Makayla Steiner and Dr. Phillip A. Snyder, English

A brief note to begin with: this project is not quite complete, and is therefore on hold until Fall of 2011. I will be presenting the final paper in a session focused on McCarthy scholarship at either the American Literature Association’s annual conference, or at a conference hosted by the Cormac McCarthy society. In the meantime I will be serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I will submit to a conference at the earliest possible date once I return. The paper is mostly complete—it needs only to be shaped and tweaked according to the specifications of whichever conference accepts it. After it is presented I intend to send it to the Western American Literature journal for publication.

Cormac McCarthy has been described as a superb storyteller whose pitch-perfect prose has earned him a place among such high caliber authors as Melville, Faulkner, and Shakespeare. His work has been described as everything from disturbing and nihilistic to redemptive and beautiful. Regardless of whether or not one enjoys his style, few will deny that McCarthy is one of the best contemporary writers of American fiction. If one were to turn to the last page in a paperback copy of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, one would find a list of books written by the Pulitzer-winning Southwestern American novelist. Just above that list, almost unnoticeable if not for the honesty of its claim, is a statement from The New York Times Book Review: “McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame.” And so he does.

During the Winter 2008 semester the English department was offering a major authors course on Cormac McCarthy, which I signed up for. In the course we read seven of McCarthy’s novels as a class, and two more in small groups. The major assignment for the course was a ten-page research paper on a topic relevant to McCarthy studies. I was originally interested in how McCarthy juxtaposed religious and scientific issues in his work—especially in the second book of the Border Trilogy, The Crossing. I ultimately wrote a paper comparing the religious and scientific worldviews of both McCarthy and British physicist Stephen Hawking. When the semester was over I felt that, while pleased with my paper, I was not finished with the issue at hand. My original ORCA project was designed to further explore the relationship between science and faith and/or religion in McCarthy’s work, The Crossing specifically.

Working on a creative project in the humanities poses an interesting set of challenges, because it is difficult to test or measure the outcomes of research objectively. However, the research process itself proved to be a test of its own. As I began extending the research I had already completed for the course I noticed that there were some interesting patterns in McCarthy’s canon: his early work was dark and dealt with the secret and taboo aspects of human experience, his later work focuses much more clearly on the more philosophical aspects of human existence, and his great intellectual achievement, Blood Meridian, serves as the turning point as McCarthy explores the history and future of human experience.

Though it arrives two novels after Blood Meridian, McCarthy most carefully addresses the questions identified previously in The Crossing, in the Mormon Ex-Priest’s Tale. It is this tale within which I focused my research in an attempt to show that critics who have described McCarthy’s work as nihilistic and hopeless have missed a very important aspect of the author’s work. I discovered that what I really wanted to get at was not the relationship of science and faith/religion in McCarthy’s work, but the question he seemed to be asking repeatedly: where in the world—this world—is God? What is God’s role in chaos, if anything at all?

That was where my paper ended up going. I discovered the difficulty of letting go of an idea that originally seemed superb in favor of one that was ultimately more important. I set aside most of my research on Stephen Hawking to integrate a sort of “history of ideas” approach to the project. I wanted to see how McCarthy’s views on God squared with some of the most influential literary theorists and philosophers of the twentieth century. So my paper currently parallels McCarthy’s philosophy with those of Michel Foucault (particularly in addressing power relationships between the human and the divine), Friedrich Nietzsche (in discussing perspectivism and how it relates to the “truths” expressed by McCarthy’s characters), and Hayden White (whose theories of historical narrative heavily influence my understanding of McCarthy and his narrators as storytellers). The paper’s basic premises is that despite the violence, brutality, and death that infiltrates McCarthy’s fiction, his novels are ultimately stories of hope and human capacity for divine action. Faith, hope, and charity are as necessary to McCarthy’s work as chance, fate, and chaos.

What I have learned so far in working on this project is that it is very difficult to grapple with serious philosophical ideas. It is difficult to express on paper the impulses and interpretations that take place while I read and researched the book. It is difficult to square up McCarthy’s vision of the world with my own, and show how seemingly different worldviews (and occasionally contradictory evidence) can co-exist and enhance the understanding of various people. It is impossible to prove a hypothesis when the very nature of that hypothesis depends as much on faith as it does on evidence. But the effort that goes into these attempts has helped me gain a greater understanding of McCarthy’s work specifically, of the American literary tradition generally, and ultimately of the human condition as it relates to the probability of a god who takes interest in our existence. McCarthy’s own words are perhaps the best lesson that come from working on a project like this. In The Crossing he writes,

What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only . . . God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against. The truth is rather if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront . . . Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace. (158)