse,” entering a “terrible covenant” with them on the rim of the hellish volcano; a “scurrilous king,” whom others instinctively fear.39

36

McCarthy, BM, 116. McCarthy, BM, 125. 38 McCarthy, BM, 124. 39 McCarthy, BM, 92, 96, 325, 130, 187, 122-35, 96, 191, 237, 131, 126-30, 282, 147, 192, 238-39, 272, 285. 37

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Using René Girard’s terminology, we may say that Holden is the Satan who imitates God, his imitation being “jealous, grotesque, and perverse.”40 According to Girard, Satan’s major strategy is the transition from the mimetic stance of all-against-all, an attitude that induces chaos and dissent, to the mimesis of all-against-one, which leads to the sacrifice of a scapegoat, an enemy common to the whole community. This sacrificial mechanism enables Satan to restore order and unity, but only to an extent which would preclude the total annihilation of his property and, in the end, reinforce his power over humans. After a short time, he will again be apt to sow disorder, violence, and disaster, which, as Girard puts it, is his “favorite pursuit.”41 Satan’s sacrificial mechanism is a subversive imitation since the sacrificed victim is never exonerated, acclaimed, or glorified, as it is in the case of godly sacrifice, but it is always–and usually deceptively–identified as the source and focus of all evil, iniquity, and misfortune. Interestingly, this scheme of fraudulent scapegoating is used by Judge Holden at least twice in the novel: in the initial and the last scene in which we encounter him. When Holden is introduced for the first time, the action is set in Nacogdoches, in “the latterday republic of Fredonia.” As the kid rides into town, the narrator mentions that “the rain had been falling for two weeks,” and we sense a growing tension in the air. The townspeople inanely wander back and forth from the local bar to the “ratty canvas tent” which is being used as a church. “You ever see such a place for rain?” a “walleyed” teamster asks the kid as the latter walks into the packed tent. The congregation is listening to the Reverend preaching about a God who says He “will foller ye always even unto the end of the road,” even to that “hellhole” of Nacogdoches, yet the atmosphere grows increasingly tense. The tent is filled with “such a heady reek of the wet and bathless,” that the members of the congregation are from time to time forced to “sally forth into the downpour . . . for fresh air.”42 The kid notices that except him all the men present are armed. At some point, the status quo is disrupted by the entrance of the judge, who is not only visibly taller than anyone present, but also refuses to comply with the unwritten regulations of “this nomadic house of God,” standing there in his hat and still smoking a cigar. The Reverend breaks off his sermon, and all eyes turn to Holden who comes up to the pulpit and takes the preacher’s place. He then delivers a short and lucid speech in 40

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 47. 41 Girard. I See Satan, 32-48. 42 McCarthy, BM, 5-6.

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which, easily applying a persuasive legal jargon, he cogently disclaims the Reverend as an “imposter” who “is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. . . . On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years . . . whom he was surprised in the act of violating” and a “goat” which he had “congress with.”43 Holden’s appalling accusations obviously wreak total havoc among the congregation: “Already gunfire was general within the tent and a dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud.” Yet this chaos is soon overcome, order and contentment restored, and the authority of the judge fortified. The mud-covered, “bleeding” and “cursing” men all stumble into the bar, where Holden is already seated. When he unceremoniously admits he “never laid eyes on the man [Reverend Green] before today,” “never even heard of him,” the dismay is merely momentary. “Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.”44 The aim of the satanic sacrificial mechanism has been successfully achieved. An analogous situation takes place in the final scene of Blood Meridian, in which growing tension in the community similarly climaxes in the sacrifice of a scapegoat. This time we follow the kid (now the “man”) into Griffin, which earlier in the novel is tellingly referred to as “the biggest town for sin in all Texas” and “as lively a place for murders as you’d care to visit. Scrapes with knives. About any kind of meanness you can name.”45 Once he comes to Griffin, the man enters a bar filled with “a dimly seething rabble,” a “motley assemblage” comprising “every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief.” They are all drinking whiskey and beer and watching a show in which a “little girl in a smock crank[s] a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline twirl[s] strangely upon a board stage.” Suddenly, one of the drinkers gets up, draws his pistol, and shoots the bear dead. Judge Holden, whom “the man” spotted among the miscellaneous throng, joins him at the bar and, despite the man’s refusal to listen, elaborately lectures him on agency, death, purpose, and ritual which “includes the letting of blood.”46 From his highly abstract philosophical disquisition we may infer that he was the one who actually orchestrated the slaughter of the bear.

43

McCarthy, BM, 6-7. McCarthy, BM, 7-8. 45 McCarthy, BM, 319. 46 McCarthy, BM, 324-25, 329. 44

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Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don’t.47

Yet Holden does not content himself with the bloody sacrifice of the animal. It is the man–he and the judge being the only members of the Glanton gang that were still alive–whose life Holden craves for. He again poses groundless and counterfeit charges identifying the man as the singular gang member responsible for its ultimate ruin: “...it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course.”48 Finally, when the man is sacrificed in the ambiguous closing scene in the jakes (“The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.”49), the longheralded triumph of the satanic, immortal judge is ultimately definite and indisputable: His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.50

It therefore seems quite legitimate to conclude that in the figure of the judge McCarthy portrays something more than just purely physical and ultimately pointless violence. Holden’s cunning deceptiveness and cynical eloquence, his exceptionally crafty use of the sacrificial mechanism, as well as his desire to imitate the all-knowing and all-powerful God–the Creator and Executor of order, makes him a truly devilish character. For all the novel’s deconstructionist undoing of binary oppositions (savagery/civilization, nature/culture) and for all the textual jouissance of its “optical democracy,” Blood Meridian cannot be regarded as altogether devoid of metaphysics. What is more, as I will argue in the final section of the present chapter, the metaphysical depth of Holden’s evil tends to pervade, encompass, and swallow the mindless violence of the remaining protagonists, rendering all of its instances equally extreme, monstrous, and incomprehensible.

47

McCarthy, BM, 331. McCarthy, BM, 306. 49 McCarthy, BM, 333. 50 McCarthy, BM, 335. 48

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Mimetic Violence and Metaphysical Longing in Child of God Another figure who may be said to engage in something more than merely mindless and purely carnal violence is Lester Ballard from McCarthy’s Child of God. Although Ballard’s insight never seems to even come near Holden’s eloquent philosophizing, the two protagonists turn out to have more in common than could be initially presumed. “I never knew such a place for meanness,” complains a woman at the post office of Sevier County–the town where Lester was born and where he grew up.51 The narration of Child of God, similarly to that of Blood Meridian, includes numerous suggestions of some kind of fundamental apprehension, disorder, and unrest. The elderly Mr. Wade recalls the vigilantes who were to maintain order in the countryside when he was a small boy, but what these “lowlife thieves and cowards and murderers” in fact did was to “whip women and rob old people of their savins” and “murder people in their beds at night.” Things have not significantly improved since at present the walls of the post office are adorned with “sheaves of posters” from which the wanted criminals stare “with surly eyes. Men of many names. Their tattoos. Legends of dead loves inscribed on perishable flesh. A prevalence of blue panthers.”52 Not without analogies to Blood Meridian, it is the continuously falling rain that is construed as a final eschatological sign signaling the end of times. When the creek overflows and floods Sevier County, the town is submerged in the merciless uniformity of nature: The water . . . lay flat and gray and choked with debris, stretching in quiet canals up the streets and alleys, the tops of the parking meters just visible and off to the left the faintest suggestion of movement, a dull sluggish wrinkling where the mainstream of the Little Pigeon river tugged at the standing water in the flats.53

“You ain’t seen a old man with a long beard building a great big boat anywheres have ye?” the sheriff asks his deputy. These biblical overtones are reinforced when the town is associated with the cursed Sodom, as simply one of those “places the good lord didn’t intend folks to live in.” “It’s a judgment,” an old woman concludes. “Wages of sin and all that.”54 51

McCarthy, CG, 164. McCarthy, CG, 165, 55. 53 McCarthy, CG, 160. 54 McCarthy, CG, 161, 162, 164. 52

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Lester Ballard is a product of precisely this kind of “meanness,” violence, and confusion, and he is considered to have been a particularly bad seed from the very beginning. Like Judge Holden, Ballard also sacrifices innocent scapegoats: women and children whom, as I have attempted to demonstrate in Chapter Three, McCarthy’s novels traditionally associate with placid meekness and compliant passivity. And like Holden, Lester also conflates death with sexuality, apparently embodying the Batailleian principle that violating the most fundamental and sacred taboos is a religious act in itself and a unique experience of a metaphysical climax. Both Ballard and Holden would therefore belong to those “chosen few” who reach the ultimate recognition that “Evil, which is essentially cognate with death, is also, in a somewhat ambiguous manner, a basis of existence.”55 Applying Girard’s theory of violence as the source of the sacred to McCarthy’s novel, Gary Ciuba presents Ballard as a subject of unceasing desire: Ballard is almost infantile in his sheer longings. He shivers. He thirsts. He hungers. He sleeps, dreaming of mountain streams, “with his mouth open like a dead man” (CG 16)–one gaping yearning. Although Ballard is often shown hunting, buying provisions, building a fire, or searching for a home, such physical gratification only prepares him to live on the level of Girard’s metaphysical desire.56

Since the subsequent murders and the bodies Lester collects, rapes, dresses up, and scrutinizes fail to satisfy his hunger, we may assume that what he in truth desires is not his victims’ physical representation but rather the metaphysical–their being as such. In accordance with Bataille’s Theory of Religion, through sacrifice he frees the offered subjects from their physical existence and thereby grants them access to the religious, intimate reality.57 Ballard therefore seeks a kind of “divine autonomy through violence,” and it is precisely violence that makes him a “child of God,” conferring “upon him the sovereignty that he has been elsewhere denied in the cosmic order.”58

55 Bataille, Literature and Evil, 16. See also “Georges Bataille: Evil as a Mystical Experience” in Chapter One of my book. 56 Gary M. Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007), 170. 57 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 43-49. 58 Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 170, 176.

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Another analogy between Lester Ballard and Judge Holden is that they are both somewhat uncannily childlike. Yet while in the case of the judge his affinities with a giant hairless infant only underscore his unearthliness and preternaturalness, what Ballard’s boyishness seems to imply (apart from the already mentioned peculiar “divinization”) is the fact that he is not only a victimizer but also a victim. The “naughty toddler”59 dresses up his female victims, paints their lips, and brushes their hair as if they were giant dolls; he hauls his enormous stuffed animals from one place to another, saving them from his burning house and taking them into the caves. Near the ending of the novel, he appears in the hospital “swaddled up in outsized overalls and covered all over with red mud” like a newborn baby.60 As Ciuba concludes, Ballard raises the narcissism of infants and the tantrums of two year olds to a sublimely heinous level where he acts out the ill-temper of a juvenile deity.61

Yet Lester Ballard’s boyishness is not the only indication of his being a victim of an exceptionally “mean” community. The narration of Child of God is interwoven with gossipy stories which circulate among the citizens of Sevier County, and Ballard appears to belong to the most favored topics of these tales. He is not only the object of the townspeople’s continuous grumbling and spreading of rumors but also the source of their unceasing righteous indignation. They tell one another how Lester’s mother abandoned the family when he was a small child, and how soon after, when he was nine years old, his father committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic of their house. Lester was the one who found his body. They say he never was right after his daddy killed hisself. . . He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hangin. We just cut him down, let him fall to the floor. . . . He stood there and watched, never said nothing. . . . The old man’s eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish and his tongue blacker’n a chow dog’s.62

Lester’s neighbors therefore view him as a person wholly devoid of naturally human empathy and unable to experience or manifest deeper 59

Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 168. McCarthy, CG, 102-03, 105, 192. 61 Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 168. 60

62

McCarthy, CG, 21.

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emotions. They also do not fail to recall that the roots of Lester’s iniquity reach deeper since already his grandfather, Leland Ballard, was a brash fraudster and a thief. He never joined the Union Army and always managed to evade serving his country during the war, yet was impudent enough to petition the government for a life-long war pension. Still, Lester’s place in the family is unique: “You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip em all,”63 concludes a member of the gossipy company. In one scene of the novel, Ballard enters the church in the middle of a service and takes the back bench. The congregation automatically, “like a cast of puppets,” turn to look at the latecomer. This time they turn back “more slowly” and begin whispering about the irreverent intruder. The preacher stops his sermon (which to Ballard seems nothing more than mere “biblical babbling”), and, “to justify the silence,” civilly pours himself a glass of water. During the rest of the ceremony, Lester is simply ignored: “Ballard had a cold and snuffed loudly through the service but nobody expected he would stop if God himself looked back askance so no one looked.”64 This way, the community of worshippers at Six-mile church somewhat hypocritically manage to denigrate the peril that Lester poses and, as Ciuba phrases it, “keep any threat of disorder at a comfortable remove,”65 preserving the desired routine peacefulness of the status quo. From the very beginning Lester is thus being marginalized, stared at with outright hostility, and even charged with crimes he has not committed. At the outset of the novel, the citizens of Sevier County gather at an auction to sell Ballard’s family farm–the current tenant must be removed for failing to pay taxes. Although the townspeople assemble to witness a brutal eviction, they come in joyful and festive moods “like a caravan of carnival folk,” “the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.” It is only Ballard, “small, unclean, unshaven, . . . a petty annoyance flickering across the wallward eye,” that unsettles the “otherwise . . . pastoral morning” by appearing at his barn door with a rifle and attempting to drive the auctioneers off. Yet he is not treated seriously and is simply removed by one of the men who gives him a vicious blow on the head with an axe–a knock after which Lester “never could hold his head right.” Later on, 63

McCarthy, CG, 81. McCarthy, CG, 31-2. 65 Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 166. 64

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according to a relation of one of the onlookers, the auctioneer simply “went on with the auction like nothin never had happen.”66 We may therefore assume that Ballard’s lack of empathy and his inability to feel compassion for others is simply a natural and inevitable outcome of the insensitivity and callousness of the community which raised him. At some point Ballard is accused of raping a woman he encountered sleeping under a tree on a cold winter morning. In fact, after staring at her body “sprawled under the thin stuff of her nightdress” and suppressing the spontaneous impulse to help her (“Ain’t you cold?”), he slapped her (apparently in self-defense) and tore her clothes off, leaving her “stark naked on the ground.”67 Unjustifiably arresting him for rape, the county sheriff, tellingly named Fate, provocatively asks Ballard about his future plans: And what then. What sort of meanness have you got laid out for next. . . . I figure you ought to give us a clue. Make it more fair. Let’s see: failure to comply with a court order, public disturbance, assault and battery, public drunk, rape. I guess murder is next on the list ain’t it? Or what things is it you’ve done we ain’t found out yet.68

Therefore, at moments, Lester has the impression that the events he is participating in have somehow been “fated” or orchestrated to serve a cause he is not himself aware of. When later in the novel he stops a truck to kill the boy who is driving it and the girl who is sitting by his side, he at some point feels that they have been “assembled there the three of them for some purpose other that his.”69 These moments imply that the apparently “active” Ballard also experiences the uncanny feeling of being driven by some powerful external force which determines his actions. Lester’s double identity of the offender and the victim in one is symbolically confirmed by the fact that he develops the habit of wearing the clothes and scalps of the women he has killed: He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.70

66

McCarthy, CG, 3, 4, 9. McCarthy, CG, 42-3. 68 McCarthy, CG, 56. 69 McCarthy, CG, 149. 70 McCarthy, CG, 140. 67

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Ballard himself is transformed into the grotesque dolls he used to play with, slowly coming to resemble rather a “crazed mountain troll” or a “part-time ghoul”71 than a genuine human being. At times there are even suggestions that it is not he who violates the women he kills but that it is rather they who are the true offenders. When he carries the body of one of his victims down the mountain road, he is described as a “man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs akimbo like a monstrous frog,”72 and each time he commits murder, he first projects some kind of sexual guilt on his prey.73 Ballard is therefore different: marginalized, separated, and “detached,” yet at the same time he is “not a freak of malign nature but kith and kin to so many other like-minded men and women in the novel”74–an ill-bred product of a violent community, congenitally inheriting their collective resentment, aggression, and hostility. This way he becomes a perfect nominee for the Girardian scapegoat who must be at once “unique but representative, the fiend who can be killed with impunity and the fellow member who attracts unto himself all the conflictual mimesis that must be purged from society.”75 Bringing together not only victim and victimizer but also “female and male” as well as “the dead and the living,” Ballard is chosen as the community’s ideal “surrogate and savior.” “The delusion is almost too enticing to discredit: order and peace will be restored once Lester Ballard is killed.”76 There is one instance in the novel when the narrator, describing Ballard’s attempt to rescue himself and his possessions from the flooded cave, stops his relation to directly address the reader: He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some 71

McCarthy, CG, 152, 174. McCarthy, CG, 153. 73 He for instance refers to his first victim as a “goddamn frozen bitch” (CG 102), accuses the Lane girl (whom he subsequently kills) of sleeping with “that old crazy Thomas boy” and giving birth to the “cretin” baby she passes off as her younger brother (CG 116-17), and he is certain that the girl he pulls out of the truck on Frog Mountain and shoots in the back of the neck was likewise promiscuous since she was “fixin to screw” her date (CG 150). See also Nell Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God,” in Myth, Legend, Dust, ed. Rick Wallach, 68-77. 74 Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 181. 75 Girard in Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 193. 76 Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 193-94. 72

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halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life.77

The image of the hostile townspeople (with the reader among them) standing on the shore and craving for Ballard’s death, as well as their factual attempt of lynching him near the end of the book again illustrate Girard’s all-against-one mechanism,78 so skillfully employed by Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. As I have mentioned, this sacrificial scheme has an amazingly powerful potential for consolidating a fragmented society and reestablishing order in the place of chaos. By pushing Ballard into the margins (both territorial and psychological), the community therefore fortifies its own center and secures its identity. They design and realize their own myth of the evil Ballard who surpasses all transgressors in their wrongdoing, while in fact he is just a “child of God much like yourself perhaps.”79 When near the ending of the novel Lester’s dead body is used by medical students, it is subjected to a very thorough examination: He was laid out on a 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.80

Nevertheless, the students who “saw monsters worse to come in their configurations” find nothing extraordinary in Lester’s intestines. Ballard, who at some point watching “the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole . . . wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself,”81 appears to be “made of” the same matter as every other human being.

Longing for Permanence The metaphysical desire that both Holden and Ballard are attempting to appease through violence may be referred to as a yearning not only for

77

McCarthy, CG, 156. Girard, I See Satan, 32-48. 79 McCarthy, CG, 4. 80 McCarthy, CG, 194. 81 McCarthy, CG, 194, 141. 78

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power over the being of the other82 but also for a sense of stability, constancy, and endurance. Child of God contains numerous instances of more or less explicit suggestions that Ballard be deeply disturbed and alarmed by change, movement, and the eternal metamorphosis of things. First, he risks his life to defend his family house (in which the rope his father hanged himself on is still dangling from the attic) and to avoid having to move to a new place.83 One time, when he is walking through the forest in the middle of the winter, he grows distressed by its untidiness and by the transfigurations that are taking place: Coming up the mountain through the blue winter twilight among great boulders and the ruins of giant trees prone in the forest he wondered at such upheaval. Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed. Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.84

Later in the novel, when Lester observes a wagon pulled by a mule, its wheels irrevocably turning and turning (turning wheels being a symbol repeatedly used by McCarthy to signify continuous change and the irreversibility of fate85), he is deeply saddened by the impossibility of attaining authentic constancy and permanence. He watched the diminutive progress of all things in the valley, the gray fields coming up black and corded under the plow, the slow green occlusion that the trees were spreading. Squatting there he let his head drop between his knees and he began to cry.86

On the same night, Ballard has a dream in which he seems to finally acknowledge the fact that he himself must also participate in the everturning cycle of nature. He dreamt that night that he rode through woods on a low ridge. . . . He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule’s barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones 82

See “The Ideology of Representation in Blood Meridian” in Chapter Two of my book, where I discuss Judge Holden’s longing for power. 83 McCarthy, CG, 7-8. 84 McCarthy, CG, 136. 85 See “Circle Metaphors” in Chapter Three. 86 McCarthy, CG, 170.

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where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.87

Killing therefore becomes, for Ballard, a way of preserving reality, of breaking the incessant circular movement, of stopping the continuous transition and change. He intuitively understands why the disabled and disfigured child violates the helpless robin by chewing off its legs: “He wanted it to where it couldn’t run off”88–his own motives for murdering one woman after another and for assembling a collection of their bodies are in a sense analogous. He simply wishes for them to stay. Judge Holden’s strategy of safeguarding and mastering reality (drawing exact copies of the plants, tools, and ruins he encounters and subsequently extinguishing, annihilating them) is similar. He also destroys and at the same time preserves a version over which he himself has absolute control; a version which is constant, immutable, and impervious to change because it has no autonomous being of its own, because it is “dead.”

Divine Violence, Metaphysical Evil As I have endeavored to demonstrate, René Girard’s theory of the inter-relationships between desire, violence, and divinity as well as his idea of mimetic scapegoating offer one possibility of expounding the metaphysical overtones present in McCarthy’s work. His protagonists (like Judge Holden) tend to imitate Satan’s all-against-one sacrificial mechanism, or else (like Lester Ballard) are themselves chosen as scapegoats capable of satisfying the mob’s yearning for concord and stability. They are also liable to use violence in order to quench desires that are deeply metaphysical in nature: the need to take over the very being of the other; the wish to assume the godlike position of one who creates and destroys, gives and takes lives, and has the power to decide about the order of things; as well as the craving for permanence, endurance, and immutability. Is it possible, on the basis of what has been said so far, to formulate any explicit conclusions concerning McCarthy’s notion of evil? For one thing, we may certainly infer that McCarthy does acknowledge the basic difference between a violence that is thoughtless, often instinctive, and not premeditated, and an evil that is not only devised and calculated 87 88

McCarthy, CG, 170-71. McCarthy, CG, 79.

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beforehand but may be also grounded in deep philosophical reflection. Violence of the first type is employed by practically all of the protagonists of Blood Meridian except Judge Holden, as well as by most of the representatives of Lester Ballard’s community who appear in Child of God. Characters who indulge in the second form of evil belong to the most uncanny and demonic figures in McCarthy’s fiction: the bearded “minister” from Outer Dark, Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, Eduardo, the pimp from Cities of the Plain, Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, and Lester Ballard from Child of God (though in his case, as has been suggested earlier, we may talk of a mixture of the two types; he is both an active, determined subject and a helpless, passive object at the same time). The mentioned distinction is closely related to the issue of intentionality–a criterion that has with time come to the fore as the deciding factor in our thinking about evil. Tracing the historical development of the way humans have tended to view matters of right and wrong in her compelling study Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman claims that since the eighteenth century we have come to “identify evil and evil intention so thoroughly that denying the latter is normally viewed as a way of denying the former.”89 We therefore tend to exonerate those who harm others with no intention of doing so–those who resort to violence merely out of stupidity, thoughtlessness, ignorance, or timidity of character. At the same time, we are likely to resolutely condemn individuals who perform evil acts in a manner that is coldly calculated, thoroughly thought out, and fully conscious. That is why we are more liable to acknowledge Judge Holden as an evil protagonist than denounce, for instance, the kid. And yet, examining the issue of intentionality with reference to McCarthy’s characters and adopting it as a criterion determining their ethical stance would be highly problematic for one obvious reason: we as readers are practically never given a direct insight into the characters’ motives or the moral grounds of their actions. We merely witness the bare deeds themselves, which are invariably related by distanced and restrained third-person narrators. What is more, the apparently more self-conscious protagonists are not in any way deemed more responsible for what they have done; quite the contrary, they seem to be less susceptible to the decrees of dark fate since the culpability for evil is randomly distributed between the meeker and more vulnerable. We must therefore presume that 89 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2002), 271.

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McCarthy does not regard the question of intentions as a crucial one; what truly matters is the act itself and its destructive effects which, from the point of view of the victim, may be equally acute regardless of the victimizer’s personal motivation. McCarthy’s departure from the modern insistence on intentions may be considered as a reflection of the stance that philosophy has tended to take after the Holocaust. “Auschwitz,” Neiman notes, “embodied evil that confuted two centuries of modern assumptions about intention.”90 Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its close analysis of the personality of a high-ranking Nazi official responsible for the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps, was certainly a turning point in that matter. As I have noted in the first chapter of my study, what Arendt’s study demonstrates is that although Eichmann was directly accountable for the death of thousands of innocent people, his intentions were actually wholly devoid of malice or forethought; they were in fact quite low and rather banal: he merely wished to be an irreproachable, order-abiding subordinate of the Führer, to avoid being sent to direct combat on the front, and perhaps to achieve a promotion. And obviously, “Eichmann is only the most famous Nazi official whose initial goals had nothing to do with mass murder and everything to do with petty desires for personal advancement. At every level, the Nazi produced more evil, with less malice, than civilization had previously known.”91 That is why the Holocaust so radically undermined our conviction that a person’s intentions may be safely regarded as the ultimate measure allowing us to clearly distinguish between genuine evil and mere negligence. “Auschwitz leaves us . . . helpless” because it exposes the unfitness of all modern attempts at a reasonable theodicy. Hence “the long philosophical silence on the subject”92–most thinkers, faced with a lack of intellectual resources liable to account for such immenseness of suffering, chose to abandon the discussion of evil altogether. Since the worst of all evils turned out to be banal and thoughtless at its core, evil as an ontological construct lost its prior distinctness. In fact, we grew so accustomed to the lack of any conceptual definiteness of evil that the attacks of 9/11 powerfully shocked us precisely with their explicitness and “traditional” intentionality. And once again, we were at a loss when it came to an ethical expounding of what had taken place. As Neiman explains the ambiguity of the situation, 90

Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 271. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 271. 92 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 281. 91

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To call what happened on September 11 evil appeared to join forces with those whose simple, demonic conceptions of evil often deliberately obscure more insidious forms of it. Not to call the murders evil appeared to relativize them, to engage in forms of calculation that make them understandable–and risked a first step toward making them justifiable.93

The issue of intentionality can therefore neither be adopted as a clearcut criterion in our thinking about evil nor can it be altogether and once and for all abandoned. And it is exactly this borderline philosophical stance, urging us to undertake reflection upon and discussion of the notion of evil without allowing us to define it in a fully transparent, systematic, or totalizing way, that finds a brilliant illustration in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Apart from the discrimination between intentional evil and mindless violence, modern philosophy adopted another fundamental division which was meant to stipulate the ontological status of evil, namely the separation between evil of natural and moral origin. Neiman identifies the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which “was said to shock Western civilization more than any event since the fall of Rome,” 94 as a point in history which first provoked the drawing of this sharp distinction. During the memorable earthquake, violent seismic waves that destroyed thousands of buildings and buried their inhabitants in the ruins were followed first by ravaging fires, which killed most of the survivors and devastated the priceless treasures of what was at the time one of the world’s wealthiest merchant cities, and then by a series of enormous tides that “smashed the port, tearing ships from their anchors and drowning hundreds of people who sought shelter on the coast.”95 This unspeakably frightful destruction, combining all natural elements allied against a prosperous, progressive, and enlightened population, provoked a major discussion between those that were inclined to view the event as God’s sentence on an increasingly secularized Europe, and those who tended to interpret it as a random and purely natural occurrence for which no human was to blame. The most emblematic figure of the former faction was the eloquent Italian Jesuit named Gabriel Malagrida, whereas the latter caucus in the dispute was represented by Portugal’s current prime minister, Pombal. And thus Pombal’s efficient and surprisingly successful attempts at preventing plague, famine, and looting so that the city could promptly return to normal life were assisted by Malagrida’s 93

Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 285. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 240. 95 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 242. 94

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dramatic summons to devote all the available time to prayer, fasting, and repentance since the Apocalypse was certain to dawn any day. Finally, the Jesuit was denounced as a heretic and visionary and, after two years spent in prison, he was publicly strangled at an auto-da-fé and his body burnt.96 Pombal’s victory constituted a symbolic triumph of naturalist explanations of the earthquake and therefore marked a profound shift in modern consciousness: “Since Lisbon, natural evils no longer have any seemly relation to moral evils . . . . Natural disaster is the object of attempts at prediction and control, not of interpretation.”97 Only evil of the moral kind can be adopted as a subject of ethical debate and an occurrence which may provoke discussions on the issue of human responsibility. Yet again, this fundamental division into two categories that seem altogether discrepant did not endure in the face of the atrocities of the twentieth century. When the impossible became true, when humanity was confronted with an evil that possessed “neither depth nor any demonic dimension” and that could “outgrow and lay waste the whole world . . . because it spread like a fungus on the surface,”98 the distinction between moral evil which could be reasonably analyzed and comprehended and natural evil which fell outside any rational discernment lost its former justification. Both came to be viewed as “special cases of something worse: the metaphysical evil built into the human condition.”99 This stance was, paradoxically, advocated by such thinkers as Camus and Sartre, who openly denounced metaphysics and straightforwardly abandoned the idea of transcendence as a liberating force. Yet by conflating the moral evil of Nazism with the natural evil of a plague,100 Camus indicated that the two have common, equally deep and unfathomable roots. I would argue that McCarthy’s novels also tend to blur the distinction between natural and moral evil, just like they ultimately identify premeditated evil with thoughtless violence. Therefore, neither the criterion of intentionality nor the principle of comprehensibility can be in the end adopted as sound and certain measures in our thinking about evil. All of its forms are at base equally scandalous, abstruse, and inexplicable. That is why in McCarthy’s descriptions of barren and hostile landscapes, mountain lakes resemble “tidepools of primal blood,” the sun is like a 96 Gabriel Malagrida, New Advent. Catholic Encyclopedia, accessed January 16, 2008, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09565c.htm. 97 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 250. 98 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 301. 99 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 294. 100 I am obviously referring to one of Albert Camus’s most famous novels, The Plague (trans. Stuart Gilbert, New York: Vintage, 1991.)

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burning “white hole,”101 the earth–its “circling” “cold and relentless,” is shrouded in “darkness implacable,” and the whole universe is not more than a “crushing black vacuum.”102 Nature is as inimical, threatening, and unpredictable as human beings themselves–a correspondence that is masterfully reflected by McCarthy’s notion of “optical democracy.”103 This principle precludes his narrators from giving priority to any “one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass” since in “the neuter austerity” of the landscape “all phenomena [are] bequeathed a strange equality” and “all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.”104 Evil perpetrated by men is just as “natural” as disasters brought about by nature itself, while sudden earthquakes, falling trees, and calamitous floods may be bestowed with the same “moral” significance as theft, rape, or murder devised by humans.105 The presentation of evil in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction therefore seems to be in accordance with what was posited in the writings of Camus, Sartre, or Adorno, yet with one crucial distinction: for all the ubiquity, inconceivability, and metaphysical profundity of the evil he relates, McCarthy does not ultimately “give up on the possibility of God.”106 He does seem to comply with Adorno’s moral imperative “not to deceive ourselves about the modern catastrophe” since “there is no right way to live when everything is wrong” (“es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”)107–his characters are not allowed to feel “at home” in any place or time, yet they are not altogether denied access to the transcendental. McCarthy’s novels contain numerous glimpses of the metaphysical, some of which I have already attempted to delineate–such as the idea of the not all-powerful and somewhat helpless God, the motif of the imitation of Satan’s all-against-one mechanism, or precisely the experience of evil as a powerful and all-encompassing force, always “already there,” more 101

McCarthy, BM, 187, 152. For a more detailed analysis of McCarthy’s presentation of the hostile Western landscape in Blood Meridian see “The Western Frontier after Vietnam” in Chapter Two. 102 McCarthy, TR, 110. 103 I examine the significance of McCarthy’s “optical democracy” in “The Ideology of Representation in Blood Meridian” in Chapter Two of my study. 104 McCarthy, BM, 247. 105 Recall, for instance, that the community of Sevier County from Child of God interpreted the flood as God’s judgment (CG 164). 106 Terry C. Muck, “From American Dream to American Horizon: The Religious Dimension in Louis L’Amour and Cormac McCarthy,” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, eds. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press , 2000), 66. 107 Theodor Adorno quoted in Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 305.

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rudimentary and primeval than anything we may ever encounter. The last chapter of my study will be explicitly devoted to a depiction of those intimations, specifically to more or less direct biblical allusions that can be found in Cormac McCarthy’s works.

CHAPTER FIVE GLIMPSES OF THE METAPHYSICAL: BIBLICAL THEMES IN MCCARTHY’S NOVELS

In the final chapter of my book, I attempt to trace some of the biblical motifs with which McCarthy’s prose is thoroughly imbued. Obviously, my analysis is partial and incomplete, due to the extensiveness of the topic and the restrictions of space I am bound to observe. I have therefore deliberately chosen to concentrate on those biblical references which are implicit and indirect, which constitute rather something of an underlying structure than a series of distinct straightforward links. That is why I practically disregard the Border Trilogy, which is abundant in precisely this kind of direct citations appearing in the dispersed speeches of various seers and prophets, and instead focus on such deeply allegorical novels as Outer Dark and The Road. The first part of the chapter concerns the topic of the relationship between father and son, first depicting its biblical representation and subsequently tracking its treatment in McCarthy’s novels, mainly Blood Meridian, Child of God, Suttree, Outer Dark, and The Road. The second section focuses on the two latter books, venturing to identify their latent biblical underpinning and briefly returning to the question of the nature of the evil that pervades McCarthy’s prose.

The New Testament: Like Father Like Son One of the major biblical themes that is prevalent in McCarthy’s fiction is the motif of fatherhood and sonship as well as the matter of the father-son mutual relationship. Before I go on to an analysis of how particular novels by McCarthy problematize this issue, let me briefly delineate its treatment in Christian exegesis and theology–employed obviously with reference to the intricate union between God the Father and Christ the Son. The attribute that is most forcefully underscored by Christian theologians is the absolute unity and indissolubility of this bond–an integrity which is wholly transcendent and altogether beyond the bounds

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of human comprehension. “I and the Father are one. . . . The Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10: 30, 38).1 All that the Son does is meant to reveal and make known the Father: The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son, and shows him all that he himself is doing. . . . If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father (John 5: 19-20; 10: 37-38).

Not only are all of Jesus’ acts in perfect accordance with God’s plan and will, but also His very nature is identical with the divine nature of the Father, despite the fact that the two of them are distinct and autonomous persons. In the words of St. Augustine, “Alius est quidem Verbum Filius Dei, sed non est aliud” (“The Son is not something different than the Father, yet He is someone different”).2 Quite paradoxically, they are both “one” and “two” at the same time. Apart from its transcendental unity, the second crucial feature of the biblical Father-Son relationship is precisely their mutual autonomy. Although, as Jesus explains, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. . . . I do as the Father has commanded me” (John 14: 10, 31), this obedience is each and every time a matter of His own independent choice–a choice that is motivated by love and the desire to act in accordance to the nature of both the Father and Himself. In fact, Jesus on the whole renounces the right to govern His own earthly existence, to give it a final and definitive sense and form. He instead decides to bear witness to the Father, allowing Him to provisionally orchestrate situations and circumstances which grant His mission an increasingly distinct meaning. Although such a resignation may seem suppressive and stifling, potentially leading to a thoughtless and mechanical reproduction of the given role, in the case of Jesus it actually turns out to be absolutely and entirely liberating. Complying with the Father’s will is for Him tantamount to the actual recognition of His own deepest self and to an existential understanding of God’s truth–the truth 1

All biblical citations used in the present chapter are taken from the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVC), accessed April 5, 2009, http://www.geocities.com/sacra_scriptura/eng_bible_index.html. 2 St. Augustine quoted by Jacek Salij OP, “Ojcostwo i synostwo u ĞwiĊtego Augutyna” [“Fatherhood and Sonship in St. Augustine”] in Ojcostwo [Fatherhood], ed. Józef Augustyn SJ (Cracow: WAM, 1998), 41.

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that makes one “free” (John 8: 32). His acts are not thoughtless; on the contrary, to paraphrase Hans Urs von Balthasar, the absolute intensity of their submission creates an absolute extensity, an unceasing dimension for contemplation.3 Freedom and submission do not oppose one another but rather enter a kind of cyclic relation: more far-reaching freedom leads to greater possibilities of submission, and vice versa: more radical submission generates a deeper acknowledgment of individual freedom.4 Jesus gives away His life not because anyone takes it away from Him–He retains the “power to lay it down” as well as the “power to take it again” (John 10: 18)–but because He himself makes the choice to do so. Other than unity and autonomy, the third most conspicuous characteristic of the New Testament alliance between Father and Son could be referred to as reciprocity. The mutual love that binds them is so perfect, entire, and unmitigated that it had to find a substantial “embodiment” in a third distinct person–the Holy Spirit. Also, by constantly underscoring the necessity of nurturing the inner child in us, Jesus demonstrates that the phase of childhood does not end with our entrance into subsequent stages of maturing. On the contrary, we should retain the constant need to acknowledge the timid and helpless child residing in us and develop the ability to be that very child’s loving and caring “father.” What therefore emerges from a brief analysis of the biblical Father-Son relationship is a string of seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes: undivided unity and absolute autonomy, total submission and unmitigated freedom, constant concurrence and each time independence, being a child and a father at once.

Blood Meridian: The Death of the Father In order to examine the motif of fathers and sons in Cormac McCarthy’s work, we again need to return to Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), which is undoubtedly his thematically richest novel. The book begins with the sentence “See the 3

Hans Urs von Balthasar. Teologia dziejów [A Theology of History]. Trans. Juliusz Zychowicz. Cracow: Znak, 1996, 54. Balthasar, the ingenious Swiss theologian, has been an exceptional inspiration in my attempts to come to at least a superficial understanding of various intricate theological issues, the matter of the interrelations within the Holy Trinity among them. 4 See Krzysztof Grzywocz. “DzieciĊctwo Jezusa objawieniem Ojcostwa. Refleksje na podstawie twórczoĞci Hansa Ursa von Balthasara” [“Jesus the Child as a Revelation of God the Father. Reflections on the Basis of the Works by Hans Urs von Balthasar”]. Ed. Józef Augutyn SJ. 84.

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child”–seemingly an ironic echo of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (“Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law / Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw”5). Obviously, the image that McCarthy offers at the beginning of Blood Meridian has nothing in common with the idyllic vision propounded by Pope. Its predominant mood is a deeply tragic sense of loss: the father lost the mother of his child when she was delivering it into this world (of the “night” of his son's birth he says, “God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens.”); the kid lost not only his mother whose name he does not even know, and his sister “that he will not see again,” but ultimately also his father who now “lies in drink” and is unable to provide his son with the most basic nurturing. The father-son relationship therefore becomes peculiarly reversed at the very outset: “the child," compelled to take upon himself obligations going far beyond his age, comes to be “the father of the man.”6 This situation is obviously far removed from the biblical ideal in which the Son gradually comes to form a transcendental oneness with the Father through both radical submission and profound freedom. The theme of fathers and sons recurs on different levels a number of times throughout the novel. It appears most explicitly in one of the stories Judge Holden relates to his companions.7 It is a tale about the father of one family who is unable to provide for it otherwise than by dressing as an Indian and robbing those who pass the road near his house, yet without inflicting any kind of physical injury on them. One day he tries to rob a young traveler, who nevertheless manages to show him how shameful his way of living is and encourages him to repent and “take his brother into his heart.” The traveler is then invited to dine with the family; they all talk and become quite affectionate towards one another. In any event, when the man walks the traveler to the crossroads, he kills him with a rock, takes his clothes, his watch and his money, buries him by the side of the road, bloodies his own body with a flint, comes back to his family and tells them that they have been attacked by robbers and that the young wayfarer was murdered. His wife time and again comes to visit the traveler’s grave, bringing flowers and grieving over his tragic fate as if he were her own child. On his death bed the father of the family reveals the truth to his son, upon which the boy with jealousy and hatred scatters the bones of the dead traveler, leaves his family, and himself becomes “a killer of men.” Yet the vital import of the judge’s story concerns the destiny of the young 5

Alexander Pope. Essay on Man. Epistle 2. Poets’ Corner. Bookshelf. http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/pope-e2.html 6 McCarthy, BM, 3. 7 McCarthy, BM, 142-45.

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traveler’s son who was at that time still in his mother’s womb and was therefore born and raised without his father: All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.8

Judge Holden’s claim is that witnessing the father’s struggle with his own weaknesses as well as gaining independence through the experience of the father’s death are essential elements of the son’s upbringing. Interestingly (and quite ironically since it turns out that no one is “entitled” to his death), it is the judge himself who functions as the major father figure in the novel, and it is the kid who seems to be both most attracted to and most subjugated by the judge’s fatherly influence. As I have already noted,9 all throughout the book the judge manifests a peculiar interest in children (usually deplorable and terrified survivors of the massacres carried out by the gang) and coming into confidential contact with them belongs to his numerous “gifts.” Yet this contact invariably proves to be noxious and ultimately deadly for the young ones: the narration either explicitly describes their violent murdering by the judge: . . . in the morning the judge was dandling [the Apache boy] on one knee while the men saddled their horses. Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with his saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it,10

relates the finding of their mutilated bodies (“In the meantime someone had found the boy. He was lying face down naked in one of the cubicles.”11), or simply tells of their obscure missing.12 Although there is scarcely any exchange between the judge and the kid until their two final encounters in San Diego and in Griffin, the kid is repeatedly reported to be carefully “watching” the judge,13 and when the 8

McCarthy, BM, 145. See Chapter Three (“Women, Children, and ‘Idiots’”). 10 McCarthy, BM, 164. 11 McCarthy, BM, 118. 12 McCarthy, BM, 191, 239, 333. 13 McCarthy, BM, 95, 243, 281, 282. 9

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expriest Tobin tells him to “study the judge,” he answers, “I done studied him.”14 He knows that the judge poses lethal danger to his own self, yet he is compelled to listen to his speeches and unable to shoot him despite being granted a few singular occasions to do so.15 The judge’s exceptional treatment of the kid is also merely suggested throughout the novel by his querying glances across the fire, to be fully revealed only at its closing. When Holden visits the kid in the San Diego prison, he asks with well performed bitterness, “Don’t you know that I’d have loved you like a son?”16 He accuses the kid of being the sole cause of the tragic finale of the gang’s venture: “You put your own allowances before the judgments of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise.”17 The kid’s fault, according to the judge, consisted in the unwillingness to participate in the mission wholeheartedly and in an insufficient degree of ingenious cruelty and forthright ruthlessness: “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”18 Holden owns up to his singular attitude to the kid and bewails the frustration of his prospects toward his person: “I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me.”19 Before they meet in Griffin for the very last time, the kid, already referred to as “the man,” comes to participate in another father-and-son exchange, this time acting the part of the destructive parent. He encounters a group of ragged boys, “violent children orphaned by war,” and is humiliated by the oldest of them who refuses to believe in his scalphunting past. Notably using rhetoric resembling that of the judge, the fifteen-year-old boldly asserts, “I knowed you for what you was when I seen ye.” The kid did not dare to shoot the father-judge, but this time, given the chance to act out the role of the deadly parent, he kills the boy who repudiated his authority and protested at being called “son.” (“You 14

McCarthy, BM, 122. McCarthy, BM, 285, 291, 298. 16 McCarthy, BM, 306. 17 McCarthy, BM, 307. 18 McCarthy, BM, 299. 19 McCarthy, BM, 328. In this case, like in his many other utterances, the Judge’s rhetoric echoes biblical phrases – here alluding to Jesus talking to Nathanael: “Jesus saw Nathana-el coming to him, and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!’ Nathana-el said to him, ‘How do you know me?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’” (John 1: 47-48). 15

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aint callin me a liar are ye son? / I aint ye son.”) This way he only extends the fatal succession of sons-without-fathers by in turn orphaning the boy’s younger brother. “Randall you take a good look at the man that has made you an orphan,” the other boys tell him. “The orphan turned once to look back at him and then he hurried to catch up.”20 When the man reaches Griffin, which, as the boys boastfully proclaim, is “full of whores” and “set up to be the biggest town for sin in all Texas,” he notices Judge Holden in the first tavern he enters. The judge immediately takes up the fatherly discourse he used in the San Diego prison thirty years before: “Do you believe it’s all over, son?” The man makes inept attempts to withdraw from the father-son exchange, yet he is overwhelmed not only by the judge’s enormous figure, his “great corpus” which “enshadowed him from all beyond,” but also by his powerful speech. He speaks of order and agency, of the dance, war, and game, of ceremony, ritual, and death. He speaks as the one who has found his destiny, who has fulfilled the role of agent and executor of order, and the only one who will ultimately prevail since he “has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, … has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart.” The man, since he failed to wholly give himself up to that gory game, must be sacrificed in a sanguinary ceremony, a ritual that “includes the letting of blood.”21 What actually happens in the final scene of the novel, remains a mystery. The man enters the jakes at the back of the tavern and sees the judge “seated upon the closet.” He is taken in and “gathered” against Holden’s “immense and terrible flesh.” The doors close and we are not authorized to witness the episode that takes place inside. The narration only relates the conversation of three men who meet in front of the jakes. In the mudded dogyard behind the premises two men went down the boards toward the jakes. A third man was standing there urinating into the mud. Is someone in there? the first man said. The man who was relieving himself did not look up. I wouldnt go in there if I was you, he said. . . . The first man watched him go and then opened the door of the jakes. Good God almighty, he said. What is it?

20 21

McCarthy, BM, 321-23. McCarthy, BM, 319, 327, 331, 329.

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148 He didnt answer.22

In the last paragraph of Blood Meridian, the narrator, with a telling use of the present tense, offers an image of the triumphant judge: Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die.23

Some critics refuse to read this final scene as the elimination of the kid and a victory of the judge, suggesting that the jakes were empty and that what “provoked the man’s cry of disgust” was “not a terrible sight” but simply “a terrible odor.”24 John Vanderheide even points to the “disquieting resemblance,” as he calls it, between the jakes episode and “the discovery scenes of Christ’s resurrection in the gospels.” The three men, standing for the revelatory angel and the two Marys, find that the outhouse, in resemblance to Christ’s tomb, is desolate.25 Yet the ending of Blood Meridian is too blood-soaked (the conversation between the judge and the kid in the tavern is intertwined with descriptions of the already mentioned huge dancing bear shot in the middle of the floor) and the judge’s insistence on bloody ritual too powerful to reject reading the jakes scene as some kind of incorrigible, perhaps sexually marked, violation of the kid. The judge “towers” over all others, triumphant and “naked,” as in other scenes following his earlier sexual assaults and murders.26 What is more, as the judge authoritatively asserts, “The mystery is that there is no mystery”;27 therefore, searching for an overly enigmatic reading of the jakes scene would most probably be a critical overdoing. Interestingly, the final image of the judge compellingly underscores his paradoxical child-like attributes; he is “pale and hairless, like an enormous infant.”28 As I have suggested in Chapter Four,29 this double nature of Holden as both an immense, massive, and savagely callous giant and an 22

McCarthy, BM, 333-34. McCarthy, BM, 335. 24 John Vanderheide, “The Process of Elimination: Tracing the Prodigal’s Irrevocable Passage through Cormac McCarthy’s Southern and Western Novels,” in Myth, Legend, Dust, ed. Rick Wallach, 177-82. 25 Vanderheide, “The Process of Elimination,” 180. 26 McCarthy, BM, 118, 240. 27 McCarthy, BM, 252. 28 McCarthy, BM, 335. 29 See “The Satan Who Imitates God” (Chapter Four) 23

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eerily puerile, soft-skinned neonate has been repeatedly hinted at throughout the whole novel. When the kid sees him for the first time in Nacogdoches, the judge is depicted as “an enormous man . . . smoking a cigar,” “his face . . . serene and strangely childlike,” “his hands . . . small.”30 When the members of the gang enter Chihuahua as triumphant victors and are invited to use the public baths, the judge makes his typically effective entrance, disrobing “last of all.” He “walked the perimeters of the baths with a cigar in his mouth and a regal air, testing the waters with one toe, surprisingly petite. He shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere upon that vast corpus…”31 As he approaches the desert wells together with the “idiot” he appropriated, what strikes in the image of the judge is the “pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born.”32 I therefore suppose that, having in mind the significance of the fatherson relationship in the novel, we may risk reading the final scene as a kind of circular return to the image with which Blood Meridian commenced. As I have already noted, at the beginning of the book we are told that the mother died giving birth to her child and we trace a reversal in which the son takes on the position of the father. At its ending, we again witness an exclusion with a simultaneous replacement: the grown man is in turn “eliminated while metaphorically giving birth to his own enormous infant, his father.”33 He is explicitly “the child the father of the man,” and “all history [is] present in that visage.”34 The kid is a son who has been deprived of the developmentally crucial experience of witnessing his own father struggling with his weaknesses. The father’s untimely surrender and death led to a premature father-son replacement, never giving the kid a chance to acquire the necessary ability of accepting the child in himself. In a sense, Blood Meridian may therefore be read as a constant search for the lost father. The members of the Glanton gang all somehow sense the graveness of the judge’s words when he says that the son without the father “will never find his way”;35 although their own drives and desires are mostly unidentified, they are

30

McCarthy, BM, 6. McCarthy, BM, 167. 32 McCarthy, BM, 282. 33 This is Vanderheide’s depiction of the situation though his text is wholly concerned with the judge as artist-creator, not as father; “The Process of Elimination,” 182. 34 McCarthy, BM, 3. 35 McCarthy, BM, 145. 31

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also compelled to submit to Holden’s authority and go on with the continual obscure pursuit which will cease only with their deaths.

Child of God: Ill-defined Roles Lester Ballard from Child of God is another fatherless figure whose early years are marked by traumatic loss. However meaningful they must have been for his subsequent anomalous development, the facts concerning his childhood period are recounted with surprising (though typically McCarthian) scantiness. From the relations of anonymous narrators we merely learn that Lester’s mother abandoned the family (“They was just the one boy. The mother had run off, I don’t know where to nor who with.”36), after which the father committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic of their family house.37 The senior Ballard is therefore more explicitly a victim than the father of the kid from Blood Meridian, and Lester, in his “chronically perverse childishness,” will repeat an analogous pattern of “holy victimization.”38 In a warped imitation of his parent, in a kind of wayward, “prolonged homecoming,”39 Lester senses the degradation and self-depreciation of suicide, and thus inverts the same aggressive impulses against others, himself becoming a serial killer. Just like the kid, Lester Ballard is deserted by his father abruptly and too early, and, similarly to the kid, he is never able to fully mature into an independent grown-up–an adult capable of accepting and parenting the child within himself.40 It is only after his symbolic rebirth, when he emerges from the underground “swaddled up in outsized overalls and covered all over with red mud,” that he seems to feel in place. “I’m supposed to be here,” he says entering the county hospital. Yet, as in the case of the kid, Lester’s obscure quest must end in death after which he is returned to the earth–to the womb that symbolically brought him back to life: “Ballard was scraped from the table into a plastic bag and taken with

36

McCarthy, CG, 21. For relevant quotations and the description of Lester’s reaction to this event see Chapter Four of my study (“Mimetic Violence and Metaphysical Longing in Child of God”). 38 Gary M. Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction (Louisiana State UP: Baton Rouge, 2007), 168, 169. 39 Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 170. 40 I refer to Lester’s childishness, underscored by the title of the novel as well as by his attachment to the doll-like female corpses and to the huge stuffed animals he collects in Chapter Four. 37

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others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and there interred. A minister from the school read a simple service.”41 This destructive lack of clear boundaries between parent and child (with both the kid and Lester forced to act out adult roles before becoming properly mature) is dismayingly represented in the scene of incest between the primitive dump keeper and one of his promiscuous teenage daughters. Reubel, with whom Ballard occasionally drinks bootleg whiskey and exchanges casual remarks about recent local events, “had spawned nine daughters and named them out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked. . . . Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue.” Yet they seem so much alike one another that he is unable to track their maturing and is never certain which is “the oldest or what age” and which is ready to “go out with boys.” In their complete lack of distinctiveness or individuality the daughters indiscernibly blend into the all-surrounding rubbish, the “levees of junk and garbage,” the upturned cars, “the trash and carpets,” the “chairs and crates,” and the “assortment of cats taking the weak sun.” They are themselves catlike in their slow, lazy movements and “like cats in heat” they attract “surrounding swains to their midden.” “Old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet” continuously come and go “in all manner of degenerate cars, a dissolute carrousel of rotting sedans and niggerized convertibles . . . all patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts,” also perfectly commingling with the undifferentiated landscape of the dump.42 The undefined daughters imitate their father in their unrestrained sexual activity, falling “pregnant one by one” and filling the dump keeper’s dilapidated shack with equally indeterminate babies. Yet the unruly imitation goes in both directions: one time Reubel encounters “two figures humping away” in the woods and upon closer observation recognizes one of his daughters. After the girl’s boyfriend hurriedly escapes “hauling up his breeches,” the father begins beating his promiscuous daughter with a stick, but soon has his own trousers “about his knees” and finishes the interrupted coitus.43 Reubel’s incestuous rape is a manifestation of his basic failure to discriminate between parent and child–a negligence that will inevitably lead to a total collapse of his family life. Again, basing his argument on Girard’s anthropology, Gary Ciuba concludes that “such lack of differentiation . . . violates one of the fundamental taboos designed to keep the outbreak of primal violence from 41

McCarthy, CG, 192, 194. McCarthy, CG, 26-7. 43 McCarthy, CG, 27-8. 42

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ever being repeated. . . . In committing this primal transgression the dump keeper . . . assaults difference itself.”44 The sons (and daughters45) without fathers, or those whose fathers are unable to define and clearly circumscribe their own fatherly roles, are irrefutably unfit to take up the responsibilities of adulthood and incapable of parenting the child that resides in them. Undeniably, the typical pattern of the father-son relationship as it is depicted in McCarthy’s novels is far removed from the biblical paradigm in which unity perfectly coincides with autonomy and obedience with liberty, and in which the process of role-exchange is a well-ordered and smooth development from sonship to fatherhood. In the reality populated by McCarthian characters, these binary oppositions blend into a disfigured and indeterminate dump, a heap of rubbish, where none of the attributes defining the biblical bond find distinct expression. What remains is elemental obscurity and inconclusiveness, a destructive confusion of roles as a result of which the sons inevitably follow their vanquished fathers and themselves die untimely deaths. Nevertheless, both Blood Meridian and Child of God lend themselves to being read as narratives of a constant search for the lost father. Such deep longing for closeness and intimacy with a father figure could serve as an explanation for the kid’s strong and, to some extent, unwilling propensity to observe, listen to, and in the end follow Judge Holden’s satanic doctrines. It may also be taken up as a key in interpreting McCarthy’s depiction of one of the rare moments in which Lester Ballard experiences some profound human emotions. He is lying awake in his cave in the dark when he fancies hearing “a whistling as he used to when he was a boy in his bed in the dark and he’d hear his father on the road coming home whistling, a lonely piper.” Lester is apparently deeply moved by this recollection, and that same night he has a dream in which he seems to finally acknowledge and reconcile himself to the prospect of his own approaching death: “He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”46 44

Ciuba, Desire, Violence & Divinity, 185-86. Obviously, there are far less father-daughter (or mother-daughter and motherson) relations depicted in McCarthy’s novels, and the father-son bond is openly treated as the most primal and emblematic one. Yet the gender issue in McCarthy’s output (which is a whole broad and undoubtedly neglected area requiring separate investigation) falls outside the thematic scope of my study. The most prominent scholar who deals with the problem of gender in McCarthy’s prose employing a moderate feminist perspective is, in my view, Nell Sullivan. 46 McCarthy, CG, 170, 171. 45

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The theme of the father-son relationship appears in nearly each and every novel McCarthy has written, usually iterating the pattern of loss, failure, and disappointment. In The Orchard Keeper (1965), the main protagonist–the young boy John Wesley, takes up the task of avenging the death of his murdered father. The man he comes to treat as his major role model (and a kind of foster father for that matter) is a dissentient whiskey dealer, Marion Sylder. Ironically, what neither of them is aware of, is that it is precisely Sylder who, years earlier, killed John Wesley’s father when the latter attempted to steal his car. In All the Pretty Horses (1992), the adolescent John Grady Cole painfully experiences his father’s impotence and inability to save the family farm from being sold by the materiallyminded Mrs. Cole. He himself, in turn, to his own misfortune, later takes up the fatherly responsibility for the reckless runaway, Jimmy Blevins. In The Crossing (1994), the parents of the two main protagonists, Billy and Boyd Parham, are brutally slaughtered by Indians, and it is the older brother who becomes a father figure for his younger sibling–a task which he himself adopts and in which he in the end also fails. The three novels I would like now to examine in somewhat more detail are Outer Dark and Suttree (in both of which it is the father’s rather than the son’s perspective that the narrative tends to adopt), as well as The Road which, I suppose, may be read as McCarthy’s (so far) final and most comprehensive statement concerning the primal bond between father and son.

Outer Dark: The Evasion of Fatherly Responsibility The main male character of Outer Dark (1968), Culla Holme, is the incestuous father of a nameless child delivered by his stolid and doll-like, yet on the whole good-natured and noble sister, Rinthy.47 Since he refuses to “fetch” the local midwife, Culla himself is the sole witness of the traumatic labor–the birth which “put him more in mind of death”: With his own hands he brought it free, the scrawny body trailing the cord in anneloid writhing down the bloodslimed covers, a beetcolored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel.48

In a frantic urge to conceal their taboo relationship, Culla takes the newborn baby into the woods and leaves it crying on the moss. Confused 47

I present a more detailed analysis of the figure of Rinthy in Chapter Three (“Women, Children, and ‘Idiots’”). 48 McCarthy, OD, 13, 14.

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in the dark swampy forest, with the earth seemingly turning in the wrong direction (when he spit in the creek, “His saliva bloomed palely on the water and wheeled and slid inexplicably upstream, back the way he had come”), he loses his path and frenziedly stumbles upon the son he has just abandoned. The baby’s protests echo with existential despair: It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.49

Culla’s unnamed child may therefore be said to belong to the substantial group of McCarthy’s forsaken sons, and, like most of them, he is also doomed to die an untimely death. Yet before he is killed, he must endure some horrific ordeals, the grimness of which we can only imagine since they are not directly related in the novel. What is exhaustively recounted is Rinthy’s awry quest for her “chap,” whom she believes Culla traded off to a provincial tinker. Incidentally, it is indeed the tinker (an unsympathetic gnome-like figure despised by the locals, “rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to the other”50) who finds the baby in the woods and takes it in his cart. Since all throughout the book Rinthy is searching for the tinker and for her child, while Culla, re-crossing and re-circling his sister’s path, is seeking Rinthy, the whole novel becomes a fable-like narration of constant pursuit and longing–this time a yearning for the lost son (symbolically represented by Rinthy’s continually lactating breasts). Yet when the child is in the end found, the father refuses to claim it as his own, afraid that assuming such responsibility could cost him his life. The boy has been taken over by the dark trio–an allegorical band roaming the neighboring villages, whose bearded leader is clearly a figure of judgment and an embodiment of Culla’s own stigma and sense of guilt. Having killed the tinker by hanging him on a tree (as the bearded man cynically informs Culla, “He’s all raised out. He cain’t raise no more,” the “dark minister” passes a final sentence on the boy. [The child] had a healed burn all down one side of it and the skin was papery and wrinkled like an old man’s. It was naked and half coated with dust so that it seemed lightly furred and when it turned to look up at him he saw one eyeless and angry red socket like a stokehole to a brain in flames. . . . 49 50

McCarthy, OD, 17, 18. McCarthy, OD, 193.

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Hand him here. Yan chap. Holme didn’t move. The child had not stopped watching him. . . . What do you want with him? Holme said. Nothing. No more that you do. He ain’t nothing to me. No. . . . The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat.51

In this most ghastly, macabre fashion, the son is sacrificed and his innocent blood is drunk by a nameless beast-like creature because of the father’s impassivity, cowardice, and inaptitude to take on responsibility for the outcomes of his own actions. Significantly, it is Culla who is asked to hand the boy to the bearded leader (“He rose with it and circled the fire and held it out toward the man”), which explicitly makes him an accomplice in the gruesome ritual and underscores his accountability for the child’s death.

Suttree: Reexperiencing the Pain of Loss Although in Suttree (1979) the motif of the father-son relationship surfaces only sporadically, its significance in the development of the main protagonist seems to be greater than could be initially assumed. We know that Cornelius Suttree’s father married beneath himself and never failed to demonstrate his deep contempt for his wife’s class, constantly making her and their children feel despised and disrespected. In his last letter he wrote: . . . the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless

51

McCarthy, OD, 231-36.

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Suttree’s life–his choice to leave his own wife and child, buy a houseboat, and earn his living as a fisherman on the Tennessee River, mingling with a whole assortment of drunkards, vagrants, pariahs, and outcasts–precisely “the helpless and the impotent” that his father so strongly detested–can therefore be read as an open contestation of what the senior Suttree bequeathed to him. And yet, despite the strong urge to counter his father, on the most primary, oedipal level Cornelius reiterates the pattern of loss, abandonment, and desertion by forsaking his own son. And again, in keeping with McCarthy’s established resolution of the theme, soon after the father’s withdrawal, the son is fated to die. The narrator does not familiarize us with the reasons of the boy’s death, and Suttree himself does not seem willing to inquire into them. Yet his intense reaction to the news as well as his unwanted and unnoticed participation in the child’s funeral testify to his strong attachment to the boy. All night he’d tried to see the child’s face in his mind but he could not. All he could remember was the tiny hand in his as they went to the carnival fair and a fleeting image of elf’s eyes wonderstruck at the wide world in its wheeling. . . . Suttree stood by a tree but no one noticed him. The preacher had begun. Suttree heard no word of what he said until his own name was spoken. Then everything became quite clear. He turned and laid his head against the tree choked with a sorrow he had never known. . . . Suttree went to his knees in the grass, his hands cupped over his ears.53 (S 153)

It is only after the boy’s death that Suttree seems able to confront his son (and himself) with the most crucial existential questions: Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.54

McCarthy’s longest novel therefore rehearses the familiar (and so clearly anti-biblical) motif of loss and detachment: the son rejects submission to the father, is himself mentally and most often also 52

McCarthy, S, 14. McCarthy, S, 153. 54 McCarthy, S, 154. 53

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physically abandoned, and in the end turns out to be unable to establish a relationship of intimacy and unity with his own son. Nevertheless, Suttree seems to belong to those few McCarthian characters who do undergo a certain development. After spending a solitary month in the mountains of Tennessee, during which he is so short of food and water that he experiences numerous hallucinations and visions touching upon the very fundamentals of his existence, and after having a brush with death lying in the hospital for weeks with a typhoid fever, Suttree seems to recover from his deep despair and gain a new sense of integrity. According to Canfield, who views McCarthy’s protagonist as a “Christian (Catholic) existentialist,” Suttree “draws his power from the commonality of suffering” and is in the end rewarded “for his many acts of charity in the novel,” for his Christ-like compassion for the dispossessed of this world.55 In the final scene, Suttree undergoes a kind of epiphany (which is not unlike the concluding illumination experienced by Lester Ballard when he recognizes himself in the face of a boy riding an early church bus): waiting in the heat on the side of a highway, he encounters a watercarrier–a cherub-like boy whose “pale gold hair . . . lay along the sunburned arms . . . like new wheat.” Accepting the drink of water that the boy gratuitously offers, Suttree notices his own reflection “in wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark and deep in child’s eyes, blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea.”56 Like Ballard, discerning his own self in the countenance of a young boy, Suttree is finally able to accept the child within himself and therefore fulfill the crucial biblical requirement of complete maturity.

The Road: Father and Son Reconciled When all is extinct, all plants burnt down and covered with grey ash, all animals poisoned or killed for meat, all colors faded and forgotten, and most human beings turned into “mummied dead,” “the flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires,” “shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth,”57 what remains is the most rudimentary division

55

Douglas J. Canfield, “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” Contemporary Literature 44.4 (2003): 686, 695, 684. 56 McCarthy, S, 470, 471. 57 McCarthy, TR, 20.

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into good and evil58 and the most elemental relationship between father and son. As most critics note, the focus in The Road (2006) differs from what is underscored in McCarthy’s earlier novels.59 This time, paradoxically, it is rather a yearning to survive and not the impulse to destroy, the wish to help and share and not the drive to acquire and seize, steadfast and loving devotion rather than blind and mindless hatred, and a devoutness to “grace and beauty” and “goodness” despite their “common provenance in pain,”60 rather than a penchant for the grotesque, the grim, and the ugly that permeates the whole narrative. In the novel’s presentation of apocalypse in its becoming, of “the world’s destruction” in which “perhaps . . . it would be possible at last to see how it was made,”61 we witness existence stripped down to its most primary forms. One of these is the relationship between father and son, which in McCarthy’s most recent novel may be said to come as close to the biblical paradigm as a human bond possibly can. This time it is the mother who abandons the family–a few years after the enigmatic global catastrophe, she decides to commit suicide with “a flake of obsidian.” Unable to passively wait for the scenario that she foresees as irrevocable: “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape and kill us and eat us,” she decides to choose death–to take “a new lover” who can give her what her husband is unable to provide: final peace in “eternal nothingness.”62 The father and son are therefore left to themselves, and it is clear that they survive only thanks to one another, sustaining each other in hope in hopelessness and in a willingness to go on when there is clearly nothing to go on towards.

58

I write about good and evil in The Road in Chapter Four of my book (“The ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ in The Road”). 59 See for instance William Kennedy’s review of The Road in The New York Times (“Left Behind,” October 8, 2006, accessed April 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes. com/2006/10/08/books/review/Kennedy.t.html). Kennedy writes: “The overarching theme in McCarthy’s work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter. Had this novel continued his pattern, that band of marching thugs would have been the focus — as it was with the apocalyptic horsemen of death in his second novel, Outer Dark, or the blood-mad scalp-hunters in his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or the psychopathic killer in his recent novel, No Country for Old Men. But evil victorious is not this book’s theme.” 60 McCarthy, TR, 46, 109. 61 McCarthy, TR, 230-32. 62 McCarthy, TR, 48-9.

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The father looks upon his son as the “word of God,” as the sole “warrant” that God ever spoke, and as “all that [stands] between him and death.”63 It is only by maintaining a sense of mission that they are able to preserve the awareness of some kind of higher purpose to their thoroughly purposeless and altogether hopeless struggles. The errand that the father and son undertake is “carrying the fire,”64 and it is a mission in which they must “keep trying” because, as the father explains, “That is what the ‘good guys’ do. . . . They don’t give up.” Yet the man intuits that in this dead and dark world his son is unique in an absolute and nearly transcendental sense–he is “the best guy,” “God’s own firedrake,” “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.”65 In the deeply poignant scene of the father’s death, he comes to clearly see that “there [is] light all about” the boy, and “when he move[s] the light move[s] with him.” That is what he tells his son when they talk for the very last time: The fire is “inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”66 In fact, the basic purpose of the sparse dialogues that the father and son exchange is precisely a mutual confirmation of this necessary sense of mission. The errand requires that they both constantly nourish a physical and spiritual closeness and steadfastly reassure one another of their devoted presence. Exchanges similar to the following appear time and again throughout the whole novel: I cant see. I know. We’ll just take it one step at a time. Okay. Don’t let go. Okay. No matter what. No matter what. ... Don’t go away, the boy said. Of course I wont go away. Even for just a little while. No. I’m right here. Okay. Okay, Papa.67

63

McCarthy, TR, 4, 25. The fire in this case may, I suppose, be read as a commonly accepted symbol of the divine, a spark of spirituality in the material world. 65 McCarthy, TR, 70, 116, 235, 26, 230. 66 McCarthy, TR, 233, 234. 67 McCarthy, TR, 197, 208. 64

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Despite these continuous, often deeply dramatic endeavors to provide one another with a possible degree of confidence and comfort, both the man and the boy have their moments of major doubt and profound despair–instances of weakness that they usually attempt to conceal from one another. When the boy is asleep, the man walks off to bitterly curse God (“Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh, God, he whispered. Oh God.”) or to cry in helpless anger (“He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage.”68). The son, in turn, from time to time hesitantly asks questions which testify to his deep-seated doubts about the authenticity of the purpose of what they are doing–questions which he knows his father is ultimately unable to answer. When he asks about their “long term goals,”69 the man is impressed by the overdone sagacity of the formulation, yet he can offer no sensible, convincing reply. Once one of their “short term” goals–reaching the south coast–is achieved and it turns out to be a grievous disappointment (the sea appears to be equally dead, gray, and cold as the mountains and plains they laboriously crossed to reach it), the boy unwillingly owns up to his grave skepticism, telling his father that in truth he did not know “what they were doing.” “The man started to answer. But he didn’t.”70 The father refuses to provide superficial answers not only because he is unwilling to affirm something that is not true but also because he senses that his son knows more than he is told: The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.71

The boy’s degree of self-awareness and sense of responsibility clearly exceed the man’s suppositions. When the father fixes the last portion of cocoa for his son and pours only hot water for himself, it is an unfairness that the boy does not fail to notice. You promised not to do that, the boy said. What? You know what, Papa. 68

McCarthy, TR, 10, 211. McCarthy, TR, 135. 70 McCarthy, TR, 206. 71 McCarthy, TR, 24. 69

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He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy’s cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back. I have to watch you all the time, the boy said. I know. If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said. I know. But I wont.72

In one of the most dramatic moments in the novel, when they catch the man who stole the cart in which they stored all their miserably scant yet life-sustaining supplies and leave him outstripped of his own clothes and shoes–a “nude and slatlike creature standing there in the road shivering and hugging himself,”73 the boy’s trust in their goodness and in the credibility of their mission is severely undermined. The father offers to tell him a consoling story, but the son openly rejects this kind of false comfort. Those stories are not true. They dont have to be true. They’re stories. Yes. But in the stories we’re always helping people and we dont help people.74 (TR 225)

The boy himself does not have “any stories to tell”–at least not “happy” ones. His own stories are “more like real life”–closer to the harsh and bitter truth. He does not have good dreams either–“They’re always about something bad happening”–about his father dying or about a horrifying toy penguin that “came around the corner” waddling and flapping its flippers although “nobody had wound it up”–an image which probably signifies the feeling of an alarming loss of control and an unsettling lack of influence on the surrounding reality.75 Near the ending of the novel he explicitly tells his father that there is no use in hiding the truth from him, that he is by now mature enough to face it on his own. When you wake up coughing you walk out along the road or somewhere but I can still hear you coughing. I’m sorry. One time I heard you crying. I know.76

72

McCarthy, TR, 29. McCarthy, TR, 217. 74 McCarthy, TR, 225. 75 McCarthy, TR, 226, 31. 76 McCarthy, TR, 227. 73

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Deeply distressed by his father’s ruthless handling of the “thief” who took away all their belongings, the boy seems to sense that it is time for himself to take over. He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die. He’s going to die anyway. He’s so scared, Papa. The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared. The boy didnt answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing. You’re not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.77

With time, the man becomes increasingly conscious of his son’s premature coming-of-age: “Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end.” He is also aware that his own temporary role is merely to facilitate the genuine carrier of the fire, to assist the only authentic missionary: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God.”78 It therefore seems that what McCarthy exposed as lost and inconceivable in a more ordinary setting, turns out to be tenable in the most outrageous and unnatural circumstances. The son, in a close and truly loving bond with the father, gradually develops his own sense of purpose, preserving a full awareness of his parent’s weaknesses and failures throughout the whole process. He is conscious of his obligations as a son and always, despite his own fears and misgivings, compliantly does what he is told. He nevertheless maintains his own independence and after the father’s death (which is an unbearably painful experience he is hardly able to endure), he takes over their mutual mission to “carry the fire” further on by himself. The father stays in his mind and heart as an authentic Godfigure: “He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget.”79 This is indeed as akin to the biblical ideal of the bond between father and son as any human relationship can be.

77

McCarthy, TR, 218. McCarthy, TR, 50, 65. 79 McCarthy, TR, 241. 78

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The Biblical Underpinning of Outer Dark and The Road Apart from the theme of the father-son relationship, which appears to be one of the governing biblical motifs present in McCarthy’s work, his novels are abundant in numerous less central allusions, notions, and references, which more or less explicitly advert to the biblical heritage, lending themselves to a deeper and more emblematic reading. Two of McCarthy’s books, Outer Dark (1968) and The Road (2006), seem especially ample with such hints, some of which I will presently attempt to unearth.

“Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” (Apocalypse 3:16) The title of McCarthy’s 1968 novel, which may be said to be his both most allegorical and most lyrical work, is drawn from the Gospel According to Matthew, where it appears in the context of two parables that Jesus narrates to his disciples. The first parable (Matthew 22: 1-15) tells the story of a wedding ceremony which the king administered for his son, inviting numerous substantial guests. Yet since the nobles, overly preoccupied with their own affairs, bluntly ignore the invitation, the king asks his servants to go out on the crossroads and summon everyone they encounter, “both bad and good.” When the wedding hall fills up with a whole assortment of guests, the king notices that one of them dared to enter unprepared–he was not wearing a wedding garment, thereby openly ignoring some basic rules established by the host.80 Interestingly, he does not even bother to think of a justification–when the king inquires about the reason of his negligence, he simply remains silent. It is this remiss and indifferent guest whose hands and feet are bound and who is “cast . . . into the outer darkness” where “men will weep and gnash their teeth” (Matthew 22: 13). The second parable (Matthew 25: 14-30) features an overlord who, upon leaving for a foreign land, entrusts his servants with the task of multiplying his property. The three servants are granted, each “according to his ability,” five, three, and one talent respectively. The first two attendants invest the money and manage to double the profits, while the last one, out of both fear and laxness, keeps the goods in a hole in the 80 Biblical commentators assume that the garments were given to the guests as they entered the wedding hall.

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ground and returns them intact to the overlord when the latter comes back home. The lord’s treatment of the “wicked and slothful servant” is analogous to the king’s handling of the remiss guest: he is also taken away and thrown into the “outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth” (Matthew 25: 30). Significantly, both of these parables are allegorical depictions of the Final Judgment and both of them underscore the sin of negligence; apparently, it is not enough to sit back and avoid engagement in evil acts in order to be saved. In fact, God seems to be more exasperated by such inertness than by open defiance and manifest commitment to wrongdoing; the “lukewarm” are those who induce in Him a deeper disgust than either the “hot” or the “cold” (Apocalypse 3: 16). It is precisely this rejection of sluggish indifference and the insistence on conspicuous engagement that seem to constitute the major link between biblical allegory and the plot of McCarthy’s Outer Dark. It may be said that the basic fault of Culla Holme is exactly his impassive lukewarmness– his inability to undertake any decisive action or to assume responsibility for its effects. In one of the first scenes in the novel he is described as “not listening, never listening,”81 and what follows seems to testify to his callous unresponsiveness: he ignores his sister’s desperate pleas to call the village midwife to help her deliver the baby, he takes his newborn son and leaves him in the forest (tellingly, not killing him with his own hands, thereby disavowing direct responsibility for his death), and then, not able to “decide what to do,” he sits “on a stone by the side of the road and with a dead stick [draws] outlandish symbols in the dust.”82 When he subsequently inquires for work in the squire’s house, it is again his lack of decisiveness that seems to irritate his employer. The squire behaves as if he wanted to test Culla’s determination and resolution to stand for his own cause: Howdy, he said. I was talking to a man down to the store said you might need some help. Said you might have some work… No, the squire said. Well, he said. I thank ye. He turned and started away. You, the squire said. He stopped and looked back. You don’t mind no for a answer, do ye? I figured you would know one way or the other, he said. Or maybe you don’t need work all that bad.83 81

McCarthy, OD, 9. McCarthy, OD, 27. 83 McCarthy, OD, 41-2. 82

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Finally, the squire asks Culla to cut up a tree for firewood and this way earn his supper. Since the task takes up over half a day of Holme’s work, it becomes quite clear that he earned more than just a plate of food; nevertheless, he seems unable, or unwilling, to look after his own affairs. You never ate no dinner as I know of. I wasn’t offered none. You never ast for none. Holme was silent. You never ast for nothin.84

And it is precisely this attitude of inertness and lack of tenacity that the uncanny bearded leader of the dreamlike grim triune blames Culla for. The bearded man, whose posture and clothing make him resemble a dark “minister” (“the smiling face, black beard, the tautly drawn and dusty suit of black”85) is clearly a figure of judgment. Both times that Holme unwillingly stumbles upon the murderous trio (the three men wander through the same unidentified landscape that is independently meandered by Culla and Rinthy and randomly kill various individuals), the bearded leader seems to be conscious of all of Culla’s secret sins and assumes a dismayingly accusatory tone. When they meet for the first time, Holme has just narrowly escaped drowning in the river while crossing it on a ferry during a dark and violent storm. The ferryman, together with another passenger and his horse did not survive the crossing. Coming to their fire as the only patch of light in the total darkness of the stormy night, Culla asks if he can “dry a little” in front of it. The three men watch him intently, while the bearded one asks in his typical incriminatory mode of expression: What did ye do with the horse? What horse? The rider’s horse. I didn’t do nothin with him. He like to of killed me. Commenced tearin up and down like somethin crazy till he run plumb off in the river. More horse than you could handle was it? I couldn’t even see it. Or maybe you was afraid to take it. That makes sense. I don’t need no horse, Holme said.86

84

McCarthy, OD, 45. McCarthy, OD, 127. 86 McCarthy, OD, 173. 85

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He also inquires about Culla’s boots (which he has stolen from the squire) and his shirt: Did that ferryman not have no better shirt than that? What? I said did that ferryman not have no better a shirt on him than that? I never noticed his shirt. The man watched him. . . . I reckon a dead man’s boots is better than near no boots at all, the man said. He felt cold all over.87

After the “minister” makes Holme exchange his stolen new boots for an old rotten pair of his own, he cryptically refers to one of his companions–a witless drooling cretin “with long arms dangling at his sides, slightly stooped, his jaw hanging and mouth agape in a slavering smile”–seemingly alluding to Culla’s nameless baby: “I wouldn’t name him because if you cain’t name somethin you cain’t claim it. You cain’t talk about it even. You cain’t say what it is.”88 The bearded man adopts the same unsettling judgmental tone when Culla chances upon their fire for the second time. “When he saw what figures warmed there he was already among them and it was too late.” And again, appearing to know everything (“You seem to know everybody’s business,” the bewildered Culla tells him, he explicitly articulates the charge against Holme: “Never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was nothing.” When Culla maintains his attitude of careless negation and impassive remissness saying “I don’t care,” the bearded man answers, “I believe in takin care of my own. . . . That’s the way I think.”89 Holme may be said to repeat the same sin of lukewarmness and negligence at least twice again in the novel. In a telling scene, very closely resembling Matthew’s account of Jesus casting out demons in the country of the Gerasens (Matthew 8: 28-34),90 Culla’s passivity again arouses 87

McCarthy, OD, 176-77. McCarthy, OD, 169, 177. 89 McCarthy, OD, 231, 234, 233, 181. 90 In this scene, McCarthy is more explicit than ever when one of the drovers tells Culla about a unique type of hog called “mulefoot” which does not have split hooves; the drover wonders whether such a hog is still a hog and whether, according to the Bible, it would still be devilish. He sums up the complexity of this issue by saying, “Makes ye wonder some about the bible and about hogs too, don’t it? (…) I’ve studied it a good deal and I cain’t come to no conclusions about it one way or the other” (OD 215 -16). 88

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aggressive suspicion and triggers very far-reaching accusations. Coming through a narrow pass above the steep bank of a river, the hogs at some point run amok and, one after another, stumble down into the water, taking one of the drovers with them, “his walled eyes beyond hope” and his “dead mouth beyond prayer.” Culla, who “rushed to a higher ground like one threatened with flood and perched upon a rock there to view the course of things,” is first blamed for failing to help the unfortunate swinekeeper (“I seen him a-setting on a rock over yander,” his brother says, “Vernon went right past him and he never reached to help him nor nothing,” and soon also for arousing the hogs and “running” them “off.” Even the somewhat deranged parson who chances to come upon them does not believe in Culla’s version of the story. “Tore up with guilt. The preacher nodded sad and negative. Plumb tore up with it. . . . Boys I believe he’s plumb eat up with the devil in him.” “He’s too mean to be saved,” one of the drovers adds.91 Not able to withstand the increasingly serious (and, on the surface at least, totally insane and absurd) accusations, Holme himself follows the hogs jumping into the river to escape the punishment they are planning to inflict on him. In the biblical account, it is Jesus who is responsible for the hogs’ drowning–after He cast the demons out of two possessed men and sent them into a herd of swine, “the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and perished in the waters.” (Matthew 8: 32). Whether dismayed by such a substantial material loss or unable to accede to such immense power, the Gerasens “came out to meet Jesus; and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their neighborhood” (Matthew 8: 34). In Outer Dark the drovers also seem to be possessed by some obscure demons. When Culla first notices them “laboring” with their “poles,” they are depicted as “gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair,” seeming “together with the hogs to be in flight from some act of God, fire or flood, schisms in the earth’s crust.”92 This impression grows more obtrusive with the drovers’ intensifying agitation: Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now upreared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineheards but disciples of darkness got among these

91 92

McCarthy, OD, 218, 220, 222-23, 225. McCarthy, OD, 231, 216.

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And indeed, in McCarthy’s novel, despite the sacrifice of a whole herd of hogs together with one of their drovers (the one who “studied” the significance of swine in the Bible), all are “too mean to be saved.” The hog keepers are craving for sensational revenge (“Let’s hang him if he don’t care. I ain’t never seen nobody hung”), the preacher is merely gathering material for a dazzling homily (“But I sure would love to do it [“save” Culla] if I could. It’d make a jimdandy sermon”), and Holme persists in his lukewarm indifference.94 In the final scene of Outer Dark, Culla is walking down a road which leads him through a hellish “dead land where nothing moved save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors” and ends in a swamp–“a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the dead.” When he starts back in the direction he came from, Holme meets a blind man walking toward the marsh. Not bothering to warn the traveler of the swampy dead end, Culla merely stands back wandering “where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.”95 Someone should, but the forever inert Culla, unchanged even by the horrid sacrifice of his son, will not be the one.

The “grim triune” and the Nature of Evil Another quite obvious biblical reference weaved into Outer Dark is McCarthy’s depiction of the dark trio and its manifest connotations with the Roman Catholic concept of the Holy Trinity.96 Since the three bearded men are an ironic subversion of the harmonious unity between God the 93

McCarthy, OD, 217-18. McCarthy, OD, 225, 224, 225-26. 95 McCarthy, OD, 242. 96 William C. Spencer takes this analogy even further, identifying the bearded leader as a parody of God the Father, “symbolizing lawless authority and destruction,” Harmon as an Antichrist, “representing violence,” and the mute idiot as the reversal of the Holy Spirit, “corresponding to ignorance.” In Spencer’s conclusion, “Evil, then, in this novel’s view includes violence and ignorance under the control of malevolent authority and often operating under a deceptive guise.” (William C. Spencer, “Cormac McCarthy’s Unholy Trinity: Biblical Parody in Outer Dark” in Sacred Violence, I: Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works, eds. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach [El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 2002], 89-91.) For all its neatness and insightfulness, Spencer’s analogy seems slightly farfetched. 94

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Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, their haunting presence in the novel may be read as one of the clearest statements regarding the nature of evil to be found in McCarthy’s prose. Not unlike the satanic Judge Holden, the bearded leader of the murderous threesome seems to represent evil incarnate. He and his companions are a band of fallen angels whose first apparition in the novel is marked by their descent from a sun-lit hill into a valley of darkness– from “spurious sanctity” into genuine “shadow”: They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well.97

What is more, each time Culla encounters the three gruesome men, they are seated around a fire, and their leader, who is at one point described as seemingly “seated in the fire itself, cradling the flames to his body as if there were something there beyond all warming,” appears to have a particular affinity with this satanic element.98 As William Spencer has noted,99 he even wears boots which resemble the mythical cloven hooves of the devil–“cracked and weatherblackened and . . . cleft from tongue to toe like a hoof.”100 With yet another similarity to Holden, the leader of the trio resembles Satan in his deceptively courteous and pleasant demeanor, always killing with a delusive smile on his face. He gains the trust of his victims, whom he seems to kill at random and without any particular reason, because his appearance parrots that of a minister: “And who is there? A minister. Pale lamplight falling down the door, the smiling face, black beard, the tautly drawn and dusty suit of black.” The three of them, as uncanny allegorical figures, always appear “wordlessly” and unexpectedly, as if they “might 97

McCarthy, OD, 3.The quoted passage is the beginning of the first of six italicized one-page chapters dispersed throughout the novel which, in a dreamlike, surreal fashion, depict the murders committed by the dark trio. 98 Once again Judge Holden from Blood Meridian comes to mind, with his habit of sitting half naked close to the fire and “pitching” the “artifacts” the copies of which he has sketched into the flames (BM 140). 99 Spencer, “Cormac McCarthy’s Unholy Trinity,” 84. 100 McCarthy, OD, 179, 176.

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have risen from the ground,”101 and they clearly derive perverse pleasure from the disinterested evil they perpetrate. While the murderous acts of the “grim triune”102 are ordinarily depicted in the intensely lyrical italicized passages, interestingly, the italics are dropped when the marauders encounter Culla Holme–as if their existence was more real for him than it was for others, as if he himself was in closer connection with their satanic natures. And it is precisely Culla’s repeated interaction with the trio that tells us the most about the way we tend to confront evil. Holme is initially attracted to the band because of the warmth of their fire–the only spot of light and heat in the allencompassing coldness and dampness of the dark forest.103 Although the incipient enchantment is gradually replaced by uneasiness and fear, Culla is unable to oppose the leader’s authoritative commands and unwillingly enters into a peculiar communion with the band. He shares the “sour black chunk of meat” which, as I have suggested, could have likely been a piece of human flesh, and he yields to the bearded man’s command to participate in an obscure ritual of exchanging boots, giving his own new pair (which he has in fact stolen from the squire) to the leader and accepting the “mismatched, cracked, shapeless, burntlooking and crudely mended”104 shoes of the nameless mute. In the end, it seems that Culla realizes he has more in common with the evil trio than he could have at first assumed, and he involuntarily stumbles upon them once again. “We ain’t hard to find. Oncet you’ve found us,”105 comments the leader. It therefore appears that once we fail to resist the temptation and yield to the authority of evil, it is hardly possible to depart from its path since we discover that we are in fact in close spiritual affinity with that which initially seemed wholly external and other.

101

McCarthy, OD, 129, 3, 229. McCarthy, OD, 130. 103 The initially appealing appearance of evil is also suggested in a scene in Child of God, when a young girl spots Ballard at the fair and is clearly lured by the expression of his face: “And you could see among the faces a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide. . . . In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly” (CG 65). 104 McCarthy, OD, 180. 105 McCarthy, OD, 233. 102

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“Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” (Luke 21: 28) If Outer Dark may be said to be rooted in Jesus’s parables relating to the passive, the negligent, and those of “lukewarm” heart as well as to the biblical image of Satan, the major scriptural source for The Road is certainly the Apocalypse of Saint John together with numerous peripheral references to “the end” which can be found both in the Old and in the New Testament. Although John’s apocalypse is unique in its abundant symbolism relating to numbers, colors, and creatures of various kinds, the purport of all biblical mentions of the final times is basically unanimous. They are all meant first and foremost to point to God as the driving force, the designer, and overseer of historical events, and secondly to appeal for unfaltering faith and hope since the horrifying cosmic phenomena which will be taking place signify that “redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21: 28) for those who “endure to the end” (Matthew 24: 13). Christian apocalyptic writings were therefore intended not so much to arouse fear and trembling in the faithful but rather to appease their anxiety in the face of all possible adversities and to fortify their steadfast trust in the righteousness of God’s scheme.106 McCarthy’s The Road has often been referred to as a “postapocalyptic novel” presenting a total vision of reality after the apocalypse.107 Depicting ultimate devastation, a gray, scorched, and ashen earth, the constant danger of unexpected natural disasters such as violent earthquakes, sudden fires, or raging storms with thunders, lightning, and icy rain, as well as a general conflict opposing all humans against one another in hateful rivalry, McCarthy’s most recent book certainly bears some resemblance to biblical images of the end of times: And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, 26 men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. . . . For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be 106

See for instance Anna ĝwiderkówna, Rozmowy o Biblii. Nowy Testament [Conversations about the Bible. The New Testament] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000), 273-97. 107 The blurb on the 2007 edition of The Road published by Alfred Knopf hails the book as “The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.”

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earthquakes in various places, there will be famines. . . . And brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death (Luke 21: 25-26; Mark 13: 7-8, 12).

Obviously, The Road lacks the flamboyant symbolism and the fantastic imagery of The Apocalypse of Saint John or The Book of Daniel, yet, however risky such a pronouncement might seem, its overall import proves to be deeply akin to that of the biblical prophesies. According to the father–and it is his perspective on the events taking place that the reader is meant to share–he, his wife, and his son are “survivors,” left to go on in this tattered remnant of reality for some higher purpose. This is a standpoint that his wife openly rejects and bitterly mocks: “Survivors? she said. . . . What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.”108 She is unable and unwilling to see any deeper design in the horrific events they are forced to experience and considers their survival as a purely random occurrence which does not entail any liabilities or obligations on their part. The man’s point of view is quite the opposite: although he is, not unlike the biblical Job, tempted to curse God for their futile lingering and for being impelled to helplessly watch his own son grow thinner and more destitute with each passing day, God is the one whom he perceives as the author of the events they are experiencing. It is therefore also God whom he questions about the purpose of the present and the possible course of the future (“He knelt there wheezing softly, his hands on his knees. I am going to die, he said. Tell me how I am to do that”109), and whom he holds responsible for all their forlorn suffering. Nevertheless, what predominates is his resolute urge to go on, to persist, and not to give up since, as he seems to be implicitly yet constantly professing, “he who endures to the end will be saved” (Mark 13: 13). The father’s recognition of God as the deviser of history together with his remarkably strong will to carry on against all odds and adversities render The Road an authentically apocalyptic piece in keeping with the canonical biblical tradition. *

*

*

As I have attempted to demonstrate in this final chapter of my study, the Bible is a major source to be acknowledged in the analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s prose–one which has been unquestionably neglected and 108 109

McCarthy, TR, 47. McCarthy, TR, 148.

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underestimated by his critics. Nevertheless, I am aware that my assertion may be openly and quite justifiably questioned since many of the themes whose origins I have identified as biblical may be derived from other religious, philosophical, or psychological schools.110 For that reason, I would like to refer to two basic arguments as the grounds for justifying my insistence on the usage of the Bible. Firstly, among the traditions which could be taken into account, the one encoded in the Roman Catholic Bible is the oldest and therefore most deeply rooted in Western culture. Although this is obviously not a decisive affirmation of superiority in itself, if we take into account Cormac McCarthy’s propensity for what is primal, elemental, and rudimentary, and the tendency, clearly discernible in each novel he has written, to reach down to the root of things, to the origins of all sensations, behaviors, and experiences, we may assume that the Bible as a source could invite him precisely with its longevity and depth of influence. Secondly, McCarthy’s prose is exceedingly rich in hints and allusions of a strictly biblical as well as generally religious origin. He seems to be especially inclined to use biblical idiom and imagery and to revel in such vocabulary as “acolyte,” “prophet,” “penitent,” “minister,” or “vesper.” This in itself naturally does not make him a “Christian” or “religious” writer, but it does invite the reader to, as one of McCarthy’s critics phrases it, “be attentive to, if not preoccupied with, the metaphysical presences in his seemingly antimetaphysical universe.”111 Yet McCarthy’s usage of the Bible is far from any kind of explicit substantiation of this source as the one and only revealed truth. Neither is the Bible in his prose mocked, deconstructed, or openly rejected as a falsified or inauthentic image of the human condition. Clearly, McCarthy refrains from constructing or employing any grand narratives or total, closed, and plainly defined systems of thought. The existential and moral inconclusiveness of his characters, the constant obscurity and indefiniteness of the narrative voice, as well as the open-ended and nonprogressive character of the plot are not meant to invite us to search for wholeness, clarity, and finality, but rather beg to be valued as worthy qualities in themselves. What truly carries weight is not so much the ultimate destination but the road towards it, not the endmost goal but the quest for it in itself.

110

Obviously, what first comes to mind is Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis as a source for the major theme of the father-son relationship. 111 Christopher Metress, “Via Negativa: The Way of Unknowing in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark,” Southern Review 37.1 (Winter 2001): 150.

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Secondary Sources Andersen, Svend. “Determinism or Meaninglessness. The Philosophical Challenge of Science in Kant and Logstrup.” In Free Will and Determinism, edited by Viggo Mortensen and Robert C. Sorensen, 100-115. Sydsats, Christiansfeld: Aarhus UP, 1987. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking, 1963. —. The Life of the Mind. Vol, I. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1977. Arnold, Edwin T. “Blood & Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy.” Commonweal 121 (4 Nov. 1994): 11-16. —. “‘Go to sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy.” Southern Quarterly 38.3 (Spring 2000): 34-58.

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Guillemin, George. “‘As of some site where life had not succeeded’: Sorrow, Allegory, and Pastoralism in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” In A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, edited by Edwin Arnold and Diane Luce, 92-130. Jackson, Mississippi: U of Mississippi P, 2001. Guinn, Matthew. “Ruder Forms Survive: Cormac McCarthy’s Atavistic Vision.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 108-15. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998. Hall, Wade. “The Human Comedy of Cormac McCarthy.” In Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 49-60. El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 1995. Hall, Wade and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 1995. Harham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. Hoffmann, Gerhard. “Strangeness, Gaps, and the Mystery of Life: Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Novels.” Amerikanstudien / American Studies 42.2 (1997): 217-238. Jarret, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. NY: Twayne, 1997. Jenks, Chris, ed. Visual Culture. London and NY: Routledge, 1998. John Paul II. PamiĊü i ToĪsamoĞü [Memory and Identity]. Cracow: Znak, 2005. Josyph, Peter. “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian.” In Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 169-88. El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 1995. Kennedy, William. “Left Behind,” The New York Times. Accessed October 8, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/books/review/Kennedy.t.html. Koáakowski, Leszek. Bóg nam nic nie jest dáuĪny. Krótka uwaga o religii Pascala i o duchu jansenizmu [God Owes Us Nothing. A Brief Note on the Religion of Pascal and the Spirit of Jansenism]. Translated by Ireneusz Kania. Cracow: Znak, 1994. Lang, Berel. “Przedstawienie Záa: Etyczna treĞü a literacka forma” [Representing Evil: Ethical Content and Literary Form]. Translated by Anna ZiĊbiĔska-Witek. Literatura na ĝwiecie 1-2 (2004): 15-63.

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http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&fri endID=161785678. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2002. New Advent. Catholic Encyclopedia. Gabriel Malagrida. Accessed January 16, 2008. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09565c.htm. Nietzsche, Friedrich. AntychrzeĞcijanin. PrzekleĔstwo chrzeĞcijaĔstwa [The Antichristian. The Curse of Christianity]. Translated by Grzegorz SowiĔski. Cracow: Nomos, 1996. —. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Encyclopedia Britannica (43). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1994. —. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” In The Living Novel: A Symposium, edited by Granville Hicks, 162-174. New York: Macmillan, 1957. —. “Some Aspects of the Southern Grotesque.” In Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, 36-50. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969. —. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. O’Connor, William Van. The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1962. Owens, Barceley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000. Oz, Amos. ”ZajĊcie dla Diabáa” [Engaging the Devil]. Plus Minus, Rzeczpospolita, September 17-18, 2005: 7. Paper Cuts, a blog about books. New York Times. Accessed July 25, 2007. http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/the-fightingcormackians. Parrish, Timothy B. and Elizabeth A. Spiller. “A Flute Made of Human Bone: Blood Meridian and the Survivors of American History.” Prospects 23 (1998): 461-81. Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 433-460. Pope, Alexander. Essay on Man, Epistle 2. Poets’ Corner, Bookshelf. Accessed October 16, 2007. http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/pope-e2.html. Prather, William. “’Like something seen through bad glass’: Narrative Strategies in The Orchard Keeper.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 37-54. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.

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Rebein, Robert. Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. Lexington, Kentucky: The UP of Kentucky, 2001. Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVC) of the Bible. Accessed April 5, 2009. http://www.geocities.com/sacra_scriptura/eng_bible_index.html. Ricoeur, Paul. Symbolika Záa [Symbols of Evil]. Translated by Stanisáaw Cichowicz and Maria Ochab. Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1986. —. Záo: Wyzwanie rzucone filozofii i teologii [Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology]. Translated by Ewa Burska. Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1992. Rosen, Elisabeth. “The American West through an Apocalyptic Lens: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal 3 (2003). Accessed May 17, 2007. http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/usstudiesonline/article.asp?us=3&id= 10. Safranski, Rudiger. Záo: Dramat WolnoĞci [Evil: The Quandary of Freedom]. Translated by Ireneusz Kania. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1999. Salij, Jacek OP. “Ojcostwo i synostwo u ĞwiĊtego Augustyna” [Fatherhood and Sonship in Saint Augustine]. In Ojcostwo [Fatherhood], edited by Józef Augustyn SJ, 37-54. Cracow: WAM, 1998. —. Rozmowy ze ĝwiĊtym Augustynem [Conversations with St. Augustine]. PoznaĔ: W drodze, 1997. Scheler, Max. Problemy Religii [The Quandaries of Religion]. Translated by Adam WĊgrzecki. Cracow: Znak, 1995. Scoones, Jacqueline. “Ethics and Evolution in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” In Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 131-60. El Paso, Texas: Western Press, 1995. Sepich, John Emil. “’What kind of indians was them?’ Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 93-110. Shaviro, Steven. “’The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 111-121. Shaw, Patrick W. “The Kid’s Fate, the Judge’s Guilt: Ramifications of Closure in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Southern Literary Journal 30.1 (1997): 102-119. —. “Female Presence, Male Violence, and the Art of Artlessness in the Border Trilogy.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 256-68. Manchester: Manchester

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AFTERWORD MCCARTHY’S VIA NEGATIVA

It is exceptionally difficult to draw general, sweeping conclusions about the underlying nature and the outward manifestations of evil in Cormac McCarthy’s prose. His writings so distinctly circumvent all neatly established categories and escape every kind of totalizing, systemic explication of reality that subordinating all of them to one universal scheme or theory would be a far-fetched misreading and a violent restriction of the broad perspective they present. At the ending of the third chapter of my book,1 I pointed to various divisions commonly employed in philosophical theories attempting to clarify and methodize the issue of evil (premeditated versus unintentional evil, natural versus moral evil), demonstrating how McCarthy manages to deconstruct these binary oppositions, conflating one category with another and ultimately proving that all exemplifications of evil are equally scandalous, grim, and unspeakable. The purpose of the (hopefully clear and lucid) organization of my book, in which my reflections on evil in McCarthy’s works proceeded from the superficial layer of visual presentations of violence (Chapter Two), through the deeper plane of conversations, stories, and narrations concerning evil and dark fate (Chapter Three), to the deepest level alluding to the metaphysical and biblical origins of evil (Chapters Four and Five), was to indicate the variety of potential readings of McCarthy’s fiction. His novels offer the possibility of depicting evil both as a lack of the good (as in the case of Lester Ballard from Child of God or the kid from Blood Meridian both of whom were in their early years deprived of the basic sense of security, love, and parental care) and as a powerful force with its own distinct nature, shape, and form (as it is embodied in such bestial, ruthless, and uncanny figures as Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, the black minister from Outer Dark, or Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men).2 We may get the impression that it is precisely those protagonists 1 2

In the subchapter “Divine Violence, Metaphysical Evil.” This is one of the major divisions I examine in the first chapter of my book.

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who represent evil incarnate–those who are conscious of their own cold, calculated mercilessness and amused with their lighthearted readiness to engage in the most brutish acts of violence–that are potentially the most appealing and fascinating for the reader since they are the ones who possess the most definite and recognizable identities. They have in themselves nothing of the victim (like Ballard or the kid who, not unlike Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, are innately distrustful and forever fleeing from something); Holden, the minister, and Chigurh are those who endure and triumph, representing unrestrained power, erudite knowledge, and cynical eloquence. It is therefore true that McCarthy’s evil, for all its inconclusiveness and open-endedness, has nothing to do with Hannah Arendt’s insistence on petty, indistinctive acts and on a blind obedience to authority as the sources of grand evil, or with Zimbardo’s avowal that evil originates from the faulty organization of the system. It is decidedly closer to Levinas’s concept of evil as excess, Nietzsche’s idea of evil as transgression, and Bataille’s depiction of evil as the ultimate metaphysical experience.3 McCarthy’s evil does not reside in the external circumstances or in the anonymous system; it is quite literally embodied in the individual, where it may remain latent and lurking until it is triggered off by totally random and unforeseeable events to reveal its destructive potential and its full sweeping force. Obviously, evil which stems from some kind of basic deprivation (as the violence that is performed by Ballard and the kid) seems to be “safer,” easier to explain, to analyze, and ultimately to justify. It is also possible to be eradicated by purely human means–by compensating for the elementary lack and satisfying the primal desire. On the other hand, the more profound, unearthly evil embodied in McCarthy’s most compelling and at the same time most alarming protagonists, is definitely more disturbing, opaque, and inexplicable. Yet it seems equally real and close to our own experience; obviously, such figures as Holden, the minister, or Chigurh, may be read as embodiments of our own self-hatred, distrust, and hostility. They represent the evil that is covert in all of us, an evil that has a form and constitution of its own, and which may, if we are not sufficiently alert and vigilant, manifest itself in ways we would never imagine or expect. Yet, as The Road ultimately proves, we are not doomed to succumb to this latent force of evil or to be eventually destroyed by its might. Against all odds, it is a child, a nameless boy with no distinctive features apart from his childish readiness to help and share, who outlives all and 3

I closely analyse all these ideas in Chapter Two.

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manages to preserve self-dignity and a deep sense of meaning and purpose. This kind of persistence does demand an unspeakable degree of toil, effort, and determination, yet it is an authentic and feasible alternative which remains within our reach. If, as I have shown in Chapter Three,4 McCarthy favored passive reconciliation to what reality offers,5 in The Road he makes it plain that this amity has nothing to do with some kind of simplistic evasion, with sitting back and taking things as they come, but that it is the fruit of a ferocious internal battle, an ongoing struggle to live the best life possible in the circumstances that one is given. It is not enough to be passive (like, for instance, the lukewarm Culla Holme)–we are to love and appreciate reality and to patiently take up the small tasks that each day brings. If we were to return to the basic breach in McCarthian criticism which I have discussed in the Preface, and which may be briefly summed up as the controversy between those who consider McCarthy as a genuinely nihilistic writer (Vereen Bell, Dana Philips, Steven Shaviro, Mark R. Michell6) and those who regard him as an advocate of the metaphysics of grace and redemption (Edwin T. Arnold, Leo Daugherty, Walter Sullivan7), we would have to acknowledge that this disagreement cannot be once and for all settled. As I have attempted to prove all throughout my study, both of these categories are too limited and too exclusive to embrace all that McCarthy is trying to say. I would agree with Christopher Metress that his prose rather represents a singular “third way,” a unique path of its own which constantly evades all clear-cut boundaries and simple, unequivocal solutions. Aptly designating this “third way” as the via negativa, Metress points to the “incomprehensibility of the divine mystery” as the crucial import of McCarthy’s major novels.

4

See the subchapter “Women, Children, and ‘Idiots.’” Even such “active” characters as Ballard and the kid may be said to gain a portion of the reader’s sympathy only because they finally end up as passive victims. 6 See such texts as Vereen Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988); Dana Philips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 433-460; Steven Shaviro, “’The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” The Southern Quarterly 30:4 (1992): 111-121; Mark Royden Winchell, “Inner Dark: or, The Place of Cormac McCarthy,” Southern Review 26 (1990): 293-309. 7 Compare with such texts as Edwin T. Arnold, “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables,” Southern Quarterly 30 (1992): 31-50; Leo Daugherty, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Southern Quarterly 30 (1992): 122-33; Walter Sullivan, “About Any Kind of Meanness You Can Name,” Sewanee Review 93 (1985): 649-56. 5

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Afterword What McCarthy’s novel is trying to tell us [is] that the darkness never passes, that serenity . . . will come to us . . . only when we reconcile ourselves to darkness as a permanent condition, when we unlearn our desire for some vision of divine light that will heal us of our crippling uncertainties and give us full knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and what God is like and would have us do.8

McCarthy’s insistence on evil, deprivation, loss, blindness, darkness, desolation, and crippleness, as well as his skepticism toward the notions of light, seeing (or “the eye” in general), and a sense of progress and purpose as concepts traditionally associated with transcendence, place his work near the assumptions of negative theology. Negative theologians tended to define God by means of paradoxes (God is all Being and non Being at the same time) and oppositional metaphors (comparing Him rather to things dark and ugly since He is infinitely more than all things bright and beautiful; these, therefore, only blur our vision, while the former more accurately point to the inadequacy of language to describe God). Avowing that darkness and lack of knowledge are the best ways of cognition, negative theology referred to God as known only as the totally unknown and as if nonexistent. Since the Absolute can neither be known or described, silence is the most revealing mode of expression that can be used to refer to Him. Negative theology therefore seems to be the most relevant meta-tool which can be employed in attempts to epitomize the key import of McCarthy’s work. It is only when we abandon the search for a totalizing, all-encompassing reading of his novels, that we will be able to fully appreciate their depth and beauty. McCarthy’s books should, in my view, be approached with something of a childish simplicity, with an openness to paradoxes, and a readiness to accept inconclusiveness, obliqueness, and a kind of elemental incomprehensibility of reality as necessary, natural, and in the end appealing elements of the human condition. Describing presence through lack and isolation, while constantly confronting his characters with suffering, abandonment, and destruction, McCarthy ultimately demonstrates that darkness does not necessarily entail desolation and dejection (while light would signify grace and redemption). Appearances are most often misleading and things are not in fact what they seem; those who have a deeper insight into how things really are, are

8

Christopher Metress, “Via Negativa: The Way of Unknowing in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark,” 147-54.

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the blind and the idiots. We are walking through darkness, but that does not mean we are doomed to lose our way.