Cormac McCarthy's Gnostic Conservatism
A Final Essay on Cormac McCarthy
“But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”—Matthew 6:23
In 2005, arts critic Richard B. Woodward travelled to Santa Fe to profile Cormac McCarthy for Vanity Fair. Woodward’s article appeared in August of that year, where he would describe McCarthy as “a quiet 72-year-old southern conservative.”[1] This depiction of the famously taciturn novelist raised some eyebrows at the time, as had Woodward’s 1992 interview with McCarthy for the New York Times where he branded McCarthy, a “radical conservative.”[2]
As Woodward offers no evidence for McCarthy’s conservatism (southern or radical), no quotes from the author addressing his political orientation, the reader of either article must assume this characterization was basely entirely on vibes. Woodward spends the better part of a paragraph in his Vanity Fair profile describing McCarthy’s truck: “a red Ford F-350 diesel pickup with Texas plates. Equipped with a Banks PowerPack that boosts the 7.3-liter engine to more than 300 hp, it has a stripped-down profile in back, like a wrecker’s, with no winch.” Woodward’s reason for including this description seems to be: surely, no liberal would drive such a vehicle. So, “southern conservative” it is.
As McCarthy never made any public statements about his politics, I think readers deserve something more substantial than Woodward’s assumptions. As it pertains to McCarthy’s fiction, I’m uninterested in threadbare categories of Left and Right, and I’d certainly like to decouple McCarthy’s philosophical foundations from the partisan divide of Democrat and Republican. When I refer to McCarthy’s conservatism in this essay, I’m speaking of a philosophical inclination that views Essence as preceding Existence, and a belief that the paramount needs of people cannot be met by material means. I understand this definition will be unpopular with the Twitterati who clutch their dichotomies tightly as a Manichean, but those who’ve studied McCarthy understand how strongly he rejects unsophisticated binaries.
McCarthy’s conservatism is neither the southern nor radical variety that the late Mr. Woodward ascribes to him, but rather a Gnostic one—a traditionalism[3] born of esoteric knowledge.
I. We Are Not Speaking In Mysteries
In the last chapter of Blood Meridian, the novel’s protagonist (known only as “the kid” in the previous 330 pages), is a forty-five-year-old drifter who encounters the villainous Judge Holden for a final time in a Texas saloon. The two haven’t seen each other in twenty-seven years and though the kid has transformed into a world-weary adult, Judge Holden “seems little changed or none in all these years” (338).
The Judge hasn’t accosted our hero[4] to reveal the secrets of his skincare routine. Rather, he’s interested in reflecting on the kid’s time with Captain Glanton’s gang of scalp-hunters. He lectures our protagonist, adopting the tone of a professor who cut his teeth on the Socratic method:
“One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast that evokes a child’s memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Don’t look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man’s jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?” (342-43, emphasis mine)
The kid answers these questions in his plain-spoken manner, telling the Judge he doesn’t “like craziness,” but of all the Holden’s lectures, this one is the least insane—and, perhaps, the most important to the dark, burning heart of McCarthy’s masterpiece. The Judge offers us a way of interpreting the incredible violence we’ve witnessed, arguing that men don’t go to war against enemies, but against their own vacancy of spirit. Or, in plainer language: we slaughter to escape our sorrow.
This is a deeply unsettling view of the reign of terror perpetrated by Glanton’s Gang. It’s also the most recognizably human thing the Judge has said in the novel: the vicious men whose brutality McCarthy has chronicled in such lurid detail are attempting to elude their own “emptiness and despair.”
As always, Holden’s lessons disturb and disrupt. The kid may dismiss the Judge’s lecture as craziness, but the Judge has never been more lucid. When he asks the kid, “What is death if not an agency?” a bright buzzer should be ringing in the Reader’s brain. Here, agency is used in the sense of “power or action.” The Judge proposes that death—particularly, violent death—is not an act of eradication, but the endowment of strength.
If Holden’s assertion is also the novel’s, the carnage that readers have witnessed over the past 350 pages represents something very different than we might have thought. When critics talk about Blood Meridian’s Gnostic ideas, this is one of the passages they reference.
II. If The Light That Is In Thee Be Darkness
To this day, Gnosticism (γνωστικός, gnōstikós, “having knowledge”) has its adherents, though each will likely give you a different definition of this loose collection of esoteric beliefs.
In her essay, “‘Striking the Fire out of the Rock’: Gnostic Theology in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Australian scholar Petra Mundik breaks down the core tenets of Gnosticism as they relate to McCarthy’s novel:
“According to Gnostic theology, the entire manifest cosmos was created by a hostile (or at best, ignorant) force of darkness and is thus a hideous aberration. This force of darkness usually takes the form of a creator-God known as the demiurge, identified as Yahweh of the Old Testament. The demiurge rules over all that he has created, sometimes with the assistance of evil angels known as archons, while the real or alien God remains wholly transcendent and removed from the created world. Some Gnostic texts claim that the demiurge is merely ignorant and genuinely believes that he is the only God, while other texts claim that he purposefully conceals the existence of the alien God in order to maintain his sole dominion over the manifest cosmos. Humanity has a divided nature, composed of a body and soul, which were created by and belong to the demiurge, but also a spirit, or pneuma, which belongs to the alien God. The pneuma is actually a fragmented spark of the divine which has fallen into, or in some cases, been maliciously trapped in the evil manifest cosmos. Thus, people are composed of both mundane and extra-mundane principles and carry within them the potential for immanence as soul and flesh, or transcendence as pure spirit.” (73)
She continues:
“Knowledge of the true state of the cosmos and of the nature of the alien God is referred to as gnosis and those who possess such knowledge refer to themselves as the pneumatics. The possession of gnosis enables the spirit, or pneuma, to become aware of its divine origins, escape from the created world, and reunite with the transcendent God. Although a vision of the cosmos as a terrible aberration may at first glance appear nihilistic, Gnosticism’s primary concern is soteriological; evil is perpetuated through ignorance, hence salvation can be attained through knowledge.” (74)
I resisted Gnostic readings of McCarthy until the publication of No Country for Old Men in 2005 and then The Road the following year. In those novels, readers see McCarthy’s Gnostic leanings on unambiguous display: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s dream of his father carrying fire to make a place for his son “in all that dark”; The Road’s father and son talking about whether they are “carrying the fire.” Once it became clear to me that Gnosticism was indeed one of McCarthy’s obsessions, I saw it everywhere in Blood Meridian.
Literary critic Leo Daugherty has long argued that Judge Holden is a Gnostic archon. Here is Mundik again, explicating Daugherty’s essay on the subject, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy”: “Daugherty points out that while ‘most thoughtful people have looked at the world they lived in and asked, How did evil get into it?, the Gnostics have looked at the world and asked, How did good get into it?’ He goes on to explain that for the Gnostics ‘evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of the bits of spirit imprisoned here,’ asserting that what the Gnostics saw is precisely ‘what we see in the world of Blood Meridian.’” (73)
But Gnosticism appears in McCarthy’s work before Blood Meridian. In the final paragraph of Suttree (1979), a voice speaks to (or inside) Cormac’s eponymous hero: “Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the Huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.” (471)
This Huntsman whose purpose is to track (and devour) human souls represents an early appearance of Gnostic archons in McCarthy’s work, those “evil angels” who assist a malevolent (or, at best, indifferent) Demiurge, and one can certainly read the Furies of Outer Dark (1968) as a trio of archons, hounding the incestuous Culla Holme on his journey through a hellish Appalachia.
Having located the influence of Gnosticism in McCarthy’s fiction, I’d like to turn to how these esoteric ideas inform his particular brand of conservatism.
III. Are These Blind Riddles?
In keeping with their Gnostic principles of an intuitive and innate spirituality, McCarthy’s narratives privilege Essence over Existence[5] and chance over choice. Oftentimes, the protagonists of these novels come to recognize themselves as creatures of an unchanging, imbedded Being; their Becoming is revealed as a glittering lie. Think how McCarthy denies the kid’s hopes for redemption in the final chapters of Blood Meridian, allowing him to be destroyed at the devouring hands of Holden. The kid has begun to carry a Bible in those last twenty-five pages, but he can’t read a single word of it and it’s the Judge’s voice that closes the novel proper: “He says that he will never die.” (349)
In No Country for Old Men, the very notion that a man might select his own fate becomes a plot point and a belief to be travestied. After taking the satchel containing $2.4 million dollars, Llewelyn Moss imagines he’s made a catastrophic decision by returning to the crime scene to fulfill the dying narco’s plea for water. He’s discovered in the course of this fool’s errand and goes on the run.
But the calamitous choice has already been made: unbeknownst to Moss, there’s a radio transponder hidden in one of the packets of hundred-dollar bills and he’s being tracked by a man who believes only in chance: the grim and supremely competent Anton Chigurh. In McCarthy’s work, you make the life-altering choice without realizing you’ve made a choice at all.
The triumph of determinism and immutable Essence is so total in McCarthy’s apocalyptic thriller that the author himself seems to have struggled with it. In the scene where Chigurh confronts and then murders Moss’s wife, Carla Jean, the philosophically-minded “prophet of destruction” flips a quarter to decide the woman’s fate. The coin toss goes against her and, strangely, Chigurh feels the need to apologize[6] and explain the vicissitudes of her bad fortune:
“I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this.” (259)
These are curious words from a creature of pure chance, but what’s more curious is that’s not what McCarthy initially wrote. In the advance reader’s edition I was sent before the novel’s publication, that passage is entirely different:
“It wasn’t up to me. Everything in your life is present at every moment of your life. To shape that moment. To fall at last heads or tails.” (257)
The final version is a (somewhat feeble and uncharacteristic) nod to choice, whereas the earlier version emphasizes Carla Jean’s predetermined fate which, in Chigurh’s mind, has been shaped by the essential qualities of her life. The expurgated passage echoes the final conversation between the Dueña Alfonsa and John Grady in All the Pretty Horses where the woman speculates about when, precisely, a coin toss starts:
“My father had a great sense of the connectedness of things. I’m not sure I share it. He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of a coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in a die in one of two ways and from whose act all followed.” (230-31).
Their conversation concludes with the Dueña Alfonsa telling our hero:
“Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside our own making.” (241)
IV. In All That Cold And All That Dark
McCarthy believed we live in a fallen world and it’s hard not to agree with him. Temperamentally, he was a conservative writer with metaphysical interests, though he ended his life as a materialist[7]. We see shades of the Gnostic Conservatism I’ve articulated above throughout his work, but what does such an orientation look like in practice and what could it mean for the flesh and blood humans in this nonfictional world?
To my mind, one of the most fascinating aspects of No Country for Old Men is the way the villain evolves[8] and the hero regresses. Chigurh sticks to his principles; Bell abandons them. Feeling “overmatched” by Chigurh, the sheriff cuts and runs, and we learn in his conversation with Uncle Ellis that he’s done so before. Bell tells his Ellis how he deserted his squad in World War II—the fact that they’d already been wiped out by German troops is no excuse; he believes he ought to have died with them—and thereby “steals his own life” (278). The older man thinks Bell’s standard is absurdly high and tells him he ought to “ease up on himself,” but it is the only standard the sheriff has. Bell resigns as sheriff out of fear that, in order to confront Chigurh, he’d “have to put his soul at hazard” (4).
If the novel suggests you protect your soul by abandoning your principles, it also implies that if you stick to them, you end up like Chigurh.
In the novel’s final pages, a retired Bell tells us about a dream he had after his father died, one weighted with Gnostic imagery:
“It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.” (309)
A Gnostic Conservatism proposes that even though the world is a dark vacuum that threatens to suck the divine spark out of you and extinguish it forever, the man of gnosis, of true knowledge, might be granted visions and he’d do well to pay attention to them. He may glimpse a spiritual realm through the cracks of this cold, material one. Bell has some idea of how to navigate a terrible loss because he has eyes to see the transcendent world. He dreams of a place where his fathers are waiting, building an eternal shelter against the winds of our wolfish world, and though he wakes up, he recalls his vision with great clarity and recounts its existence to us.
[Author’s Note: This essay was finished and slated for publication before Vanity Fair released their article about Augusta Britt. After the revelations in Vincenzo Barney’s profile of Ms. Britt, and my response to these on X (I called McCarthy’s actions “indefensible”), the magazine that had accepted this essay cancelled its publication—a decision I both understand and support. As the piece you’ve just read addresses some of the darker philosophical underpinnings of McCarthy’s work, I decided to make it available for free. I’ll allow the reader to draw connections to Barney’s piece and my own. It will be my last essay on Cormac McCarthy.]
NOTES:
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2005/08/cormac-mccarthy-interview?srsltid=AfmBOopvBYFiTI3gqQXjM4nJP4nyWz8CmCpRHxb6DSfmz4Send3j9bLO
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html
[3] I speaking strictly of the small “t” traditionalism we associate with rural America, not the Traditionalism of René Guénon.
[4] In Blood Meridian, one must use this term rather lightly.
[5] I use these terms in an Aquinian sense, not a Heideggerian one, Essence being, to Aquinas, the fundamental nature of a thing, and Existence that thing’s presence in visible, knowable reality.
[6] When the coin comes up tails, Chigurh’s first words are, “I’m sorry.” (page citation)
[7] In a conversation with Lawrence Krauss on The Origins Podcast six months before his death, McCarthy told the physicist, “I’m pretty much a materialist.” The “pretty much” in that sentence is central to the argument I’m making: a divine spark needs only the slightest crack to set the house of a man’s soul on fire. Full conversation here:
[8] During Chigurh’s lethal confrontation with Carson Wells, Chigurh tells the former Special Forces officer who’s been hired to hunt him down that “getting hurt changed me. Changed my perspective. I’ve moved on in a way. Some things have fallen into place that were not there before” (173). And changed he is. Later, when Chigurh murders the man who hired Wells, he lectures him as he’s bleeding out, informing the dying man that he used birdshot in his suppressed scattergun instead of double-aught buck to keep from “rain[ing] glass on people in the street” (200). He certainly never worried about collateral damage before his injury. After retrieving the money from Moss’s hotel room, he takes it to the businessman it once belonged to and gives it to him, asking nothing in return but a possible job in the future: “I’d say the purpose of my visit is simply to establish my bonafides. As someone who is an expert in a difficult field. As someone who is completely reliable and completely honest” (251-252).
Tired of having to prove he can “extricate himself by an act of will” (175), Chigurh decides to put himself at the service of something higher. He’s still the “psychopathic killer” (141) Wells said he was, but now he’s one who acknowledges something outside himself.