McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian" [1] is one of my all time favorite novels and continues to be a source of inspiration. Its almost biblical in its prose and unrelating in its pace and violence. I even wrote a song based off it (shameless plug) [2]. The villain of the story, Judge Holden is up there with the Joker for me in sheer evil. I would love to see a movie adaptation of it although I doubt it will ever happen. Too bloody. Too violent. I highly recommend it if you aren't easily put off by its dark tone.
I love the snippets of prose I've seen from Blood Meridian and The Road, but I am reluctant to read them, even though they're well on their way to becoming classics of the English language. My impression is that the books are saturated in darkness with very little light shining through. The violence and horror will stick in my thoughts long after I put my books down. There are certainly books and movies I regret ingesting for imagery that they've embedded in the back of my mind.
The way I read it, McCarthy makes it painstakingly clear that destruction is a necessary catalyst for creation. He treats violence honestly and respectfully, but he does like to write about some pretty dire scenarios (massacre of Mexicans/Indians, post-apocalyptic scavenging).
McCarthy expands on this theme slightly in a rare interview: McCarthy likes the scientists at the Institute for a simple reason: The stuff they explore, like his writing, cuts to the bone.
“If it doesn’t concern life and death,” he says, “it’s not interesting.” [0]
If you're looking for lighter (but still excellent) storytelling on similar Western/survival themes I'd suggest the Border Trilogy [1] by McCarthy. My high school English teacher had us read these instead of Blood Meridian (his favorite book of all time) because they're much less violent. You won't get the full experience, though, as some of McCarthy's characters are genius because of their depravity, violence, and seemingly chaotic natures.
I'm a huge fan of CM however I found the BT and it's obsession on horses almost indecent. I would recommend BM, The Road and No Country ... in that order.
Not gonna lie: Blood Meridian deals in some very grim and violent subject matter. There are no heroes in that story. Its about a gang of scalp hunters (the Glanton Gang. They actually existed if you can believe it...) so I'll leave you to draw your conclusions about what a story like that would entail. The way McCarthy makes those types of scenes digestible is by almost always describing them in the past tense. You the reader come upon them after they happened. He also writes with a detachment to the event and speaks of some downright unspeakable acts almost matter of factly. I am pretty squeamish and I could handle it so you'll probably be fine because of that.
The Road I found harder to read than BM. Its less violent (although there are a couple spots that get pretty gruesome) but just unrelentingly bleak and grim. I needed to lie down after reading it. Again his detachment from the events happening make it bearable. Worth it IMO.
Assuming you haven't read them, I'd recommend digging into All The Pretty Horses or No Country For Old Men. Both are incredible stories that have the same scenes of elemental good vs evil that crops up in McCarthys work over and over again but are less... intense.
If you read Blood Meridian backwards, it's about a band of merry fellows travelling east, towards the sunrise, delivering toupees as they make their way.
For me, the violence is made palatable - even interesting - by the sheer beauty of McCarthy's language. It's earthy and archaic, and yet strangely phantasmagoric. It's a bit trite to say, but McCarthy talks a bit like William Faulkner on acid, exploring a hardscrabble alien planet.
> . . . and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. . . And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.
I have read The Road; I have not read Blood Meridian (yet - not sure if I will or not).
I read The Road when I was probably 22 or 23. I now have a son who is six (I'm a man, for context), and I suspect that if I were to re-read it, I would likely weep uncontrollably for an hour or two, and then spend the next several months sporadically crying and clutching my son. It is a hard, hard read, and even harder (I assume) if you're a parent.
That being said, it's also a masterpiece of a book. Ultimately it does have a glimmer of optimism, it's just a really rough time getting to that optimism. I don't regret reading it, but once is enough, for now.
I've read The Road twice. First as a son, then as a father. My dad and I went though some crap I couldn't grasp when I was young. The book made me feel like I could finally understand what he was going through. Why he did what he did. I've never had a book change me like the road had.
I read it again when my son was 4 months old. That's when I finally understood, at a visceral level, what it means to carry the fire. I think we're both going to be better because of it.
I will read the book one more time after my dad passes.
Perhaps it is good to put yourself in that mindset semi-regularly?
That's what life really is, when you strip away the conveniences. The real horror is to realize that for many people in history (and even now) reality has been worse.
I know a lot of people who found The Road incredibly depressing. But I thought it was optimistic and the most moving thing I've ever read.
I haven't read Blood Meridian yet, but Child of God (another McCarthy novel) definitely lacks the optimism of The Road.
As for this article, I think that the subconscious fascinates almost everyone. The reason we have psychology (in my opinion, of course) is that it's apparent to almost all of us that there's something going on under there.
Everyone has anecdotes like the one mentioned in this article, where a solution to a problem appears in a dream or pops into someone's head immediately after waking.
"Child of God" was pretty tough to get through. There were moments of such absurdity that I had to laugh despite some of the grossness (you probably can guess what I am talking about).
I had to put Child of God down for two years and come back to it. I was surprised to see how disturbed I was at Lester's depravity, especially since I enjoy stories that examine the darker side of human nature. I was glad to have gone back and finished it though.
I tore through The Road a few years ago and consider its prose some of the finest I've ever read. It's grey-ness stuck with me and I still think about it now and then (combined with the dialogue in No Country for Old Men, which I've only seen, not read).
I think you should read one of them. If you want, I'll read The Road (or any other one) while you do and we can talk about it. Someone has to carry the fire.
I read The Road and I can empathize. There's a few awful scenes, including one that really hits you after you think you've been desensitized to the horrors. However, I'm really glad I read that book because it's incredibly profound. Certainly, it's deeply unsettling to the reader, who is forced to imagine living through every cherished thing in your world destroyed and defiled. Yet, it also imagines what is the core of humanity when it exists in a vacuum without any obfuscation (my rationalization of the child, to those who have read it). Plus, this is all written in really beautiful prose- I found myself re-reading many lines to appreciate the creative use of language. I hope this convinces you to stomach the ugliness and give it a read :-)
I would certainly recommend Blood Meridian in spite of the nastiness (and I like the Border Trilogy well enough for their extremely sparse prose), but I found The Road a little underwhelming. His post-apocalypse vision seemed surprisingly less terrible than I was expecting, frankly. People all over the world are doing worse to each other right now... so unless you avoid the news, I doubt you'll be haunted.
If horrific violence / imagery affects you long after putting a book down, then I would say definitely don't read Blood Meridian - and I say this as someone who counts it as one of his 3 favorite novels.
It presents man's intellect as the apotheosis of 4 billion years of pain, suffering, death, and destruction. Man as the ultimate practitioner of the ordering principle of the universe: War
The Road was one of the most devastating novels I've ever read. A part of me wishes I'd never read it. But it was also one of the most stunning pieces of writing I've ever consumed. It's worth it for that.
Yes. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to better understand ourselves as individuals, and as the human race as a whole. We will never improve if we just ignore the shit bits of ourselves.
Cormac McCarthy is possibly my favorite writer and I would not recommend the border trilogy. I only read one and a half of those because I found them to be the most painful things I'd ever read.
I would say Suttree is a lighter (relatively speaking) read.
Suttree has some funny bits and some great bleak bits too, I love this part where he's looking through is aunt's old photo album:
The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. [...] What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.
McCarthy's "No Country For Old Men" is one of the only books I've ever read, as an adult, that actually made me jump in my chair because a scene was so tense:
>He was half way back up the caldera to his truck when something made him stop. He crouched, holding the cocked pistol across his knee. He could see the truck in the moonlight at the top of the rise. He looked off to one side of it to see it the better. There was someone standing beside it. Then they were gone. There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. Now you're goin to die.
He's returning to the truck in the middle of the night to give the guy water and had just found out he'd been shot in the head (meaning someone else had been there). This is where he turns around to see someone standing next to his truck he parked up the hill and is coming to the realization that things are about to get really bad.
Worth reading simply for the quality of McCarthy's writing. And that he can write about language and the mind without mentioning fMRI's, 'the part of the brain that ___' and 'emerging neuroscience'.
I found it wonderful that McCarthy has avoided conflating the brain with the mind. I get very frustrated trying to read through the literature on this subject (a passion of mine, was my career track before I dropped out of academia and learned how to program) and seeing the cult of the brain taking over. McCarthy is not so encumbered with materialist scientism. He is willing and able to discuss the mind in all its ethereal glory.
The only Cormac McCarthy novel I've read is Suttree and it's incredible. Apparently it's semi-autobiographical, and it reads like a Huckleberry Finn outcast/hobo/dark alternate reality and extremely funny and sad the entire way through. It's entirely gripping and so very well-written. I read it voraciously a few summers back after a trusted friend's recommendation.
It need not be stated that McCarthy's work is some of the most powerful and well crafted fiction of the twentieth century, but this article came off as a little strange and underdone. He has a few insights, but he jumps between ideas without connecting them and doesn't provide much backing for his arguments. The conclusion too is terribly weak: McCarthy presents his central idea (that the unconscious isn't used to language so it speaks in symbols), he mentioned it to someone he respects, the listener responded favorably, case closed. Really? Its a fresh viewpoint but there seems like so much more to explore here, so many more questions raised by the conclusion than those addressed. For once his art of omission has worked against him.
What would Cormac say about this? Say if human evolution would have picked up the "Aphantasia" gene to spread then Cormac's main question the "Kekule problem" would dissolve or won't arise.
This McCarthy quote from the (linked-to) essay caught my eye:
How the unconscious goes about its work is not so much poorly understood as not understood at all. It is an area pretty much ignored by the artificial intelligence studies, which seem mostly devoted to analytics and to the question of whether the brain is like a computer. They have decided that it’s not
Is that true? Who has decided the brain is not like a computer? That is news to me.
I love McCarthy's work but this is nonsense. Current AI work is all about the relationship between differdntiable connectionist systems and algorithmic/symbolic computation. AI researchers are well aware of the parallels between this and subconscious/conscious human thought and things like Kahnemann's system1 vs system2 thinking. "Is the brain like a computer" is too ambiguous a question to take seriously.
His article is interesting in parts but really arrogant and not as novel or anti-mainstream as he seems to think it is. It sounds like someone who spent a long time chatting with physicists or biologists and no time reading research in artificial intelligence, at least from the last decade.
It depends what is meant by computer. Certainly they don't have anything analogous to source code, registers and the operations that CPUs carry out on them, addressable memory, etc. Nurons are also different in many significant respects from the analogous elements in computational neural nets.
However there are a lot of flat statements like this made in the article where I’m not entirely sure what the author meant or what grounds he had for saying it and this is one of them. Another is:
"The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously."
How can anyone possibly know that, especially if we have no real idea when it happened?
Edit:
Another thing that got my back up a bit were the disdainful references to 'influential persons', as though David Krakauer and Cormac McCarthy are renegade outsiders.
There are some really good points here that I largely agree with. Most of what we do or know or think or even say is processed or generated by the unconcious mind. I know what I am going to write here and now, but I don't know it in linguistic form until I actually write it. I'm generating it in a non-English language representation in my brain and converting that written into English and only part of that pipeline is really conscious.
I don't think there is any reason to believe that the brain is like a computer in any meaningful way. Both the brain and an electronic computer are able to operate on information, but beyond that the differences between the two far outweigh the similarities on pretty much every level. Even neural nets (that is, the machine learning algorithm) are just general, very simplified, models of how some parts of the brain are constructed. True, neural nets can do things similar to things that the brain can do (like describing images) but this is really only a facile similarity, to my understanding.
Well, I haven't read his Nautilus piece yet, but I think that I will like it. I love his fiction. And it seems quite clear that consciousness is mainly just an observer.
I don't think it's quite clear at all. What distinguishes observer from observed?
All experience is the working of consciousness. The feeling of subject-object distinction is no more real than the distinction between hot-cold sensation.
The subconscious becomes way easier to understand once you meditate a bit on the structure of the brain and do a little reading on the split-brain condition.
The two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a neural superhighway called the corpus callosum. If you cut the bundle, then the hemispheres can still communicate, but the bandwidth is cut to a trickle. In this situation, the hemispheres develop divergent personalities and they can often fight over broader executive control of the organism.
With the bundle intact, the halves settle into roles, with the left brain taking the conscious aspect. The right brain forms the unconscious.
Thanks for reminding me about the corpus callosotomy. I think I've read about it at some point, and then it somehow merged with lobotomy in my mind, although it's of course almost unrelated. Do you have a recommendation for some good literature about the condition?
>It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know.
>Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes.
> There is no selection at work in the evolution of language because language is not a biological system and because there is only one of them
Organisms don't 'wait' for new traits to come along. They just come along and if they are useful and benefit the organism, they propagate across the population through successful reproduction. Evolved traits propagate themselves precisely through being useful in helping the organism survive and reproduce. McCarthy doesn't seem to understand the elementary process by which natural selection functions.
>The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously.
>For while it is fairly certain that art preceded language it probably didnt precede it by much.
There is absolutely no evidence for any of this whatsoever. It's pure supposition. How can he know language propagated so fast and arose so suddenly? Some evolutionary biologists analyzing the physiology of early hominids think there is evidence of physical adaptations for language as far back as Homo Ergaster over a million years ago, but vocal language leaves no archaeological evidence. There is just no way to know how long it took to develop to modern forms and no reason to suppose that physical representation in the form of art predates spoken language.
Edit:
McCormack's premise seems to be that Language did not evolve from any preceding capacity, including any preceding ability to communicate. We know that modern primates other than humans communicate in very primitive pre-linguistic ways, but McCormack specifically dismisses the idea that human language is descended from or evolved from similar capabilities in our common ancestors. This seems absurd to me on several grounds.
Our common primate ancestors did not have vocal cords or throat configurations capable of modern speech, or anything close to it. McCormack even points this out in the essay and highlights the fact that reconfiguring our throats for speech is, independent of any advantage language gives us, a serious disadvantage because it makes us more susceptible to choking. Yet then he goes on to say that language gives us no evolutionary advantage because it’s ‘not a biological system’. If it gives no evolutionary advantage, how does it compensate for the increased risk of choking?
Speech-like non-verbal communication must have preceded physical adaptation in order to make the adaptation advantageous, otherwise there would again have been no compensating factor for the choking risk. So early forms of language-like communication would necessarily have been non-verbal (by which I mean involving gestures sounds like those made by some other modern primates but not 'spoken'). This early communication was less efficient and advantageous than spoken communication, otherwise physical adaptations for spoken communication would not have increased fitness.
So it seems far more plausible that language-like communication originated as more complex forms of gestures and sounds our common primate ancestors already used and then evolved into a form dominated by spoken language in order to increase it’s efficiency. After all, our ancestors going back millions of years had complex physical culture including manufacturing composite artefacts, creating and managing fire, processing and cooking food. All of these would need to be taught somehow. Yet McCormack’s thesis is that this teaching involved communications no more sophisticated than the basic communications we see in other primates and other mammals today, until spoken language somehow burst on to the scene fully formed 100k years ago.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-West/d...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45jPip11_j8