Understanding Cormac McCarthy by Steven Frye (2009)

Acknowledgements

1. “I have no desire to speculate on the behavior of a living author who in recent years has emerged as one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The best focus is the works themselves, and now that the later ones have thrust him into public view, the whole of his canon exists in reprint additions that can be found in any major bookstore.” (xi)
   • I find this a bit overstated. There must be some desire to understand the author. “Books are made from books.” But that means that authors are made from readers. Readers have perspective and interpretation. McCarthy cannot un-know what he knows. He also cannot know what he doesn’t know. It is the best focus, yes, but not the only focus.
2. “Judgments of this sort are always subject to reconsideration…” (xii)
   • could not love this more. This is how I hope to always approach scholarship

Chapter 1: Understanding Cormac McCarthy

• Rhode Island to Tennessee to Texas to Santa Fe
• Roman catholic to university of Tennessee to the military
• “coming to terms with McCarthys works, requires close and dedicated attention to the intricacies of form, as well as to the complexities of language, style, and voice. Individual passages must be read, reread, and pondered, always with a playful acceptance of their ambiguity.” (4-5)
  • Agreed. This idea extrapolates into my opinion that overly reductive criticism based on identity politics will result in shallow findings. Either McCarthy is as good as we think he is and requires deeper level of interrogation or he isn’t, and why do we even bother.
• ” sense of community” (5)
• literary influences – Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner
• literary dislikes Marcel Proust Henry James (6)
• Eliot, TS Tradition and the Individual Talent, Perspecta, 1982
• Three forms and movements based off of additional literary influences (7)
  • frontier romance
  • philosophically preoccupied
  • southern gothic
• “McCarthy’s works can be understood as ‘revisionist’ frontier romances, but one must take care in defining this term. The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Blood, Meridian, and the novels of the Border Trilogy are not overtly political; yet they are often rooted in the historical concerns of the 20th and 21st centuries.” (9)
  • Maybe not overtly, but the political nature of McCarthy’s work is undeniable. Orchard keeper is very political, and the thread continues throughout. In fact, Frye seems to contradict his own point on the same page.
• Frye makes the point concerning “secular absolution” concerning John Grady, and all the pretty horses. Why is points sinners on John Grady’s own behavior and the judge it causes me to consider that perhaps this is where the odd scene with the preacher and the dumplings and the radio that broadcasts gods message to Mars may come in to play. (10)
• Page 11 has an excellent brief on McCarthys characterizations as a writer and list of traits attributed by academic critics that support the idea that McCarthy has a wide variety of themes in characterizations.
• the occurrence of “mystery” in McCarthy’s work
• Regional literature associatations
  • William Faulkner
  • Erskine Caldwell
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Flannery O’Connor
  • Carson McCullers
  • Walker Percy
• Southern Gothic
  • Ellen Glasgow
  • Tennessee Williams

Chapter 2: The Southern Works

Chapter 3: Into The West Blood Meridian

Chapter 4: The Border Trilogy

• Literary Influences
  • Faulkner
  • Dostoyevsky
  • Melville
• APH
  • JGC
    • post-war American Ishmael (by Chicago Tribune journalist)
    • Would I call John Grady a stoic? Or heroic? Probably not. (109)
  • set in 1949 – 100 years post BM
  • Alfonsa – “jaded matriarch” (102)
    • reflects the influence of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov
    • coin toss (107)
  • “The novel’s title is drawn from an Appalachian folk song of the same name that emerges from a varied oral tradition. In one version, it is a lullaby, sung by a grandmother, as she sweetly conjures the image of the “pretty horses” she hopes will imbue the child’s dreams with a sense of comfort and repose. In spite of his stoic resolve, John Grady is just this child.” (104)
  • critic review
• The Crossing
  • “Boyd falls in love with a Mexican girl” (118) but is this really what happens
  • Frye ids three important figures
    • the priest at Huisiachepic
    • the blind revolutionary and his wife
    • the gitano, the gypsy at the wrecked airplane (119)
  • literary influences (119)
    • James Fenimore Cooper
    • William Gilmore Simms
    • Herman Melville
    • William Faulkner
    • Mark Twain (although Frye notes that McCarthy would disagree)
  • Philosophical influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
    • “Although characters in the novel live out, the one story and their lives are presented in such a way as to emphasize the universal nature of the single journey, they never come to a complete and intellectually coherent, understanding of details, purpose or meaning.” (124)
• The Cities of the Plain
  • “at once a western full of romance and nostalgia strengthened by a sense of moral urgency, inspired by the postwar years and the nuclear age. But it is equally a metaphysical and psychological romance, preoccupied with the complexities of consciousness and the shaping forces of fate in human destiny. In this sense, John, Grady and Billy are distinct and complementary protagonists…”(133)
  • Title draws from ch 19 Genesis (136)
  • “John Grady is still the John Grady is still the mythic horseman, stubborn in his efforts to tame them, yet possessed of a mystical ability to see into them and to communicate with the ‘justice’ inherent in their ‘hearts.'” (137)
  • Eduardo “an otherworldly incarnation of evil” is this overstated (137)
    • possible parallel to Alfonsa (143)
  • Frye comments on the use of Spanish throughout the novel (139) I suggest that this language is another language. If you don’t know it, you won’t understand it and echoes. The ideas of this is another country you wouldn’t understand.
  • Story of consequences (141)

Chapter 5: The Later Works

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index