A Tragic Fire: Cormac McCarthy and Gnosticism in Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men, and The Counselor

5/8/2014

The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last to ever be.
-Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian

When I finished reading Blood Meridian for the first time it didn’t sit right with me. There was something silent, but fundamental, hidden between the words, and I had missed it. I opened it again and read the epilogue, cryptic and enraging as it was, three or four more times.

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… (351)

Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help. My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.

I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.

Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.

The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.

He is illimitable since there was no one prior to set limits to him...He is unsearchable since there was no one prior to him to examine him....He is ineffable since no one was able to comprehend him to speak about him. He is unnameable since there was no one prior to him to give him a name.
-The Apocryphon of John

This God created Sophia, his divine consort, and endowed her with all manner of creative powers. Sophia soon wished to use these to bring forth a likeness of herself without God's consent or agreement:

And because of the invincible power which is within her, her thought did not remain idle and something came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance, because she had created it without her consort.

And when she saw the consequences of her desire, it changed into a form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires which flash. She cast it away from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it, for she had created it in ignorance...And she called his name Yaltabaoth.

This is the first archon who took a great power from his mother.
-The Apocryphon of John

This is Jehovah, the God of Orthodox Christianity and Judaism, the god of our world of matter. He is a sort of aborted fetus, an infant thrown off of a cliff because he is an abomination. An archon is a name Gnostics give to those who hold power in Yaltabaoth/Jehovah's world of matter, and he is himself the chief archon. From here on out this false god goes about creating in the realm (our world of matter) he has been exiled to. To Gnostics the true God, the “Alien Divine” has nothing to do with this world. And Jehovah in his ignorance said:

"It is I who am God; there is none apart from me."

When he said this he sinned against the entirety. And this speech got up to incorruptibility; then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying, "You are mistaken Samael" -which is "god of the blind.”
-The Apocryphon of John

In McCarthy’s screenplay for The Counselor the diamond dealer, who, like Jehovah, deals in false currency, repeats this idea for us.

And this is the God of the Jewish people. There is no other God. (19)

This "god of the blind" creates man, a creature made only of matter, in all its destructive and corrupt nature.

...and the spirit which originates in the ignorance of darkness and desire and their counterfeit spirit. This is the tomb of the newly formed body, with which the robbers had clothed the man.
-The Apocryphon of John

McCarthy tells us the same thing about the Glanton Gang in Blood Meridian:

Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse. A thing surmised from the blackness by the creak of leather and the chink of metal. (157)

Photo by Trigger Image

The material body and world exist under this “ancient curse” we are “condemned to ride out.” This state of affairs doesn’t leave us much to live for or look forward to. As Leo Daugherty points out in his wonderful essay on Blood Meridian:

So, whereas most thoughtful people have looked at the world they lived in and asked, “How did evil get into it?” the Gnostics looked at the world and asked, “How did good get into it?”

In order that at some point things can be made right again, so that we can come back around to truth and spirit, the “Alien God” who cannot be named blessed us with a small grace, or, in McCarthy's language, the fire. It is the divine essence, the spark of the true God buried within the corrupt and opposed matter of the human body. In the Hypostasis of the Archons this comes from God through Sophia.

And immediately Sophia ("Wisdom") put forth her finger and introduced light into matter, and she followed it down into the region of Chaos.

The arrival of the Christ on the physical plane was intended to help us awaken to the Gnostic spark or flame within us. See the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes.”

Waking up from the slumber of matter and the body into knowledge, gnosis, or the divine fire, is our journey, and people exist in different places in that journey. Some people are still completely asleep and ignorant of the "spark of the alien divine" and they live only by the destructive laws and power driven dynamics of the material world (which is doomed no matter how far we come in our individual realization). Because they operate according to the laws of the material world they are often seen as the greatest survivors, the most powerful and successful within it.

Back to McCarthy. Many of McCarthy's central characters are what could be called tragic Gnostic heroes. "Hero" might not sound like the most accurate word to describe the kid in Blood Meridian, Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men, or the counsellor in the screenplay from the Ridley Scott movie of the same name, and they are not heroes in the traditional sense, but only become so once one understands their characters within a Gnostic framework. But before we understand McCarthy's heroes we need to understand his villains.

The Judge in Blood Meridian is one of Jehovah's archons (lords) and is McCarthy's most terrifying creation. He rapes and murders children, kills without pause, lusts after power, speaks all languages, dances, and plays the fiddle prodigiously. He takes spiritual possession of things by drawing them in his notebook. Anton Chigurth from No Country for Old Men and Malkina from The Counselor are lesser archons. Chigurth, like the judge, cannot be killed and Malkina knows things she cannot possibly know. All three, the judge, Anton Chigurth, and Malkina lust after power, control, and violence. Each comes right out of parts of Nietszche, who McCarthy clearly considers the greatest philosopher of the material world. See the judge in Blood Meridian:

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. (261)

Or Malkina in The Counselor:

The hunter has a purity of heart that exists nowhere else. I think he is not defined so much by what he has come to be as by all that he has escaped being. You can make no distinction between what he is and what he does. And what he does is kill. We of course are another matter. I suspect we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. (183)

The archons destroy anything that doesn't fall under their dominion, kill without pause or remorse, and toy with human prey for entertainment. The most disturbing thing about them is that they always come out on top. They never lose, never die, never learn their lesson or meet their end at the hands of more righteous powers. But that's the point. Each of McCarthy's bad guys is in sync with the corrupt nature of matter, and since, to Gnostics, matter is in itself evil, evil must win out on the physical plane. It's only natural.

In McCarthy's works the Gnostic spark is revealed through empathy, a sense that the hero identifies with another as himself. It is a recognition in the very questionable hero that beneath the surface of the material world each of us has a spark buried within that is a part of the unity that is the divine fire, the “Alien God.” This comes out in a very muddled way, as it initially must through the filter of a physical body. All three of the central characters mentioned above perform these acts of empathy amidst other much more selfish acts, even violent and damaging ones. Each hero is at a stage in the journey, as much of the world is, where he has only begun the process of unclothing the divine spark within him. It is easier to use moral language to describe this idea, but I don't believe McCarthy is presenting us with a moral lesson at all. For him the Gnostic spark is more like a scientific fact, and our individual recognition of it is a phase in our evolution. It only appears as empathy to a world used to interpreting things in moral language.

Like all tragic heroes the kid, Llewelyn Moss, and the counselor have a tragic flaw, but the “flaw” in the case of McCarthy's heroes is the Gnostic fire. It is what makes them vulnerable, incapable of victory and survival, in a world of matter where power is the ruling principle. They have to die, or in the counsellor's case be destroyed, because they're no longer playing by the rules of the game (the world of matter) they are a part of. The death or downfall of each can be traced to a moment of empathy, a moment when they recognized that the divine fire in them was the same as the divine fire in someone else. In Blood Meridian the kid's moments of empathy and identity take place alongside murder, indifference, and cruelty, but they still separate him from the other members of the Glanton Gang who are still completely in the grips of the material world and the body’s slumber. As the Glanton Gang engages in the slaughter of a group of natives and scalps them one of their members, a man named McGill, is skewered through with a lance, while the rest of the gang waits for him to die the kid has a brief moment of empathy. The kid moves to help the injured man, but McGill has become a liability, and Glanton shoots him in the head.

The kid waded out of the water and approached him and the Mexican sat down carefully in the sand.
Get away from him, said Glanton.
McGill turned to look at Glanton and as he did so Glanton levelled his pistol and shot him in the head. (163)

Later, being stalked in the desert by the judge, the kid and the badly injured ex-priest Tobin stop to rest. Tobin feels he can no longer continue.

He raised his head slightly and he spoke without looking at the kid. Go, he said. Save yourself.
The kid took the water bottle from the shales and unstoppered it and drank and handed it across. The expriest drank and they sat watching and then they rose and turned and set out again. (307)

These are a long way from shining moral victories, and in my view this makes them all the more interesting. At best we could call the kid morally ambiguous, he “has a taste for mindless violence,” but alongside this the Judge recognizes there is something different about him. McCarthy’s breadcrumbs about what separates the kid are subtle, but towards the end of the novel the judge finally tells us outright:

No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone in your soul reserved some corner of clemency for the heathen. (311-312)

The “flawed place in the fabric” of the kid’s heart is the Gnostic fire. The judge calls it flawed because by the standards of the material world, the world that belongs to the judge, it is flawed. One of the reasons McCarthy makes the kid (like the counselor) nameless is so that the judge can’t control or comprehend him (following the ancient idea that naming something gives one power over the thing named). The kid meets his end at the archon’s hands, the tragedy on the material plane comes to an end, and the Gnostic spark returns to the divine fire. The ruling dynamic of tragedy has always been participation, and as the kid is released from the bonds of the body the reader is too.

Early on in The Counselor a conversation between Reiner (played by Javier Bardem) and the Counselor (played by Michael Fassbender), hints at the same idea –empathy makes him ill-fitted for the world he is about to enter. Just before the counselor commits to take part in a drug deal to get himself out of financial trouble:

Reiner: Yeah. Well, you’re not the straight dude people think though, are you?

Counselor: I guess not.

Reiner: I don’t mean the caper. I mean you. Women like you.

Counselor: All right.

Reiner: You know what they like about you?

Counselor: I’m a good fuck?

Reiner: Yeah, right. They can sniff out the moral dilemma. The paradox. (32-33)

Michael Fassbender as the counselor and Javier Bardem as Reiner in The Counselor.

It is this moral dilemma, the empathy that divides his actions, that ultimately destroys the counselor. A client in a women’s jail asks for help with her son who has just been arrested. The counselor agrees to help and puts up the money to bail her son out, even though he is in financial trouble himself. This moment of empathy with the woman in jail causes the drug deal to fall apart and makes things look to the Mexican drug cartel as if the counselor was involved in stealing from them. His fiancé is kidnapped and used in a snuff film to make up for the money the cartel believes the counselor has cost them. He is Oedipus, wandering the rest of his days as an exile who has gouged his own eyes out. Again, things have played out as they must on the physical plane. Everyone in touch with the divine spark has been destroyed –at least on a material level.

In No Country For Old Men Llweleyn Moss stumbles into a world he too cannot survive in. McCarthy uses narcotics again, because for him the world of drugs is one of the clearest examples of the material world’s drive to destroy itself. Moss tries to stay alive, but like the Kid and the Counselor “the flawed place in the fabric” of his heart ends up being the death of him. Llewelyn has a briefcase full of money and no one knows where he is. All he has to do is get on a plane and leave. But he can’t leave his wife behind, his love and identity with her brings him to the motel where he’s supposed to meet up with her and where the Cartel kills him. Had he been not had this empathy he would not have met the tragic end he does. Just before he dies an attractive young woman that he picks up hitchhiking asks him if his wife knows what he does for a living.

Does she know what you do for a livin?

Yeah. She knows. I’m a welder.

She watched him. To see what else he would say. He didn’t say anything.

You ain’t no welder, she said.

Why ain’t I? (232)

Here we have one of McCarthy’s few clues. Llewelyn Moss is a “welder,” someone who creates bonds with fire. The young woman tries to use sex to tempt him away from his empathy, from the identity he shares with his wife. The last thing Moss says before he’s murdered is an affirmation that he is in touch with the Gnostic Spark, that in his own humble way he won’t be swayed by the destructive gravity of the body. It is again easy to take this in a common, moral sense, and see it as Moss being faithful to his spouse. But that’s not the mark McCarthy is trying to hit, it’s too simple, and too obvious. Moss turns down the woman’s advances and she says:

There’s a lot of good salesman around and you might buy somethin yet.

Well darlin you’re just a little late. Cause I done bought. And I think I’ll stick with what I got. (235)

Gnosticism holds that the nature of matter is destructive, and that ultimately all matter will be destroyed. The very stuff that our bodies are made up of will take us to our death. This destruction is a process that we are creeping closer and closer to. There is no longer any “country for old men” because we are into a period of decline, a period that those “old men” who were still able to identify with the Gnostic spark in one another can no longer fit into. Gnosticism’s saving grace is that this world wasn’t the important thing to begin with. Nietzsche might say that this too is nihilism, the denial of this world in favour of another one. But part of the Gnostic claim, like the Buddhists, is that the spark can be realized in this world, that individuals can evolve into an expression of the divine essence on this plane. The Gospel of Thomas tells us:

The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth. But men do not see it…Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there.

This is why McCarthy’s man of the epilogue in Blood Meridian goes about the earth “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” The man of the epilogue is the artist, and his job is to reveal the divine spark buried within the nightmare that is our history. McCarthy’s task is to awaken, and the tool he uses to strike the fire from us is darkness.

NOTES

1. The entry above is a continuation of a much shorter, earlier piece on Cormac McCarthy and his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. The first entry, How I Discovered Fire and Cormac McCarthy, can be found here.

2. I would like to acknowledge the heavy debt my understanding of McCarthy and Gnosticism owes to Leo Daugherty and his paper Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy. You can find Daugherty’s paper here.

3. The sheriff in No Country For Old Men could almost be looked at as a Gnostic narrator. He repeatedly emphasizes that we are in a period of decline and that the state the of the world is getting steadily worse. The final scene in the movie adaptation of McCarthy’s novel reaffirms the Gnostic idea that no matter what occurs in the material world the divine spark, or the fire, is the essence we will return to on the other side. This is the same fire McCarthy uses in The Road and Blood Meridian.

4. I have avoided the temptation here, for the sake of brevity, of a much more detailed Gnostic analysis of Blood Meridian, The Counselor, and No Country For Old Men. A more in-depth look at each piece individually is needed to do McCarthy’s work justice.

5. Other excellent tools for further insight into Blood Meridian include Bookdrum’s guide to Blood Meridian, which can be found here, and Professor Hungerford’s two part lecture at Yale University, available below.

14 Comments

Matt Blick link

5/11/2014 03:22:55 am

Honestly? I don't buy any of it. No offence. You could be right but I guess that you could make a convincing case for the evidence of 'anything' in McCarthy - from a critique of Capitalism to Buddhism, the Illuminati or Alice In Wonderland. Unless McCarthy becomes more clear in his writing (unlikely) or more outspoken as to authorial intent (never gonna happen) these books are like a Rorschach test. You can see in em what you want to.

For me as a reader, not a scholar, McCarthy's world is an ugly place, where bad things happen to good (and bad) people, randomly and people rarely get the happy ending they want. Sometimes they don't get an ending at all. Often there is a mystical Mexican to give you some incomprehensible advice and most churches are ruined by the time you get there. WHY any of this is true, McCarthy doesn't say - maybe he doesn't know, perhaps he doesn't even care. The senselessness is part of the suffering.

For what it's worth I think Sheriff Bell is the main character not the narrator.

Chuck Crabbe

5/11/2014 07:09:41 am

Thanks for commenting Matt. You’re right, since McCarthy doesn’t give us much in the way of overt meaning, in the end it’s all dream interpretation. What I think we can be certain of is that there is meaning intended, and it’s up to us to try and decipher it, or accept what we get as pure story. That being said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “anything" could be read into McCarthy’s work. Specific symbols, references, and motifs are used purposefully, and while their meaning can be debated, they all have a mythological and historical context that I think McCarthy is more than well aware of.

Sheriff Bell is an interesting character. He is a key figure in No Country For Old Men, but he’s always peripheral to the centre of the story, which is why I think of him more as a narrator than a main character -he provides commentary, not action.
Cheers!

6/6/2014 06:04:29 am

Hey Chuck,

Great essay. There is a point you don't address, though, and it's one of the big hindrances to me fully adopting a Gnostic take on BM. That is, fire in McCarthy is frequently destructive. Just in BM, the kid and Toadvine burn down the hotel in Chapter 1 (resulting in the judge calling the kid "Blasarius" in Chapter 7), and anytime there's any sort of massacre going on, the first thing the gang do is set fire to the tents/houses.

This is more plain in Child of God: Lester moves from the cabin to the cave after the cabin burns down. And later, he burns down the girl's house after she won't sleep with him. And in a surprisingly not subtle scene for McCarthy, Lester takes his ax to the blacksmith to get reforged. Which scene is essentially an essay on how fire is good to a point, but if used incorrectly is ruinous.

Granted, McCarthy's symbolic use of fire in later works (Bell's dream at the end of NCFOM and obviously The Road) definitely makes it seem like a symbol for the spark of divinity/goodness/etc. residing in man. And it seems that way many times in BM as well. But I can't get past the destructive scenes, and I don't know what to make of them.

Chuck Crabbe link

6/9/2014 04:25:16 am

Hey Ed,
Thanks for reading the piece and commenting, I’m glad you enjoyed it. The point you bring up is an excellent one and has been a source of bother for me too. McCarthy does use fire as destructive, particularly in Outer Dark, Child of God, and in parts of Blood Meridian. I think there’s a couple of different ways this can be interpreted.

McCarthy’s work, right across the board, is elemental. He gives us emotion and psychology through weather, landscape, violence, and destruction. This would be difficult to do without fire, one of the most primal of the elements. I would hazard a guess that when fire is used metaphorically, as it is in Sheriff Bell’s dream or the epilogue to Blood Meridian, it is a reference to the Gnostic Spark, and when it is used literally, as it is when Lester Ballard’s house burns down, it is used as elemental force that is an illustration of matter’s tendency towards it’s own destruction, or just simply as fire. This might seem like a fine line, and a lot to expect of a reader, but I think it makes some sense. Also, fire is only one of the ways McCarthy gives us the “tragic flaw’ in his Gnostic heroes. It is also referred to as “a flawed place in the fabric” of the kid’s heart and the “moral dilemna” that women can sniff out in the counselor.

The other point that is worth considering is that Gnostic Tragedy might have come into McCarthy’s work as a progression and that Gnosticism isn’t present to the same degree in the earlier works. Although, to me, the close of Outer Dark, when Holme walks past the blind man headed toward the swampy wasteland, sounds like an announcement that McCarthy’s fundamental, but underlying, theme will be Gnosticism: “Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.” Or, in other words, my work will be Gnostic, and part of my role as an artist will be to reveal the destructive nature of matter ("someone should tell..”) and the “spark of the alien divine” in a world that is blind to it.
What do you think? Does any of that ring true with you?

7/1/2014 11:51:42 am

Hiya Chuck,

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I got to your blog clicking through some other websites and couldn't find it again. Then yesterday I was on the McCarthy forums and it turns out their Twitter just linked to one of your other posts. So here I am. I'm making a point to click the "Notify me of new comments" box this time.

I gotta say, I'm skeptical of thinking of fire as playing two completely separate roles, mainly because of the blacksmith scene in Child of God, which seems to say that fire has various, mutually opposing aspects and that these aspects are inherent in what fire is. (Which, incidentally, reminds me of Job: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.") Although, as you mentioned, it is possible that these ideas have entered his work gradually. So perhaps it's not entirely fair to hang this idea solely on one scene in CoG? But there seem to be so many other things that remain consistent across his works, so it's hard for me to ignore.

Anyway, in this vein, I find an interesting parallel with Moby-Dick, which has the idea of one thing, multiple aspects as one of its central concerns. For example, the sea is alternatingly described as peaceful, almost holy, and then dangerous and barbaric. Moby Dick himself is in one paragraph described as swimming "divinely" and in the next as toying with the sailors in a "devilish way". This is the whole point of "The Whiteness of the Whale", that whiteness is imbued with so many contradictory associations (much like white is the union of all different colors) that they cancel out, so that white is "the colorless, all-color of atheism". It continues in "The Doubloon", where all the characters look at the same coin and interpret the symbols on it in wildly different ways.

Personally, I'm inclined to look at McCarthy's use of fire that way, that the destructive quality is inextricably linked with its positive ones. Granted, I don't understand this fully. But given the CoG and Moby-Dick connections (and the MD connection is one I'm very comfortable making, given that McCarthy's love for that book is well-known), that makes more sense to me for now. I can also view the quote from his NYT interview, "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed", through this lens, that evil and violence is an integral part of life and there's simply no way to get around that.

However: the use of fire towards the end of BM is quite striking. It seems to be only good. Early in Chapter 17 there's a scene which the chapter headings refer to as "The godfire", wherein is said that "Each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be." The first and the last? The idiot is *constantly* staring at the fire and is described as "yearn[ing] for the flames". And I'm inclined to read the kid's dream as if the idiot has transformed into the coldforger, who is also "an exile from men's fires". In Chapter 23, the man and the old buffalo hunter each have their separate fires on the plain, and seeing the hunter's fire, the man goes to join him. Almost like the fire is what joins strangers together.

And let's not forget about the burning tree in Chapter 15: There are the dual Exodus references, with the burning bush and the pillar of smoke in the morning. Then there's the "precarious truce" among the various animals, as if the fire nullifies or at least suppresses the mutual antagonism among them. Then when the kid sleeps, lightning strikes the ground all about him, and he is kept safe. And then, my favorite one: Unless McCarthy accidentally left a very bizarre coincidence in the book, the burning tree scene takes place on Christmas morning. Reread Chapter 15 and count the days: They leave Ures on December 5, two weeks later they massacre a town on the Nacozari River, and two days later they fight Elias’s army. This puts the encounter with Elias on December 21. And if you count the days and nights between that and the burning tree, it's late on the 24th or early on the 25th. I posted a bunch more details at http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/bm-timeline/ in the fourth and fifth posts, if you're interested.

So it seems that starting from, say, Chapter 15 onward, fire is only ever good. Which is totally in keeping with your Gnostic reading. But I'm honestly still not sure what exactly to make of the times when it's destructive. Maybe you're right, after all? Maybe in BM, since the positive aspects of fire far outweigh the destructive, we're supposed to view the latter as incidental? (However, I definitely think the dual nature of fire is indispensable in CoG.)

Interestingly, McCarthy seems to do the same thing with the sun in BM. Throughout the book, the sun is "malevolent", "bloodred", "urinecolored", "calamitous", "squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth". It is a "pandemonium", a "holocaust". It bleaches and cracks and dries and kills. When the kid is on the run from the Yumas in Chapter 20, there are places "where a man might lie in hiding but

7/1/2014 11:55:18 am

Interestingly, McCarthy seems to do the same thing with the sun in BM. Throughout the book, the sun is "malevolent", "bloodred", "urinecolored", "calamitous", "squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth". It is a "pandemonium", a "holocaust". It bleaches and cracks and dries and kills. When the kid is on the run from the Yumas in Chapter 20, there are places "where a man might lie in hiding but there was no place the sun would not find him". But: When the sun rises at the beginning of Chapter 15, "the fires on the plain [those of Elias and his men] faded like an evil dream". Two separate times, once in Chapter 15 and once in Chapter 20, the sun seems to pick out the kid as good, in a sense: In Chapter 15, just before the burning tree, he is watching a battle on the plain from up in the mountains, he is literally above the fray, and "the sun shone solely on the high rocks where he stood." Then, in Chapter 20, just after Toadvine sells the judge his hat, the kid and Tobin are alone at the top of the well and "the morning sun fell only upon the upper rim", and not on the judge, the idiot, or Toadvine, who are down in "the pit". The sun clearly seems to do damage to the judge, which must be a good thing, right? He even says in Chapter 20 "Yonder sun is like the eye of God". (And I definitely think the capitalization is important. McCarthy seems extremely particular about when the word "God" is capitalized. Usually when the judge says it, it is not (Like "War is god.") Whenever there is mention of the gods of the Indians, it is not. Anytime "a god" or "some god" is mentioned, it is not. But it is when it is the Christian God. It is when Reverend Green or Captain White or Tobin mentions God. And "Christ" is always capitalized. This is strange. And I imagine important.) Then in the coldforger scene, the "false moneyer" is working "all through the night... for a dawn that would not be." But in the epilogue, the dawn "is".

The point is that the sun also seems to have these contradictory aspects built into it. And to me, the fact that McCarthy has another symbol used in this way makes it all the harder to write it off as being either accidental, incidental, or simply utilitarian. But at the same time, as I just noted, the destructive aspect of fire is not nearly as prominent in BM. Food for thought, I guess

Also, you mentioned fire as "tragic flaw". I know the lines you quoted, but I'm not sure what you mean insofar as they connect to fire. Could you elaborate?

Ed

P.S. Sorry for the rambling. I get carried away and excited, and I don't have a ton of time to edit. "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter [post]."

7/1/2014 11:57:17 am

Hey man, sorry for the repeated posts. Every time I try to post something I get an error message, so I do it again and again. But it turned out that it was posting each one but giving me an error anyway. But it was cutting it off in the middle, probably because it was too long.

6/6/2014 06:13:22 am

Oh hey, one more thing: I was just wandering around your website and saw a mention on your "Identity" page that you've read and studied Jung. I have not, but I've heard that many Jungian concepts come up in McCarthy. (Check out John Sepich's essay "Why Believe the Judge?" in "Notes on Blood Meridian". Honestly, I don't like the essay at all, but he pulls many many quotes from various works of Jung that really sound like scenes from BM.)

Is there a good place to start reading him? His body of work is enormous, and aside from Wikipedia articles and the like (which are so watered down as to be useless), I'm having trouble finding a place to begin.

Thanks,
Ed

Chuck Crabbe link

6/9/2014 04:35:33 am

There’s probably no one I would recommend higher than Jung. The first book of his I read was a collection edited by Murray Stein called "Jung on Evil.” I’d begin there or with “The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature” (since you have a background in that area). Other good jumping off points might be “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” or “The Undiscovered Self." Check these out and pick up whichever one interests you the most. As soon as you have a little bit of background reading done on Jung get yourself a copy of “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” and hold on to your hat! Hope that helps. Cheers!

7/1/2014 11:53:27 am

Thanks a lot for these references. I'll definitely check them out when I get some time.

Much appreciated,
Ed

Chuck Crabbe

9/1/2014 01:52:50 pm

Hey Ed,

That's a great point about the tree burning on Christmas, I don't think I've seen that made reference to anywhere else, probably because no one else has made the calculations. Any thoughts on what McCarthy's intentions might be there?
I also think that there's something to what you're saying about the possible parallels with Moby-Dick and the many aspects of one element, force, or character. One of the very few things McCarthy has been forthright about is his admiration for Melville. Apparently he's just donated his personal papers to the Wittliff collections at Texas State University (98 boxes of notes, rough drafts, etc.) to be archived. Hopefully as these are released some of his intentions and symbology will become more transparent. http://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu/about/news/oct62010-mccarthyexhibition.html
The "tragic flaw" in McCarthy's Gnostic heroes is their sense of identity with other humans, or rather, with the "spark of the alien divine" that burns in them. It relates to "the fire" in that I present the fire as a metaphor for this empathy and recognition. The two terms are interchangeable, the moral dilemma in the counselor is the same as the fire in the kid. It is only to be thought of as tragic in relation to the physical world of matter, where identity with the other can only lead to death because Neitzsche's will to power (as expounded by the judge) and destruction are the governing forces. Hope that clears it up!

Cheers!
Chuck

9/1/2014 04:27:25 pm

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for the "tragic flaw" explanation. The phrasing made it sound like a bad thing. Now I understand. And I totally agree. Fire (when it's representing something good) definitely seems to be that.

As for the burning tree scene: It definitely seems to be one of the only times in the novel where we see some sort of "cosmic good" at work. There are a few instances where people are good to one another (the cattle drovers the kid meets on his way to Bexar, the Dieguenos who take in the kid and Tobin after the shootout with the judge, the way the kid treats Sproule, David Brown (during the "surgery" scene), Tate, and the "eldress in the rocks", the way Toadvine seems upset over the massacre of the Tiguas and loses it over the judge killing the Apache child, et al), but by and large these seem incidental, unimportant, sometimes foolish on the part of the benefactor. But the burning tree makes it seem like there is an (admittedly, weaker) antipode to the judge acting in the universe. (There's something similar in Chapter 4 where someone prays for rain and it almost immediately rains.) My guess is that McCarthy's trying to impress upon us the horrors of a world run by the judge while at the same time obliquely hinting at a counterpoint to him.

Interestingly and strangely, the pairing of the Christmas timeline with the Exodus reference (in the pillar of smoke) gives a rather Christian character to McCarthy's concept of "goodness". I'm not sure that I fully buy McCarthy as Christian, so I'm a bit skeptical, but it does seem to point in that direction. I need to think on this some more.

Finally: Not sure if you're interested, but I spent much of the first half of the summer rereading and analyzing the shit out of BM. In particular, I came up with some interesting stuff regarding the ending. Not to plug myself, but if you wanna check it out, it's at http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/the-end-of-bm-a-reading/. Warning: It's very, very long. But you wrote up that long essay above that I thought was super insightful, I thought maybe you'd like to see one of mine.

Anyway: Thanks for responding. Once again, much appreciated,
Ed

9/2/2014 03:28:39 am

One more thing: The idea of good as a weaker antipode to evil also comes out of Moby-Dick, specifically Chapter 106:

"Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter [Ahab's] monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers."

Rick Wallach link

10/12/2015 08:54:12 pm

Very nice piece. Just a quick word to you about the forthcoming book "A Bloody and Barbarous God" by the terrific Australian scholar of Gnosticism and the occult, Petra Mundik. It'll be available in April from the University of New Mexico Press. Since I reviewed the manuscript for them, I can tell you well in advance that if there's an ember of interest in the subject, and of course in McCarthy in general, this will be a must-have book. Diary it.

Author

Chuck Crabbe is an author and teacher. His first novel, As a Thief in the Night, was published by Open Books in February 2014. He currently lives in Brampton, Ontario with his wife Lesley and their children.