Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001
Editorial| February 23 2023 Editor’s Introduction The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2023) 21 (1): 1. https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Editor’s Introduction. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 23 February 2023; 21 (1): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Cormac McCarthy Journal Search Advanced Search As I write this, The Passenger has been published, Stella Maris is right around the corner, and conversations about McCarthy’s newest work have started in earnest—in reviews, in classrooms, and on pages that will eventually make their way into future issues of this journal. The McCarthy Society dug into some initial discussions at conferences held in Dublin in June 2022 and Savannah in September 2022, and we hope to host a small symposium in Fall 2023 in order to further those inquiries. Stay tuned for details!This issue opens with Kevin Power’s keynote from the Dublin conference, “Babycinos at the End of the World: Cormac McCarthy and Parenthood.” (I wonder if this is the first time that “babycinos” has been a search term in the MLA Bibliography?) Conor Picken follows with a consideration of different parent-child dynamics in his article about Suttree and alcoholism. Jonathan and Rick Elmore take up... You do not currently have access to this content.
{"title":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Editorial| February 23 2023 Editor’s Introduction The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2023) 21 (1): 1. https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Editor’s Introduction. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 23 February 2023; 21 (1): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Cormac McCarthy Journal Search Advanced Search As I write this, The Passenger has been published, Stella Maris is right around the corner, and conversations about McCarthy’s newest work have started in earnest—in reviews, in classrooms, and on pages that will eventually make their way into future issues of this journal. The McCarthy Society dug into some initial discussions at conferences held in Dublin in June 2022 and Savannah in September 2022, and we hope to host a small symposium in Fall 2023 in order to further those inquiries. Stay tuned for details!This issue opens with Kevin Power’s keynote from the Dublin conference, “Babycinos at the End of the World: Cormac McCarthy and Parenthood.” (I wonder if this is the first time that “babycinos” has been a search term in the MLA Bibliography?) Conor Picken follows with a consideration of different parent-child dynamics in his article about Suttree and alcoholism. Jonathan and Rick Elmore take up... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134941967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0034
Rick Elmore, J. Elmore
abstract:While scholars agree that John Grady Cole is central to the meaning of All the Pretty Horses, the search for the truth of his character has largely ignored the role of truth in the novel. In this article, the authors argue that one finds in McCarthy’s text a battle over the nature truth, John Grady’s philosophical realism at odds with the world’s moral and metaphysical relativism. To follow the theme of truth in All the Pretty Horses is, the authors contend, to see that, for McCarthy, moral and metaphysical relativism threaten the possibility of a good and just world, this threat illuminating not only the arc of John Grady’s quest but McCarthy’s hope for society itself.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0073
R. Wyllie
abstract:Scholars debate whether Anton Chigurh, the villain of No Country for Old Men, is a personification of neoliberal capitalism or motivated by philosophical obsessions with death and fate. This article argues for the philosophical Chigurh, who among five military veterans in the novel seems least assimilated to markets and the logic of moneymaking. The article explores connections between war trauma and fixation upon mortal fate, as well as the novel’s themes of military honor and atavistic violence. The author’s argument re-specifies McCarthy’s critique of neoliberalism in the novel, which appears in the limited moral imaginations of other characters who refuse or otherwise fail to conceptualize a killer without economic gain motives.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0054
W. Sanborn
abstract:Cormac McCarthy’s ninth novel No Country for Old Men is at points a thriller, a shoot-em-up, a novel of violence, a novel of the Border Southwest, but at its heart, it is a novel of the Vietnam War. Set in 1980, the text is populated by veterans of the war in Vietnam, and even those not explicitly identified as such carry the Vietnam War in their person and psyche. Llewelyn Moss and Carson Wells are sniper and Special Forces, respectively, while Anton Chigurh is too trained to be anything but a special operator. All three return from war to participate in war—a war based on the narco-economy and the violence secondary to such. In the work, each of the three uses military-taught skills to survive or not as the author conjoins each veteran’s postwar life with his peri-war training. Subversively, McCarthy creates a fourth Vietnam War veteran though the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a veteran of World War II. Bell’s psychological makeup, his guilt, his regret, his self-ostracization, is that of the Vietnam veteran. But, while McCarthy creates a novel of the Vietnam War, the Coen brothers’ film of the same title marginalizes the Vietnam War and cuts the theme from the film. The novel could not exist without the Vietnam War, but the film can, and does.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.20.2.0089
S. Peebles, B. Sheehan
ABSTRACT:In this interview, Stacey Peebles talks to Beowulf Sheehan, the preeminent author photographer working today, about his experience photographing writers. In particular, Sheehan describes the 2014 photo session in which he traveled to Santa Fe and photographed Cormac McCarthy, both at the Santa Fe Institute and at McCarthy’s home. The occasion was McCarthy’s forthcoming novel The Passenger—which would not be published, as it turned out, until 2022, and then as two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. Sheehan talks about the relationship of text, author, and image; how he approached the exciting challenge of photographing McCarthy; and his own thoughts about McCarthy’s work.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.20.2.0136
Ian R. Gibson
ABSTRACT:The following article considers a peculiarity of composition that unites the books of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Its claim is that the narrative world of these texts is made to reflect the reverse order in which the trilogy itself was composed, and that the uncanny foreknowledge the reader encounters in the early story is both a by-product of this composition process and a meditation on its effect on the reality of the narrative world. The result is a kind of reality in which effects are permitted to precede their causes. To make sense of this, I propose a reading of the Border Trilogy that simultaneously considers McCarthy’s supposedly contradictory influences: the scientific and the religious—and, more specifically, quantum entanglement and biblical typology. It is my claim that by examining both of these influences together—something that scholarship on McCarthy has been surprisingly reluctant to do—we arrive at a new picture of the kind of world that the author takes to be possible. In what follows, I offer a close reading of a connection between two scenes, and argue for the reliance of the larger trilogy, in terms of both form and content, on the interdependence of apparent opposites.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.20.2.0108
Dianne C. Luce, Zachary M Turpin
ABSTRACT:In this article, we reprint McCarthy’s interviews from newspapers of East Tennessee and Lexington, Kentucky, including five newly discovered ones, all granted between 1968 and 1980, when McCarthy was still a relatively unknown author. In contrast with his usual reticence, these pieces provide candid glimpses of McCarthy’s ideas about his writing. Together, they suggest that McCarthy was often willing to be interviewed when it would please his friends and neighbors.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.20.2.0178
C. Warren
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Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.20.2.0158
Heath Wing
ABSTRACT:This article argues that violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is attributed to an allegory of sovereignty found in the work. As such, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of state of exception—a sovereign space of suspended law—is the common denominator for violence in the novel, which reduces human life to an animalized existence known as bare life and accounts for the novel’s unanthropocentric viewpoint. The state of exception is first enacted by way of the illegal scalp-hunting contract exchanged between Governor Trias and the Glanton gang, which is mediated by the judge. Furthermore, Holden’s place of privilege at the governor’s side in his palace demonstrates allegorically the relationship of the king and his court jester-fool, thus signaling the sovereign’s need for chaos and violence for validation. Ultimately, this article interprets Blood Meridian as a novel that can be understood as a biopolitical metaphor for the modern nation-state.
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