.:| The Mr. Renaissance Bi-weekly Newsletter |:. archives | discuss | subscribe | print page
July 9, 2003
Hello everyone,
In my English 517 class, we have been reading The Crossing, the second novel in Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. McCarthy is a very enigmatic man who has granted only a single interview in his life, so details are difficult to derive with any certainty. Virtually everything that is known about the man can be found on The Cormac McCarthy Home Pages, including selected translations of the Spanish that liberally intersperses his novels. I wish to examine the book a little more thoroughly, but suffice it to say by way of introduction that while on the surface it appears to be a Western, when one begins to delve in, the dialogs between the characters soon reveal many religious themes: particularly in the examination of the nature of God as each understands Him.
Our professor gave us a word list of philosophical terms to review for the class discussion Monday which I scribbled down and researched. Among these were (the first three hyperlinks of which are particularly good primers for those who seek a solid introductory understanding of the same): Gnosticism, existentialism, nihilism, Stoicism, phenomenology, and he also recommended we brush up on the basic teachings of Christianity. Personally, based on my own observations, the vast majority of the book can be summarized as being reflective of existential nihilism, though it uses allusions derived from Christianity to drive its mechanisms. To provide you with a general idea of existential nihilism as pertains to literature, the subsection of the nihilism entry above reads in part:
The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified “Yes,” advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism. In retrospect, it was an anecdote tinged with desperation because in an absurd world there are absolutely no guidelines, and any course of action is problematic. Passionate commitment, be it to conquest, creation, or whatever, is itself meaningless. Enter nihilism.
While it is very difficult to know what McCarthy attempts to achieve with his presentation of these competing ideologies, looking at it purely from the standpoint of literary criticism it is a brilliant piece of work. I will also say in passing that when the critics say that his books are not sentimental, they are serious. To catch us up to speed (and at the risk of spoiling aspects of the plot for those who might be interested in this read), Billy is a sixteen-year-old boy whose family has been murdered by Indians and he and his fourteen-year-old brother have escaped to Mexico where they are forced to fend for themselves. His brother is otherwise occupied (I’ll not spoil that part) and Billy rides on alone to seek shelter and food. A woman invites him into a house and he meets her husband, who is blind. I wondered if this would not have special significance, because blind men, mad men, and fools are traditionally literary archetypes for persons who are wise, often the sole person in the entire production who truly has any sense of knowledge of Reality with a capital R. I was not to be disappointed, though things did not unfold exactly as I might have expected.
The wife feeds Billy boiled eggs and begins to tell the man’s story as he occasionally interjects a thought. This section of the novel is some very dark reading and it spans a course of eighteen pages. We learn that the man was a loyal soldier in the battle of Durango, captured and taken as a prisoner of war where his eyes were sucked out of their sockets by a German Huertista named Wirtz, the caption of the federal army. Because of the soldier’s fierce patriotism and his unwillingness to renounce his country, Wirtz takes the POW’s face in his hands and appears to give him a kiss on each cheek—I wondered if this was an allusion to the kiss of Judas when he betrayed Jesus—but it is no kiss: I’ll spare you the further gory details.
Eventually, he is released and turned loose to wander with the only possession he has: a greenwood stave given him by an anonymous person. He fumbles along in his blindness, traveling down many roads and has a strange effect on people. Many confide in him, when such never happened before; almost all still their voices when he approaches. Among his accounts, the woman tells of a time he tries committing suicide in a shallow river as he is wandering the road alone, blind, and friendless when a man who can see stops to rescue him, thinking he is really drowning. A few moments later, they are sitting next to each other and the man with sight has put the blind man’s fingers up to his face, trying to tell him there is still light in the world. The blind man merely replies in Spanish: “It is only a face.”
The other man sat in silence. As if contemplating how to answer. He asked if blind men could weep. The blind man said that any man could weep but what the man wished to know was could the blind weep tears from the places where their eyes had been, how could they do this? He did not know. He took a last draw from the cigarette and let it fall into the river. He said again that the world in which he made his way was very different from what men suppose and in fact was scarcely a world at all. He said that to close one’s eyes told nothing. Any more than sleeping told of death. He said that it was not a matter of illusion or no illusion. He spoke of the broad dryland barrial and the river and the road and the mountains beyond and the blue sky over them as entertainments to keep the world at bay, the true and ageless world. He said that the light of the world was in men’s eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see. He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men’s imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen. He said that he could stare down the sun and what use was that? (283)
Further along in the woman’s narrative, a group of rebels rides into a town and shoots most of the menfolk in front of their children and wailing wives and mothers. The blind man happens through and unwittingly winds up in a funeral procession, a little girl clinging to his hand whose mother has previously died and who has just lost her father and brothers. Now the woman switches over to tell the story of the girl which the blind man learned. The girl is speaking to the sepulturero, a Spanish word for mortician, which makes sense, given that “sepulture” in English refers to putting the dead into a burial vault.
She was still holding the hat [she removed from her father’s head] in her lap at midnight sitting in the church when the sepulturero stopped to speak to her. He told her that she should go home but she said that her father and her brothers were dead in her house on their mats and a candle burned in the floor and that she had nowhere to sleep. The sepulturero listened. Then he sat beside her on the raw wood bench. The hour was late, the church empty. They sat side by side holding their hats, she the sombrero of woven straw, he the dusty black fedora. She was crying. He sighed and seemed himself weary and cast down. He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed times of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation? It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart’s memory which is the sole place of their abode then and now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift. (287-8)
When we translate the question written in Spanish that Billy asked the woman who is narrating the tale, we learn that she is that girl: evidently, when she left town hand in hand with the blind man they eventually married. What I find noteworthy about the blind man as a character, however, is that he is the perfect metaphor for darkness, for he himself is surrounded by it at all times. His narrative, as we will see in a minute, could be easily suggestive of existential nihilism; in fact, in the days he did have sight, he could have escaped, but chose instead to remain with the other soldiers: this factor alone could further reinforce his pessimism and his dark outlook on life. The blind man describes himself like this:
He said that men with eyes may select what they wish to see but for the blind the world appears of its own will. He said that for the blind everything was abruptly at hand, that nothing ever announced its approach. Origins and destinations became but rumors. To move is to abut against the world. Sit quietly and it vanishes. (291)
The book also records this interesting sentiment: “Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case” (290). There were a few other noteworthy points as well. For instance, the blind man speaks against the sepulturero as a man who does not know true darkness: “When the boy asked him if this knowledge were a special knowledge only to the blind the blind man said that it was not. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them” (292). From here, the narrative resumes:
Y las palabras del sepulturero acerca de la justicia? the boy said. Qué opina? [And the words of the sepulturero about justice? Your opinion?]
At this the woman reached and took up the bowl of eggshells and said that it was late and that her husband should not tire himself. The boy said that he understood but the blind man said for them not to preoccupy themselves. He said that he had given a certain amount of thought to the question which the boy had asked. As had many men before him and as men would after he was gone. He said that even the sepulturero would understand that every tale was a tale of dark and light and would perhaps not have it otherwise. Yet there was still a further order to the narrative and it was a thing of which men do not speak. He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new. (292-3)
In retrospect, I find this whole narrative and others of a similar nature a stroke of literary genius. However, when reading the book for the first time, it can become a very dark and depressive venture.
Since I plan on writing my literary analysis on this novel, I have been doing some extra reading on the subject, and I found an archived forum on the McCarthy site that discusses “‘Christian’ readings of the novels.” The webmaster Marty Priola writes: “I come from the perspective of one who sees and believes in an active and real God. I am very much Christian, and like Aquinas, I see evidence of God all around me in Nature . . . .” He brings out a point I find most interesting, mentioning also his conception that McCarthy’s characters are themselves haunted by the “God Question.” I wish to cite an extensive portion of his post, for it is very relevant to my course of discussion:
Mortimer Adler said that the existence of God could be proved logically, but that the existence of a GOOD God was where the leap of faith came in. I agree with that. And I think McCarthy might too. His characters seem to presuppose the existence of God, but then they wonder an awful lot about His nature.
As do all of us, I guess. The last five or so chapters of the Old Testament book of Job are relevant here, where God speaks to Job from the whirlwind and asks Job a series of humbling and troubling questions. It’s interesting stuff.
What I see McCarthy doing, over and over again, is raising the Big Question of the nature of God and how we, as imperfect humans, ought to respond to God and to our predicament, since we are possessed of less than perfect knowledge about the world and about God and everything else.
I don’t believe the whether or not of God’s existence comes up all that often. Rather, McCarthy seems to be dealing with the next issue, as in we all know God exists, so what do we do about it, what difference does His presence make, etc.
I believe McCarthy’s using those tools to get at those questions, because they’re what we have been given. He’s shifting and turning them to show them in different lights, fallen under different shadows, and corrupted by time and the fallibility of man over the centuries.
It’s not enough to know that God exists, as Adler says, you have to BELIEVE that He is also good and benevolent. I think McCarthy’s asking, much like his heretic asks in The Crossing, for some evidence of that, given the world’s existence as we perceive it.
We could go even further, of course, and, McCarthy’s novel aside, say that it is not enough to believe that God is merely good—suffice it to say, however, that without this belief in place, few will venture on over the threshold into the saving grace of the heavenly kingdom. Would you be interested in the salvation of your soul from a God who was at best uncaring, unapproachable, or unknowable, and at worse, capricious and malevolent? If you did, your response would surely arise from a motivation of fear rather than love. I can only imagine the coldness of such a spirituality, though this might very well give us an invaluable clue in helping us love and understand our fellow brothers and sisters caught up in the trap of legalism. Have you ever stopped and considered that there is an underlying assumption in their understanding of God that causes them to respond in these unattractive and often abrasive ways? As a gentle lesson to us all, let’s try to hurt for them rather than ranting about how they hurt others. But I digress.
Concerning McCarthy, if he is intent on finding evidence of the goodness of God through the voices of his characters—I’m not necessarily saying that he is not—one would have to peel back the layers of disillusionment and cynicism that seem implicit in the narrative. The book is not a particularly happy read, the vast majority of the characters destitute in one way or another. The goodness of human nature is shown only to be taken away by the evil inherent below the surface, particularly as portrayed by the common people’s generous hearts and tragic stories and the corruption of those connected with authority. This detail, though dark, is certainly reflective of the reality we see. This is a lesson Schaeffer hammers home as to why so many young people have grown disillusioned with Christianity: when the theme of redemption and transformation are divorced from the thing (person) redeemed and transformed—when sin is not entered into the equation as being the ugly reality it is—we are not left with realism, but rather a sugar coated romanticism that fails to correspond to the world of chaos in which “the youth of the nation” find themselves embedded.
I think if there was a single paragraph that best seems to express what to me was the underlying portrait of God painted in The Crossing, it would be this description toward the rear of the book. Billy has just entered a church door when he sees “a solitary figure bent at prayer” (389). When he touches her, she asks him what he wants. He says he wants nothing and asks the cause of her prayers. She says that “she only prayed” and that “she left it up to God as to how the prayers should be apportioned” (390). She says that she prays for all and that she will pray for him. He thanks her in Spanish, to which she replies: “No puedo hacerlo de otro modo” [I couldn’t do otherwise] (390):
He nodded. He knew her well enough, this old woman of Mexico, her sons long dead in that blood and violence which her prayers and her prostrations seemed powerless to appease. Her frail form was a constant in that land, her silent anguishings. Beyond the church walls the night harbored a millennial dread panoplied in feathers and the scales of royal fish and yet fed upon the children still who could say what worse wastes of war and torment and despair the old woman’s constancy might not have stayed, what direr histories yet against which could be counted at last nothing more than her small figure bent and mumbling, her crone’s hands clutching her beads of fruitseed. Unmoving, austere, implacable. Before just such a God. (390)
That last sentence joined with the preceding fragment of dangling modifiers is chilling. The portrait is accurate enough on one level: not only is Mexico a country known for its history of grief, heartache, and bloodshed (not to mention the trails of tearful mothers and widows), but during the war years this was especially true. When one considers that these novels take place during the Second World War, this is a beautiful passage that happens to symbolically portray the message the book carries home about God. It raises the question of chaos and evil in the world, and, as the Christian webmaster of the McCarthy site maintains above, it does not deny God but does call into question His basic goodness. Further, throughout the novel, many of the characters hold a view of God as being unknowable and if not unmoving, then certainly unmovable by any human petition. There is a certain implicit fatalism: again, I think the recurrent theme could best be summarized as existential nihilism.
There is another element that needs to be considered as well and I first turn to the words of Quijada, a Yaqui Indian Billy meets:
. . . The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. . . . (387)
His point is an excellent one. In a world where God either does not exist or is unknowable, there is no point of reference. In this sense, McCarthy’s novel is very postmodern, for nearly everything in it ends up in entropy. It was even pointed out that the novel opens up with the figure of a wolf—untamed, wild, mystical, and free—and ends with “an arthritic and illjoined” dog with “milky half blind eyes” that “was wet and wretched and so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists” (423). (That’s pretty bad, if I do say so myself.) :) But you see, postmodernism realizes a great truth. Just as maps are arbitrary, so are the words of men. In a world that has turned its back on God, the explanations men offer are but narratives and the strongest narrative, the grand récit or master narrative wins. “Truth” is determined by the strongest and most powerful arbitrator. But just as a the lines drawn on a piece of paper we call a map do nothing whatsoever to alter the landscape, so too the words chosen by men do nothing to add or subtract one iota from a Personal, Transcendent God. Words alone will never touch Him; words do nothing to change Him. Words can help us understand truth but they can also confuse truth.
Words can drastically affect our understanding of things and I think this is part of the reason why the French intellectuals are known for starting out with theories concerning human consciousness and ending with studies in semantics and linguistics. In his first unit on semantics, Dr. Robert Harris (who happens to be a Christian, by the way), shares the following.
In each case, however, the particular word applied to the thing is important, because the word can influence or alter our perceptions of the thing through the powerful symbolic and psychological effects of the word used: connotation and association trigger certain almost automatic responses within our brains, and create attitudes toward, and influence our judgments about, the thing described by the word merely because it is described by that particular word. How do your attitudes and perceptions change when the word describing each of the following items is changed?
Note here the power of words. The little blooming plant remains absolutely the same plant no matter what we call it, but the word we use to describe it may make the difference between its life and death. Suppose a friend says, “I have a weed at my house I want you to see.” Would you go see it? But what if he says, “I have a beautiful garden flower at my house that I want you to see”? The only thing that has changed is the description of the plant. Your attitude toward a thing has been altered (should we say “manipulated”?) by a change in language. A principal goal of semantics, then, is to teach the student to consider the thing referred to apart from the words describing it, and not to react to words. At the same time, it is important to realize that we all do have a very strong tendency to react to words, and that we therefore must be careful both in interpreting the statements of others and in choosing our own words.
We should take careful note of the ideas we hear and try to understand not only what is being said, but also what is not. The same is true of the ideas we read. While McCarthy’s novels can perhaps be seen in many different ways, we should recognize that he paints a rather accurate portrait of the conception many people hold of God. Rather than seeing such things as blasphemous and hopelessly dark, we should instead see them as a gateway to deeper dialogs: we should see within them the cries of hungry human hearts. As Christians, we are involved in an intimate relationship with a God who is knowable, personal, and transcendent alike. Conversely, we also have the answer for why there is evil and suffering in the world. Armed with these resources and remembering that words wielded wisely are of paramount importance, we can proceed to wade in and wage war without intimidation. The war we wage is not won with earthly weapons, but rather with the supernatural power of love.
We have the solution to arbitrary maps; we live within the reality of the landscape itself that answers to no map. Even as we realize this fact, however, we must also understand that maps do have a useful place in our lives: they either help us find our way or effectively keep us from reaching our destination. As the postmodernists point out, nearly everyone these days fancies himself a mapmaker. Therefore, we must wield our words wisely: we must evaluate the words of others as shrewdly as serpents while conversely responding as gently as doves with our own. May the weapons of our warfare ever be outfitted accordingly: sharpened on the steel of truth and tempered with the temperance of love.
God bless,
Eric
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.”
Table of Contents | Home | About | Newsletter | Forum | Misc. | Contact | Search | Links | Random Page
.:| get up to date: newsletter :. 1&1 .: discussion forum: participate |:.