Wordcraft -- McCarthy’s six-gun gothic, part II

(Guest blogger Jim Dolan concludes his discussion of Gothic elements in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other works. Jim Dolan is a prize winning poet, a fiction writer, moderator of Writer's Garrett Stone Soup All Genres group in Dallas, occasional film actor, a psychotherapist in private practice and passionate bicycle racer. He is a lifelong resident of Oak Cliff Texas, where he lives with his wife, Karen. He regularly blogs at www.coach4pros.blogspot.com/. )

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I first discovered Cormac McCarthy in the early ’90s. I completely believe that McCarthy's abilities with English are Shakespearian, and the experience began a two decade engagement with everything McCarthy has written, some titles two or even three times through.

Last week, I discussed the Gothic fiction elements of “an ancient house” and “the implication of the supernatural” in McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Today, I’ll apply the Gothic criteria of horror, menace, dread; the grotesque front and center; and an absolute concern with good vs. evil, with evil the likely winner.

Is there a mood of horror, menace, dread? Readers of McCarthy will know there is no writer more capable of establishing this tone than he. Is the grotesque present? In No Country for Old Men, the grotesque is present in climactic peaks; in Blood Meridian it is on every page. Check.

McCarthy gives us death on every page, either actual, impending or long since. We are forced to confront the Dark Angel.

He asks us to look at what we should not see. And we are never able to not look at it. We are forced to see ourselves and every human creature as both angel and devil

His novels take place in the created, Biblical world of the Western God, but it is a world from which that God has fled, and as when children are left alone too long, a deadly mayhem is the result. The world is off the chain, and when the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men wonders if now he is seeing 'a new kind', he points a finger to that time in the near future when the moral center has collapsed and we all plunge into the abyss.

And it is into this abyss that the world has plunged in his last novel, The Road. There, a boy and his father wander the wasted world, their only goal survival. McCarthy is so successful at depicting a world where not only God seems to be gone, but the natural world appears to have died as well that I may never be able to bring myself to read it again, so devastating is that atmosphere. But in the end we are given the faintest ray of hope.

I take it that in posing this world, McCarthy is asking me, you, himself, What in the name of God are we going to do about it?

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Wordcraft -- McCarthy's six-gun gothic

(Today’s guest blogger, Dallas-area writer Jim Dolan, discusses the Gothic elements in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other works. Jim Dolan is a prize winning poet, a fiction writer, moderator of Writer's Garrett Stone Soup All Genres group in Dallas, occasional film actor, a psychotherapist in private practice and passionate bicycle racer. He is a lifelong resident of Oak Cliff Texas, where he lives with his wife, Karen. He regularly blogs at www.coach4pros.blogspot.com/. )

When I first discovered McCarthy in the early 90s it was by reading All the Pretty Horses. I had not had a prose reading experience like that since discovering Vladimir Nabokov when I was much younger- a sense of envelopment in prose that was sensual, almost tactile, like eating chocolate or the best focaccia bread with red wine. I discovered that my pleasure in the text was multi-leveled through an engagement with character, setting and story but also through the encounter with the palpable qualities of the language itself. I completely believe that McCarthy's abilities with English are Shakespearian. But I mention this as a way of saying that All the Pretty Horses began a two decade engagement for me with everything McCarthy has written, some titles two or even three times through.

I recently led a panel discussion for the Writer's Garrett where we discussed his Western novels. The point of the discussion was to see if we could establish why it is that these texts are frequently referred to as Gothic. Of course, I had to go and find out what elements are present in the classic European Gothic texts, and discovered the following:

-- An ancient castle, an old manor, a family home is occupied by the protagonist's generation and is in disrepair; there are unexplained events that happen in the environs

-- The supernatural is presented or implied

-- The supernatural occurrences are related to an ancient curse upon the family, stemming from some massive wrong-doing long ago

-- There is a mood of horror, menace, dread

-- The grotesque is front and center

-- An absolute concern with good vs. evil, with evil the likely winner.

Looking at the McCarthy Western novels through the Gothic lens, we can see that the Border Trilogy is really just good old fashioned Western Romance told in divine prose. We can take those out of the discussion. This leaves us with Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Today, I’ll apply the first three Gothic criteria -- an ancient home, the supernatural, and a curse stemming from massive wrong-doing.

In Blood Meridian we are presented with a novel unlike any before or since, an unending bloodbath with no detectable moral center, something No Country for Old Men does possess in the character of the Sheriff. Do these two qualify as Gothics? I think so. We can begin by substituting the Old West for the ancient house in which the spirits of the dead shriek for revenge in the persons of the Comanche Hordes come to slaughter Captain White's platoon beginning on page 51 of Blood Meridian. In No Country for Old Men, Moss has penetrated the mystery house of Mexico and stolen $2 million from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. Again, cause for an exacting revenge, in the person of Chigurh, the vastly more powerful counterpoint to the waning Sheriff.

(Next week: Guest blogger Jim Dolan continues his discussion of the Gothic in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, with the criteria of horror, menace and dread. Leave a light on!)