Surely the only genius of letters more unique than Cormac McCarthy to emerge from Providence, the capital of Rhode Island, was H.P. Lovecraft, the master of cosmic terror who he believed inspired his nightmares and mistrusted medicine. Absolute dedication, renouncing self-promotion, rebellion against linguistic norms and a progressive inclination to branches of science and philosophy of complex discernment for ordinary mortals defined the trajectory of one of the indisputable colossi of contemporary American narrative, deceased yesterday.
Neither early vocation nor academic training nor literary workshops. The young man born in 1933 into a Catholic family of Irish origin dropped out of college in 1951 to enlist in the US Air Force and it was while he was stationed in Alaska that he began to read compulsively. A decade later he settles with his first wife in a shack at the foot of the Smoky Mountains, lacking running water and heating to concentrate exclusively on writing. The marriage dissolves after a few years. Obtaining a chain of scholarships allows him to travel around his country and Europe and complete manuscripts that will cement his reputation. With his second wife they buy a barn in Louisville (Tennessee) that he renovates with his own hands and where he spends most of his time devoted to his novels. Without a regular income and with compromised hygiene -it seems that access to water is still a pending issue since the ablutions are carried out in a nearby lake-, the marriage dissolves after a few years. The new ex synthesizes the causes of the collapse with these statements: “Cormac received calls from university centers offering him two thousand dollars to give a talk about his books. To which he replied that everything there was to say about them was on the page. So we spent another week eating cans of beans”. Let’s stay with this piece of information to which we will return later: McCarthy gives early signs of the basic trope of the writer-island (or misanthrope or hermetic or aloof or jealous of his privacy), someone who is allergic to explaining, deepening or interpreting his work. He does not proceed to speak of what has already been fixed by the written word.
The critical blessing received by his novels Suttree (1979) and Meridiano de sangre (1985) are not reflected in sales -systematically around five thousand copies- but the author refuses to commit his exclusive dedication to literature and the second one ends, after twenty years of dedication, in a stone shack located behind a shopping center in El Paso, which he himself defines as “barely habitable”. We don’t know what would have happened to McCarthy if he hadn’t finally achieved commercial success in 1991 with All the Beautiful Horses – the first installment of the “Frontier Trilogy”, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. , and completed with En la frontera and Ciudades de la plaina-, if he had ended up writing under a bridge by the light of a bonfire or in a shelter for people without resources or adopted by an academic institution. The only thing we can assure you is that the economic tranquility and the consequent improvement in the conditions of his homes – from the 90s until his death he lived in a house in Tesuque, a town in New Mexico – did not bring him sentimental stability, since in 2006 he divorced his third wife.
The title No Country for Old Men, given to the 2005 novel starring an old sheriff who must deal with drug trafficking and a murderer with a peculiar modus operandi on the border between the United States and Mexico -based on a film adaptation of the Coen Brothers that its manager originally conceived as a script, a format to which he would return many years later with The Counselor, also brought to the big screen– has served as inspiration for countless articles and condenses the vision of a ruthless, ferocious and hopelessness that McCarthy portrayed in his novels. They draw a shocking geography, not suitable for the faint-hearted or naive, where human violence and cruelty find their reflection in a Nature whose disinterest in our affairs sometimes seems to be confused with a desire for revenge and which often acts as a metaphor for the indomitable and unpredictable of the individual. A recurring theme has been placing ruthless individuals in inhospitable settings, being hunted by law enforcement officers and good men whose morals are not enough to fight the surrounding darkness. God does not exist nor is he expected in the bibliography of the author, who worked in traditions as diverse as the western, southern gothic, dystopia and police.
The desolate The road –“There was a flash, the crops rotted, the animals died, the fuel ran out”- was the culmination of the search for parallels between our dark interior and the arid, inclement and hostile environment that surrounds us. . A vision of the Apocalypse in which the writer projected a wasteland, depopulated, silent, dead world… through which a father and a son wandered. Two terrified and helpless souls going through Purgatory waiting for an exit to the sea that would lead them to the heaven of salvation or, failing that, end up in the jaws of some cannibals that would engulf them towards hell. Two castaways in search of food, shelter and escape, faced with the daily dilemma of whether to animalize for the sake of survival or not give in to the sacrifice of generosity and empathy that ultimately makes us human.
And how did he shape all this nihilism and this battle to preserve some dignity and moral sense? His style evolved from the clear ascendant of William Faulkner of his first books, which were denser and more ornate, to a progressive formal purification through which a growing abstraction slipped, leaving more room for interpretation (if not a moderate confusion). McCarthy advocated the simplicity of the declarative sentence and the maximum reduction of marks on the page, which resulted in a minimum punctuation (sacrifice of commas, periods, hyphens…), something that gives a special rhythm to the story but that forces concentration to be forced, at the risk, for example, of losing track of who is speaking at each moment.
As an anecdote, mention the frequency with which Spanish terms have appeared in his work, the result of a mastery of it that goes back to his stay in Ibiza in the 60s, later perfected by the fact of having lived in places with a strong Hispanic community like El Paso (Texas) or Santa Fe (New Mexico).
A very typical case of American literature is that of the writer who seeks to minimize his contact with the world and especially with the press, perhaps the result of misanthropy, shyness, calculation or fear that verbalizing matters related to his work could somehow break the spell. Thus we have from the total ghost that Thomas Pynchon would represent to the surly on rare occasions only glimpsed that it was J.D. Salinger going through a Halley’s Comet attending to the media as is Don DeLillo. Cormac McCarthy would fall somewhere between the three as he did not participate in festivals, did not give talks, declined presentations and book signings of his and only gave four interviews throughout his life. The first was to The New York Times in 1992, when he was almost sixty years old, the second to Vanity Fair in 2005, the third to the Oprah Winfrey television show, and the last in 2009 to The Wall Street Journal. Both the inaugural and that of The Oprah Show have been interpreted as surrenders to higher forces: a favor to her longtime editor and the pressure derived from the tremendous power of influence of the African-American starlette, who would not take no for an answer when he would choose one of your novels for his book club. However, the writer did not move from Santa Fe and anyone who has watched the meeting clearly perceives that he would have preferred to be roasted on a grill.
As the journalist Michael Hall explained in an article for Texas Monthly, this invisibility led to the formation of “a certain cult around him, a restless world of academics, scholars, groupies, enlightened readers and mere curious people. People capable of traveling to El Paso to meet him or rummage through his garbage, or post brainy semiotic theories about his work on Internet forums, or simply stay at home with his books, captivated by his prose and by the bloody and sad stories that proposes You can imagine the life he must have had to write like that. They feed the myth of the cynical recluse”.
Against speculation and the temptation to generate legends, McCarthy assured Winfrey that it had been hers to limit herself to devoting all her strength to writing, discarding any distraction, whether lucrative or inflaming her vanity. “I always knew that I didn’t want to work, that my absolute priority was to dedicate the only life we ??have to doing what I like the most.” During the course of the program he also made it known that he favored the company of scientists, which brings us to the next point.
In recent decades, the writer’s work table has been in an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center focused on the study of complex adaptive systems. Not only were the days when he had lived and created in holes, suffering from cold and hunger, long gone, but the choice of the enclave denoted a growing interest in physics and mathematics that he transferred to his writings (he was also a member of the Philosophical Society Americana, which could justify the hermeneutic charge of that rarity, between the nouvelle and the theatrical piece, which supposed The Sunset Limited). Despite lacking scientific training, in 2017 he published an essay, The Keluké Problem, dedicated to the human unconscious and the origin of language, and served as a proofreader for physics books, including Quantum Man, a biography of the mythical Richard Feynman a by Lawrence Krauss, and offered advice on writing scientific articles to the journal Nature. In any case, they say that he remained faithful to his typewriter, or at least the legend affirms that until his last breath he continued typing on an Olivetti Lettera 32 (the first was sold by Christie’s auction house for $ 254,000 in 2009)
“We are facing a Cormac McCarthy 3.0, before a mathematical and analytical novel,” announced David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, months before the release of The Passenger, the novel with which McCarthy broke a literary silence in November of last year. sixteen years old and which in Spain, unlike in the United States, was published jointly with Stella Maris, with whom it formed a kind of diptych as they were connected through their protagonists, although eight years separated the action of one and the other.
Although Cormac McCarthy had been thinking about some of his ideas and characters for four decades, his gestation and development are incomprehensible without the context of abduction by science that defined the last stretch of his author’s life. Two novels that dialogue through the Western brothers, Bobby and Alicia, united by complex ties in which taboo feelings are mixed, the love for physics and mathematics and the ascendant of their father, Robert Oppenheimer’s collaborator in the development of the atomic bomb. The elusive nature of reality, the secrets of consciousness, paranoia as the default mode of the American psyche (here McCarthy converged with the interests of other hermit colleagues such as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo), the role of physics and mathematics in the redefinition of the place of the human being in the world, the legitimacy of suicide, the traumas and ghosts of the past, the moral limits in fraternal relationships, mental instability… The passenger and Stella Maris addresses a multitude of important issues, challenging the reader to accompany him on a tour de force replete with far-reaching insights and challenging questions. A work that, saving the distances, echoes the words of James Joyce at the conclusion of his Ulysses, about what would have scholars blowing smoke out of their ears for a long time.
