CORMAC MCCARTHY
THE “ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE” STILL BREATHES ALMOST four decades after Harold Bloom first birthed that wily method of reading: during composition a work of literature is engaged in an unconscious “agon” with a certain existing work, an agon that forms the sways and contours of the new work under construction, even though the writer is probably unaware of this agon. Bloom’s theory is frequently mischaracterized as Freudian—the ambitious son attempting to overthrow the sovereign father, Milton needing to vanquish Shakespeare before Milton can establish his own effective selfhood as a poet—but, as Bloom himself has repeatedly insisted, his theory isn’t Freudian because it isn’t sexual, Oedipal, psychoanalytical. What’s more, this agon happens between the poems or plays or novels themselves, and not between the writers. This theory for lovers of literary tradition takes some steadfast handling, but once you learn how it drives it lets you see some thrilling views.
I’ve been mulling over Bloom’s theory because my second novel, Hold the Dark, has recently appeared and I’m having to hear the name “Cormac McCarthy” rather more than is necessary. Mostly well-meaning readers are finding in my tale the vestiges of McCarthy, that cowboy-booted paragon who has supplanted Norman Mailer as the regnant mafioso of the American masculine, the unrepentant vicar of violence. I’m half sure I get what readers mean when they summon McCarthy in regard to this book—though by doing you praise they do you in—and yet with the exception of Child of God, I don’t know McCarthy’s work as well as I should.
I made it a scant five pages into his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, confused as to what exactly was supposed to be happening, turned away by the knotted syntax. I recall being impressed as a teenager by the sinister and alien tenor of Outer Dark, but that was twenty years ago, so don’t ask me about the plot of that novel. That Faulknerian barge of a book called Suttree? I quit a quarter of the way in, and I’m guessing you did, too. His universally lauded masterwork, that orgy in the abattoir, Blood Meridian? As soon as I recognized that it was indeed an unholy and antinomian masterwork engined by all those otherworldly sentences, I gave myself a reprieve, at about two-thirds in. (About Blood Meridian, Bloom has said, “The violence is the book.”) No Country for Old Men reads too much like a screenplay for my antennae, its cinematic violence too unmodulated, too exterior. The Road I quit halfway in because as a father of young boys I can brook only so much vicarious anguish involving young boys. The Border Trilogy? I still haven’t got around to that—my fault, not his.
Hold the Dark is set in the Alaskan wilderness, in an isolated village at the lip of the tundra. Children have gone miss ing, possibly taken by wolves. Medora Slone summons the wolf scholar Russell Core to investigate the vanished, and once he arrives at the farthermost reaches of American soil, in this austere and fatal landscape, he must oppose not only the enigma of evil and the indifferent majesty of nature, but his own spiritual banishment. When Vernon Slone returns from a desert war to discover his young boy dead and his wife missing, he cuts a vengeful path across his frozen homeland, pursued by both Russell Core and a police detective called Donald Marium. The story’s violence never approaches the pitch of Technicolor savagery in Blood Meridian, no babies butchered in high-def, but is rather an inevitable, organic manifestation of the landscape’s indifferent decrees.
Being praised for false emulation is nearly as bad as being pilloried for false errors. I’m not aware of McCarthy’s ever having ventured into the icy wilds of Alaska, into the village-living of a clan forgotten, forsaken by civilization. Nor am I aware of his ever summoning a female protagonist. Hold the Dark belongs to Medora Slone: not only is it she who sets the clock of the narrative, but it is she who risks the most, who is the most unswerving in her determination, and who by the novel’s close is the most transformed. McCarthy didn’t invent the portrayal of violence in fiction—that laurel goes to Homer—nor did he invent the cop-and-criminal plot, the chase story.
If most of the McCarthy comparisons have been favorable, all of them have been facile. This is testament to the McCarthy hegemony, to how wholly he dominates an entire sector of American fiction, and to how he has usurped our understanding of a certain literary pedigree. Write a novel with a specific register adequate to the task of addressing nature and redemption, one which includes the bloody madness of men, and McCarthy is the artist languidly at hand for every reader itching to make a connection. But McCarthy’s prominence is such that another novelist interested in the primitive flux of violence, and in that crossroad where this world grinds against the other, would have to be self-sabotaging to attempt to emulate him. Neither the novelist nor the novel could ever get away with it. Every page would carry its own proof of transgression, and thus its own guarantee of detection.
Every serious novelist, I’m convinced, enters each new narrative with an imago, or with a confluence of imagoes. If I was at all aware of other novels during the construction of my own, those novels were novellas, Mann’s Death in Venice and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: the taut pathos at the spine of their telling, their structural efficiency, the fearless dealing with death’s dominion, the punch of their brevity. No novelist with a lifetime of reading behind him can ever be completely aware of the manifold influences that set up residence inside his own story. “To read means to borrow,” wrote G. C. Lichtenberg. “To create out of one’s reading is paying off one’s debts.”
My own anxiety of influence derives not from an unconscious agon with a preceding work, but from knowing the necessity of originality while acknowledging that true originality is not possible. It’s all been done before. After Homer and Virgil, after the King James Version, after Dante and Chaucer, after Cervantes and Shakespeare and Tolstoy—what’s left to invent? You’ve no doubt heard about the “biblical” bent to McCarthy’s subjects and sentences, but he’s more Hellenic than Hebraic: his tales pulse at that juncture where mistakes meet fate, where human agency is constrained by the exigencies of a life, and where the horror you see indicates a more terrible horror you cannot.
I have to admit that I wanted Hold the Dark to pulse at that same juncture, but I doubt that had anything to do with McCarthy. I’d guess it had everything to do with the Homer and Aeschylus of my boyhood, those Greeks I was steeped in as a half-lonesome kid of divorce who somehow intuited that these ancients had usable responses to my woe. In Hold the Dark, Medora is my Medea. But not only the Greeks. There were also those Jack London tales of far-out frigidity, White Fang and The Call of the Wild and his imperishable story “To Build a Fire,” which still serve as some boys’ welcome mat into the world of imaginative literature. And there was Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a ferocious story by an uncommon genius who astonished my twelve-year-old sensibility and astonishes me still. The novelist Padgett Powell has named O’Connor “the goddesshead,” the fount touched by every medieval-minded crooner of darkling forces, and you can be certain of McCarthy’s own tremendous debt to Ms. O’Connor.
Like O’Connor, I was reared beneath the allegorical tyranny and flesh fetishism of Roman Catholicism, the blood and pain that is the Passion. Catholics both practicing and lapsed never shake off the pageantry and mythos of that worldview, its dramatic grasp of causation and salvation: it affects every molecule of our lives, and every inch of our art. I understand that McCarthy, too, was reared a Catholic, and he has my empathy for such a baroque upbringing, though I’m not responsible for that shared fact of our biographies.
Literary pedigree is, or should be, a valid concern for any writer or for any critic considering that writer. A novelist must tell his own story while consciously and unconsciously taking from the masters, from the mythical and historical and folkloric and religious, while trying to imbue his own sentences with vitality and nuance. McCarthy won’t ever be stripped of his divine status, and that is as it should be. But if we agree that after a certain point in literary history wholesale originality became impossible, then we might benefit from the understanding that McCarthy is not the begetter of what we now consider the McCarthian. He has his own literary gods to whom he offers alms, the Homers and Faulkners and O’Connors, and those same gods can hear the invocations of us all.
—The Daily Beast, OCTOBER 21, 2014