Calming US Pessimism in Cormac McCarthy’s Pages

Calming US Pessimism in Cormac McCarthy’s Pages

In a moment of general bewilderment about what modern America is (or what it is now), the death of the old Cormac McCarthy It puts us in front of liquidating a prototype that is difficult to place at this point, or that, looking from here, we ended up removing it. America as it was. How it endeared to some, frightened many others, and attracted many people who had little to lose. A place where the idea of ​​starting or even starting over is widely possible It is amusing that, in one of his rare interviews, McCarthy reaffirms his complete lack of interest in travel, tourism, and knowledge beyond the world, that the place which intrigued him is New Zealand, so scanty and lush enough to be tempted to start all over again, as it was for his country , in its origins. But McCarthy in his novels told of another America, snatched up in the air and filmed while things had already gone awry, and against his fantastic backgrounds the human comedy of oppression, even in its worst version, devoid of any culture, was replicated with hegemony. Of muscle and a haze of confusion descending on the whole.

In a moment of general bewilderment about what modern America is (or what it is now), the death of the old Cormac McCarthy It puts us in front of liquidating a prototype that is difficult to place at this point, or that, looking from here, we ended up removing it. America as it was. How it endeared to some, frightened many others, and attracted many people who had little to lose. A place where the idea of ​​starting or even starting over is widely possible It is amusing that, in one of his rare interviews, McCarthy reaffirms his complete lack of interest in travel, tourism, and knowledge beyond the world, that the place which intrigued him is New Zealand, so scanty and lush enough to be tempted to start all over again, as it was for his country , in its origins. But McCarthy in his novels told of another America, snatched up in the air and filmed while things had already gone awry, and against his fantastic backgrounds the human comedy of oppression, even in its worst version, devoid of any culture, was replicated with hegemony. Of muscle and a haze of confusion descending on the whole.

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A pacifist pessimism, which has its roots in Faulkner’s stories and which McCarthy saw as the natural context of the countryHe, perhaps, rejected in the version that he had chosen to live there, the excessive force of nature, the red lands of New Mexico, where America should be forcibly polluted with mad Mexican spirituality and with this unseemly existential turmoil. . At forty, when he was still a failing writer, Cormac moved to Santa Fe to never leave. There’s a little air, a little sun, a little work, the norm that one makes his own rules, everyone lives by their inclinations, and it’s often anything but innocuous. America, the beacon of the world (we are in the mid-seventies), America Washington and the city, according to him, is a papier-mâché superstructure of the founding idea of ​​that civilization, which can benefit from a possible last marriage with the metaphysics of nature and instead indulge in the eternal game of desires that seduces the human mind.

In his hermitage, a stone’s throw from the border, McCarthy has what he needs: Olivetti’s Letter 32, on which he’ll write his novels (he’ll sell at auction for nearly $300,000 to Fitchie, unless he buys himself an identical one for pennies. —he called it mockingly.) by watching presentations, or, if you prefer, a fierce critique of the system), it has quite a few scientists to whom you can dedicate your free time by exploring their discoveries and studying their intellectual journeys, it has an outstanding observatory on stage, a humanity free from moral prejudices, free to follow Instincts, which are hardly dominated by generosity and sympathy, but which contain surprising oddities that can be recorded. And as he possesses the spontaneous foal of the great American storytellers of the twentieth century, titles of success have arrived for McCarthy, for now he has mastered the method: do not press his lively vision, even if it contains malicious and corrupted by its people, and enjoys perversion, in arrogance, in short, In American Natural Barbarism.

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From there come his best tragic heroes, the albino referee “Meridiano de Sangui”, the murderer Anton Chigurh from “No Country for Old Men” whom Javier Bardem will give an unforgettable physicality in the Coen brothers’ cinematic version, even the pyrotechnic diver Bobby Western from the recent “Il Passeggero” , which is a true spiral between apocalyptic and bokash. In all of this, McCarthy loathes the idea of ​​becoming the spokesperson for whoever knows any intellectual vision of America, or worse, of humanity. Rather, he likes to make his books sell well, to occupy himself with other things, and to entertain readers with his pictures on the edge of the abyss, or even at the bottom of the abyss.: how ni street, an atypical plot, a post-apocalyptic father and son wander among the rubble of civilization. The rest is up to us to read. For example, jot down two novels about America that McCarthy proposes. A country unable to happily finish its development, stranded in the field of impulses, divided into gangs, variegated gangs of people ready to outdo themselves. Where is the space between what is said – show the sticky, sticky ways of a killer who kills with a cattle gun? – and the true intentions of the speaker (president, candidate, industry captain, broadcaster, for example) are so uneven, that you immediately want to grab your hat and go for a long walk in the desert. Certainly without forgetting to take the rifle hanging there near the door.

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