Tribute: The Cormac McCarthy multiverse 

Pulitzer-winning American writer Cormac McCarthy passed away, aged 89, this week.

It’s a human urge to sum up artistic achievement in a couple of lines, to pigeonhole creators by assigning a few adjectives to their work. Superior artists fly above these nets. They inhabit many worlds arising from a unique vision and changing perspectives. Take the work of Cormac McCarthy, who died this week at 89.

His prose style has often been described as austere and grave, almost Biblical in its cadence. In All the Pretty Horses (1992), for example, we read: “He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

Yet, as James Wood has pointed out, he also wrote in another register which can be described as grandiloquent. Wood’s example, from The Passenger, McCarthy’s late novel, fits the bill: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” (I had to look up “alcahest”: it means “universal solvent”.)

Then, there is the nature of the novels themselves. Blood Meridian (1985) has often been described as one of his bloodiest and most violent, with descriptions of mutilation, scalping and worse. In The Road, however, there are affecting moments of tenderness between father and son as they find themselves traversing an apocalyptic landscape.

Many of his novels can be termed Westerns for grown-ups. That’s certainly the case with the books known as The Border Trilogy, with protagonists coming to terms with the consequences of their actions as they travel through the frontiers between ways of life and thought. In contrast, Suttree (1979) has been called the story of a “doomed Huckleberry Finn,” with the titular character living as an outcast in Knoxville and mingling with the town’s more unsavoury and eccentric residents.

McCarthy’s work was centred on the crises of men, whom he portrayed as flawed, haunted individuals searching for meaning and grappling with an unfeeling cosmos. On the other hand, his last work, Stella Maris (2022), takes the form of the recorded psychiatric sessions of a 20-year-old woman who broods on her relationship with her brother along with loftier matters such as the nature of existence.

What can unify this multiverse is McCarthy’s conviction that language is an invention of homo sapiens to narrate the workings of the unconscious. In a rare essay published in 2017, he wrote that “the unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else”. In other words, it is “a machine for operating an animal”.

While thinking belongs to the unconscious, language is “charged with describing the world”. For us human beings, “the facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that”.

Certainly, McCarthy was noted for his distinctive use of language to describe the heart of his reality. Saul Bellow, a member of the committee that awarded a MacArthur grant to McCarthy in 1981, said that his sentences were “life-giving and death-dealing”.

In one of his infrequent interviews, he said: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” There’s no reason to “blot the page up with weird little marks…I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

This precise approach, with an expressive and, sometimes, idiosyncratic choice of words, made his descriptions of landscapes extraordinary. To take one instance of many, here is a passage from All the Pretty Horses: “The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles down-country to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it.”

In his novels, the outer terrain matches the inner environment. It can be stark and desolate, mirroring indifference; at other times, it can be suffused by grandeur. His landscapes are a reminder of humankind’s puniness in the face of an unknowable dominion.

In Blood Meridian, one of the characters describes the facets of the world: “a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.” In his work, McCarthy reckoned with the horrors and wonders of such a universe. His depictions live on.