McCarthy-ism

This weekend, I finished reading Cities of the Plain, the final installment of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Every time I go back to a McCarthy novel, I'm struck by the ease with which his eloquence touches everything he relates. From the American Southwest in the early twentieth century to that same are 50 years later to a an unnamed post-apocalyptic wasteland, McCarthy's subjects are rarely pretty, but always beautiful. He writes with a keen understanding of what is important to his narrative, and, far from beating you over the head with it, he almost keeps it a secret. He lets you into the world of his stories like someone showing you something through a keyhole. You can't be sure if what you're seeing is what the principal characters would relate to you if they were to tell you the same story, but you can be sure that it's significant. In his most violent moments, he treats his subjects with care and depicts the fine detail of a scene as if saying it too loudly would topple the whole house of cards. Every time I go back to a McCarthy novel, I care more for his characters -good guy cowboys and bad guy pimps alike - than I do for the characters in almost any other piece of fiction. Part of that is the nature of the world in which those characters live and interact. Even when they are unquestionably evil, it is no far stretch to imagine that they are victims of circumstance. Even when they are good, but do bad things, it is a momentary lapse in character. This is a result of the most impressive characteristic of all McCarthy's novels: Each story is the story of the place, not the people. The people are only the incidental plot. They are no less important than the landscape or the horses or the wolves. They are only the vehicle by which the reader can understand the story of the place. McCarthy tells the reader this implicitly in The Crossing, when he talks about the as-yet-uncaptured wolf. She is not in nature. She is not of nature. She is nature. She is the American Southwest, the planet, the universe, existence itself, just as are we all. The truly magnificent quality of McCarthy's writing is his ability to create the memory of a place. He tells you a story as it is. Not the story as his protagonist sees it. Not the story from a variety of perspectives. The story as it is. The story, from the world's perspective. Men are killed. Women die. Men are spared. Animals are revered and trapped and used. The world does not see these things as good or bad, and certainly does not take an active role in their execution or hindrance. But, make no mistake, the world sees them. And the world remembers them. So, when a character is spared, and lives the rest of his life wondering at his survival and the death of others, he is asking the wrong question. He can retrace steps, reconstruct motives, or follow alternate paths of choice, but that cannot change what he remembers. And the simple act of remembering is the proof that he is, and that he is still of this world.