No Country For Inner Monologues
Sparse Prose and Reader Participation in Cormac McCarthy
Hey gang, I’m on vacation and got behind on writing this, so we’ll keep it short today.
First of all, a huge thanks to my subscribers so far—it’s really amazing to see you reading and (hopefully) enjoying my stuff. This is where I’m obligated to say that if I write something you particularly like, please share it with someone else you think might enjoy it too. I appreciate so much everyone who has subscribed so far but what if I had more subscribers? Really makes you think.
I’ve been thinking I should lay out a little more clearly what to expect from this newsletter going forward. The first post of the month will generally be about books—something I’ve read recently or an author I’ve discovered. The second post of the month, which should go out the third week, will be about something else: movies, tv, video games, politics, whatever. And then the last week will be home to quick rundowns of everything else I read and watched that month that I didn’t cover in the two main posts. I’m still trying to ramp up my reading habits to where they need to be to keep supplying myself with material for the newsletter, hence the lack of reading/watching lists so far, but I’m going to hold myself to it going forward.
Anyway, thanks again to everyone reading this. It means a lot.
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As you may have heard, Cormac McCarthy is back. He hasn’t published a new book since The Road in 2006 and has since mostly since been hanging around the Santa Fe Institute, apparently thinking about physics, the relationship between language and consciousness, and the atom bomb. He teased a book tackling these themes in 2015. This fall he’ll release a duo of related novels called The Passenger and Stella Maris that Knopf says will deal directly with these topics, a significant departure from his usual elliptical way of approaching the philosophical realm.
This is very exciting! McCarthy is 88 years old and, along with Pynchon, one of the last of the American masters from that generation still kicking. But for all the praise I could lavish on him, I’m not as well acquainted with his work as I’d like. I’ve previously read Blood Meridian (masterpiece, obviously) and The Road (very good, much better than the movie led me to expect), but that was the extent of my experience with him before these new books were announced. For years I’ve meant to read his earlier stuff—his Appalachian period, in contrast to the later Southwestern period—and this was the kick in the pants I needed. I plan to cover those earlier books—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark—in here at some point, but out of excitement and convenience I first grabbed the other McCarthy already on my bookshelf, which happened to be No Country For Old Men.
In No Country, McCarthy takes as his subject the smallest gestures and motions that make up his characters’ actions. Here’s a sentence: “He reached the Devil’s River Bridge at sundown and half way across he pulled the cruiser to a halt and turned on the rooflights and got out and shut the door and walked around in front of the vehicle and stood leaning on the aluminum pipe that served for the top guardrail.” There are six ands in that sentence! It is also, to be clear, better than any sentence I have ever written.
The entire book is like this. McCarthy drowns the reader in process. When Llewelyn Moss, on the run with a bag of cash he found at the scene of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert, tries to retrieve it from the motel room air duct where he stashed it without being detected by the men he assumes are hunting him, we get this:
He climbed down and got the shotgun and went to the door and turned off the light at the switch there and stood in the dark looking out through the curtain at the courtyard. Then he went back and laid the shotgun on the bed and turned on the flashlight.
He untied the little nylon bag and slid the poles out. They were lightweight aluminum tubes three feet long and he assembled three of them and taped the joints with duct tape so that they wouldnt pull apart. He went to the closet and came back with three wire hangers and sat on the bed and cut the hooks off with the sidecutters and wrapped them into one hook with the tape. Then he taped them to the end of the pole and stood up and slid the pole down the ductwork.
He turned the flashlight off and pitched it onto the bed and went back to the window and looked out. Drone of a truck passing out on the highway. He waited till it was gone. A cat that was crossing the courtyard stopped. Then it went on again.
He stood on the chair with the flashlight in his hand. He turned on the light and laid the lens up close against the galvanized metal wall of the duct so as to mute the beam and ran the hook down past the bag and turned it and brought it back. The hook caught and turned the bag slightly and then slipped free again. After a few tries he managed to get it caught in one of the straps and he towed it silently up the duct hand over hand through the dust until he could let go the pole and reach the bag.
We have essentially no access to the thoughts of this book’s characters and are limited to observing their actions. When Moss goes to a sporting goods store to buy the tentpoles he uses in the above quotation, we are in the dark about what he plans to use them for. It’s only once he’s constructed his tool and used it that his actions gain coherence. I think it’s a fun approach—McCarthy asks his readers to participate in creating the details of his story more than is often the case, which I find engaging and propulsive but also raises interesting questions about agency and morality when he asks this in a story that involves so much desperation and horrific violence. Put another way, it’s one thing to fill in the gaps in Moss’s thinking but it’s quite another to do the same for Anton Chigurh, the remorseless killer pursuing him.
As an aside, it occurs to me this isn’t far off from the technique Gaddis uses in all his books after The Recognitions. His following books—JR, Carpenter’s Gothic, A Frolic of His Own, and Agapē Agape—are composed almost entirely of dialogue with virtually no narration, leaving the reader to intuit all the action of a scene from interjections, exclamations, and other clues Gaddis layers in. Generally the narration only breaks in for “tracking shot” transitions between scenes, which is notable here since McCarthy originally conceived No Country For Old Men as a screenplay.
There is a major exception to the “no inner monologues” rule McCarthy follows. There are sections throughout the book where Sheriff Bell, following both Moss and Chigurh’s trail of destruction, pontificates at length about his apocalyptic vision of America’s decay and his inability to reconcile himself to the world around him. These sections are interesting at first but quickly overstay their welcome. I think this is intentional on McCarthy’s part—this guy is tiresome and contradicts himself within the space of a page. Often he’s so close to getting it, noting that the demand for opiates has skyrocketed since the end of the Vietnam War (the book is set in 1980) while still wondering naively where the demand for drugs in the US is coming from. My main criticism of the movie adaptation is that Tommy Lee Jones and the Coen Brothers can’t help but make Bell the moral arbiter of the story. A more honest and interesting portrayal would have preserved his most important qualities in the book, which is that he’s an idiot and a reactionary.
He does make a pretty good death panels joke at one point though:
Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.
Given my age, I associate death panels entirely with their invocation during the debates over ObamaCare in 2010 but since the book was published in 2005 I guess they predate that event? Were they really an idea floating around in 1980?
One other thing about the tiny scale of the actions McCarthy describes throughout: as in the passage above about Moss, there is an almost pathological fixation on the guns the characters carry. Picking them up, putting them down, tucking them in a waistband or behind a car seat, McCarthy notes every motion that affects a gun. And this is a book about guns—all of the violence in the story is done with them. I posit this is actually where the focus on small actions originates. It’s appalling that such horrific scenes could result from that tiny action of pulling a trigger. The slightest flex of a single finger does so much damage over and over—it becomes the unit by which all other actions are measured. Set against that, the grand scale of Bell’s concerns about the country are simply impossible—whole novels spin out of the slightest twitch.
