READING DATES: BOOK CRITIQUE - POETRY ASSIGNMENT POEM DUE:
3/17/08 - PAGES 1-70
3/19/08 - PAGES 70-140
3/21/08 - PAGES 140-185
3/26/08 - PAGES 185-287
POEM DUE: RD: 3/26/08
PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE
FINAL TYPED FOOT (3) LT’S
WITH (3) VISUALS: 3/28/08
TEST: 3/28/08
PULITZER PRIZE - 2007 FICTION: For distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000). Awarded to The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf).
TASK: STUDENTS WILL READ THE PULITZER PRIZE (2007) BOOK - THE ROAD BY CORMAC MCCARTHY TO ELUCIDATE HIS STYLE, PLOT, FRAME, USE OF LITERARY DEVICES - THREE MINIMUM - AS WELL AS (TONE), AND HISTORICAL VIEW OF (PAST - PRESENT - AND FUTURE). THROUGH (EXPOSITION - RISING ACTION - CLIMAX - FALLING ACTION - RESOLUTION), OF THIS AWARD WINNING FICTION PROSE, AND THROUGH CONTENT KNOWLEDGE , STUDENTS WILL CREATE AN EIGHTEEN (18) LINE FREE VERSE SELF-ANALYSIS POEM OF THEIR PAST - PRESENT - AND FUTURE (PHYSICALLY, MENTALLY, AND EMOTIONALLY - WITH GOALS), DEMONSTRATING MINIMUM OF THREE LINKS WITH LITERARY DEVICES TO MCCORMICK’S WORK - THE ROAD, USING THEIR OWN FOOT SHAPE TO CREATE THE FRAME FOR THEIR POEM, AS WELL AS, CLASS DISCUSSIONS OF READINGS, AND A TEST AT THE CONCLUSION OF THEIR READING.
Short Biography: Cormac McCarthy: Cormac McCarthy (born July 20, 1933, Rhode Island) is a highly acclaimed American novelist. The author of eight Southern gothic and Western novels, his work is often compared to that of William Faulkner. McCarthy’s family moved to Knoxville in 1937, and McCarthy spent some time at the University of Tennessee and in the US Air Force in the 1950s before eventually marrying and settling in Tennessee. He published his first novel, The Orchard Keepers, in 1965. It was followed by Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree. These early works were all set in southern Appalachia.
In the mid-1970s McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas and 1985’s Blood Meridian found the author switching the setting of his books to the Southwestern US. Often regarded as McCarthy’s finest work, the novel tells the story of a teenager who finds himself riding with a vicious gang of outlaws who are being paid by the Mexican government to bring back Indian scalps. The book unflinchingly depicts horrific acts of violence committed by Americans, Indians and Mexicans alike and, indeed, one of McCarthy’s underlying themes appears to be that the West was won through bloodshed. Critics have noted strong gnostic elements in Blood Meridian.
McCarthy currently resides in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Despite several awards and a number of positive reviews, McCarthy was not widely read until the publication of his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992). The book, the first part of what McCarthy calls “the Border trilogy,” spent some time on bestseller lists and won the National Book Award. It was later made into a film. The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998) rounded out the trilogy.
Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth (“Cormac McCarthy - Books”).
Many contemporary writers who enjoy an academic following are themselves academics, or are at least willing to address academic audiences through public readings or interviews. However, along with other notorious hermits like J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy is unusual in that he evades the spotlight. Unlike Salinger and Pynchon, McCarthy’s reputation in the academic world and with a widespread general audience has come about only in the late 1980s, even though the first of his seven novels was published in 1965. The delay in recognition for McCarthy is perhaps due to the fact that he does not fit comfortably among his contemporaries; his writing seems to connect best with an older tradition, one which explores the often tragic implications of the rugged individual trying to survive the hostile North American frontier. While narrating the lives of his rough-hewn outsiders, McCarthy subtly reveals a profound awareness of literary tradition; he is frequently compared to William Faulkner and Herman Melville. Yet McCarthy’s ability to tell stories, notably his command of descriptive language and his unfailing ear for dialogue, ultimately supersedes the allusive aspects of his work (Cormac).
“Cormac McCarthy - Biography.” 2008. Biography - Authors. 12 March 2008. http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4573/ McCarthy-Cormac.html
“Cormac McCarthy - Books.” Books of the Times. 2007. 12 March 2008.
http:www.biblio,com/authors
CITIES OF THE PLAIN Volume 3, The Border Trilogy By Cormac McCarthy 292 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.
BOOK REVIEW - CRITIQUE.
Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, Cities of the Plain, not only completes his ”Border Trilogy” but also reveals the grand design behind it: It brings together the heroes of ’ All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, and in doing so recapitulates the themes of loss and exile laid out in those earlier books.
Once again, the border between Mexico and the United States is used as a metaphor for the boundaries between the old and the new, the past and the future. Once again, the Old West — of cowboys, trail drives and unaccommodated nature — is memorialized as a vanishing time and place. And once again, a ”doomed enterprise” violently divides the characters’ lives into a before and after.
Although Mr. McCarthy has been hailed by critics as a great American original and compared to Faulkner, Twain and Melville, he is actually a highly derivative writer. This quality has become increasingly clear as his early, more disjunctive work, like ”Blood Meridian” and ”Outer Dark,” has given way to increasingly accessible, straightforward narratives.
In fact, ”The Border Trilogy” gives us two McCarthys. The first one emerges as a direct descendant of Hemingway and gives us some powerful storytelling, delivered in laconic if oddly familiar prose. (”Troy had climbed out of the truck and he walked back and stood smoking quietly and looking at the tire and the tube and the Mexicans.”) The second McCarthy emerges as a ham-handed Faulkner pretender and gives us lots of portentous meditations on time and nature and fate. (”They drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name.”)
Happily for the reader, the Hemingway-inspired McCarthy controls the better part of Cities of the Plain.. Although the book occasionally lapses into the pretentious mumbo jumbo that made The Crossing such a lugubrious read, ”Cities” showcases Mr. McCarthy’s gifts as an old-fashioned storyteller; it is, arguably, his most readable, emotionally engaging novel yet. He seems to have shrugged off the chilly detachment that so often turned his characters into faceless pawns moving (or moved) across an epic chessboard: they may still fall prey to fate and chance and things beyond their control, but they now elicit our sympathy and our concern.
As Cities of the Plain opens, John Grady Cole (the youthful, Huck Finn-like hero of All the Pretty Horses) and Billy Parham (the picaresque hero of The Crossing) are both working as ranch hands on the Mac McGovern ranch in Orogrande, N. M. Since the end of World War II, the old cowboy life has begun to recede: there are now cities — well, towns — where once there was nothing but open space, and cattle ranching is becoming a lost way of life.
John Grady, we learn, is still a callow, idealistic boy intent on following his heart. Billy, now the veteran of several hazardous crossings into Mexico, has become an older, more sober-minded cowboy who looks fondly on John Grady as an impetuous younger brother.
When John Grady falls head-over-heels in love with a young, epileptic prostitute named Magdalena, Billy counsels caution, but his efforts will be in vain. Even the threats of Magdalena’s possessive pimp, Eduardo, cannot dissuade John Grady. He concocts a plan to spirit Magdalena away from the whorehouse and take her across the border. The two plan to marry and move into a small cabin that he has painstakingly restored.
As so often happens in Mr. McCarthy’s novels, John Grady’s quixotic plan will devolve into a violent confrontation, one delineated by Mr. McCarthy in sharp, agonizing, blood-drenched detail. Just as John Grady’s romance with Magdalena recalls the doomed romance he conducted in Pretty Horses with another Mexican girl, so other incidents in this novel reverberate with echoes of events from the trilogy’s two preceding volumes. A hunt for a pack of wild dogs that have been killing calves on the McGovern ranch recalls Billy’s hunt for a wolf in ”The Crossing,” and a vicious attempt to implicate John Grady in a murder recalls a similar setup scheme in Pretty Horses (Michiko 1-3).
Michiko, Kakutani. “Books of the Times - Moving Along The Border Between Past and Future.” New York Times. May 22, 1998. .
FOR A CRITIQUE OF THE ROAD: PRINT OUT THIS CITE AND BRING TO CLASS: MARCH 19, 2008.
Kennedy, William. “Left Behind.” The New York Times - Sunday Book Review. October 8, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/books/review/Kennedy
THE ROAD By Cormac McCarthy. 241 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. - Book Critique.
McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.” Forest fires are still being ignited (by lightning? other fires?) after what seems to be a decade since that early morning — 1:17 a.m., no day, month or year specified — when the sky opened with “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” The survivors (not many) of the barbaric wars that followed the event wear masks against the perpetual cloud of soot in the air. Bloodcults are consuming one another. Cannibalism became a major enterprise after the food gave out. Deranged chanting became the music of the new age.
A man in his late 40’s and his son, about 10, both unnamed, are walking a desolated road. Perhaps it is the fall, but the soot has blocked out the sun, probably everywhere on the globe, and it is snowing, very cold, and getting colder. The man and boy cannot survive another winter and are heading to the Gulf Coast for warmth, on the road to a mountain pass — unnamed, but probably Lookout Mountain on the Tennessee-Georgia border. It is through the voice of the father that McCarthy delivers his vision of end times. The son, born after the sky opened, has no memory of the world that was. His father gave him lessons about it but then stopped: “He could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.” The boy’s mother committed suicide rather than face starvation, rape and the cannibalizing of herself and the family, and she mocks her husband for going forward. But he is a man with a mission. When he shoots a thug who tries to murder the boy (their first spoken contact with another human in a year) he tells his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” And when he washes the thug’s brains out of his son’s hair he ruminates: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.” He strokes the boy’s head and thinks: “Golden chalice, good to house a god.”
McCarthy does not say how or when God entered this man’s being and his son’s, nor does he say how or why they were chosen to survive together for 10 years, to be among the last living creatures on the road. The man believes the world is finished and that he and the boy are “two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” But the man is a zealot, pushing himself and the boy to the edge of death to achieve their unspecified destination, persisting beyond will in a drive that is instinctual, or primordial, and bewildering to himself. But the tale is as biblical as it is ultimate, and the man implies that the end has happened through godly fanaticism. The world is in a nuclear winter, though that phrase is never used. The lone allusion to our long-prophesied holy war with its attendant nukes is when the man thinks: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”
They keep walking, the man coughing blood, dying, envying the dead. They are starving, stalked by the unseen, by armed thugs who travel by truck, and in terror they see an army of “marchers” who appear on the road four abreast and epitomize what the apocalypse has wrought: “All wearing red scarves at their necks. … Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. … Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. … The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings. … Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.
And the boy asks, “Were they the bad guys?”
“Yes, they were the bad guys.”
“There’s a lot of them, those bad guys.”
“Yes there are. But they’re gone.”
The overarching theme in McCarthy’s work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter. Had this novel continued his pattern, that band of marching thugs would have been the focus — as it was with the apocalyptic horsemen of death in his second novel, “Outer Dark,” or the blood-mad scalp-hunters in his masterpiece, “Blood Meridian,” or the psychopathic killer in his recent novel, “No Country for Old Men.” But evil victorious is not this book’s theme. McCarthy changes the odds to favor the man and boy, who for a decade have survived death by fire and ice, and also cannibalism, which has become the most grievous manifestation of evil’s waning days. In the cellar of an antebellum home they discover naked slaves of a new order, people who were ambushed on the road and then kept alive as food. One man’s legs and thighs have been cut away, his hips cauterized by fire; and he lives on. When six of the cannibals return to the house the man and boy barely escape the same fate. Hiding, afraid to breathe, the father tells the boy it’s going to be O.K. He says that often.
The boy asks: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?”
“No. Of course not. …”
“No matter what.”
“No. No matter what.”
“Because we’re the good guys.”
“Yes.”
“And we’re carrying the fire.”
“And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.”
“The Road” is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses — short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him, coming after “No Country for Old Men,” published last year. That was also tight and fast, an extremely violent thriller with the energy of his sentences and a philosophical sheriff lifting it out of the genre; but in the McCarthy canon that book seems like a Graham Greene “entertainment” alongside ambitious work like “The Road.” He is said to have other novels in unfinished drafts, so perhaps he will revert to grandiloquence in those to come. But on the basis of “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road” it does seem that he has put aside the linguistic excesses and the philosophizing for which he has been both venerated and mocked — those Faulknerian convolutions, the Melvillean sermonizing — and opted for terse dialogue and spartan narrative, a style he inherited from another of his ancestors, Hemingway, and long ago made his own.
The accessibility of this book, the love between father and son expressed in their quicksilver conversations, and the pathos of their story will make the novel popular, perhaps beyond “All the Pretty Horses,” which had a love story and characters you might befriend and not run from, and which delivered McCarthy out of cult status and onto the best-seller list. “The Road” is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization — “the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.” Money and gold mean nothing, nor do government, education, books, politics, history, friends, home. The pilgrimage is plotless but it races with tension, a sequence of enemy encounters or sightings, the perpetual danger from the killing weather, huddling under blanket and tarp, endlessly gathering firewood, confronting mysteries the dead world presents to a man seeking (and finding) water and food in the deserted houses, barns and boats that survived the firestorms. The father is ingenious in understanding how the natural and fabricated worlds function; and also lucky, as he modestly tells the boy.
But that luck is providential, for “The Road,” in addition to being a nonpareil vision of an apocalyptic landscape, is also a messianic parable, with man and boy walking prophetically by rivers, in caves, on mountaintops and across the wilderness in the spiritual spoor of biblical prophets — Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, to name a few. Elijah, herald of the Messiah, who will return on the Day of Judgment, turns up as a destitute straggler who looks like “a pile of rags fallen off a cart,” and the boy insists on feeding him. He says his name is “Ely.” In one of the longest conversations in the novel the father talks to Ely about being the last man on earth and says that nobody would know it
“It wouldnt make any difference,” Ely says. “When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”
“I guess God would know it. Is that it?” the man asks.
“There is no God,” Ely says.
“No?”
“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
When the man suggests the boy is a god, Ely says: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing. … Things will be better when everybody’s gone.” As a kicker to his doomsaying he adds that even death will die. “He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: Where did everybody go?”
Who knew Elijah did stand-up?
The man and boy keep heading south and do reach the ocean, which the boy heard was blue, but it is as gray with ash as the rest of the world — a dead sea. And the Gulf Coast is as cold as Tennessee. When they capture a man who stole their goods the father leaves him naked on the road to freeze. The boy protests but the father chides him: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” And then the 10-year-old messiah, who is compassion incarnate, and carrying the fire, gives up his secret. He says to his father: “Yes I am. I am the one.”
The good guys remain elusive as the father sickens, and he talks of the boy inevitably being alone on the road. The boy asks about another boy he saw walking alone. Was he lost?
“No,” the father says. “I dont think he was lost. …”
“But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?”
“Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”
Goodness is an anomalous subject for McCarthy, especially in the language of a children’s book. He has given his own kinetic language to the narrating minds of morons, cretins, madmen, psychotic murderers; and in “Blood Meridian” to a satanically articulate god of war who rides with scalp-hunters and is the supreme evil opposite of the good boy messiah. Those narrators all became oracular presences on behalf of evil, but this father and son remain only filial familiars, brave and loving and good but tongue-tied on what else they are or are becoming. The boy refuses to speak his thoughts or dark dreams to his father; the father is as inarticulate on his Promethean son as he is on his own obsession with their forced march. But the father was right about goodness: it arrives on cue as a deus ex machina that has been following the pair and swiftly enfolds the boy savior into a holy family, maybe a holy commune, where they talk of the breath of God passing “from man to man through all of time.” Then McCarthy ends with an eloquent lament: a vision of mountain trout that “smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional” in a time gone when the world was becoming; and what had been was “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” And all things “were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Brief and mystical, this is an extremely austere conclusion to the apocalyptic pilgrimage. Of the boy’s becoming, or his mission — redeeming a dead world, outliving death? — nothing is said. The rhythmic poetry of McCarthy’s formidable talent has made us see the blasted world as clearly as Conrad wanted us to see. But the scarcity of thought in the novel’s mystical infrastructure leaves the boy a designated but unsubstantiated messiah. It makes us wish that that old humming mystery had a lyric (Kennedy 1-2).
Kennedy, William. “Left Behind.” The New York Times - Sunday Book Review. October 8, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/books/review/Kennedy
