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Borders of Destiny
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20675 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
4,378 Words |
| Author
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Tom Pilkington
Tom Pilkington is University Scholar and Regents Professor of
English at Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas. He
is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Critical
Essays on the Western American Novel and State of Mind: Texas
Literature and Culture. He is a former president of the
Western Literature Association. |
One does not often hear such lavish praise for a writer from the American West. Saul Bellow gushes over his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences." The real hero of his novels, writes Shelby Foote, "is the English language." "He must be acknowledged as a talent equal to William Faulkner," judges Madison Smartt Bell. Newsweek calls him a "literary lion in the desert…the best kept secret in American letters." The New York Times Magazine says he "may be the best unknown novelist in America."
These and other encomiums recently have been laid at the feet of Cormac McCarthy. But like most stories of discovery and triumph, this one features plenty of twists and turns. McCarthy, who was born in New England and grew up in Knoxville, Tenessee, has lived for nearly two decades in El Paso, Texas. So far as I know, New England does not claim him as literary son, but the South most certainly does. To be sure, McCarthy's first four novels (beginning in 1965) are set in the Deep South. The lone book-length critical study of his work to date, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy by Vereen Bell, published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1988, attempts to locate him in the southern literary tradition. Moreover, the current issue of Southern Quarterly is devoted entirely to a consideration of McCarthy's fiction.
Still, for at least the last decade, McCarthy has been concerned with things western (and Latin American) rather than southern. The shift westward was probably inevitable. "I've always been interested in the Southwest," McCarthy has said. "There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West."
McCarthy as a Western Writer
For all that, McCarthy must be considered a literary hybrid. In his formative years he was steeped in southern literature and culture, and the influence on him of southern writers like Faulkner--especially Faulkner--is clear. The reader may be excused if he concludes that McCarthy's most recent fiction was composed by the illegitimate offspring of Louis L'Amour and Flannery O'Connor-and that the Marquis de Sade was the delivering physician. Like L'Amour, and Flannery O'Connor--and the delivering physician. Like L'Amour, McCarthy has a remarkable talent for painting action pictures in words. His resemblance to O'Connor (and Faulkner) seems twofold: First, there is his concern with the most vexing of metaphysical questions, and second, his taste for the flashier aspects of
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