Cormac McCarthy Journal and Penn State University Press

Starting in 2015, the Cormac McCarthy Journal will be published by Penn State University Press. This is great news for McCarthy scholarship. I think also this move demonstrates the high quality of the contributions already published in the journal thus far.

Stacey Peebles, editor of the journal, comments on the announcement:

I’m happy to announce that beginning in 2015, The Cormac McCarthy Journal will be published by Penn State University Press, which will be a boon for us in terms of design, prestige, visibility, production assistance, and availability in libraries and databases like JSTOR. Although our upcoming 2014 issue will be published before Penn State UP takes over our hard-copy production, we have already worked together to create a website for CMJ on their journals page. Clicking “Submissions” on that site will take you to our new online submissions website for the journal.

Although I’m still happy to field inquiries from my gmail address as I’ve done in the past, I’ll now direct submissions to the website, as well as use the site for readers’ reports as much as possible. We also have a new email address specifically for the journal. Access to previously published articles will soon be available through JSTOR (and hopefully MUSE) links on our Penn State UP website. When those links have been established, we’ll take down our old journal website, which has been hosted by the Texas Digital Library.

Members of The Cormac McCarthy Society who pay for “Membership with Journal” will continue to receive a subscription at no extra cost, and Penn State UP will handle subscriptions for non-member individuals as well as institutions.

This has all been possible because the community of McCarthy scholars has produced such great work over the years, and because there’s so much still to be done! Thanks to everyone who has supported CMJ by submitting work, commenting on others’ essays, subscribing, and reading with interest.

Here’s to keeping the critical conversation going!

See also,

• Cormac McCarthy Journal page at Penn State University Press website
• Current website for the Journal (latest issue: vol. 10, no. 2)
• Stacey Peebles' original announcement at CormacMcarthy.com
• Online site for submissions to the Journal 

Running Toward a Reckoning

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it.

A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

–Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, 5.

J. Frank Dobie and Cormac McCarthy

Sometime in 1987, a courtly, middle-aged gentleman approached the front desk at the Special Collections library at the University of Texas at El Paso. The man was well known by this time to those who worked at the library. He'd been coming in regularly over the past decade, doing research on Texas and Mexico and the Southwest. Some people knew that he was a writer, knew that he'd even won a MacArthur "genius" grant for his work—although few readers had heard of him and he toiled in obscurity.

At the help desk, speaking in his a soft Tennessee accent, the man asked for a slender volume kept in the reserve stacks, housed inside a red pamphlet box. The item is a reprint from an article originally published in the American Hereford Journal in 1954. Its title is, simply, "Babi'cora," and its author is the great folklorist of the Southwest, J. Frank Dobie of Texas. . . .

The researcher at UTEP in 1987, Cormac McCarthy, paid very close attention to Dobie's Babicora article. McCarthy arranged to have the story photocopied, and he made exacting pencil marks in the margins of particularly interesting passages. McCarthy went on to make substantial use of Dobie's work as he fashioned his novel in progress--a book that would be published seven years later as The Crossing.

–Steven L. Davis, "Mining Dobie: Cormac McCarthy's Debt to J. Frank Dobie in The Crossing," Southwestern American Literature 38.2 (Spring 2013): 52.

The Caravan of Carnival Folk That Begins Child of God

From the opening scene of the novel, which is the setting for the origin of Lester Ballard's eminent descent into degeneracy:

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truck bed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinned and gesturing to the others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. 

–Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, 3.

Nightmarish Narrative Logic

Edwin T. Arnold's apt comment on the nightmarish narrative logic of Outer Dark:

This story seems derived from the world of folklore or dream, peopled as it often is by mysterious denizens and ruled by some nightmare logic which makes one question at what level of reality the story operates.

Stone Figures Quarried from the Architecture of an Older Time

It was late afternoon when they set forth again, out from the town, the wheels rasping in the sand, back down the yellow road. Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew.

On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 77.

Strung Out in Silhouette Against the Sun

The first sentence of Outer Dark (which I think sets the tone and ethos of the narrative that follows):

THEY CRESTED OUT on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a moment and going on again strung out in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 4. Capitalization and emphasis in the original typography.

Wars and Rumors of Wars In the Border Trilogy

Evenin Mr Johnson, he said.
Evenin son.
What's the news?
The old man shook his head. He leaned across the table to the windowsill where the radio sat and turned it off. It aint news no more, he said. Wars and rumors of wars.

–Cities of the Plain, 61.

Commenting on this scene, John Wegner argues that "War is the central thesis to McCarthy's southwestern works" (73).

He follows this assertion with a survey of the wars that frame the Border Trilogy:

The Crossing begins between World War I and World War II with American on the verge of the Depression, and Cities of the Plain essentially ends in 1952 as America's presence in Korea grows. John Grady Cole's father returns from a World War II p.o.w. camp sick and dying; The Crossing ends with Billy's witness of the 'strange false sunrise . . . of the Trinity Test'; and Cities of the Plain begins with John Grady's drinking with Troy, a war veteran. 

After pointing out the prominent role of the Mexican Revolution on the one hand, and America's involvement in World War II on the other, Wegner notes that "these two wars act as historical frames for the [Border Trilogy], defining and mapping the world in which these characters must live and survive" (74).

–John Wegner, "Wars and Rumors of Wars in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy," in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, 73-74. (Kindle)

The Bloody Borderlands of Blood Meridian

The novel recounts the adventures of a young runaway, the kid, who stumbles into the company of the Glanton Gang, outlaws and scalp-hunters who cleared Indians from the Texas-Mexico borderlands during the late 1840's under contract to territorial governors. Reinvisioning the ideology of manifest destiny upon which the American dream was founded, Blood Meridian depicts the borderland between knowledge and power, between progress and dehumanization, between history and myth and, most importantly, between physical violence and the violence of language. 

–From Rick Wallach's précis of Blood Meridian.

The Road and the Re-Written Myth of the American West

The most recent issue of the open-source European Journal of American Studies is devoted to "postfrontier writing." I was happy to see McCarthy and The Road included as a dialogue partner in the discussion.

Title: "Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Rewriting the Myth of the American West"
Author: Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz, a professor at the Universidad de Duesto in Bilbao, Spain.
Source: European Journal of American Studies ("postfrontier writing" issue, 2011)

Abstract:

This article argues that Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road (2006), marks a clear departure from the interests and aesthetics he showed in his earlier works of fiction. Apart from the fact that the Rhode Island-born writer embarks for a first time in his long career on a popular sci-fi sub-genre such as the post-apocalyptic novel, the book exhibits a number of thematic, structural, and stylistic patterns which differ quite radically from those found in his earlier novels. Most likely influenced by some recent events that have deeply shaken the country and others affecting his personal life, McCarthy can be seen to abandon the landscapes and vernacular rhythms that had become the staple of his artistic performance.

By comparing The Road to some of his earlier fiction, the article attempts to establish where those elements of discontinuity become most apparent. In spite of his deadpan naturalism and rather laconic language use, the author manages to keep his readers on their toes thanks to the novel’s much accomplished suspense concerning the fate of the two protagonists. The denouement of the story also strikes those familiar with his fiction as unusual. Still, the second half of the article reveals that, despite all these departures from his previous aesthetics and philosophical wanderings, there are also a number of elements in The Road that speak of his commitment to some values and myths that have contributed to his reputation and fame.

Outline:

1. Introduction
2. Elements of Disruption
3. Unusual denouement
4. Elements of Continuity
5. Conclusions

Conclusion:

My analysis should have made it clear, then, that his treatment of landscapes, human relations, and language itself is largely refashioned in this work. Probably, it is the ending of The Road that is most likely to catch his most faithful readers unawares. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to say whether this novel signals a definitive turning point in his literary career, for the American West is still very much present in his art and one could even read it as the culmination of his legacy of re-mythologizing the American West.

Like Fairybook Beasts

Spectators drifted away, the narrow street emptied. Some of the Americans had wandered into the cold waters of the stream and were splashing about and they clambered dripping into the street and stood dark and smoking and apocalyptic in the dim lampfall.

The night was cold and they shambled steaming through the cobbled town like fairybook beasts and it had begun to rain again.

–Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 190.

The First and Last Line of Blood Meridian

See the child.

He says that he will never die.

 –Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, pp. 3 and 327 (in the 1992 Vintage edition).

Ad for Cormac McCarthy's "New" Novel

From an ad that ran in the New York Times on September 26, 1986:

Commentary from the NYT:

Cormac McCarthy's second novel, “Outer Dark,” is a grim, desolate piece of fiction. It's a grinding story about a woman, Rinthy, who bears her brother's baby, only to have him leave the infant in the woods to die. You don't get a sense of the novel's dark subject matter in this perky advertisement, though. It focuses instead on McCarthy's rugged good looks (he was 35 at the time), and even “pops” his head, giving this ad an ironic, cheerful, proto-Spy magazine feel. The blurbs, mostly from Midwestern book sections, are cliché-strewn even by book-ad standards.

(ht)

Cormac McCarthy Journal vol. 8, no. 1 (Fall 2010)

The Fall 2010 issue of the Cormac McCarthy Journal is now available. With Stacey Peebles taking over as editor of the journal, this issue continues work on The Road (which was the subject of the previous issue) and also includes articles on Sunset Limited, McCarthy's western fiction, as well as a number of reviews interacting with McCarthy scholarship.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction (Stacey Peebles)

God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Erik Wielenberg (1-16)

Prometheus Hits The Road: Revising the Myth
Daniel Luttrull (17-28)

“Minimalist Tragedy”: Nietzschean Thought in McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited
William Quirk (29-46)

A Frontier Myth Turns Gothic: Blood Meridian
Ronja Vieth (47-62)

Cormac McCarthy, Violence, and Borders:
The Map as Code for What Is Not Contained
Daniel Weiss (63-77)

A Note on a Review of Blood Meridian by Robert Bolaño
Samuel Sotillo (78-79)

Don Graham Does Cormac Doing Oprah
Jim Welsh (80-81)

Book Reviews

• Luce, Dianne C. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Review by David Cremean (82-85)
• Beck, John. Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature. Review by Rick Wallach (86-87)
• McGilchrist, Megan. The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier. Review by Nell Sullivan (88-91)
• Appalachian Heritage: A Literary Quarterly of the Southern Appalachians. Special issue on Cormac McCarthy. Review by Allen Josephs (92-93)

Contributor Biographies (94-95)

See also,

• Table of Contents and Links to the PDFs of the articles
• The Cormac McCarthy Society
• Read: The Sunset Limited (GBks) (Amz)
• Read: The Road (GBks) (Amz) (Kindle)
• Read: Blood Meridian (GBks) (Amz) (Kindle)

Novels For Students Features "All the Pretty Horses"

The latest volume (36) of Gale's Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels is out.

Novels for Students is a literary student textbook aimed at high school and undergraduates that introduces and seeks to contextualize a selection of literary works in each volume (cf. this fuller description of the series).

In volume 36, they feature McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. In their "Criticism" section, they reprint my article on McCarthy's use of dreams that was published in the Explicator a few years ago.

The McCarthy section looks like it would be helpful in teaching this novel (though, obviously I'm biased regarding the quality of at least one of the critical excerpts!).

If you're interested in reading my selection, here are the bibliographic deets:

"Dreams as a Structural Framework in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses." In The Explicator 66.3 (Spring 2008), 166-170. Reprinted in Novels For Students, Volume 36 (Detroit: Gale-Cengage, 2011), 35-37. (full text) (pdf)

How Many Cormac McCarthies Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

Q: HOW MANY CORMAC MCCARTHIES DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB?

A: Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot, bright bulb and twist it dead. The other two follow, smoking, and whisper about what is to come: the treacherous scramble in wet woolen darkness, the fight to fill that space with light. One of them, the youngest, cradles the thin bowl of glass in his hands like a baby foal born too soon―partly out of gentleness, partly as if to shield it from the mare’s desperate inquiring eyes.

The men walk to the bulb. The Remover’s shadow blackens as he approaches it. A quick unnatural lunge.

Then all is dark.

-via (ht)

Violence and Real Life

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy says philosophically. "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

—Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" New York Times (April 19, 1992)

The Sunset Limited (HBO) Trailer

HBO's production of The Sunset Limited is slated for Feb 12. This is my favorite teaser trailer:



The longer trailer provides a glimpse of the dynamic that Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and White (Tommy Lee Jones) will have in the film:



It looks like this will be a quality production (w/ perfect casting, IMO).

See also,

• The Sunset Limited page at HBO's website (they have clips, behind the scenes footage, and interviews).

A Glimpse at HBO's Production of Sunset Limited

Only good can come of this:

I've wondered what kind of relationship Jones and McCarthy have (if any), and an LA Times article sheds a little light on that and Jones' role in this production. Melissa Maerz writes,

Sitting at HBO's offices in Manhattan, looking serious in his long black trench coat, Jones recalls what drew him to "The Sunset Limited," which was first produced by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006. (McCarthy, who rarely does interviews, wasn't available for comment.) Jones, who has known McCarthy for years, meeting through a mutual friend, "Lonesome Dove" screenwriter Bill Wittliff, says the play reminded him of discussions he used to have with other students when he was at Harvard. "We'd sit around for hours talking about things like, is the theater really dead? Is Big Ten football better than Southwest Conference? What is the effect of television on the office of the presidency?" says Jones. "You're more open when you're younger."

He pauses, looking out the window. "I don't talk to anybody like that now," he says, his voice a little colder. "I know what I think, and I expect that you know what you think. I'm not gonna argue with you."

I'm looking forward to seeing this adaptation.

James Franco to Direct Blood Meridian?

From CNN: 

Meanwhile, Franco also hopes to take on Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" in 2012 and is currently in the process of making a deal to write the script and direct the project.

And Showbiz411:

“As I Lay Dying” isn’t the only writer-director project Franco’s involved in. He tells me he’s also in the process of making a deal with Scott Rudin to write and direct Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” in 2012.

Maybe. From the rest of those reports, it looks like Franco has a number of other things on his plate. 

So, we'll see if the Blood Meridian bit pans out.