Raising a toast to the man who wrote No Country for Old Men

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy passed away, aged 89, in Santa Fe, on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. (Photo: Twitter)

Very few people in India have heard of — let alone read — Cormac McCarthy, the extraordinary American writer who passed away this Tuesday. I, too, had been unaware of his work till the Coen brothers made a very disturbing film from his novel No Country For Old Men (2005) in 2007. I then read his books.

To put it in very clichéd terms, McCarthy was classified as a “great American writer” in search of the “great American novel”, a perhaps-mythical goal that has been a sort of millstone for all ambitious literary creators in that young country (the United States was born only in 1776 with its declaration of independence from Britain; that’s less than 250 years ago).

Great American writer: Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, JD Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer. I am sure I have missed out a few, or maybe many. My personal favourite is Mark Twain, whose stories I can read any number of times and try to guess what he is really talking about, under all the laugh-out-loud comic brilliance.

McCarthy was no Mark Twain. His tales are grim and bleak. Some of them have shocking endings that will surely upset the reader. Take No Country For Old Men. It is Greek tragedy on a scary — and also granular — scale. Every character comes to grief or dies, because they have strayed from the “moral” path. The person who survives and wins is a dispassionate killer who sticks to his job, murdering everyone who comes in his way. In modern psychology terms, he is a sociopath or psychotic. In Indic terms, maybe, he is following his “dharma”, however terrible it is.

McCarthy’s stories are about consequences. Every action, every decision that a man takes has consequences over which he has no control. Because once the action is taken, it is immutable. You have set off a chain of effects that have their own life and logic. Let me share a few pieces of dialogue from No Country For Old Men.

“You think yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. ” “Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this.” “I believe that whatever you do in your life, it will get back to you. If you live long enough, it will.” “By the time you figured it out, it would be too late.” “Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm saying?” And the chilling “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” The hitman says this just before he shoots a man dead. It’s all about the helplessness of the human condition.

McCarthy’s world is a brutal one. Yes, actions have untended consequences, but the cosmos is also entirely probabilistic — there are vast forces of history and circumstance that rule over our lives with as much assurance of the result as a coin toss. He has been termed “nihilistic” by several critics. Harold Bloom, the most towering figure in the field of American literary theory and criticism in the 20th century, had this to say about McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian (1985):

“The first time I read Blood Meridian, I was so appalled that while I was held, I gave up after about 60 pages… But it intrigued me, because there was no question about the quality of the writing, which is stunning. So I went back a second time, and I got, I don’t remember… 140, 150 pages, and then, I think it was the Judge who got me. He was beginning to give me nightmares just as he gives the kid nightmares. And then the third time, it went off like a shot. I went straight through it and was exhilarated. I said, ‘My God!’… He has attained genius with that book.”

Bloom has read more books than you and I can read in several lifetimes. He is supposed to be the final word on Shakespeare. So he carries some authority. He also mentions the extreme violence that features in McCarthy’s novels. In fact, the violence is the story in several of the books.

The result is that MaCarthy is not an easy read at all. In fact, he invokes horror. The New York Times review of his most acclaimed novel The Road (2006) says: “McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: ‘At the tide line, a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.’” I have no idea what “isocline” means. Something to do with isosceles triangles, perhaps?

Why should a reader willingly submit to stories about innocent people being killed in horrific ways? There are no easy answers to this at all. According to McCarthy, the world is cruel and unjust, where your intentions, however honest, count for nothing. Bloom says that he made “apocalyptic moral judgements” in No Country For Old Men. I did a Google search for “Cormac McCarthy apocalypse” and got 614,000 results.

But. But. But. Writers like McCarthy serve a great purpose, though I firmly believe that art should have no greater purpose than what it is by itself. His utterly pessimistic vision, which saw violence as the fundamental characteristic of life, impels us to look at our principles and assumptions.

McCarthy spent his whole life writing. Unlike his predecessors like Hemingway, he never held a job. He just wrote. Some years ago, he told an interviewer: “You have to be dedicated… I thought, ‘you’re just here once, life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’…If you’re really dedicated, you can probably do it.” Oprah Winfrey asked him: “You have worked at not working?” He replied: “Absolutely, it’s the number one priority.”

Let me leave you with the beauty of his writing, however upsetting his stories are. Here: “He walked out in the grey light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

And this: “The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

How can one not celebrate this man, even though he thought that there is hardly any hope for us?