[Ed. note: Michael P. Murphy, who teaches literature in the Bay Area, is the author of A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination]
Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.
—Yuma Daily Sun 6/13/82 (from Blood Meridian, 1985)
Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.
—The Road (2006)
In virtually all of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, the “blood-dimmed tide” prophesied so eerily in Yeats’s Second Coming (1920), is no prophetic conjecture: it saturates the world. This dark sanguinity has inspired human-on-human brutality forever, more or less, as the first epigraph above discloses. The tendency to destroy is a primeval force, a constituent element of both the universe and its inhabitants. As in Gide and his novel The Counterfeitors, evil in McCarthy is real and materially embedded; it migrates—from setting to setting, from character to character, from novel to novel—revealing that the created world can be a circuit of violence, slaughter, and subversion. Protagonists and antagonists are belched-up from the very bowels of the earth and set free to do battle in desolate outposts windblown by dust and blood. In McCarthy, it is the antagonists who usually take the day; and, in a nod to the more pagan modulations of Celtic tradition “fury destroys the world.” The best lack all conviction; the worst are intense and hell-bent on destruction.
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McCarthy’s literary facility with begetting characters from setting (and, as importantly, revealing the essential ways in which setting can be a character) bespeaks and reveals his sense of “realized eschatology.” The sacramental idea that spiritual forces move through the finite, that grace (or degradation) builds upon nature (as in classical Thomism), and that the mystery of human freedom is a great drama—in which “players” freely assent or dissent to goodness of God (as in Luther, Kierkegaard, and Balthasar)—resound in McCarthy and link him to a host of authors whose sense of theological aesthetics derives from the artful rendering of characters who struggle in a fallen world. In McCarthy destruction and chaos are rendered rhapsodically; and McCarthy, as a prose stylist, demonstrates perhaps the most refined anti-aesthetic in contemporary literature, a “desacramentalizing” point not lost on the postmodern theological imagination. However, while there is a terrible beauty in McCarthy, the regenerative resolutions that we expect in the classic Western Novel are replaced by apocalyptic finales that promise nothing. Generally speaking, there is not the “advent of a gracious catastrophe,” as in O’Connor, which would otherwise flood the bleak atmosphere with iterations of restorative light.
A main theological key to understanding these gaps is found most acutely in the way McCarthy insinuates the work of the German mystical theologian (and/or theosophist) Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) into his fiction. McCarthy explicitly refers to a more darker modulation of Boehme’s theology in one of the three framing epigraphs of his 1985 Blood Meridian, a novel that integrates the sordid historical exploits of the mid-nineteenth century Glanton gang with a kind of Old West Faustian encounter between the volcanic Judge Holden (more often, simply, “The Judge”) and the “kid.” Simply put, the Judge is the most finely drawn figure of Satan in contemporary fiction and he makes it his great work to “enshadow” the innocent kid. The Judge berates, time and again, the kid’s native habit of mercy as the gang makes its dark pilgrimage, scorching the earth, consuming bodies and desecrating souls. “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart,” the Judge barks-out on one occasion, “you alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.” The kid responds, here and elsewhere: “I aint with you”; but, even though the kid ultimately calls him “a liar” and walks away, the Judge, indefatigable, stalks and slaughters him in the dead of night. The novel ends with the Judge “dancing, dancing. He says he will never die.”
In the Boehmian contours of McCarthy’s narrative there seems a clear debt to the famous passage in Milton’s Areopagitica: “The good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably.” For Boehme, the divine Logos contains in posse the germs of a balance of opposites; and individuals, because for Boehme the freedom of the will is primary, must choose the good so as to be in cooperation with the grace of God. This is orthodox enough; but, while most critics agree that reading McCarthy is an adventure in both the metaphysics and theology of violence, few are prepared to grant an ultimately redemptive value to his fiction. This is especially true in Blood Meridian; and while it may be credible to turn to Girard and view the kid as a type of messianic scapegoat who protests the violence of the world by capitulating to it—the salvation of a protagonist via negativa—the nihilism implicit to the narrative renders such interpretations tenuous. With the end of Blood Meridian we observe a realized eschatology consistent with a Boehmian thesis: all is consumed by the hateful blood of the enemy as a probable matter of course.
However, while these depressing and destructive tendencies dominate most of McCarthy’s fiction, we have lately seen the bloom of the more fecundating sides of this grand theological dialectic—a divine “yes” where there were usually “no’s.” With the publication of The Road (2006), we have begun to see, in short, a more articulated sense of hope-amidst-the-darkness, which is also perfectly consistent with Boehmian theology, albeit in a qualified way. The Road illuminates how love sustains a father and a son who struggle to survive amidst the social disintegration in a post-apocalyptic/post-human America. The son in The Road has much in common with the kid in Blood Meridian; but, in an explicitly Trinitarian fashion, it is the kenotic love between father and son that creates (or reveals) the spirit of hope missing from McCarthy’s other novels. McCarthy subtly inserts the concept of “salitter”—which is a Boehmian term that describes the substance of God that dwells in and works through nature—and narrates how the willing participation in the spirit of creation (called “The Fire” in The Road) sustains humanity and reveals how the grace of God is present in “the deep glens” where “all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” For McCarthy, if fury destroys the world, love can save it. Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.
