Charles McCarthy, Jr., nicknamed as Cormac McCarthy, is an American writer born in 1933. His writings include novels, short stories, screenwriting, and plays.
He writes in the Southern gothic tradition with self-willed characters set in the rural Southern side of America. Furthermore, there is stylistic complexity, dark violence, and dense prose style.
McCarthy’s works include ten novels, two screenplays, three short stories, and two plays. In these works, the writer plays with three main genres; Western, post-apocalyptic, and South gothic.
McCarthy’s popularity rests his unique style with less punctuation and graphic representation of violence in his works. These features make him one of the remarkable American writers.
Born in Providence, he was raised in Tennessee and enrolled in Tennessee University in 1951. He left the university to enroll in the Air Force and then started his literary career with “The Orchard Keeper” first published in 1965.
He gained wide success from the beginning of his literary career and traveled to Southwest America to gain more experience for his literary works.
Later he published more works and won a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Black Memorial Prize for his different works.
Nowadays, McCarthy serves in Santa Fe Institute which is a research center for multiple disciplines. McCarthy’s essay, “The Kekule Problem” was published from this institute. It traces down the origin of human language and human subconsciousness.
The literary critic, Harold Bloom called McCarthy one of the 4 major literary writers of the contemporary time. Also, modern critics compare him to William Faulkner in writing style.
In 2009, the PEN American Center awarded McCarthy with the PEN/Saul Bellow Award.
Cormac McCarthy’s Biography
On July 20, 1933, the literary figure, Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode. He was one of the six children of Charles Joseph McCarthy and Gladys Christina.
The family shifted to Knoxville in 1937 because his father served the Tennessee Valley Authority as a lawyer. According to McCarthy, they were considered rich because the people around them were living in small shacks.
Jim Long was his childhood friend whom he discussed as J-Bone in the semi-autobiographical novel “Suttree”.
At an early age, McCarthy joined St. Mary’s Parochial School and later went to Knoxville Catholic High School. He was also an altar boy for the Knoxville Church.
After school, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1951. However, he left the university in 1953 to enroll in the Air Force. At that time, he began to read books with great eagerness.
Early Writing
In 1957, McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee where he published two stories in the students’ literary magazine, The Phoenix with the name C.J. McCarthy.
These works were “Wake for Susan” in 1959 and “A Drowning Incident” in 1960. These stories won him the Ingram Merrill Award in 1959 and 1960. However, he left the university in 1959 and moved to Chicago.
Marriage
From university life, McCarthy began to write stories. Therefore, he changed his name from Charles to Cormac because he did not want to be compared or confused with the famous dummy, Charlie McCarthy by the ventriloquist Edger Bergen.
In 1961, he married Lee Holleman, a fellow student, and moved with her to a poorly facilitated shack outside Knoxville in the Smoky Mountains. They had a son named Cullen, born in 1962.
With time, the situation worsened as Cormac asked his wife to get a job along with the responsibility of the baby as well as house chores. With her earnings, he could devote all his time to novel writing. However, after some time of this stressful situation, she moved to Wyoming and filed a divorce against him.
Formal Writing
In 1965, McCarthy wrote his first novel “The Orchard Keeper” and sent it to Radom House for publication because he only knew this publishing center then.
There, the novel reached the hands of Erskine who remained Faulkner’s editor until his demise in 1962. Erskine also served as McCarthy’s editor for two decades.
After one year of publication, the novel received the William Faulkner Foundation Award for a remarkable first novel. This novel received wide acclaim between critics for its similarity with Faulkner’s works and its beautiful and striking imagery.
Unstable Beginning
Unable to pay the rent, he was expelled from a quarter in New Orleans. He would keep a bulb in his bag while traveling to read wherever the night may come upon him. In 1965, while availing a Traveling Fellowship given by The American Academy of Arts and Letters, he traveled in the liner Sylvania to reach Ireland.
There he met a dancer and singer working for the liner, Anne DeLisle. They got married in 1966 in England.
Outer Dark
Also the same year, McCarthy won the Rockefeller Foundation grant that supported him to visit Southern Europe. During this time, he wrote “Outer Dark” which was his second novel.
He published the book in 1968 after returning to the US and it earned him great favor from the readership.
Later McCarthy bought a barn in Louisville, Tennessee, and repaired it himself. He lived in the barn with his wife in absolute poverty. In 1973, he published “Child of God” which was based on real events and was set in Appalachia.
In 1976, the couple separated and McCarthy shifted to El Paso, Texas.
Successful Writing
He began the screenplay career in 1974 when Richard Pearce from the broadcaster PBC contacted McCarthy to write a screenplay for the television series, Visions. He completed the work in 1976 named “The Gardener’s Son” and it aired in January 1967. That year, this episode was nominated for two primetime Emmy Awards.
McCarthy’s other novel “Suttree” appeared in 1979 which was a semi-autobiography. With the winning of McArthur Fellowship in 1981 that was about $236,000, he traveled South-West to gather information for his next novel, “Blood Meridian” or “The Evening Redness in the West” that he published in 1985.
The book received huge critical and positive reviews. For instance, Harold Bloom also admired the work.
All the Pretty Horses
McCarthy was never well-known before 1992 when he wrote the novel “All the Pretty Horses”. It earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Award.
Another novel “The Crossing” followed in 1994 and “Cities of the Plain” came in 1998 thus completing the Border Trilogy.
A five-act play also appeared in 1995 “The Stonemason”. The next work McCarthy published was “No Country for Old Men” in 2005.
In 2006, he wrote “The Road”, a story of an isolated father and son’s survival after a disaster in the US. This novel won him the Pulitzer Prize.
He continues to write screenplays and stories. Currently, McCarthy is working with the research center, Santa Fe Institute as a trusted member. While working for this institute, he published his first-ever non-fiction work in 50 years.
It is an essay, “The Kekule Problem”. It features the doing of the unconscious mind and the origin of language.
Cormac McCarthy’s Writing Style
McCarthy’s style is unique in its construction of graphic images of violence and gothic. Also, his specialty lies in the minimum use of punctuations in his work. His writings are mostly influenced by his biographical instances also.
Polysyndetons
McCarthy avoids using punctuation and pauses in his sentences as he considers them unnecessary. For instance, he does not use commas in many places and instead, replaces it with the conjunction ‘and’.
This use of conjunctions instead of punctuation marks is called polysyndeton. In an interview, McCarthy declared that he likes simple assertive sentences and uses periods, capitals, and colons but he does not use semicolons.
He does not prefer to use punctuations and even skips quotation marks separating the dialogues because he thinks that these punctuations stain the paper ‘with weird little marks’.
In most cases, McCarthy’s dialogues lack coherence as they have no punctuations to separate them; however, they still have the sense of the dialogues. This strict behavior to the non-use of punctuations can be observed from his beginning career when McCarthy edited some work for a professor at the University of Tennessee when he was there.
As a result of this edition, he removed much of the punctuations and this attitude was admired by the professor.
Even for Santa Fe Institute, he edited the influential article, “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business” in which he removed commas from many of the places. The critic, Saul Bellow considers his style as ‘absolutely overpowering use of language’.
The polysyndeton style of McCarthy’s writing can be clarified from the given example. In “No Country for Old Men”, the narrator uses conjunctions instead of commas.
He narrates ‘He left the beer on the counter and went out and got the two packs of cigarettes and the binoculars and the pistol and slung the .270 over his shoulder and shut the truck door and came back in.’
Genre
McCarthy writes in the Southern gothic, apocalyptic, and Western genre. He also wrote a crime thriller. The Border trilogy, “Blood Meridian”, “Cities of the Plain”, and “All the Pretty Horses” are the best examples of classical Western conventional plots. However, they deviate from some of the conventional elements in the genre.
Also, he frequently applies gothic and violence in his stories. For example, “The Road” is also sometimes placed in horror and science fiction but not tightly attached to these genres.
Generic and Idiosyncratic
McCarthy’s work is unique in its simple and generic yet unique style. His style is one of the most idiosyncratic forms among the general literature as it is copied mostly.
His work is a blend of simply generic as well as complex style. For this reason, he is confused by most critics for the overwhelming genericity and its ‘complexity’ that they take for literariness.
For instance, “All the Pretty Horses” found its way through the hearts of people by its generic resemblance to the Western genre, simplicity of the struggles of the story, and the conventional value of the plot.
Likewise, “Cities of the Plain”, and “Blood Meridian” are known for their generic conventional style.
Spanish Influence
As in the 1960s, McCarthy has lived in Ibiza, Spain, and later in El Paso, Texas, he knows the Spanish language. This influence of Spanish upon him can be seen in most of McCarthy’s works.
For instance, the author, Jeffrey Herlihy Mera observes in “All the Pretty Horses” that John Grady Cole is a native Spanish man.
Also, the other characters of the Border trilogy like Grady’s mother, Parhnam, and Jimmy Blevins are considered Spanish who are US-born. Also, in “Blood Meridian”, Judge Holden is considered to have a similar Spanish ancestry. Therefore, there are occasional Spanish dialogues in his works.
To clarify these dialogues, The Cormac McCarthy Society has created Spanish to English translation of some of his novels, “Cities of the Plain”, “All the Pretty Horses”, “Blood Meridian”, and “The Crossing”.
Language
McCarthy is a confident writer who does not stick to the conventional style of writing; rather, he opts for directness and vivid representation of his thoughts. Therefore, he uses simple language as colloquialism is better than a formality for him. He does not enslave himself to grammatical rules, punctuations, spellings, etc.
There is also no restriction for using word categories for McCarthy. For example in “The Road”, he says ‘The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe….. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
In this example, the word ‘running’ is used as a noun and ‘sorrow’ as a verb. These words maintain the rapid flow of the text.
Themes in Cormac McCarthy’s Writing
McCarthy’s works mostly deal with violence, horror, pandemic, and other issues that the common people encounter in the journey for survival. These themes are discussed as follows.
Violence and Horror
In most of his works, McCarthy explicitly represents horrible situations and violence. For instance, in “Blood Meridian”, the protagonist ‘the kid’ begins his life when his mother dies in childbirth.
He escapes to Texas from his father’s command. There he begins a violent life by becoming a worker for the murderers and criminals and chooses innately violent professions. Also, the novel begins with three epigraphs one of which is about an ancient scalped skull. This gives a tinge of horror to the novel.
Furthermore, in other works like “The Road”, “Child of God”, and “The Crossing”, McCarthy gives the point that when social constraints are broken, humans fall into the primitive violent style in the struggle of survival of the fittest.
Morality
The later works of McCarthy have a highly moralistic value. According to Erik J. Wielenberg, “The Road” is a work in which McCarthy represents morality as a human attribute. It is secular and originates from humans rather than divinity.
His works depict the falling humanity when they are kept free from social restrictions. In this process, they forgo human morality and fall into self-destruction.
For example, in “Blood Meridian”, the protagonist intentionally accepts criminal jobs when he flees from his father.
Likewise, “All the Pretty Horses” also features the loss of innocence of man and tells how men fall into evil without self-control in the character of John Grady. However, when they realize their doings, they have no one by their side.
Individual Society Conflict
In most of his stories, McCarthy portrays individuals in conflict with their social values. For instance, they follow their instinct rather than rational thinking or social norms.
There is a darker view of future life in the minds of certain characters and they follow the path of negatives rather than following what is right.
For example, in “Child of God”, a violent young boy Lester Ballard is a serial killer. There is extreme isolation, violence, and perversion in the story that portrays the destruction of society caused by an individual.
Likewise, the novel “Outer Dark” also begins with violent opposition against social norms when Rinthy gives birth to a baby from her brother and her brother lets the baby die in the woods.
Authoritative Inhumanity
One of the impressions that McCarthy wants to convey is the inability of those having legal or illegal power. This behavior is particularly seen in novels like “All the Pretty Horses”, “No Country for Old Men’, and “Blood Meridian”.
In “All the Pretty Horses”, corrupt authority is seen in the form of a disloyal police officer. Likewise, the law enforcement authorities in “No Country for Old Men” are also corrupted.
In “Blood Meridian”, the state provides bounties to the murderer gang to carry on the murders procession.
Survival
Mostly in his apocalyptic novels, McCarthy focuses on the small choices that one avails to survive. For instance, the evil that the main character goes through also hints at the survival value of the character.
When society does not play its role in giving people their proper place, they involve in unprecedented tortures of barbarism.
For example, in “Blood Meridian”, the kid flees his home and joins criminal groups for survival through unfair means when he does not find a good way of life in society. Likewise, in “Child of God”, the protagonist has no family life or friends, so he revolts against the social order and degrades to evil.