The Eruption of the Sordid: Cormac McCarthy's Resistance to Modern Ideology

Abstract

This essay examines Cormac McCarthy's antipathy toward modern ideology, or the ideas that when taken together enable the process of top-down social transformation called “modernization.” The essay argues that McCarthy employs a formal device we may call “the eruption of the sordid” to create spaces for the representation of more organic ways of living. This article further focuses on the double bind McCarthy's approach creates, whereby he can upset the logic of modernization but does not induce from the lives of his characters a shared alternative to this logic.

Keywords::

• Cormac McCarthy
• modernity
• aesthetics
• The Orchard Keeper
• Outer Dark
• Child of God
• Suttree
• The Road

Notes

Notes

¹ Modern ideology also appears to us in its more longstanding form, too. We certainly may view the Iraq War as an attempt at species improvement in the modern sense. The postmodern, then, is a partial fulfillment of the promise of modernity; because partial, the postmodern is at once evidence of modernity's completion, as well as evidence of its failure.

² Phillip A. Snyder offers a compelling reading of the link between nostalgia and the material world as it plays out in McCarthy's Border Trilogy. As Snyder argues, “the Border Trilogy shares with other modern and contemporary western texts a hard-edged nostalgia for the cowboy past tinged with a persistent advocation of cowboy virtues in the present, particularly as invested in the materiality of cowboy culture” (199).

³ My argument here is similar to Holloway's reading, insofar as Holloway sees McCarthy as trapped between a modernist desire to enact a stable position of estrangement from which to criticize culture on firm footing and a postmodern commitment to the exposure of exactly such desire as a construction and supposedly, therefore, an illusion. Hence, what Holloway calls McCarthy's “late modernism” is “this juxtaposing of conflicting definitions of representation [… which] has become the formal hallmark of McCarthy's mature” work (34). My analysis departs from Holloway's on several levels, to include my decreased sympathy for McCarthy's struggle—I cannot figure out why one cannot push for a worldview that admits its constructed nature—and my considerably more moderate politics, which a Marxist such as Holloway likely would term “reformist” (a label I accept).

⁴ My thinking here shows the influence of James Wood's scathing review of No Country for Old Men (2005). As Wood contends, “there is often the disquieting sense that McCarthy's fiction puts certain fond American myths under pressure merely to replace them with one vaster myth—eternal violence […]. McCarthy's fiction seems to say, repeatedly, that this is how it has been and how it will always be.” Malewitz also offers an intriguing window into this problem in McCarthy, seeing that while McCarthy's men can perform resistance via rugged consumerism, they do not or cannot articulate the nature of this resistance. As Malewitz writes of No Country for Old Men's protagonist and antagonist, “Moss's and Chigurh's actions never serve as a platform by which to mount a sustained critique of the systemic practices of late-capitalist conditioning” (740).

Moreover, I think this resistance to sustained critique in McCarthy—or better yet, resistance to a vision of community—relates directly to what Nell Sullivan identifies as a “closed circuit for male desire” in the writer's fiction (230). Women often figure as representatives of “society” in McCarthy, and given the writer's antipathy toward society, we find antipathy toward women that plays out in their marginalization and in the dysfunctional heterosexual relationships that permeate all of McCarthy's fiction.

⁵ This is why Michael Herr's blurb for Blood Meridian, in which Herr termed the text a “classic American novel of regeneration through violence,” is apt. This also is why John Cant's insistence on McCarthy's “courage” in working to “deconstruct American mythology” is overstated and one-dimensional (120, 10). This same one-dimensionality crops up in John Wegner's otherwise excellent analysis of how McCarthy's fictions “constantly remind us that history and all the events of history revolve around war and revolution” (78). Wegner appears too ready to see how McCarthy's works “cry out against the meaninglessness of war,” without taking into account McCarthy's sense that at times violence not only is just, but even life-affirming (78).

⁶ As Robert L. Jarrett argues, “All three […] main characters are linked by their common exile from the values and lifestyles of a newly dominant urbanized South […]. Through the figure of John Wesley Rattner we see that the past […] is unrecoverable and unrepeatable within the present” (14). Dianne C. Luce links this theme to East Tennessee's historical confrontation with modernity, arguing that through The Orchard Keeper readers witness “the inexorable attempt by aggressive, technology-based culture to contain/detain the more nature-based culture of Red Branch's ‘orchard keepers”’ (36).

⁷ The novel's literal nature leads Christopher R. Nelson to credit Outer Dark with a transgressive ability to refuse readers' attempts “to clearly assign guilt and responsibility to a deviant other” (31).

⁸ For more on the idea of the posthuman and its link to the elegiac nature of McCarthy's canon, see Guillemin.

⁹ Lydia Cooper persuasively links this aspect of Child of God to what she sees as a “‘least of these’ theology” operative across McCarthy's early novels (No More Heroes 42).

¹⁰ No better way, that is, save for perhaps as “canticles,” in keeping with Kenneth Lincoln's work. As Lincoln writes, “McCarthy's self-styled elegies surface as authorial ‘threnody’ in the texts, an archaic blues lament for the wounded, suffering, and dead. The praise-chant of grief-song contains terrible personal tare; the prophetic story or vatic warning carries shocking public texture” (17).

¹¹ I believe it is this aspect of McCarthy's work that undergirds Francisco Collado-Rodríguez's excellent analysis of how No Country for Old Men and The Road examine whether “storytelling [has …] the capacity to take characters and readers to any sense of truth or emotional relief” (50).

¹² Cooper's work influences my sense of the theological implications of The Road. I strongly disagree with her contention that the novel affirms “a categorical rejection of fear-based behavior” (“Cormac McCarthy's” 234), for the boy arrives at a kind of salvation at novel's end thanks to his father's steady application of fear-based behavior (which prevents the child from becoming some thug's next meal). Nevertheless, Cooper convincingly traces connections between The Road and traditional grail narratives, and she links those connections to the novel's composition.

¹³ I hope this conclusion, vis-à-vis Suttree, reflects the seriousness with which I meet Jarrett's warning that the “very sensitivity of Suttree's imaginative perception, lacking in most other McCarthy characters, may betray us into excessive sympathy” (57).

¹⁴ At the same time, The Road troubles the very idea of selflessness, because, as Laura Gruber Godfrey shows, the novel figures memory as burden. As she writes, the boy, at novel's end, “is burdened […] not by the loss of memory but precisely because of it” (174). Therefore, to share in this novel is to entrap the person with whom one shares with the weight of memory.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ty Hawkins

Ty Hawkins is an assistant professor of English at Walsh University, where he teaches American literature, general-education literature, and composition. He is the author of Reading Vietnam amid the War on Terror (Palgrave 2012), and his work has appeared in journals such as College Literature, Papers on Language and Literature, and War, Literature & the Arts.