Eric Knickerbocker
July 27, 2003
Cormac McCarthy’s second book in The Border Trilogy offers an impressive array of worldviews all competing together in the larger narrative framework of the novel. These are not only expressed through the life of the protagonist Billy Parham and his brother Boyd, but also in the narratives of the many people they encounter on their horseback journeys through the hot desert sands of Mexico. Critic Robert L. Jarrett, associate professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, suggests the same in Cormac McCarthy, noting that “Despite the claims of the ex-priest [in The Crossing] that all men’s tales are one, such visions or tales are individual, highly particularized, hence the necessity for the interpolated tales, each containing a unique vision of the world” (147). He goes on to suggest that “The McCarthy novel is not only stylistically divided in its narration and in its inclusion of regional and professional dialects, but it is also divided among contradictory ideological, philosophical, and ethical visions that resist easy integration into a unified ideology by readers or critics” (Jarrett 147). In my own reading of The Crossing, however, I propose that a compelling case can be built for an overarching view of existentialism—if not its marriage to the dark-skinned nihilism—under the watchful and perhaps complacent eye of God as the Unknowable, Impersonal Absolute: the “wholly” Other.
The minute the word nihilism is introduced into the topic of discussion, visions of the tearing down of creeds and the intentional destruction of all moral, philosophical, and religious values present themselves to the mind. Nihilism to many suggests chaos, anarchy, and mutiny against any and all powers that represent order. When, however, nihilism is wed with the philosophical viewpoint of the existentialist, it does not necessarily indicate any active form of destructive behavior, but rather adds to the existential position the notion that life is senseless and absurd, devoid of all meaning save that which we might supply it with our personal narratives, or little stories that help us abstract “truth” from the chaos.
In his encyclopedic entry “Nihilism,” Dr. Alan Pratt, professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle University, points to the passage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth when she goes into her soliloquy about the futility of life to demonstrate the stance of the existential nihilist in classic literature:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Qtd. in Pratt, para. 12.)
Other well-known motifs that express the existential nihilist’s perspective of life include the Greek tale of Sisyphus, first noted by novelist Albert Camus in his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a cruel king in Corinth who was condemned to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder up a mountain, knowing full well that once he reached the top it would again only come rumbling back down, yet he shouldered his burden again and again, faithfully trudging back up the mountainside in compliance with his fate. For the existential nihilist, the meaning attached to his futile actions is found in the acceptance of his fate and from this can be extracted the dual virtues of courage and scorn: facing an absurd world with a “stiff upper lip”: a world in which God either does not exist except as a human fabrication or is wholly apathetic, whimsical, and unknowable. Even the philosophical stance of the existential nihilist is itself absurd according to Camus: “I call the existential attitude philosophical suicide. How else to start from the world’s lack of meaning and end up by finding a meaning and a depth to it?” (qtd. in Wyatt, para. 14). It is Pratt, however, who seals the literary marriage between the larger existentialism and its nihilistic injection:
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.
The self-described existentialist and atheistic philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre fleshes life out in similar terms, maintaining that in this life, we are “condemned to freedom” and that “existence precedes essence”—we could say that life is entirely what we make it by our choices (Pratt, para. 13). Again, this is where the dual virtues of courage (to face life like a man) and scorn (to keep living it in spite of its absurdity) come into play. Like a good existentialist, McCarthy critic Vereen M. Bell picks up on the same thread of thought concerning McCarthy’s use of characterization in “The Ambitious Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy”: “There is a powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy’s novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into communicable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy’s world, existence seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its importance from this fact alone” (Bell, para. 1).
McCarthy, however, seems to stop just short of extreme existential nihilism, not quite embracing the totality of the “Nothingness” nihilism proffers. In The Crossing, McCarthy suggests rather an overarching existential view of reality and of God. In McCarthy’s novels, God seems to be a given that all characters more or less acknowledge, but He continually turns up as being unknowable and distant. Such a notion of God could be termed agnostic—that is, “not knowing”—and “not knowing” as a form of “knowing”—that is, pronouncing the truth statement that “God is not knowable”—is almost indistinguishable from its atheist cousin, either stance lending itself well to existential nihilism, if not quite crossing the mark in all its particulars. If we are to find our purpose in McCarthy’s novels—if indeed there is one—it seems not to be bound up in God, who is distant and unknowable. Marty Priola, webmaster of the official McCarthy website, expresses a complementary sentiment:
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. (Priola, 9th post)
In his sweeping summary of McCarthy’s fiction, Jarrett’s final paragraph concludes with these parting words:
. . . What belief that can be registered in McCarthy’s fiction is first a belief in the significance of the choice of linguistic style and a belief that fictional and human identities are both not fixed but derive from choice. Second, McCarthy’s fiction expresses a belief—a highly qualified belief—in narrative as a replacement for the older verities of divine narrative. If knowledge of the darkness of the world and the self is a perilous knowledge, what knowledge we can have must be expressed in the form of narrative: “All is telling.” Beyond their considerable range of language and style, McCarthy’s narratives gain their power largely through the intensity of this belief in narrative and narrative alone. (153)
Jarrett’s implication that personal narratives replace religious revelation and that we are shaped by our choices all point to a form of modified existential nihilism. Jarrett is quite correct in saying that McCarthy’s novels express a postmodern sentiment, because to the postmodern mind, unlike the hardcore nihilist who takes a definitive stance toward truth, nothing is knowable with certainty. It has been said in jest that the Cartesian motto should be rewritten for the postmodern generation: “I think I think, therefore I might be.”
The closest we come to full bore existential nihilism is through the “eyes” of the blind man, a stroke of genius on McCarthy’s part. Not only are madmen, jesters, fools, and blind men often the archetypal figures that represent Reality with a capital “R” (whatever that Reality might entail as per the individual author), but this blind man, who sees only darkness, represents the darkness of the nihilist quite well:
. . . 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)
Even though the blind man is perhaps the most extreme in his views, we don’t see much optimism or hope displayed in any of the characters, and certainly no less in the exploits of Billy Parham. The only mission in which Billy achieves the thing for which he set out to accomplish is the final trip to find his brother: cradling his brother’s bones in his arms, he has “succeeded,” though the irony is obvious: he didn’t quite have that small detail of his brother’s death in mind when he set out on his mission.
If there is a single paragraph that to me best seems to express the underlying portrait of God painted in The Crossing (and the subsequent futility of life save perhaps the virtues of courage of scorn and the ubiquitous, truth-manufacturing “narrative”), it would be a description found 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)
These final words clinch the grand récit or master narrative of the novel well: God, just as the woman on whom He casts His glance askance, is “unmoving, austere, implacable.” And in this world where such a God inhabits, whatever meaning there is to be found is bound up in the telling of the tale and the choices of the players. And if we are to say that McCarthy’s novels have a postmodern bent to them, we will also have to admit that they bend toward the opaque side of existentialism and often border dangerously close to existential nihilism if not completely behold its face like sunflowers turned toward a darkened sun. The simple truth is, with such a McCarthian God at the helm, we’re all on our own.
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