Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy's (1933–) significance, particularly in his pre–Border Trilogy writings, lies in the refusal of his fiction to be significant, to be meaningful, in the way that American literature generally has intended. His work shies away from depictions of thought or interior mental space, leaving his readers to sort out the motivations of the characters on their own. His language is at times baroque (most notably in Blood Meridian [1985]), at other times stripped back and minimal (Child of God [1973] or The Road [2006]). At the same time, McCarthy is remarkably expert at appropriating the traditions of American fiction in a way that acknowledges them even as he employs them to new effect. He does this sometimes by simply pushing a mode or genre to its extreme. His novel Outer Dark (1968), for instance, toys with the traditions of southern gothic but does so as if the South were actually hell. Blood Meridian imitates the western even as McCarthy cross-pollinates this genre with the spirit of intense viciousness and gnostic philosophy. McCarthy seems both to be bringing one era of American literature – an era tied to more stable notions of character, self, genre, ethics, and order – to a close and to be opening another, this one more interested in the possibilities of pushing the forms and styles to which we are accustomed in new directions.