Understanding Cormac McCarthy

Steven Frye

Description

A roadmap to the dark and mythic topography of McCarthy's fiction

Named by Harold Bloom as one of the most significant American novelists of our time, Cormac McCarthy has been honored with the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of McCarthy's fiction to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions.

Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic transformation. Understanding Cormac McCarthy explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the "romance" genre, the southern gothic and grotesque, as well as the carnivalesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that marks McCarthy's transition to the West and his full recognition as a major force in American letters. In the final two chapters, Frye explores McCarthy's Border Trilogy and his later works— specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road—addressing the manner in which McCarthy's preoccupation with violence and human depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose, and value.

Frye provides scholars, students, and general readers alike with a clearly argued foundational examination of McCarthy's novels in their historical and literary contexts as an ideal roadmap illuminating the author's work as it charts the dark and mythic topography of the American frontier.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Sense of Place
• Anton Chigurh
• The Realist
• Philosophical language
• Pudd'nhead Wilson
• Suttree
• Erudition
• Self-Reliance
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Parable
• General officer
• Chivalry
• Theodicy
• Inception
• General
• Paul Tillich
• Erle Stanley Gardner
• American
• Cormac McCarthy
• Theodore Dreiser
• Thomas Wolfe
• Sam Peckinpah
• Søren Kierkegaard

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611172041
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING
CORMAC McCARTHY
Understanding Contemporary American Literature
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee • Sherman Alexie • Nicholson Baker • John Barth
Donald Barthelme • The Beats • Thomas Berger
The Black Mountain Poets • Robert Bly • T. C. Boyle • Raymond Carver
Fred Chappell • Chicano Literature • Contemporary American Drama
Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926–1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970–2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature • Robert Coover • James Dickey
E. L. Doctorow • Rita Dove • John Gardner • George Garrett
John Hawkes • Joseph Heller • Lillian Hellman • Beth Henley
John Irving • Randall Jarrell • Charles Johnson • Adrienne Kennedy
William Kennedy • Jack Kerouac • Jamaica Kincaid
Tony Kushner • Ursula K. Le Guin • Denise Levertov
Bernard Malamud • Bobbie Ann Mason • Cormac McCarthy
Jill McCorkle • Carson McCullers • W. S. Merwin • Arthur Miller
Lorrie Moore • Toni Morrison’s Fiction • Vladimir Nabokov
Gloria Naylor • Joyce Carol Oates • Tim O’Brien • Flannery O’Connor
Cynthia Ozick • Walker Percy • Katherine Anne Porter
Richard Powers • Reynolds Price • Annie Proulx
Thomas Pynchon • Theodore Roethke • Philip Roth
May Sarton • Hubert Selby, Jr. • Mary Lee Settle • Neil Simon
Isaac Bashevis Singer • Jane Smiley • Gary Snyder
William Stafford • Anne Tyler • Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace • Robert Penn Warren • James Welch
Eudora Welty • Tennessee Williams • August Wilson • Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING CORMAC McCARTHY
Steven Frye

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2009 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2009 Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Frye, Steven.
Understanding Cormac McCarthy / Steven Frye.
p. cm. (Understanding contemporary American literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-839-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933– Criticism and interpretation.
2. Southern States In literature. 3. West (U.S.) In literature.
4. Mexican-American Border Region In literature. I. Title.
PS3563.C337Z66 2009
813'.54 dc22
2009009376
ISBN 978-1-61117-204-1 (ebook)
For Kristin, Melissa, and Thomas with love
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Cormac McCarthy
Chapter 2
The Southern Works
Chapter 3
Into the West
Blood Meridian
Chapter 4
The Border Trilogy
Chapter 5
The Later Works
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Series Editor’s Preface
The volumes of Understanding Contemporary American Literature have been planned as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers. The editor and publisher perceive a need for these volumes because much of the influential contemporary literature makes special demands. Uninitiated readers encounter difficulty in approaching works that depart from the traditional forms and techniques of prose and poetry. Literature relies on conventions, but the conventions keep evolving; new writers form their own conventions which in time may become familiar. Put simply, UCAL provides instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers identifying and explicating their material, themes, use of language, point of view, structures, symbolism, and responses to experience.
The word understanding in the titles was deliberately chosen. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Although the criticism and analysis in the series have been aimed at a level of general accessibility, these introductory volumes are meant to be applied in conjunction with the works they cover. They do not provide a substitute for the works and authors they introduce, but rather prepare the reader for more profitable literary experiences.
M. J. B.
Acknowledgments
This book explores the fiction of an author who has spent much of his adult life writing in relative obscurity, often with the support of faithful editors and generous grants and fellowships, but for the most part out of the public eye. Before the accolades that came with his later works, many of his novels were out of print. Over those many years, the author showed little concern over this, becoming perhaps without knowing it an archetype of artistic focus and intensity. The personal motives for this reaction find their origin in the recesses of an individual personality, and I have no desire to speculate on the behavior of a living author who in recent years has emerged as one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The best focus is the works themselves, and now that the later ones have thrust him into public view, the whole of his canon exists in reprint editions that can be found in any major bookstore. Like many academic readers, I came to McCarthy with Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy, motivated by a twin interest in the American romance and the literature of the American West. But in my evolution as a McCarthy scholar, I have studied and written on the southern novels and the dramatic works and have found in them a rich variety in theme, style, and intellectual interest. I have my favorites, those works I think stand apart, as well as those I consider less meritorious. My sentiments and perspectives might perhaps be gleaned from these pages, but I have done my best to limit them, to give each novel its due, and to bear in mind that “understanding” a work does not mandate a general assessment of its value in comparison to others. Judgments of this sort are always subject to reconsideration, are sometimes motivated by an ill-conceived academic hubris, and are perhaps best relegated to hallway conversation or the always enjoyable coffeehouse book chat. This is a teaching volume, and I have attempted to provide a thorough treatment of influence, formal aesthetics, thematic texture, and historical context those things that give students and thoughtful readers a sense of an author’s purpose and emphasis. In this endeavor I have drawn from the support of many colleagues, fellow McCarthy scholars, as well as friends and family.
I would like to thank my friend and colleague Eric Carl Link, professor and chair of the English department at the University of Memphis. Eric and I have worked together for over fifteen years, first as graduate students at Purdue University, then on a series of articles and an edited collection, and finally as coeditors of an academic journal. He has read this book in various draft forms, and his remarkable blend of incisive criticism, judgment, and unstinting faith has been invaluable. Thanks go as well to my longtime friend Greg Trine, a creative writer working outside the academic field, who helped me by providing the fresh perspective of the thoughtful nonacademic reader. I would also like to thank Jerome Klinkowitz, editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, volume E, for his insightful reading and careful line editing, as well as Edwin T. Arnold for his careful reading and commentary. Over the years, I have gained immeasurably from my association with many McCarthy scholars, a number of them active members of the Cormac McCarthy Society. These include Dianne C. Luce, Rick Wallach, David Cremean, Christopher D. Campbell, Stacey Peebles, Nick Monk, Jay Ellis, Susan Hawkins, John Wegner, John Cant, and my own student Alan Noble. The selected bibliography that concludes this volume owes much to Dianne C. Luce’s online bibliography on the Cormac McCarthy Society Web site. My study of the tradition of the American romance, especially in the nineteenth century, has been enriched over the years by G. R. Thompson, Robert Paul Lamb, and the late Cheryl Oreovitz, as well as Derek Parker Royal, an eminent Philip Roth scholar who recommended that I propose this volume. I have also benefited much from the perspective of thoughtful McCarthy aficionados outside the academic realm who read portions of this book and kept me mindful of audience. These include Greg Young, Michael Young, and Bryan Young. Thanks also to my colleagues in the English department at California State University, Bakersfield, for their support and encouragement, and to the professional staff at the CSUB Walter Stiern Memorial Library, especially Kristine Holloway and Jamie Jacks. A special thank you to my parents, Ed and Joann Frye, whose support and attention have been unwavering, flowing always from a wellspring of selflessness. And as always, my deepest appreciation goes to my wife of nearly twenty years, Kristin, whose mind and heart are as strong as they are tender, and who enriches all that I do. Finally, thanks to my children, Melissa and Thomas,