IM-1776: America's Prophet
A tribute to Cormac McCarthy
Yesterday I wrote a tribute to Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) for IM-1776. He was was our greatest living novelist and will be remembered with the likes of Melville and Faulkner as the chief American mythmaker of his time.
An excerpt:
After passing through a ghostly Southern underworld, where Faulkner was his Virgil, McCarthy settles into his own voice. Everything after his first four novels is clean and crisp, like a canyon wind that sears your throat. The language is elegant and the prose often Biblical. The dialogue is taut like a bowstring but sometimes unravels into sinuous monologues that probe life’s deepest questions. The descriptions of the landscape, its flora and fauna, and the heavenly bodies that spin far above are magnificent and invoke the divine. And the scenery provides comfort and relief from the nauseating violence that erupts on almost every page.
Blood Meridian rejects the nostalgia that torments Southern literature. Once again, the protagonist is unburdened by the past. He is “the Kid,” a nameless nobody, displaced but not really dispossessed — for he has no inheritance nor memory to speak of. In his exile from nothing he joins a band of scalpers, and together they sweep across a vast expanse like a thundering storm. The mysterious land and its exquisite features pretend to hold answers to great questions, and we are tempted to believe they might just reveal the Kid’s destiny. But the deeper the wretched band penetrates this almost infinite space, the more alien the world becomes, so boundless and incomprehensible. And even as the heavens appear ready to offer up a revelation or a drop of transcendence, we are always left wanting. The promise of violence is all that remains — that and death. In this state we are all rendered fools, our utopian aspirations collapse, and the religion of progress becomes nothing more than devilish joke. We cannot help but recall Nietzsche’s chilling admonition about what lies in store for those who probe the furthermost limits of reason.
I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to drop questions or feedback in the comments section below. And don’t forget to follow IM-1776 for more great content.
Always,
Lee