Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period

"By this point there has been an awful lot published on McCarthy, both in terms of articles and full books. As I mentioned, there’s no biography, but I was trying to think what would be the one thing I’d recommend to read about McCarthy, and Dianne rises to the top—this book in particular. In it, she covers the Southern novels up through Suttree , and she unpacks all of this historical background. Like me, she’s very interested in McCarthy as a person who engages with region, and her chapter on Child of God is wonderful because she talks about the historical cases that McCarthy may have been drawing on in order to create this character. One of them is Ed Gein, who was also the inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho . You would never think to put Child of God together with the film Psycho , but they do share this common ancestor. Luce does a great job of looking at the different characterization of these two figures, Norman Bates and Lester Ballard: their motivations, the way that those motivations are explained or not explained. There are some sharp differences and some interesting commonalities, and she does very fine detail work in digging this stuff up. She also puts it in the context of another killer from the region, James Blevins—who interestingly shares a surname with a character in All the Pretty Horses . So she puts that historical basis together, and then adds in a metaphysical understanding of Ballard as somebody who is stuck in Plato’s cave, if you will; he can’t emerge into enlightenment because he’s struggling down in the shadows. And it happens literally in the book: he enters a cave system near the end of the novel. It’s just such a masterful reading. That is probably my favourite of the chapters in her book, although she does excellent work with all of the Southern novels. Typically, when we say that we mean The Orchard Keeper (which is his first), Outer Dark , Child of God and Suttree . Now, The Road was published in 2006—but it is post-apocalyptic, and its location is not obvious to the casual reader. It is set, at least in part, in the South, in Tennessee, although that’s rather veiled. He also has his scripts. His play The Stonemason is set in Louisville, Kentucky. His screenplay, The Gardener’s Son , is also set in Tennessee. Those are lesser known works, certainly less read, but part of that constellation. But when people usually say ‘the Southern novels’, they mean those first four. Yes. She does a great job of laying out the historical—explaining the Tennessee Valley Authority and why that matters, why that’s such a phantom presence in all of his Southern novels. But then she is using the text and the historical sources to author a metaphysical reading as well. I don’t know if I would say that what he thinks his characters are confronting is evil. That’s a philosophically and theologically loaded term. I think sometimes attributing the term ‘evil’ to someone or something is an easy way out—it can subvert the need for investigation, for asking really tough questions. I mean, if you look at Blood Meridian and some of the really atrocious stuff that’s happening, these things are also politically motivated, right? So, parts of the Mexican government are paying the Glanton gang to scalp Native American tribes in the area, and so the Glanton gang is essentially functioning as a band of mercenaries—but they buy weapons from a Prussian working out of Santa Fe and seem to be partially funded by an American consul. And these are historically verifiable figures. What some McCarthy scholars have been interested in more recently is his engagement with economics : how talking about ‘evil’ as simply a metaphysical category might be an easy way of not talking about some of the motivating factors for why this violence was occurring. Or look at Child of God. One of the big conversations around that book is how the community can be seen as driving Lester to do this. They repossess his farm; they reject him socially, they keep pushing him away and away and away. The guy just wants to have some space for himself and he literally is denied any kind of human community or resource. This is his reaction. To call it ‘evil’ is too simple. “Oprah asked McCarthy if he believes in God, and he said: ‘It depends which day you ask me’” You might be able to use the term about particular characters in McCarthy, most notably Judge Holden in Blood Meridian and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men , specifically because their motivations are less clear. Chigurh is not killing for money, he says so, and Judge Holden doesn’t seem to be either. They don’t seem to be satisfying perverse desires. In Judge Holden’s case, it’s not clear how (or if) his perversity is linked to his murderousness. Maybe McCarthy engages evil as what we call it when we don’t have a clear choice of explanatory factors. But the idea of evil as straightforward, ‘there are beings in the world that are black holes’, I don’t know, to me that sounds a little too easy. Oprah asked him that. She was pretty good at asking him straight questions. Oprah asked him if he believes in God, and he said: “It depends which day you ask me.” This was about The Road, which of all of his novels is probably the most religiously inflected. Certainly the father in that book thinks about God and wonders about God, in some pretty specific terms. And so in that Oprah interview, when they were talking about The Road , he did say that “I don’t think you have to have a great idea of who or what God is in order to pray.” Which I thought was a nice way to put it. Oh, those are extensive. Let’s see. Michael Crews has recently published a book about McCarthy called Books Are Made Out of Books , which is a quote from the Woodward interview. Crews went through McCarthy’s archives and wrote about all of the different authors that he seems to be alluding to, or mentions explicitly in his correspondence, in his notes for a manuscript. So the short answer is there’s a whole book-length list of those. But the big ones are Faulkner, both in style and substance, and Hemingway in some of the subject matter and also style. Steven Frye would say you have to talk about Dostoevsky , you have to talk about Herman Mellvile, you have to talk about these capital-R ‘Romantic’ authors. Plato , right, his philosophical works. It seems that for most of McCarthy’s life he’s been a voracious reader and consumer of ideas. So, those would be the big names, but there’s certainly a lot of others."