American Gothic: Cormac McCarthy

My first experience with Cormac McCarthy was All the Pretty Horses, a novel I imagine was the introduction to his work for many readers, a nice romantic story of young cowboys riding the open ranges and meeting swarthy young women south of the border. Part of his "Western Trilogy" that includes the lesser novels The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, All the Pretty Horses utilizes a sparse diction and economy of language perfectly suited to the taciturn young hero. It got made into a mediocre movie directed by Billy Bob Thornton, and even the casting of my heart throb Penelope Cruz didn't raise the work much in my estimation. No Country for Old Men takes place in the US/Mexico border region, with a good old boy sheriff hunting down a Eastern European hitman, who is searching for some poor dope who stumbled upon the aftermath of a shootout between drug dealers and wanders away with a suitcase full of money. The Coen brothers (a shoutout to my paisanos from the Twin Cities) turned it into a film good enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Fargo set in the deserts of the Southwest instead of the icy frozen north of Minnesota.

I think you need to read McCarthy's last work, The Road, and a couple of his earlier novels to comprehend the importance of this writer (objectively recognizable: McCarthy has won among other awards a Pulitzer Prize, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and MacArthur grants, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, so I guess he has that going for him).

Blood Meridian (1984) and Suttree (1979), both written before the Western trilogy, manifest a kind of American Gothic that comes directly out of William Faulkner (much as does, say, Toni Morrison's Beloved) or even Mark Twain (in whose work, among the most important literature our country has produced, not far below the ironic humor lurks a brutal world view). I read Blood Meridian last summer, a truly harrowing work about a heart of darkness, or many hearts of darkness, in the scorching sun of the Mexican desert where bounty hunters maraud like a plague of the Apocalypse. McCarthy has said he likes precise declarative sentences and it is the minute, detailed descriptions that render this book so powerful. The cold lens through which we see the violence puts everything into the sharpest focus (Roberto Bolaño uses this stylistic device so successfully in a similar way in 2666). To leave the emotion, the decrying, the breast-pounding, the judgment out of the narrative makes the reader confront precisely reality (whether fictional or not). Joseph Conrad said fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Suttree, a novel some twenty years in the writing, takes the author back to the city where he grew up, Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Tennessee River. The protagonist is a fisherman who lives in a wretched shantyboat and wanders among the dregs of society (like that fisher of men, Christ): the homeless, conmen, drifters and grifters, whores and thieves, alcoholics and drug addicts and vagabonds of all kinds, preachers and perverts. He inhabits a narrative world not far from Huck Finn's and his observations of the comedie humaine are not so far different. The flotsam of the river reflects the people he encounters, filthy refuse, stinking and rotting, what Twain would have called the damned human race. But McCarthy, like Twain, always leaves open the possibility of discovering in the end man's humanity to man.

Recommended activity: Today, this lucky Friday the 13th, starts the 29th Feria Internacional del Libro (International Book Fair) of Oaxaca, downtown on the Alameda near the Cathedral, running through November 30. There will be tables with books for sale as well as a wide-ringing calendar of events and discussions. For more information go to http://www.vivelalectura.com.mx/.

Recommended reading: Papeles inesperados, by Julio Cortázar. Hetereoglossia, anyone? A compilation of little known stories, articles, deleted chapters, interviews, letters, and...by one of the masters of modern Latin American literature. A lot of the texts hit and miss, but some true gems ("Manuscrito hallado junto a una mano," "La fe en el Tercer Mundo," "Acerca de Rayuela," "Entrevista ante un espejo"). I'm working on a review of it for the book review Rain Taxi that should be done in the next couple weeks.