Cormac McCarthy's Gnostic Conservatism

The Cosmic Politics of 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.