Stephen Fry is a professor of English and novelist and the author and editor of several books about the reclusive, philosophical author, including Understanding Cormac McCarthy. In this episode, we begin our conversation with some background on McCarthy and a discussion of his distinctive style and themes, and why he avoids the limelight and prefers to hang out with scientists over fellow artists. We then dive into The Road, and Stephen s thoughts on what inspired it, as well as the other books that influenced it.
00:09:15.480So I think he developed it, again, by reading it, maybe even a kind of unconscious level, reading some of his favorite authors.
00:09:22.520But at the same time, his blending of this minimalism with very, very sometimes ornate and sometimes even obtuse language, I think is very self-conscious.
00:09:36.800He uses sometimes a very archaic vocabulary, a specialized vocabulary.
00:09:42.540And I frankly don't think he intends us necessarily to be sitting there with a dictionary.
00:09:47.160I think one of the reasons why he might, if you don't mind, what I want to do is, if I could, I'd like to read a passage to explain.
00:10:15.040It howled execration upon the dim Camerine world of its nativity, wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jaw hasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete, beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.
00:10:32.300Now, that ornateness and that kind of language, I'm actually teaching that novel or finished teaching that novel to a group of graduate students.
00:10:43.440And one student called out that very passage, a very famous passage in McCarthy, and very politely but reasonably asked, why not say it a different way?
00:10:52.140I don't entirely understand what he's doing.
00:10:54.920And so what I had the students do is I said, all right, let's do an experiment, a thought experiment.
00:10:59.040Why don't we try to translate that into a more understandable language?
00:11:05.600And so I had the students do that, and they're great students, but they were really reluctant to share their translations because they all intuited the fact that you can't take a phrase or a term like witless paraclete.
00:11:55.200You mentioned some of his themes earlier on, dealing with the grotesque, with violence.
00:11:59.640What are some of the other themes you see pop up over and over again in McCarthy's works?
00:12:04.180Well, I mean, one of the things I would say about McCarthy is that he is a philosophical novelist.
00:12:09.540And not all novelist, not all serious novelist, what I call a philosophical novelist.
00:12:15.300And what I mean by that is that he deliberately engages existing philosophical systems, cosmological systems, places them in the context of a narrative, and sort of sees how they play out.
00:12:28.560And, of course, one of the biggest issues we confront in philosophy is metaphysics and the question of, you know, does God exist?
00:12:39.220But more than that, I mean, not only does God exist, but what is God's nature?
00:12:46.920Is God in any way anthropomorphic in his emotions?
00:12:49.900Is God just a cosmic joker, as Melville pondered?
00:12:55.460So, metaphysics and the question of our relationship to the divine or lack thereof is central to his works.
00:13:05.100Epistemology, right, the question of knowledge.
00:13:07.180So, he will say over and over and over again, he refers to people's minds as things in and of themselves.
00:13:15.600So, the question is, as a thing out there in nature, can the mind know all that there is to know about the very universe that the mind exists within?
00:13:25.120And that's a question that he seeks to answer without ever, you know, fully answering it.
00:13:31.960And all of this is not abstract in McCarthy because these questions, I mean, I like to think of it this way.
00:13:39.880When I was a small child, I had a nightmare at some point in time.
00:13:45.240And my Missouri grandmother, who had a third grade education, said something like, I don't know, something like,
00:13:51.700Steve, remember the lilies of the field.
00:14:17.280It's about taking philosophical ideas, placing them in narrative, and in doing so, seeing how those ideas shake out in the lives of people.
00:14:28.240And so, metaphysics and epistemology, but then he confronts us with something fundamental.
00:14:35.440And that is that we exist in a violent world.
00:14:38.180How does that experience, how should that experience condition how we think about meaning, purpose, and value?
00:14:48.000And in the midst of all of that, we see this especially in the road, there's this emphasis on human community and brotherhood and paternal love, those kinds of things.
00:14:59.100Well, going back to this idea of the exploration of violence, one of the things that always strikes me about McCarthy and his treatment of violence,
00:15:07.880But at the same time, you're reading it, you're like, well, there's nothing, he's not really grotesque about it.
00:15:11.960But for some, the way he's able to use language, you just, you feel, like in the road, he doesn't get really detailed in the gory details too much.
00:15:21.380But you're left with the impression, you also see this in No Country for Old Men, you're left with this impression, like, boy, something really bad just happened.
00:15:29.220And you kind of, you feel it viscerally.
00:15:34.200I think, I've listened a number of times too, he's got an interviewer, he does a three-way interview with Werner Herzog and another scientist, I don't remember the scientist's name.
00:15:44.580Herzog was very, you know, very complimentary of McCarthy, almost to the point where he seemed, you know, politely embarrassed.
00:15:52.040But, you know, Herzog said that he, something like he, by his strange, unique, and totally distinctive use of language, he sort of ascribes a world into being.
00:16:02.460So, it, on the one hand, you look at it and you think, well, this is not, you know, in scare quotes, realistic particularly.
00:16:12.060But in a sense, it's not objectively realistic, it's not how we necessarily sort of see the world.
00:16:19.120But I think McCarthy starts to capture in these moments of violence, intense violence, how we might feel the world, right?
00:16:27.900How we might fully experience that moment beyond simple sight and smell or taste, but the sort of extrasensory psychological perceptions.
00:16:41.660I think that's what he's about, is sort of creating a sense of the horrific that is not simply sensory, but psychological.
00:16:51.040So, you mentioned his interest in epistemology and metaphysics.
00:16:53.660This, some people don't know this about McCarthy.
00:16:55.820He's like a, he works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is sort of like the science institute.
00:17:01.100What's a novelist doing at the Santa Fe Institute where they're exploring issues of science?
00:17:05.480Well, I think there was some serendipity.
00:17:07.900One, McCarthy's known for not really liking to hang out with artists or writers.
00:17:12.240He much prefers to hang out with scientists.
00:17:16.480When he won the MacArthur Genius Grant, he met Murray Gellman, who was a founder of the Santa Fe Institute, and they became friends.
00:17:26.500And Murray Gellman is a Nobel Prize winning physicist.
00:17:29.500So, it's through that relationship that he got involved with the Santa Fe Institute, was already living in the Southwest.
00:17:38.100And he became involved there probably for the same reason that when he was a small child, he had more hobbies than anybody else.
00:17:45.660And that science and all of these questions became just central to what he wanted to inquire into.
00:17:53.780And so, he's a fellow there, he writes there, or has for a number of years, helps people edit their work.
00:18:04.740And also, the Santa Fe Institute itself is a sort of cutting-edge institute that's dedicated to complexity science.
00:18:13.280That is, complex systems theory in a multidisciplinary kind of, taking a kind of multidisciplinary approach.
00:18:20.800So, this idea, what they used to call chaos theory, now they tend to call it complex adaptive systems, that really is a science.
00:18:30.100But it also has these pretty powerful implications when it comes to questions of determinism versus free will, which are themes that have preoccupied him.
00:18:40.380So, he's interested, I think, in seeing how that stuff plays out, right, in the physical world and in the scientific realm.
00:18:46.360I think it comforts him a bit because science offers at least a limited kind of certitude.
00:18:53.100And he said that, that, you know, he likes that some things you can boil down to facts.
00:19:39.400And there's a sense that he doesn't care for that kind of celebrity.
00:19:44.080But I also think that there's a strong sense that too much celebrity and too much engagement with other people who are commenting on your work can have a corrosive effect upon the work itself.
00:19:59.620And I think my sense is that he is a consummate artist.
00:20:03.740As much as he doesn't necessarily want to hang out with other ones, he's utterly uncompromising in his commitment to his art and was, you know, again, he was in his 60s before he really started, you know, making any real money at it and yet maintained that commitment.
00:20:24.500I think it's an aspect of personality.
00:20:26.040But I also think that there's a sense that almost, well, a very practical sense that it could compromise what you're trying to do with yourself as an artist.
00:20:37.280I've noticed my favorite writers, so McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, they all are kind of, they don't get out in the spotlight very much.
00:20:45.860And I wonder if, I'm sure it's personality, but I think, I wonder if also for McMurtry, if, you know, he just passed away this past year.
00:21:03.500And he, you know, he, you know, he was, you know, very popular in terms of having his novels adapted into cinema and really fine, fine films that came out of McMurtry's work.
00:21:13.920But still, I think there was kind of the same thing with McCarthy, a sense of, of, of, I'm doing something that I, I, I know what I'm doing and I, I should not compromise it by too much chatter.
00:21:25.960We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:21:32.460So let's dig into the road because this is my favorite novel.
00:21:34.740And I think it's a great, if you've never read Cormac McCarthy, it's a great one to start out with.
00:21:38.660It's, um, it made, it was turned into a movie.
00:21:41.720It came out in 2006 general plot is that it's, there's a nameless father and a nameless son traveling through a post apocalyptic landscape in America, somewhere in the Southeast.
00:21:55.340Do we know what inspired McCarthy to write the road?
00:21:58.200Was there something that happened to him?
00:21:59.280Well, he tells us actually in his one TV interview, and if I'm recalling it, I think I'll get the outlines of it pretty, pretty correct, uh, that he was with his, his young son at the time.
00:22:09.360He had a son late, John Francis, who was probably eight or 10 years old at the time.
00:22:15.200And he was in a hotel with his son who was sleeping on the bed.
00:22:19.920And McCarthy says he was looking out the window late at night.
00:22:22.980And he imagined what the world might look like 50 or a hundred years from at that moment.
00:22:30.100And, uh, that, I, I think, you know, standing between his son and that idea inspired the road, which he wrote fairly quickly.
00:22:42.340So that moment is part of what inspired him.
00:22:46.080But I think clearly what, what inspired him at, at a deeper level is, is having his second son at that age in a time when it seemed to have a pretty, pretty profound impact on him.
00:22:59.340And, and how's the road similar to McCarthy's previous works and how is it different?
00:23:07.380I think that McCarthy's associated with a kind of ornate style, or at least that's what people comment on when they look at his earlier works.
00:23:15.480If you look at those works, you see a kind of minimalism there too, in different places.
00:23:20.560But the road is much more overtly minimalist and much more conscious of the legacy of Hemingway.
00:23:29.340There's even a couple of places in the road, one where the father recalls a time where a cat is sheltering under a table or something.
00:23:40.380And that recalls Hemingway's cat in the rain.
00:23:43.000He, the father recalls a moment when the boy is being born and the narrator in, in the thoughts of the man says,
00:23:51.040her screams don't matter or something to that effect.
00:23:54.900And that is a direct reference to Hemingway's Indian camp.
00:24:02.700And I, I think the, the more ornate, more, I suppose, the more archaic style is a smaller percentage of the road.
00:24:13.660Uh, so stylistically it's actually very different, but I, I think in so many ways, the road is a culmination of the kinds of things that he's been thinking about all the way since 1965.
00:24:28.940And the kind of things that many or most of us think about as we sort of go through a life, you know?
00:25:10.380And Dostoevsky, of course, was a, an Orthodox Christian writer, but coming out of an existential tradition.
00:25:18.020And I think that the brothers Karamazov is a pretty direct influence on the road.
00:25:25.720And in the brothers Karamazov, you have two brothers that, that debate the existence and the nature of God.
00:25:32.200Ivan, the atheist says he will not believe as long as one child suffers.
00:25:38.820And Alyosha really doesn't have a response to that except to try to live a good life.
00:25:43.280And I think that basic question, that basic dynamic and concern is at the center of this novel, which is very much about a child who is suffering.
00:25:55.680So yeah, Dostoevsky and the brothers Karamazov, I think in particular.
00:26:01.860What do you think are the big themes in the road?
00:26:03.240Well, I think it's a book about, that's asking that fundamental question, does God exist?
00:26:10.680If God exists, what is my relationship to him?
00:26:15.620I think, and I should credit a friend of mine and a fellow scholar, Alan Josephs, who wrote an article called The Quest for God in the Road.
00:26:23.260And he published it in a collection of essays that I edited, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy.
00:26:29.000And he actually teases out all of the references to God and to godlessness and demonstrates through this detailed textual analysis that the novel weighs, in a way that other McCarthy works don't,
00:26:43.440weighs in the direction of a belief in not only God, but something on the order of a Christian God that is beneficent.
00:26:54.140And I think struggling with that question and tentatively resolving that question, very tentatively, is, I think, the central theme that it is about.
00:27:06.340And the thing of it is that McCarthy's unsentimental about the question.
00:27:11.680And when I say that, I mean that oftentimes when people grapple with or veer toward belief, they veer in the direction of a kind of sentimental conception of the divine.
00:27:35.520And in the context of that, is it reasonable to be hopeful about human existence and the human experience?
00:27:42.880And I think McCarthy wants to ask that question in this novel, but he says, you know, if you're going to find hope, and I think he does, you have to find it after you have immersed yourself in an abyss.
00:27:54.060And if you find hope there, then it's a stalwart hope indeed.
00:27:58.560And that ultimately is, I think, how the novel plays out, again, tentatively.
00:28:03.240And some disagree with me, and there's different ways to read it.
00:28:06.960But that's how I read it, moving in the direction of a kind of Christian existentialism, in a way.
00:28:12.220It's kind of Kierkegaardian, in a way.
00:28:16.260Oftentimes, the road has been compared to a biblical allegory.
00:28:18.700But biblical in that tradition of biblical, it's exploring these big questions of existence, human existence, whether God exists, but it's also there's violence mixed in with it.
00:28:30.000Maybe, off the top of your head, what are some examples, like very obvious examples of biblical references that we see pop up in the road?
00:28:38.280Well, with reference to the boy, he's quite, you know, clearly configured as a Christ figure.
00:28:44.600He's associated, again, with the word of God.
00:28:47.140The man describes him as a golden chalice.
00:28:50.260That is, you know, a liturgical, you know, image.
00:28:54.320The father refers to him directly when he's talking to the old man, Eli.
00:28:59.140He calls, he says, you know, what if I said he is a God?
00:29:02.680So, there's references to the boy as a Christ figure.
00:29:06.240And he also says that the sacred idiom is shorn of all reference, right?
00:29:13.280And so, you might imagine that he's just using images of the divine as a figure of speech.
00:29:21.040But the boy, if you think about childhood, my experience with children when I was a child is they can be pretty brutal.
00:30:29.180It is the same kind of wilderness that you find in the Old Testament where the Israelites are tested by God in a desert before they're delivered ultimately to their mission and to their understanding of their role in the world.
00:30:44.680And the same thing that Christ experiences in the wilderness when he goes for 40 days and 40 nights where he's quite literally tempted by Satan.
00:30:54.040Here you have the man being tempted by this character, Eli, who tries to tempt him into hopelessness, a kind of Satan figure.
00:31:03.360So, the boy is Christ figure, all of this kind of liturgical and Eucharistic imagery, and also this broad leot motif of the wilderness that I think should be read typologically.
00:31:16.020No, there's a great example of the boy being a Christ figure.
00:32:56.500In other words, McCarthy said when he was interviewed about the road, he said, you know, when he was asked, you know, have you got the whole God thing figured out?
00:33:04.060He said, well, it depends upon what day you ask me.
00:33:10.100You don't have to have a clear idea of who or what God is to pray.
00:33:15.760You might even be quite doubtful about the whole business.
00:33:19.300I think that McCarthy's content to be doubtful.
00:33:21.800He says in a later interview, he said that he has a great admiration for the spiritual view of life.
00:33:28.480He said, he's asked, is the God in the road, the God you encountered when you were in Catholic school?
00:33:36.140And McCarthy said it may be, but he associates spirituality with being decent and with being ethical.
00:33:45.200And he says that in the same interview.
00:33:46.960He wants to be a more spiritual person in order to be a better person.
00:33:51.640So I do think McCarthy's content to sort of embrace what is genuinely our ethical, our existential condition, which is we simply don't know the answer to that question in any kind of a solid or empirical way.
00:34:05.000We can take various leaps of faith, but ultimately they are leaps.
00:34:09.480And he's content to rest in that uncertainty, but he has a real sympathy for a theistic view of the world.
00:34:20.100Now, again, he experiments with ideas, and I think he's experimenting with a kind of Christian existentialism in the road.
00:34:28.320But he's experimenting with Gnosticism in Blood Meridian and other things and in other books.
00:34:33.480So what I would say is I would attach the term heterodox to McCarthy with respect to the God question.
00:34:42.660Well, and it seems to something he does with this book is that he finds the divine in the relationship between the father and the son.
00:34:49.980It's almost this relationship between the father and son.
00:34:52.060It's almost a materialist spirituality.
00:34:54.780You know, because it's just you see over and over again the father, you know, holding the boy, wiping blood off and gore off the boy's head, the boy pleading out for the father.
00:35:06.640And so it is a very, it's a very visceral, very grounded in nature thing that's going on.
00:35:12.680But there's also like it's tinged with spirituality at the same time.
00:35:17.500I mean, that's, that is, that comes, I think, pretty clear toward the end of the book.
00:35:22.920Remember in the book when the man is dying and he's talking to the boy and he says to the boy, he says, you know what, you're going to be okay.
00:35:31.600And it's pretty clear that the man is confident that the boy will be, in quotes, lucky, will be okay, and that goodness will find him.
00:35:40.320But what the man says, too, is he says, look, you have to talk to me.
00:35:45.660And if you make it like talk, you will hear me respond to you.
00:36:20.040She said the breath of God was his breath yet, though it passed from man to man through all of time.
00:36:26.320And that is the end of the plotted novel before the mysterious kind of epilogue.
00:36:31.060The idea there is not, you could imagine someone who is from a more maybe traditional Christian perspective saying, well, okay, you can go ahead and talk to your father, but keep trying to talk to God too.
00:36:44.960What the woman says is, or essentially what she implies is that as you talk to your father, you are talking to God.
00:36:52.800Because God was physically and in a very real way manifest in the relationship you had with your father and the love that bound you together.
00:37:04.820So God is not in some abstract other place.
00:37:09.120He's right there wherever we find ourselves bound to each other by love.
00:37:13.500And when I use the term love, I mean it, I don't think this is a, this is for McCarthy, this is not a kind of, a kind of, you know, give me a hug love.
00:37:27.060It's, I will kill anyone who touches you love.
00:37:29.480And, and that kind of conception of, of the divine and of mercy is all over Flannery O'Connor, all over any number of other authors who are, who are grappling with this kind of Christian existentialism.
00:37:44.520It's a material manifestation of the divine.
00:37:47.200It doesn't mean that the divine isn't out there somewhere else, but it is here.
00:37:51.540And now do we see God every time we see each other would be the claim from this worldview.
00:37:59.480Um, and again, it's obviously very conjectural and I don't know that McCarthy, uh, believes it at every moment in his life, but he put it in play in this novel.
00:38:09.740So there's this deep and abiding love between father and son, but throughout the novel, you see a tension between them as well.
00:38:16.640Um, they kind of get in these very tense, like they don't yell at each other very often, but there's definitely a tension.
00:38:23.480Like what is the source of the tension?
00:38:25.080Well, I, you know, that's a tough one to, I, it's not really much more complex than the fact that the father feels like he's the one that has to handle things.
00:38:39.660Nothing will get done and their fate is in his hands.
00:38:44.240The father's trajectory toward this kind of moment at the end where there's this sort of guarded, but powerful kind of belief, uh, is not a thing that the father has early on.
00:38:56.940He believes that what's going to happen is going to happen because he does it.
00:39:00.160The boy believes that they have a deeper and greater responsibility to do what's right outside of the survival impulse.
00:39:11.320And that's, you know, that's part of McCarthy's sort of grappling with post Darwinian things.
00:39:15.560You know, what kind of responsibility do we have when all the strictures of civilization are stripped away?
00:40:03.920And, and I think that that's part of the, of the, the blend of, of philosophical and psychological questions.
00:40:11.920Because I think what there's something that's very almost allegorical about their relationship as real as it, as it comes, comes to us in, in their various expressions to one another.
00:40:21.900Or, I mean, right, you know, I, I would say you're putting it well.
00:40:25.320In other words, that is our condition, right?
00:40:27.260You can never, I have, I have two grown children.
00:40:58.340It goes to that epistemology question that McCarthy has explored.
00:41:02.800And the question of subjective versus objective knowledge.
00:41:05.540You know, we can, we can both, you know, pick up the modem that's in front of me and, and, and say it's a modem.
00:41:10.620But, but the deeper things that go to the question of what it means to, to know something at a subjective level, to, to feel something and experience something is an entirely different thing.
00:41:22.140So let's talk about the most famous line from the road.
00:41:40.980You know, I think he wants it to be an evocative image of, of, of divinity at one level, but how that divinity is, is fully defined.
00:41:51.540It's, it's an obtuse and strange enough image that allows for us to read it in different ways.
00:41:57.680What's interesting is that McCarthy's been toying with that image for decades.
00:42:05.580It appears all the way back in some of his earliest novels, but it really appears, and there's a kind of a through line that appears with the epilogue to Blood Meridian.
00:42:17.040And after a bunch of horrific stuff has happened, you have this epilogue that's outside the plotted novel, and you've got this group of figures that are walking through a nighttime desert landscape, and they're using some kind of implement to strike the ground and release the fire that, quote, God has put there.
00:42:36.360And then, and then, and then the epilogue just ends, but it's a fire that God has put there.
00:42:42.380And then at the end of No Country for Old Men, Ed Tom Bell has a dream about his father, and they're riding out in the wilderness, and the father rides past him with a gourd that has fire in it.
00:42:55.380And the father passes him, and it becomes dark again, but he has this strange kind of faith that the father will be waiting for him in all that cold and all that dark.
00:43:07.700So, again, with all the sort of God stuff that is playing out in these later novels, I think the idea of embodying it in an image that is both simultaneously evocative and mysterious, remember that the final word of the novel, and I think the final word that might be on McCarthy, is mystery related to this metaphysical question.
00:43:35.880But at the same time, I think it is an evocative image of at least a potential divinity.
00:44:50.880Well, I'd like to read, it's my favorite scene, and every time, I probably will start bawling like a baby after I read this, but it really sums it up.
00:46:02.840You know, I've had that response a number of times myself, especially the first time that I read it.
00:46:10.260And that is a, you know, just a, you know, it's a moment that anyone, anyone who loves anyone, whether it is a child or whoever, you know, is going to be, you know, affected by that moment.
00:46:27.060And I think that for all of my discussion of these philosophical themes, I think the point to be made there is, is that those themes don't mean anything to us or don't mean as much to us until we live a life.
00:46:47.100Until we encounter other human beings, then all these metaphysical and epistemological questions become real in a very intimate way.
00:46:58.660And I think that's McCarthy's purpose.
00:47:01.660He doesn't see philosophy as an obtuse thing for long-bearded men.
00:47:05.980He sees it as a thing that, you know, 65-year-old third-grade educated women from Missouri experience, right, when they're talking to their grandson.
00:48:38.860We all are capable of committing to one another.
00:48:41.500We're all capable of, of going on, even when it absolutely makes no sense to, in this particular, you know, situation.
00:48:55.280McCarthy himself said, what he wants us to take away from this novel is that we should be grateful for what we have.
00:49:01.940And I think you might feel positive when you read that book, because you probably almost immediately look around at the things that you have, and you say, thank whatever.
00:49:15.380Maybe God, maybe circumstance, but I'm grateful.
00:49:19.620And what it's a, it's a gratitude that's not abstract.
00:49:32.160It's not, and that's his point, is to take ideas that articulated by philosophers remain abstract and to put them into play in human lives.
00:49:40.740Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation.
00:49:43.360Thanks for listening to me blubber like a baby.