The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy

A longstanding thought experiment for Shakespeareans is to imagine the status and study of the playwright had the First Folio not been published in 1623. How might we read and understand Shakespeare if we didn’t know that he wrote Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, or Twelfth Night, to name just a few of the plays that were printed for the first time in the Folio? Without the Folio, Shakespeare studies would be an unknowingly impoverished activity; what would it be like, for instance, to discuss something like representations of evil in the tragedies not knowing that Shakespeare was capable of imagining Iago? The challenge for a reader of the 2023 reissue of Vereen Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (first published in 1988) is to both acknowledge and work past these kinds of hypothetical contortions—to put yourself in Bell’s place, producing the first comprehensive examination of McCarthy’s works when Blood Meridian had been published just three years previously. No Border Trilogy. No published screenplays. No National Book award. No Pulitzer Prize. No national interviews. No affiliation with the Santa Fe Institute. Seven of twelve novels still to come. Consider for a moment the ways in which The Passenger and Stella Maris have already reconfigured understandings of both McCarthy and his canon since their publication—inviting us to rethink everything that has come before—and it becomes apparent that meeting Bell at his place in time and on his terms is no easy task. On a grand scale Bell’s vision is now unavoidably incomplete, but this point should not obscure his genuine insights, which are all the more remarkable for being produced amidst an inchoate field of study. (Bell’s bibliography lists just ten items, five of which are book reviews in popular periodicals.) It is perhaps strangely fitting that the first book-length study of McCarthy was reissued mere months after the author’s death. Reading Bell’s Achievement is an inherently retrospective experience, and McCarthy’s recent passing seems to enhance this feeling. Our past is Bell’s unknowable future. Now that McCarthy’s canon is a seemingly fixed thing, it is difficult to say how our readings of the earliest books that constituted Bell’s entire field of study might be colored by our awareness of what comes next. To what extent do we fan what are only faint embers in his pre–Border Trilogy texts with the certain knowledge that these elements burn more brightly in what McCarthy would later write?Bell got there first. This is his meritorious accomplishment as well as his curse: his work exists as the foundation upon which all subsequent studies can ground themselves and explicitly diverge from. It would be hyperbolic to claim that Bell has become a strawman, but it is certainly true that he is now a useful rhetorical touchstone for scholars, a temporal and theoretical marker to gauge how far McCarthy studies have come. This is especially the case in terms of Bell’s claims regarding McCarthy’s nihilism. In Edwin Arnold’s seminal essay on McCarthy’s “Moral Parables” written in 1999, for instance, Bell is—quite understandably—the launching point for Arnold’s thesis. Arnold begins by acknowledging Bell’s groundbreaking work, but takes issue with Bell’s suggestions that “McCarthy’s books are essentially nihilistic, devoid of conventional plot, theme or moral reference” (45); indeed, Arnold refers to such a position as “anti-interpretation” (45). In this way Arnold creates space to put forth that “there is . . . evident in [McCarthy’s] work a profound belief in the need for moral order” (46). As some have observed, including Ty Hawkins, who notes the irony of assessments of Bell’s work strictly focusing on nihilism given his “nuanced position on the issue” (84n36), and Russell Hillier, who remarks that “Despite the sea-change in McCarthy criticism . . . even today Bell’s nihilist/pessimist thesis has a tendency of sticking like a burr” (6), the kind of gesture that Arnold makes toward Bell, one marked by the specter of nihilism, constitutes Bell’s primary connection to contemporary studies of McCarthy. Patrick O’Connor, to offer a recent example, positions his chapter on Blood Meridian in Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned (2022) as a “direct and nuanced response” to Bell’s “far-reaching insight on the ambiguous nihilism of McCarthy” (9). Similarly, Marcel DeCoste’s recent monograph, Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment (2024), opens by invoking Bell’s study: “With Bell’s work, McCarthy was first heralded by literary criticism as a literary nihilist” (2).It must be said, however, that The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy explores and maps much more than just the “prevailing gothic and nihilistic mood” (1) that Bell mentions on the opening page of his introduction, and the promise of this reissued edition is that scholars and students of McCarthy now have a ready opportunity to consider not just the origins of the field but the many luminous trails that Bell began to carve through McCarthy’s lush prose. That nihilism continues to shadow references to Bell’s work is likely partially a function of his memorably titled essay from 1983, “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy.” This ten-page essay offers short, critical assessments of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree, and opens with the now infamous claim that “Cormac McCarthy’s novels are as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of plot” (31). The “Ambiguous” qualifier in the essay’s title tips Bell’s hand; he is in many ways thinking out loud on the page in 1983, delving the dark core of the early work while also resisting its gravitational pull, trying to find traction with McCarthy’s work and make productive claims while offering abbreviated thoughts on four very different novels. Bell’s claims regarding McCarthy’s nihilism are greatly diluted by the time he produces his book-length study; as Matthew Potts has written, by 1988 “Bell has abandoned that term for more careful ones” (2). Both essay and book begin at the end of Outer Dark, with Culla on the road to the swamp—this moment clearly fascinated Bell and any sense he has of McCarthy’s nihilism seems to both begin with it and radiate from it—but only a small portion of the essay makes its way into the book and does so in thoroughly paraphrased and reworked forms. (The longest parallel section involves Harrogate’s train ride to Brushy Mountain prison.)If, as I’m suggesting, there is much more to be found in Bell’s study than nihilism, ambiguous or otherwise, Bell himself complicates such an assessment by offering a book that lacks a clear through line or central argument; he concedes early on that “this study of McCarthy has no thesis other than that which issues from the cryptic intelligibility of the novels themselves when they are patiently and attentively considered” (xiii). This means that each of Bell’s chapters (one is devoted to each novel) functions as a mostly discrete unit, without much cross-pollination of ideas from section to section. That being said, Bell uses his short introduction to offer an overview of McCarthy, portions of which still resonate. Bell writes of McCarthy’s “eerily unselfconscious” characters, who can produce “empathy on our part” even though their motivations are “usually tantalizingly obscure” (4). He also highlights McCarthy’s tendency to subordinate plots to “stories within stories,” constructing novels in “small anecdotal units” (7) that hold both formal and thematic weight in that these units suggest “it is in the pockets of experience, in the particular, that we live” (8). In ways that its author could never have anticipated, this latter claim, combined with Bell’s warning that “Book-spanning plots are promised but turn out not to exist” (7), would serve as a reasonable starting point for a reading of The Passenger.Bell is especially compelling in his assessments of arguably the most difficult aspect of McCarthy to articulate: his singular style. He identifies a generative tension between the clear, material realities that McCarthy is able to conjure and the evocative poetry of his prose. The “concreteness” of his style is emphasized numerous times, and Bell stresses that although this “binds us to the phenomenal world,” the novels are not “merely naturalistic” because McCarthy uses metaphor to enliven and complicate his “concrete worlds” with an “aura of mysterious, opaque, and unyielding signification” (2). This understanding informs Bell’s analysis of the novels themselves: in The Orchard Keeper, for instance, readers are placed in a vibrant environment and “held there by the subliminal effect of metaphor” (17); in discussing Suttree, Bell reverses direction to make the same point: readers must excavate “the dense lyrical idiom” to discover “a world with distinct edges [that] is clearly there behind the layers of stylization” (77). At times Bell’s admiration for McCarthy’s style effectively stuns him into silence. Chapters are punctuated by conspicuously long block quotations from McCarthy’s work (these are especially clustered in the sections on Suttree and Blood Meridian). There, just look at this—read it closely, Bell seems to say. You have to work through it slowly and carefully to appreciate what it is I’m trying to share with you. Surely many of us reading this journal have expressed something similar when discussing or recommending McCarthy’s work. McCarthy’s voice might thus drown out Bell’s at times, but when Bell marshals his interpretive forces there is much to admire. His distillation of the relentless, savage beauty of the language of Blood Meridian effectively captures the strange allure of that book (and McCarthy generally) and is difficult to improve upon:A number of Bell’s other thoughts on Blood Meridian are, in hindsight, prescient. What Bell plants as seedlings have bloomed in readings of the novel over subsequent decades. He contends that Blood Meridian “presses the psychology of the frontier theory to its logical, appalling extreme” and positions Holden as “a direct descendant of Melville’s Captain Ahab” (119). He anticipates what has since become an influential reading of the book (as seen in Monk and Cant, to cite two examples) in his claim that the story offers a “critique of our culture’s anthropocentrism,” and that Holden’s terrifying “intellectual imperialism” is “Enlightenment doctrine . . . pressed to its logical conclusion” (124).The most impressive chapter in Bell’s study is on Child of God. When we again remind ourselves of Bell’s position at the inception of McCarthy studies, the Child of God section is emblematic of the truly innovative quality of his insight. While the critical work that has amassed around this bizarre, often repulsive novel doesn’t fully neutralize its horrors, nevertheless that work now serves to guide contemporary readers through an alienating experience. Bell impresses because he meets the formidable challenge of McCarthy’s novel without the extensive critical infrastructure that now exists for readers in the twenty-first century. The chapter might lack a certain formal precision, making Bell’s thoughts somewhat difficult to track (his absence of a larger thesis does him few favors), but there are valuable waypoints to discover, some of which are now fundamental to navigations of Child of God’s dark pathways. Lester is “worth our attention,” writes Bell, because his “needs and behavior have at least vague affinities with our own” (65). If the novel is an extended Rorschach test for the reader, then Bell sees Lester as a “berserk version of fundamental aspects of ourselves—of our fear of time, our programmed infatuation with death, our loneliness, our threatening appetites, our narcissistic isolation from the world and the reality of other people” (55). Bell observes that the story begins with Lester being “literally dispossessed,” making the novel “another of McCarthy’s meditations on the theme of homelessness” (58); Lester’s various dwellings become “parodies of home,” populated by his collection of corpses, which can be understood as his “ghoulish family” (61). Although he views the text as an “aimless and fragmented” object (53), Bell does well to synthesize Lester’s narrative arc with the intermittent chapters that are told from the perspective of various unnamed members of Sevier County. There is irony in Lester becoming “a part of the mythology of his region” (54) and thus gaining a place in the very community that so thoroughly and brutally rejected him. More than that, the scraps of information we can gather about those recalling Lester and his story reveal a community that is a patchwork of violent urges, “preoccupation[s] with death,” and “charged with sexual energy” (55). Remarkably, argues Bell, it is only Lester who possesses “the capacity to judge himself” because of “some kind of incomprehensible courage” (55). The flaying, eviscerating, and dissecting of Lester’s body at novel’s end is read by Bell in nuanced, sympathetic terms and expertly expressed: “We are most aware of Lester’s humanness at the point at which it is irrevocably extinguished” (67).The privilege of hindsight means that one can of course nitpick missed opportunities. Bell highlights the three unnamed men in the “mysterious parable” (22) that opens The Orchard Keeper, and goes on to locate John Wesley in the same graveyard at the end of the book—“the elm tree being sawed up in the beginning of the novel has in fact been felled here, in this cemetery” (31)—but he stops short of concluding that John Wesley is one of the men in the opening pages. This not only takes some of the sting out of Bell’s claims that The Orchard Keeper is a relatively formless novel but also strips John Wesley of his narrative powers, precluding the possibility of the story being “framed as his imaginative reconstruction of the past” (Luce 35). Elsewhere Bell rightly positions Suttree as a watershed in McCarthy’s career, with its “prevailing spirit . . . an oddly happy one” (83) and with Suttree’s “new order of experience” making him a “new character in McCarthy’s work” (72); he offers little, however, on the unique urban setting of Suttree, which is surprising given Bell’s attentiveness to landscapes and settings elsewhere. But these kinds of quibbles seem unfair and pedantic when one comes across lines such as the following, which could be etched into the bedrock of McCarthy studies and seem to prophesize core elements of novels (the Border Trilogy, The Road) that McCarthy had yet to write: building on the “humanistic value” that he sees in Suttree, Bell writes, “For McCarthy a belief in the reality of other people is the first principle of responsible existence, and that is not a theory for him but a vision, complete in itself, expressed not in discourse but in the creation of a world that we are compelled to believe in” (114).I’ll end where Bell begins. He concludes his preface with a fittingly visionary flourish: “With such a novelist critical discourse is hard to get started, but once it is started it seems destined to go on” (xiii). Here’s to the achievement of Vereen Bell, the one who did the hard work to get it all started. McCarthy’s first dedicated explorer, surveyor, cartographer. He might no longer lead the way, but he marked many rich inroads for those of us continuing to traverse McCarthy’s works into futures unknown.