The Rugged Individualism of Cormac McCarthy
The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Cormac McCarthy's 'The Passenger.'
American novelists in the 20th century used to be celebrities and, perhaps, men: Hemingway, certainly Faulkner. Now, they might as well not exist, in a situation that might be worse than the 19th century one that led Melville to die drunk and forgotten or Henry James to escape to England. We suffer from a kind of feminism, driven by the pantheistic spirituality of our times, and pushed by elites who can’t handle these decadent times.
It’s against this background that Cormac McCarthy’s work makes sense. He’s not just a novelist, or a chronicler of American decline, but an alternative to the times. He brings back rugged individualism, once the American dream, and, since this is a second look at that former strength, he tests the connection between American freedom and nihilism, as well as the deeper question that comes out of our love of stories, of drama, of conflict, our longing for beauty seen in staring at the ugliness he conjures up in his stories of America’s past and future, Western and sci-fi, the all-American concerns – do the upright people twisted by the times long for God? Did we have to end up this way? Are we fated?
The problem is that McCarthy became prestigious as an old man. In the ‘90s, he started winning every award America can bestow, a sign that the elites were losing their minds, as well as playing with something they didn’t understand. McCarthy’s novels aren’t for the softheaded types that end up in MFAs or publishing houses, but the stench of corruption does attract them. They’re novels for men agonized. Then, after the prestige of the publishers came the glamour of Hollywood, and a bunch of McCarthy’s stories were filmed, and No Country For Old Men became a sign of the times, winning over everyone from the talented young men to the decrepit Oscars. His career became an image of the decadence his works stand against.
How do you deal with that sort of problem? One all-American idea is to reject celebrity and embrace anonymity; no delusion that America can love you back. That’s not enough for McCarthy, who’s written very little since 2006, and now has two crazy new novels out, The Passenger and Stella Maris, connected stories of Bobby and Alicia Western, brother and sister, who embody American decline after WW2, intended to dynamite his reputation and maybe set him free.
McCarthy has also achieved what seems impossible, a novel for the times that doesn’t involve the racial obsessions of elites. The intelligent man will feel relief for a while, given the hysterical histrionics of our times, which threaten to make us forget about greatness and settle for aggressive mediocrity. But then you begin to ask yourself: What else is there in America to make for national drama and therefore storytelling on a grand scale, if it’s not racial dramas? Freedom without civilization, civilization without freedom, and a strange mix of the two—McCarthy is very concerned with these possibilities.
The conflict instead is between Southerners and science. America is transformed by the atomic bomb, by the arrival of a power that no longer seems connected to humanity; as the scientific talk in the novel suggests, maybe physics has inadvertently revealed that there is no providence, maybe no cosmos at all, and so science is nihilism. A kind of pious old Southern lady tells Bobby: “You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life.” She’s his grandma, the last of his family; she talks about her people building a wonderful house, all solid wood, with their hands, and, admittedly, engines. Then the nuclear era came and the Southern land was invaded by scientists who built in concrete, the government and military surrounded the complexes in barb wire, and treated the women working there—Bobby’s mother—as slaves, not allowed to speak or notice anything, servants of the machines that can enrich Uranium. The house ended up lost in a flooded valley, presumably because of the TVA.
Bobby spends his time in New Orleans at the beginning of the 1980s, the last redoubt of Southern aristocracy in its decadence. There doesn’t seem anything Southern about Bobby, because he went to school at CalTech and studied theoretical physics, his father’s metier. Bobby once had aristocratic habits – European Formula car racing, of which the only memory is his Maserati Bora. Bobby went to Europe in 1968 and concerned himself with eating well and working as a mechanic on his Lotus, the only statement of his reaction to the moral revolution of those times. An accident ended that pursuit; he’s a salvage diver now, as much a job as a metaphor. He’s haunted by his sister’s suicide ten years back; he investigates his friends’ disreputable lives to see if any of them know what the hell they’re doing, or to see in what ways they’re falling apart. Maybe his nobility comes out not only in his willingness to live among the crazy people, but in their willingness to reveal themselves to him. But he’s not able to judge them as they might want.
Technology and science go together with manliness in Bobby. He grew up in the country, he’s good with his hands, and he loved the wilderness as a boy. The moral resources of American freedom, however, collapsed somehow. He has, like the other people he knows, nothing for which to live and no way to find something that fits with his moral demands and the catastrophes America suffered in the ‘70s. Freedom turned out to be a trap.
The crazy part of the novel, of course, maybe famous by now, is the incest. This, I guess, is the upcoming theme of American decadence, something liberals want to Progress towards out of sheer perversity. McCarthy brings it out with tragic intent. He just wants to force the issue, the contradictions of American power. Isn’t the ideal American man, Bobby, supposed to love the ideal woman? She’s the best there is, even smarter than him, even more beautiful, and perhaps even more rugged in her love of freedom. Isn’t that happiness supposed to justify how hard it is being American? Don’t ordinary people want to see that in the extraordinary, so they can hope? And is that even love, or more something like worship? The problem is this perfect girl is his sister. And in another way the problem is that she’s crazy and suicidal. America cannot fix her, but might drive her to prefer death to life and renege on the American promise.
McCarthy is not a subtle writer; he ignores understatement. There’s something vague about him, though, the odor of Christianity, the demands of a religion that elites have forgotten and that people maybe pantomime, but do they really believe? If you read The Passenger, you’ll notice this question coming up, do these characters doom themselves because they break God’s laws? They seem to understand themselves as impious, yet defiant, impenitent. They cannot stop narrating their stories—this is how Americans make it almost impossible for a novelist to do his job—but cannot make sense of them either. As though every broken heart were a demand on God, a confession, a communion for lost souls. The manly Bobby sees that this goes far beyond his resources; these people can’t believe in him…
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and host of the ACF podcasts.
Justin Lee's contribution to the symposium: A Conversation with the Thalidomide Kid | RealClearBooks
Sam Buntz's contribution to the symposium: Riding Shotgun to the End of the World | RealClearBooks
