Certain critics have suggested that Cormac McCarthy’s novels are based on pointless violence. It’s a common experience to read a book in which the world is portrayed as a nest of vipers who exterminate each other in the worst possible ways; human nature unexpurgated, the critics argue. One can easily imagine the author rubbing his hands in front of a mirror, just before sitting at his desk, thinking about the vile, corrupt deeds his character is going to commit that day; wondering what new way he can find to horrify the world. To make the reader shudder. But in the case of Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023), that judgment is unfair and totally ineffectual. He wasn’t an author who arranged his novels as a list of senseless felonies. His prose work is among the most profound and beautiful to be found in contemporary times. His fictional worlds are inhabited by men with complex codes of honor, whose lot it is to endure hard lives on the margins of modern society. His narratives can pass from the straightforward, detailed description of a long ride on horseback to the purest lyricism when depicting the tenuous changes of light on the late afternoon horizon; from imagining the spirits of almost extinct native North American tribes galloping in the wind to speaking of the villainy of a gang of bloody scalp hunters; from defining God with a total lack of irony to displaying his own heartrending compassion for the burden of death carried by each and every member of the human race.
The word that distinguishes his work from the mainstream of the extremely violent novels swamping the shelves of bookstores is hope. Or rather, a strange sensation—mostly unjustifiable, and very difficult to locate in a way that is set in stone—that it’s all been worth the effort.
All that is true, but there’s no denying that the novelist wrote what can be considered some of the darkest, bloodiest novels in contemporary North American literature.
Bret Easton Ellis undoubtedly vies for that honor: American Psycho (1991) was, and continues to be, harshly criticized for the same form of excess. An interminable series of showy, gratuitous killings stultify the novel to the point of eliminating any narrative structure not associated with delight in the macabre. Ellis has published four more novels since then, but American Psycho remains in print and is by far the author’s most famous work. Nevertheless, Ellis did not yield to the monster he created; Lunar Park (2005) is a revealing sign of an evolution in style, the need for transformation that causes the younger version of the author to set out on paths that lead him to himself. From being the young nihilist who rants and raves rather than narrates, maintaining his enfant terrible status became less important to Ellis than the story and the tools employed to tell it, showing the metamorphosis of a lifelike (or almost lifelike) character and giving form to certain reflections that are central to the novel. If instinct (a destructive instinct, a vitriolic need to deliver blows to American society) is at the heart of his first books, it’s clear that in his more recent work this creative motor alternates with other reasons for writing, and that Ellis is refining his thesis with each new novel.
And the goal of that quest is meaning.
McCarthy, on the other hand, didn’t have to travel that path to self-knowledge in his books. From his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), the grim or thorny events in the story have their precise counterpart in his ability to find room for hope and to tease out an ending that gives precedence to certain untamed, godless versions of virtue over a reality that at times seems determined to annihilate its characters. The world is a wild place: this is one of the truths that filter through into every paragraph of McCarthy’s novels. But also, between war and cruel rage, lack of mercy and death, the heart of man triumphs in a completely unostentatious way; it glows humbly, like the fragile but incandescent material of which it is composed.
Holocaust and violence are forces inherent in the human soul—if we are honest with ourselves, centuries of history and literature make it impossible to ever forget this great truth; and if we do, there are novelists like the author of Child of God (1973) to remind us. But the art doesn’t simply lie in giving a pedestrian account of the damage, in recognizing the dark side of the soul and describing its expanses with sadistic rage and delectation. I imagine it also involves seeing what is behind it all. Searching among the ashes to which barbarity and pain reduce human beings to find the particles that continue to burn weakly, glimmering in the enclosing darkness. And then suspecting that we have come face to face with an essential—more hidden and inaccessible, and therefore the most precious—part of our nature.
Throughout the broad range of his novels, nature is far from being the backdrop in a movie yellowing from falsity. When Blood Meridian (1985) inaugurated McCarthy’s Western cycle, the landscape—already an overwhelming, hypnotic presence in the author’s novels—took on the endless, menacing dimensions of the old desert.
The fury of the elements is one more force, one more character—most often choleric and dry as dust—that constantly challenges the people who live in the remote plains or makeshift cities that compose the desolate geography of the author’s work. It rains a lot in McCarthy’s novels; storms roll in from the horizon to unleash lightning that flashes with all the strength of its soul: “[He] watched the lightning. Down there in the wood the birchtrunks shone palely and troops of ghost cavalry clashed in an outraged sky, old spectral revenants armed with rusted tools of war colliding parallactically upon each other like figures from a mass grave shorn up and girdled and cast with dread import across the clanging night and down remoter slopes between the dark and darkness yet to come.”[1] The celestial ray, the “sulphur light”[2] that makes human imagination regress to a magical state preceding reason. Then, infected by the perception of the attributes of an earlier era, the narrator asks himself, “Are there dragons in the wings of the world?”[3]
Rivers overflow, rain washes things away, cold and heat threaten life. It would be no exaggeration to say that in every one of his books, the author couldn’t resist the temptation to dedicate a beautiful, intense paragraph to a description of the dramatic effects of lightning on the world, the sky’s rage at the earth. “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”[4] Nature is a titanic stage setting whose dynamic is measured on grandiose scales. A looming, earthly god intimidates minuscule humans as it urges them to test the limits of their resistance.
In addition to reminding humans of their mortality, lightning becomes an instrument of destiny. The young Blevins who accompanies Rawlins and John Grady Cole in their flight in All the Pretty Horses (1992) is afraid of lightning as he is certain it will cause his death. A long list of family members killed by some improbable but well-aimed bolt is a strong argument for fearing the fury of the elements. Dying from a lightning strike is, therefore, a form of inheritance; a sort of prediction of death.
Animals, unsullied carriers of a fragment of natural forces, connect humans to the earth. In the first chapter of The Crossing (1994), sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with capturing a predator that is attacking his family’s cattle. After a long, ingenious struggle, during which the animal manages to elude all the traps the boy and his father lay for it, Billy succeeds in capturing the pregnant she-wolf prowling their land. Compassion for the animal leads him to disobey his father and return the wolf to Mexico, where it in fact comes from. The inhabitants of the region whom he meets on his journey say he is crazy and beg him to give up the plan. But something impels him to reinstate—even if only on a secondary and slightly onerous plane—the natural order of things. As if the human race were not possessed of life to use and abuse at will, but were only the least integrated of animals, the one that must keep its eyes open so as not to outreach itself, to remain in contact with its primitive, most genuine traits.
Rather than calamities one prays will never come about, those natural forces are integrated into the lives of the characters. Life and death are in true communion. The possibility of dying in the harsh climate or in an encounter with some wild animal doesn’t concern those who live in a territory where the border between Mexico and the United States is nonexistent, a region that predates geopolitical limitations; that undefined status makes them detached, stoic: both ideal attributes for integration into an ecosystem that provides only the necessities for survival. Infiltrating—or maybe reintegrated into—a primitive dynamic where everything is connected; a dynamic these indomitable cowboys don’t fear, even though they know its wildness, its lack of pity. Claws, fangs, extreme weather, poison, thorns, fast-flowing rivers, storms. The childhoods of the characters are passed in close proximity to death, in coexistence with wild animals, listening to the unspoken message of the harsh land around them, and so they grow into men who hear that voice of the wind and ghosts with which that part of life speaks to the human race. A human race that seems to benefit from listening to it from time to time.
A thin red line separates Mexico and the rest of North America, and within a context of illegality and death, the Mexican side of the frontier both resists and allows the trafficking of almost anything—people, goods, ways of life, expressions, stories—just as happens in nearly all the novels of this narrator of the Deep South. Riding between the postmodern Western and adventure fiction, each of McCarthy’s books has more than one thing in common with the violent, stark, lyrical, rugged, southern imagery of Sam Shepard and Barry Gifford. Literature that neither asks for nor offers mercy, these works present a cruel vision of a country of dark entrails and a turbulent spirit.
No Country for Old Men (2005) contains the usual dose of violence (bullets fired at point-blank range, scenes that seem more appropriate for a country in the grips of war) and rural life, but also introduces a new element into McCarthy’s work: the reflection on old age that triggers the incurable, senile nostalgia for times past that overwhelms Sheriff Bell—a Second World War veteran and pacifist—when faced with the senselessness of the present day. In this way, the novel oscillates between two territories that compose a spoken portrait of a region unsuited to men with little resolve: the sheriff’s monologues, wistful remembrances of an irremediably lost country that is burdened with “a strange kind of history and a damned bloody one too.”[5]
A careful reading of the novel would possibly lead one to come to the following conclusion: it is easier for people to communicate with and be receptive to the forces of nature than to seek the point where harmony can reign in their relationships. Rather than undertaking that quest, the majority calmly accept their role as pawns of a force that is capable of carrying them away: war is “the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”[6] This monologue in Blood Meridian, spoken by Judge Holden—a greatly feared and diabolical figure, leader of a group of nomadic bandits whose capacity for torture and killing knows no limits—displays a trite, mythic conception of war. The hostility apparent in armed confrontations illustrates the position this expression of civilization has in McCarthy’s oeuvre.
Desert roads are lawless. Or, at all events, law ends up being imposed, after hundreds of gunshots, by the person whose superiority consists of dodging the bullets of others and accurately aiming his own. Bandits, Indians, convicts, highwaymen, fugitives (possibly from themselves), thugs, lunatics, pariahs, men without a past or future; the vast majority of the characters in whom McCarthy and readers find points of fascination are beings who live in that shadowy space into which society fails to project its order. The limits of social life, in need of a higher arbiter to maintain the peace, melt away on reaching their frontier with an untamed region. Because society, civilization, that force constructed from culture and politics that brings humans together over time, finds its limits in each person who decides (or is forced) to live outside it.
In recent times, those of his readers who are accustomed to the twofold literary cartography of McCarthy’s work—novels set in the vicinity of Knoxville and others of a Western nature—have found No Country and The Road (2006) strange fruit. More violent and stark than usual. Even more direct, like two pressingly urgent visions: less lyrical, less parsimonious in prose terms; books of a calculated, disturbing minimalism. Two body blows attempting to connect as effectively as possible and so quickly canceling each other out. No Country for Old Men opens with a scene that clearly foreshadows catastrophe: the war veteran Llewelyn Moss stumbles on the aftermath of a mass killing; in an unnamed high plain on the Mexican-American border, a pile of corpses bears witness to the event, and two million dollars (which Moss feels no qualms in appropriating) is now the prize for finding the former soldier alive.
“I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my grandaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustlin cattle. Now they’re runnin dope. I dont know as that’s true no more. I’m like you. I aint sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build a annex on to hell,” muses Sheriff Bell.[7] There is no enduring fixed point of balance to give oneself up to. Humans are capable of carrying off everything on their “worstward ho,”[8] and that sense of dejection is portrayed above all else in the novel.
Humans die with awful ease. We are entities with no way out, trapped in the fragility of decomposing flesh, poorly protected by a civilization that sooner or later reveals itself to be a rickety utopia. At the mercy of the truly powerful—the very people who hand out death: assassins, traffickers, madmen—for whom only violence has any value. The spiral of violence and extermination that certain men let loose on the species like tendrils of hate threatens to obliterate everything. The psychopath Anton Chigurh performs a string of the most horrendous forms of killing: evil embodied in a subject who had little need of an order from a narco to hunt down Moss. En route, a few others will bite the dust for simply having crossed his path. Sometimes for less.
In the violent darkness, the author often used to glimpse a subtle tone of light that gave meaning to the whole picture: Did he then admit defeat? Evil is certainly a presence and a constant point for reflection in McCarthy’s novels. The same evil that seems to permeate every hour of these dark times. The fact that it has been the focus of philosophers, artists, historians, and social and criminal critics makes it impossible to ignore for a sensibility attentive to the symptoms and open wounds of the age; it is the same evil that, in McCarthy’s novels, even the blind can see before them, from which some men flee, but which those brave souls who know how to confront it survive. In each of his books, evil is manifest as just one more element from which the world is constructed. No more or less important than all the other forces under which human beings exist. Evil is indeterminate and nuanced, although the latter doesn’t exempt it from showing itself to be brutal and bloody in the actions of men. But neither is it exuberantly fascinating, trivial, or commonplace; it, too, has its point of equilibrium. In that network of correspondences and battles, it finds its rightful place in the secret order of things.
Perhaps that last point explains why the figure of Sheriff Bell is capable of showing us that even in this cruel, frenetic novel there is a minute space where human beings can aspire to end their days in peace.
It could almost be said that the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Road was written by someone else. The prose is still spare, severe, but the novel has dispensed with the overloaded passages, the omnivorous grandiloquence, and the primacy given to style that was his trademark. It is as though McCarthy veered off the path and reached a conclusion even he found surprising. There’s always a temptation to interpret beyond the literary work and explain a book from the viewpoint of a particular moment in its author’s life or the historical period in which he existed. To find—or construct—an extra-literary message. Begin the investigation with the dedication of the book—a curious feature, as none of his previous novels had one—and you come up with the name of the author’s eight-year-old son: John Francis McCarthy. The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and its main problematic can be summed up in the following questions: How can a father raise his son to live amid devastation without making him heartless? How can one raise—a verb that clearly implies the future—any child in a world whose present has no value?
In this light, the novel might appear to be a long letter (I’m tempted to say an ethical will) disguised as fiction. The teachings of an adult male who has seen too much and is looking for a means to transmit (bequeath) a minimal core of knowledge to the person who is going to need it on the path he is setting out on. As mentioned above, this novel and No Country could seem like a pair of bones stripped of flesh by the action of the desert climate, stark and urgent, whose reading leaves no room for free interpretation.
Despite the heightened sensibility that spread throughout the United States after 9/11—or possibly exactly because of it—only a very few of the novelists interested in the practice and criticism of the American way of life have offered their take on the topic, fictionalizing the possible effects of the event. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) is a head-on vision of the attack, with one of the survivors as a central character. In McCarthy’s interpretation of things, he seems to have decided to move forward in time, to carry the atmosphere of beating war drums that are deafening the country to the limit, and then recount what would happen next.
In his brief essay “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” Philip K. Dick speaks of the dangers facing writers when they allow themselves to be carried along by ill omens: “All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom.”[9] In this sense, recounting the future becomes an exercise that repeats the scenarios and actions that occur after a nuclear catastrophe—a very possible future for Dick and other authors. But this is not an invitation to wallow in tragedy. Dick demands a more realistic function of post-apocalyptic narratives: to take desolation as a point of departure for imagining how humans might survive in such conditions. “Make the ruined world of ash a premise,” he declares. “State it in paragraph one, and get it over with, rather than winding up with it at the very end. And make the central theme or idea of the story an attempt by the characters to solve the problem of postwar survival.”[10] A horrific event recounted hundreds of times does not gain clarity in the repetition. Following this logic, it is right for The Road to dispense with almost all the scenes that are given pride of place in No Country. Here, life sustains itself precariously among the ashes of the old world, a practically absurd relic of a past that is painfully breaking up in the memory, on the point of ceasing to exist forever. And that quality—life—is central to the subterranean reflections the novel secretes under the scorched crust of a planet plagued by an atmosphere of ash and extreme cold. Nuclear war, climate change; speculation about technology or arms are not the enigmas animating this future narrative.
The only means of avoiding starvation is the canned food the survivors forage for among the ruins of civilization. When the protagonists of the novel find provisions in quantities that will allow them to live, the question arises of whether life in a devastated world is still an infinitely transcendent gift: “Even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over.”[11] The value of life becomes relative in the face of “the frailty of everything revealed at last”; consciousness is an ember of humanity condemned to live in a cadaverous world. Violence is not inherent in the apocalypse, but in the circumstances that prevent its completion; the precious but flimsy miracle through which life persists, even though it be—I repeat—as a fragile spark that gives meaning in the infinite darkness.
An involuntary crier of doom, McCarthy never took his eye off the things that really matter, and this being the case, it became an almost ethical duty to deal with the grimmest of scenarios, the worst of futures, so as to be able to say that—between despair and madness, total aridity and lack, cannibalism and robbery—life must forge a path. “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up.”[13] The father wants to preserve in his son the innocence every child has a right to in order to find out about life; he hides the brutality of the new world from him because he hopes that, when they reach the south, another life will await them. At some point in All the Pretty Horses, it’s said that if one doesn’t hide what’s coming from the young, they won’t even have the courage to set out on the path of their individual existence. It’s a hard test, and its cruelty has to be hidden under a veil of mystery. Otherwise, life would be immeasurable, an impossible task.
The Road would seem to be proof of that. Emptied of history and future, when the protagonists reach the coast, the father confronts the physical and spiritual enigma that is the sea, and in the face of the titan that has always prompted profound philosophical and mystical questions, he can only feel hollow: “The slow surf crawled and seethed in the dark and he thought about his life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back.”[14] Highways and interstates are all that remain of the old way of life, language slowly empties out, lacking referents in the real world to give it meaning. What is it that makes us human? The question hovers over the ruins of the world in every page. Is there something beyond the historical convention of culture or the refined forms of existence that technological advances secure for the species? In what particle of our organic material does the essence that defines us reside?
The characters search among the rubble for that silver thread linking their battered souls to the extinct human race. The worst has yet to come: it wasn’t war and devastation; the world that most deeply violates human essence has still to be revealed, populated by posthumans urgently trying to remake themselves from their own ashes. At the heart of this lugubrious, terrifying story, the author states that the human race must forge the circumstances that allow it to “be”—not continue being, but being again, from a different perspective, a true renaissance—that ensure its existence, not as a mere sustaining of physical abilities, but with dignity. The dignity that violence and destruction wrench from us, leaving us at the mercy of our own rage and the most cruel and direct action of the elements.
CODA
The recently deceased Spanish novelist Javier Marías, himself an eternal candidate for a Nobel Prize, was one of the authors who for decades pointed to Cormac McCarthy as the ideal laureate. It’s no secret that there was probably only one reason why the Swedish Academy failed to act with the justice the case merited: I’d lay odds on the fact that the author of one of the last legitimate literary odysseys would have refused the prize on discovering that to receive it, he would have had to be present at a public ceremony. Nor does it seem likely that he would have considered—if given the option—recording a video, and not for reasons of his mental and spiritual health, but from sheer lack of interest.
An out-and-out recluse, McCarthy seemed unaware of what was happening around him: prizes, sell-through print runs, legions of readers and fellow writers publicly expressing their admiration. The cowboy-in-chief declared himself to have a long list of interests (the versatility of his narrative voice would support this assertion), in which literature never ranked very high. He was immersed in a world where Manichaeism wasn’t a valid perspective, where natural forces toughen the skin and the souls of men, and the size of a soul is measured in an unforeseen field of battle: a world where life and death are complementary forces that daily create what we call our reality.
It’s a curious fact that one of the most popular weapons of the Wild West, the single-action, .45-caliber Colt Frontier revolver, was commonly known as the Peacemaker. This rather evasive way of naming an object by the opposite of its effect can be seen as the equivalent of the order underlying McCarthy’s cosmos: without guns, peace would be impossible; without the changes and fractures that generate violence, it is impossible to discover the ultimate order of the world.
In the Wild West, a gun can stand as a counter-emblem of itself. Just as in those vast territories where the world is unquestionably real, there is a balance of opposites in objects. Antithetical spirits are present in a single material, exactly as they are in McCarthy’s novels: death and life, the fall and the rise, violence and tenderness.
As a peacemaker who felt no fear in eschewing what could turn out to be dangerous shortcuts on the long road to meaning, that sense to which all human will aspires, Cormac McCarthy took the roundabout route, the panoramic odyssey that takes in harsh territories, uncivilized towns, and implacable men.
In his final years, when we could all predict that stylistic changes in his most recent works heralded new forms (while his last novels[15] were cooking over a slow flame, in his implacable, unhurried manner) and announced a fresh creative (humane, philosophical) period, it was possible to state that the arduous journey had indeed had its recompense, found its meaning. Sixteen years after the publication of The Road, Cormac McCarthy once again surprised us by leaving the way the great do, at the peak of his creative powers: he died shortly after publishing his last great literary saga, offering readers another reason to appreciate his work and renewing public interest in it. The narrator of All the Pretty Horses says that “it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”[16] Reading McCarthy’s books, it seems to me that it was worth not knowing at the beginning where we were heading, that life was a paramo of loneliness and thorns; worth fearing violence, madness, and death, confronting the harshness of existence, in order to at least guess that a logic, the implacable logic of life, is hidden behind it all; to understand the nature of the destiny of human beings, their smallness and unending need to survive, after the event. 
NOTES
[1] Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (New York: Random House, 1979), 287.
[2] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2007), 52.
[3] McCarthy, Suttree, 35.
[4] Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1992), 67.
[5] Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Random House, 2005), 284.
[6] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (London: Picador, 1985), 249.
[7] McCarthy, No Country, 79.
[8] Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983).
[9] Philip K. Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” Oblique no. 6 (December 1955).
[10] Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction.”
[11] McCarthy, The Road, 163.
[12] McCarthy, The Road, 28.
[13] McCarthy, The Road, 145.
[14] McCarthy, The Road, 254.
[15] The Passenger and Stella Maris, both published in 2022.
[16] McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 284.
Luis Jorge Boone (Monclova, Mexico, 1977) is the author of more than twenty books, including the poetry collection Bisonte mantra, the short story collection Suelten a los perros, the novel Toda la soledad del centro de la Tierra, and the book of essays Cámaras secretas: Sobre la enfermedad, el dolor y el cuerpo en la literatura. He is a member of the SNCA of Mexico. He has received the Inés Arredondo Short Story, Elías Nandino Young Poetry, Ramón López Velarde Poetry, Gilberto Owen Literature, and Agustín Yáñez Short Story awards.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator who has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American literature and has published shorter translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms.
Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo