Cormac McCarthy

Human greatness and the void an artist leaves.

I would not call myself a fan of Cormac McCarthy, in that I have not even read the majority of his novels. I read The Road several years ago, and a few days ago I started reading Blood Meridian. I have The Passenger and Stella Maris on my desk, waiting patiently. (They will have to wait awhile, as my newborn son has significantly slowed down my reading pace.) I guess I could be called a fan-in-training; once I’ve completed my training I’ll earn the right to call myself a fan of his work. But I was still struck with a profound sadness when I learned that he had died.

There is only so much that I can say about McCarthy in particular without sounding like a fool; I’m not a proper literary critic, and he is a subject I have under-studied. But since I have lately been captivated by McCarthy, savoring the words of Blood Meridian while my son naps, I have to say something.

Cormac McCarthy was a great American novelist. Harold Bloom called McCarthy the true heir to Faulkner and Melville, and I think he was right. Bloom wrote that “no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian”, noting that even McCarthy was unable to best the book. He wrote seven novels after Blood Meridian, including The Road and No Country for Old Men.

When Bloom writes about McCarthy, he emphasizes the distinctive American character of McCarthy’s work. It is a thought that had occurred to me, though in a less sophisticated form: only an American could have written Blood Meridian. The brutality and the beauty go hand-in-hand in McCarthy, both in prose and in story. The book at first reads like a half-written, half-slurred stream-of-consciousness, but eventually the read finds he is able to read it properly. He starts to see it for what it is. It is an elevation of historic, rural American speech; it is the frontier’s Shakespeare. And just like the Bard, McCarthy does not shy away from the darkness in the human soul, like when a hermit speaks to the Kid early on in Blood Meridian.

A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

But enough about McCarthy’s book. I also want to talk about greatness.

I once told an interviewer that I was a great lover of human greatness. What I mean by that is that I love when human beings achieve something. Even when a machine can do it just as well, or better, like we now see in the case of great games like chess, there is something beautiful about a human person being able to just be great. Even if ChatGPT or its ilk could one day write Blood Meridian, I’d be in love with the fact that a human being did it.

This is because I see human beings as creatures in need of development. This is, essentially, an Aristotelian view, though it was shared by the Stoics. Human beings are born with a great deal of potential. When raised well and when cared for, that potential can become actual.

Sometimes, like in the case of McCarthy, it happens even when the world seems to be conspiring against the individual. McCarthy lived in poverty for a great deal of his life. He attended, but did not graduated from, the University of Tennessee. On paper, he should not succeed. He should be another statistic. But that man became one of the great American novelists.

When a great man or woman dies, there is a void. We can all feel it — it is why we all go buy their books or listen to their records when we hear the news. There is a little less human excellence in the world, at least for a little awhile. McCarthy’s first novel was published three years after Faulkner’s death, but his masterpiece wasn’t published for another twenty years.

The void gets filled. Other human beings will go on to achieve greatness. That gives me a little bit of hope, even as I mourn the loss of a true artist.