From an interview in 1992, shortly before the release of All the Pretty Horses:
"You haven't come to the end yet . . . This may be nothing but a snare and a delusion to draw you in, thinking that all will be well."
The Ugly Intertextual Fact
The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.—Cormac McCarthy, quoted in "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," New York Times (April 19, 1992)
Cormac McCarthy Journal vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 2008)
Volume 6 of the Cormac McCarthy Journal was dedicated to discussing The Road, McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning, post-apocalyptic novel.
Noting the striking variety of perspective, approach, and method present in the articles, John Cant, the editor for this issue, notes that
There is nothing surprising in that of course, but what is truly astonishing is that they are all able to demonstrate convincingly that all their tropes, images and ideas are to be found in McCarthy’s text in ways which make one sure that he is aware of them himself, that they are not unconscious influences. From Job to Schopenhauer and Derrida, from the Christian mystics to Steinbeck and Ford, from the ‘locomotive’ imagery of death to the painterly imagery of still life, McCarthy seems to know and revere them all. What other living writer displays such erudition?Table of Contents:
Editor’s Notes
John Cant
Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millennium
Dianne C. Luce (6-12)
Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited: Dialogue of Life and Death: A Review
of the Chicago Production
Dianne C. Luce (13-21)
Another Sense of Ending: The Keynote Address to the
Knoxville Conference
Jay Ellis (22-38)
The Route and Roots of The Road
Wesley G. Morgan (39-47)
The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road
Chris Walsh (48-54)
The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-
Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Tim Edwards (55-61)
Full Circle: The Road Rewrites The Orchard Keeper
Louis Palmer (62-68)
Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Phillip A. Snyder (69-86)
Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism
Linda Woodson (87-99)
Compassionate McCarthy?: The Road and Schopenhauerian Ethics
Euan Gallivan (100-06)
Sighting Leviathan: Ritualism, Daemonism and the Book of Job in McCarthy’s
Latest Works
John Vanderheide (107-120)
“The lingering scent of divinity” in The Sunset Limited and The Road
Susan J. Tyburski (121-28)
“Golden chalice, good to house a god”: Still Life in The Road
Randal S. Wilhelm (129-49)
Contributor Biographies (150)
See also,
- Link to the full PDF of the Journal
- Cormac McCarthy Society
- Read The Road: (GBks) (Amazon)
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