Any Cormac McCarthy fans here ?

[bemildred]

24. Blood and time: Cormac McCarthy and the twilight of the West

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In places where life is harsh and cruel, in barren lands where human habitation finds only precarious purchase, McCarthy follows a causality strict and inevitable. As Guy Davenport wrote in a 1968 essay, every sentence in McCarthy's fiction conveys swift and significant action. “He does not waste a single word on his character's thoughts.” Such austerity may offend the self-appointed guardians of bourgeois consciousness, but book reviews leave little trace in the strata of literary history. What lasts are those monuments, like the pictographs and painted pebbles of the Pecos River people, like the stone water trough whose image closes No Country for Old Men, that are made to last ten thousand years:

You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I've read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. . . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise.

McCarthy takes the long view, and any reading of his work that fails to understand that, any reading that suggests that this most disciplined and rigorous novelist had any object in mind other than making a novel that will outlast our cities of the plains, has failed to reckon with his art.

Not all art will comfort us as we age, and McCarthy's least of all. His fiction, like so much of our oldest literature, is tragic, and as such is held together by the very warp of the world. Sometimes his subject is the tragedy of history, in which two laws equally just and true come into unavoidable and violent conflict. Sometimes it is that of transgression, as when a brother and sister come together in the darkness and out of that furtive grappling are undone. Most often it is the simple natural drama of predator and prey, of hawks and wolves, trappers and hunters and snake catchers and those who run dogs under the moon; the drama of muskrats and field mice and catfish, wild house cats aloft in the claws of owls, all of which fall prey to man, who hunts all things. In No Country for Old Men, we witness the drama of householders and peaceful folk who wish only to be left alone, but who are drawn into inevitable strife with the world's hidden powers. At its root, McCarthy's fiction arises from the tragedy of all wild creatures, of whatever is begotten, born, and dies, the tragedy of autonomous life in a world increasingly circumscribed by a rage for order and captivity. More than merely human. It is the tragedy of warm blood itself, of blood and time.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/02/0080935