Fragility of hope

This article is the original form of an abridged version published in the NZ Listener July 8-14 2023

The image is an original A.I. generated rendering of the Judge.

Cormac McCarthy, author and seer who foretold our destruction and that of our natural world dies at 89

Last week American literary titan Cormac McCarthy died. Having lived to 89, across both the industrial and information age and having recently published his final 2 novels; strange metaphysical expositions on life-long obsessions, he probably dies complete. As someone who so extravagantly and doggedly sought to transcend his time and place, he leaves a legacy that probably just about befits the audaciousness of his literary ambitions.

As an American and literary writer, the eulogising in this country was brief and, predictably, focused on the film No Country for Old Men (where the screenplay is based on one of McCarthy’s more accessible novels).

While down here we have not thought too much of him in the week since he died, McCarthy knew and thought about NZ. He was famously reclusive, but after the publication of The Road, dedicated to his son John, he offered a rare interview to Rolling Stone and told them. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place.”

Having been first published in the 1964 McCarthy's popular recognition only came after 27 years of impoverished obscurity, with the first novel of his western trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. While that trilogy is enduringly beautiful, when I read of his death it was the two bleak bookends to that trilogy, Blood Meridian and The Road I thought of. One, the story of mankind’s doom brought forth by its rampage of sadistic destruction. The cheerier of the two, about the apocalypse. I reflected that in these recent times of history writ larger, McCarthy has left us with enduring truths about humanity and how we live within our environment that only great literature can.

To many, Blood Meridian’s brutal singularity makes it the white whale; the great American novel. While it speaks loudest to the rusted heart of America, where that country is western humanity’s best and its worst (the place with the spiritual thirst), it speaks for us all. It is a tale of the old west, appropriating but recasting the creation myth of America as a bloodthirsty nightmare. Its prose is as archaic, florid and unforgiving as its violence. Just as its gothic pallet of blood is about to overwhelm, the last act reveals that its two protagonists, the Kid, the Judge, were throughout locked in a deadly dance of fates. The otherwise nameless Kid, who, despite his murderous passage from boy to man, 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 clear-eyed and unrelenting depravity. Mercy is held up as a uniquely human ideal, as much by its scarcity as by the Judge’s disgust of it.

If indeed Blood Meridian is a grand metaphor for our place in the modern world, McCarthy leaves us no hope that the worthy ideals we cloak ourselves in will buttress our fate against the degeneracy of our consumption and destruction. Rather he sees our cruelty and decadence as never dying and dancing, dancing on, as intrinsic and necessary to our being as each breath we draw.

In contrast, although The Road is painted with the choking greys and blacks of the cremation smoke of a dead world, it looks beyond this destruction. It builds a world of relentless danger, horror and futility to best reveal the fragility of the small flicker of hope McCarthy grants us. A rare, faint and guarded hope born of faith and love and the duty of a father to a son. In The Road McCarthy allows us to peer through the acrid smoulderings of the destruction of our world to see the idea and ideal of humanity still falteringly alight; belief beyond annihilation.

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 cruelty, violence and depravity of human progress. As we feel the first chills of a new cold war and are warned by its chief alchemists that artificial intelligence is an existential threat to our very idea of humanity, McCarthy sounds as timeless and clear a clarion warning as any given. Not least because he unsentimentally leaves no hope his message will be heeded, and our annihilation averted.

However, despite the prospect of this ruin McCarthy also asks us to maintain hope. He asks us to contemplate and endure the darkness of 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 which is less infernal and better cast to live in harmony with our domain for the millennia to come.

He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in the light and in the shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die[1].

Will we be the Judge, or can we be the son, or must we always be both?

[1]Blood Meridian