3. McCarthy Criticism This chapter starts by discussing the beginnings of McCarthy criticism, which are linked to the commercial success of All the Pretty Horses. The rest of the chapter analyses specific studies of McCarthy in order to better contextualize my own arguments. 3.1. McCarthy as Author: Beginnings of Secondary Literature Vereen Bell¶s 1988 The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy is the cornerstone on which all subsequent criticism has been built and to which reference must always be made. Early secondary literature was typically more concerned with establishing McCarthy as a serious author within academia than with laying out a clear methodology and fixed critical positions. Rick Wallach comments that early studies like %HOO¶VKDGWKHLPSOLFLWJRDORISURYLQJ³ZK\&RUPDF0F&DUWK\LVVR good´ 2002: 1). Bell purports that his study, ³has no thesis other than that which issues from the cryptic intelligibility of the novels themselves when they are patiently and attentively considered´ (1988: xiii), which is as much as to say that he uses a hodgepodge of methodology, depending on its suitability to the text at hand. Bell addresses all the McCarthy novels existing at that time, from The Orchard Keeper to Blood Meridian. The preponderance of his technical vocabulary centers on terms like unity, structure, balance but also metaphysics, theme, discourse, reoccurrence. All in all he aesthetizes the novels, eschewing political and social issues in favor of humanistic appreciation and philosophical insights. This somewhat loose approach did, however, generate many good ideas and much fruitful debate on McCarthy, spurring other critics to quickly produce more secondary literature. Though Bell avoids questions of classification, later critics did debate the matter of aesthetic codes (realist, modern, postmodern, etc.) in McCarthy¶s fiction and were more apt to address issues of methodology. 88 Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces The real catalyst to McCarthy criticism was the popular success of All the Pretty Horses almost immediately following its publication in 1993. Upon the death of his longtime editor at Random House, Albert Erskine (also Faulkner¶s editor), McCarthy switched to another publishing company, Alfred A. Knopf, which heavily promoted the new book. While by 1993 Blood Meridian had only sold 1,500 copies, All the Pretty Horses sold 500,000 within the first two years of its release. Since that time, McCarthy has become a national literary figure, winning the National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. His fame today appears even more certain and destined to last, in light of film productions of All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Road in 2006 and Harold Bloom has named him one of the four great novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. The first academic conference on McCarthy was held in 1993, select essays of which were published in the 1994 anthology Sacred Violence. Since then there have been over twenty additional book length studies on McCarthy and countless articles. McCarthy criticism has now moved into a more mature phase with established positions and a wide array of methodology wielded by critics of diverse backgrounds and interests. One of the best of these books is The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy in which David Holloway undertakes a Marxist metacriticism of the most important secondary literature on McCarthy to date; it is valuable for its insights and rigorous methodology, as well as for a review of McCarthy criticism up to 2002. Though McCarthy has been known to the general public and to academia for more than fifteen years now, his most recent novel, The Road, calls for a reassessment of its author¶s oeuvre. Whereas other McCarthy texts engage very specific places and times (pre-war Appalachia or the post-war border regions of Texas and Mexico), this latest novel eschews even the very notion of specificity by its post- apocalyptic setting and almost categorical avoidance of proper nouns (there are eight in the text).1 2QH FDQ GLYLGH 0F&DUWK\¶V OLWHUDU\ 1 &ORVHDWWHQWLRQWRWKHWH[WUHYHDOVVRPHPDUNHUVVXFKDVWKH³6HH5RFN&LW\´ sign that place The Road in the southeastern United States. The text begs the .