Patrick Mulligan is an environmental lawyer and McCarthy reader.
OPINION: Last month, American literary titan Cormac McCarthy died. Having lived to 89, across the industrial and information age, he probably dies complete. As someone who so extravagantly sought to transcend his time, he leaves a legacy that almost befits the audaciousness of his literary ambitions.
Over here, we have not thought much of him since his death, but McCarthy knew about us. Although famously reclusive, after the publication of The Road, dedicated to his son John, he told Rolling Stone: “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilised place.”
His first novel was published in 1965, but popular recognition came about 27 years later, with the first of his Western trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. While that trilogy is enduringly beautiful, it was the two bleak bookends to it, Blood Meridian and The Road, that my thoughts turned to. One, the story of humankind’s doom brought forth by its rampage of sadistic destruction, and the cheerier of the two, about the apocalypse.
To many, Blood Meridian’s brutal singularity makes it the white whale; the great American novel. Although it speaks loudest to the rusted heart of America, where that country is the home of Western humanity’s best and its worst (and its spiritual thirst), it speaks for us all. It is a tale of the Old West, appropriating but recasting America’s creation myth as a bloodthirsty nightmare.
Its prose is as archaic, florid and unforgiving as its violence. Just as its gothic pallette of blood is about to overwhelm you, the last act reveals that its two protagonists – the Kid and the Judge – were throughout in a deadly dance of fates. The Kid, despite his murderous journey, is the guardian of the novel’s only vestiges of mercy. The Judge, uncertainly human, is a horrific beast of unremitting charm, invention, intelligence and scientific knowledge, all deployed with exultant depravity.
If indeed Blood Meridian is a grand metaphor for our place in the modern world, McCarthy rips away any notion that the worthy ideals we cloak ourselves with will buttress us against the degeneracy of our consumption. Rather, he sees our selfish cruelty as intrinsic to our being as every breath we draw.
In contrast, The Road is painted with the choking greys and blacks of the cremation smoke of a dead world, but it looks beyond this destruction. It builds a world of relentless horror and futility to best reveal the fragility of the small flicker of hope that McCarthy grants us. A rare, faint and guarded hope born of faith and love and the duty of a father to a son.
One could, of course, wish McCarthy’s bleak worlds do not become our future. However, this seems in vain when we are incapable of being as clear-eyed and receiving as him of the violence and depravity of human progress. As we feel the first chills of a new cold war and are warned by the chief alchemists of artificial intelligence that it is a threat to our very idea of humanity, McCarthy sounds as timeless and clear a clarion warning as any given. Not least because he never suggests his message will be heeded or our annihilation averted.
Despite the prospect of this ruin, McCarthy also asks us to maintain hope. He asks us to endure our physical destruction with faith and love. Perhaps it is this message that will allow us to gaze into our beyond and create a nobler vessel for our human essence, one less infernal and better cast to live in harmony with our domain for the millennia to come.
