The Cormac Mccarthy Journal

The Cormac McCarthy Journal Volume 6 Autumn 2008 A Publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society Editor John Cant University of Essex Editorial Advisory Board Edwin T. Arnold Dianne C. Luce Appalachian State Univ. Midlands Technical College, retired Rick Wallach University of Miami Webmaster: Marty Priola Front cover concept, design and refinement by Marty Priola The Cormac McCarthy Journal 1 The Cormac McCarthy Journal Vol. 6 Autumn 2008 Contents Editor’s Notes 4 Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millennium Dianne C. Luce 6 Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited: Dialogue of Life and Death: A Re- view of the Chicago Production Dianne C. Luce 13 Another Sense of Ending: The Keynote Address to the Knoxville Conference Jay Ellis 22 The Route and Roots of The Road Wesley G. Morgan 39 The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road Chris Walsh 48 The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post- Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Tim Edwards 55 Full Circle: The Road Rewrites The Orchard Keeper Louis Palmer 62 Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Phillip A. Snyder 69 Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism Linda Woodson 87 Compassionate McCarthy?: The Road and Schopenhauerian Ethics Euan Gallivan 100 The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2 Sighting Leviathan: Ritualism, Daemonism and the Book of Job in McCarthy’s Latest Works John Vanderheide 107 “The lingering scent of divinity” in The Sunset Limited and The Road Susan J. Tyburski 121 “Golden chalice, good to house a god”: Still Life in The Road Randal S. Wilhelm 129 Contributors 150 Newfound Press - The Knoxville Conference 150 *Editorial note: the pagination of the Vintage paperback edition of The Road is slightly different from that of the hardcover Alfred A. Knopf edition. Please check the ‘works cited’ for each article to determine which one the author is using. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 3 Editor’s Notes John Cant olume 5 of the Society’s Journal was devoted to Cormac McCarthy’s ninth novel, No Country for Old Men. How many Vof us would have wagered, Holden style, that the author would, in the next two years, have this work turned into a film, have a play performed in both Chicago and New York, publish the text of this play and a tenth novel, win the Pulitzer Prize and be interviewed on television by Oprah Winfrey? Perhaps the least surprising aspect of these events has been the general ac- claim that has greeted The Road in the USA. No surprise either that the Uni- versity of Tennessee in Knoxville should choose to host its first conference on Cormac McCarthy following the appearance of The Road. This issue of the journal features a number of the papers delivered at the conference. Jay Ellis was asked to give the keynote address and this is published as spoken, since it is exactly that, an “address” rather than a paper. Other contributions have been edited, but only to transform them into articles, the distinction being largely a matter of presentation. Dianne Luce has contributed two items not presented at the conference, one of which is an overview of McCarthy’s latest “progress,” together with brief outlines of the conference papers. Although this issue is ostensibly devoted to considerations of The Road, the book commanding attention on an international scale and seeming to oc- cupy a more significant place in McCarthy’s oeuvre than The Sunset Limited, it seemed to me appropriate to pay attention to the latter work also; others clearly shared this view since several contributors mention both. Dianne Luce offered to reprint her review of the play here and I was glad to accept. Further articles came from regular contributors Linda Woodson and John Vanderheide. I was hoping to arrange the journal’s contents in an order that would reflect a sense of continuity or development in the ideas expressed. Needless to say this proved to be impossible, not because the contents lack cohesion--they are all focused on the same work(s) after all--but because our contributors represent such an enormously wide range of points of view and fields of expertise. 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 uncon- scious 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? Place and landscape is of prime significance in all McCarthy’s work: this seems especially so in the case of The Road. For anyone familiar with his The Cormac McCarthy Journal 4 literary “journey,” the question of the location of this particular road is, I be- lieve, fundamental. Is the sense of “return” that so many find here justified? It is for this reason that I have placed Wesley Morgan’s piece on “Route and Roots” early in the sequence, since I am sure that it answers the above question in the affirmative. A little noted aspect of McCarthy’s novels lies in the fact that each new work is different in form from any that has gone before. Further work is prom- ised and eagerly awaited. What form will it take? Debate is certain to ensue and the journal will seek to reflect it. McCarthy’s work has always been a “matter of life and death.” His importance grows as our culture faces this, the eternal question, in more urgent ways as each year passes. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 5 Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millennium Dianne C. Luce n April of 2007, a group of Cormac McCarthy readers and scholars came together in his hometown, Knoxville, Tennessee, to share their Iperspectives on his work as it has been evolving in this decade and its continuities with his earlier writing. Hosted by the University of Tennessee and coordinated by Chris Walsh, visiting lecturer from Great Britain, the conference bore the title “The Road Home, McCarthy’s Imaginative Return to the South.” With that sense of urgency that possesses many long-time readers of McCarthy’s novels, most presenters chose to focus on his newest work: the widely reviewed novel The Road and the stage play The Sunset Limited, largely ignored in the press. The conference thus comprised some of the first schol- arly responses to these two important products of McCarthy’s seventies and remains the most extensive collaborative treatment of them. (A significant follow-up took place in the two McCarthy sessions of the American Literature Association’s convention in Boston in May.) The online proceedings preserve the Knoxville conference papers, which point significant new directions for McCarthy studies, and the vibrant discussions that followed. In different ways, The Road and The Sunset Limited, both published in 2006, are startling works. Together with No Country for Old Men (2005), they proclaim McCarthy’s quenchless creative energy and the variety in which that creativity is manifesting itself, from the genre-bending noir western, to the existentialist life-and-death debate, to the disturbingly realistic contemplation of the loss of the world in a future that reinscribes the terrain of McCarthy’s personal and writerly beginnings. In the final decade of the last century, the publication of the Border Trilogy, together with Knopf’s concerted efforts to enhance McCarthy’s recognition, resulted in his belated acknowledgement in the popular press as one of America’s foremost living writers. (McCarthy’s earlier novels, published under the Random House imprint, had each sold fewer than 2,600 copies [Tabor]). However, after the ambitious labor of the Trilogy reached its slow culmination with the publication of Cities of the Plain in 1998, many readers (certainly many reviewers) saw him as writing in a western niche. In the seven-year interval between Cities of the Plain and No Coun- try for Old Men, some had also begun to wonder whether he would close the book on his writing career. But scholars knew that there was still the “New Orleans novel” in the works, and when Richard Woodward interviewed McCarthy in 2005 for Vanity Fair, we learned that there were as many as four or five novels underway, even while McCarthy was intensely engaged with the various intellectual activities of the Santa Fe Institute, where he has been The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 an “unsalaried” fellow since 2001 (Woodward 100, 104). It was not surprising to read that McCarthy was working on several projects concurrently; this has been his practice from the beginning. What is intriguing is the revelation that the two most recent novels have been produced in short creative explosions: McCarthy told Woodward he had written No Country in “about six months” (103), and he told Oprah Winfrey that The Road was composed in just a few weeks after a four-year gestation period when it lay percolating in his subcon- scious (McCarthy). No Country for Old Men was published July 19, 2005, in a first printing of 147,000 copies (Publishers Weekly; Maryles, “Hardcover”). By August 1, it appeared on the Publishers Weekly hardcover fiction bestseller list, ranked at nine, and it stayed on the list for five weeks, rising to the rank of sixth in three of those weeks (Publishers Weekly). It was reviewed extensively and for the most part favorably in the U.S.

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