Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalyptic Vision

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Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell

When I think of contemporary writers who focus on violence the way that the Beowulf poet does, novelist Cormac McCarthy comes to mind. One novel of his you may know because it was made into an Oscar winning film is No Country for Old Men (2005).

This novel features a Latino villain named Chigurh who appears to be an irresistible force of evil, a “true and living prophet of destruction.” The book has a character, sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who functions as a voice of humanity and who appears confounded by Chigurh. Chigurgh, the books make clear, is an evil that is loosed when a nation loses its moorings. He cannot be stopped—not by Llewelyn, a Vietnam vet who stumbles across a bag of money following a drug deal gone bad, thereby drawing Chigurgh’s ire. Not by a hired killer that a drug lord sends to take him out. And not by the sheriff

The novel begins with Bell describing another cold-blooded killer whom once, when he was young, he sent to be executed for killing a 14-year-old girl. He remembers how the man showed no remorse and reflects how he was a harbinger of things to come. Now an old man, Bell no longer feels up to the challenge of combating evil. He feels a failure and wonders whether he hasn’t been mean enough. (As he puts it, “if you got a bad enough dog in your yard, people will stay out of it.”) But he also realizes that, to fight successfully, he would “have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that.” This appears to be a moral qualm that, say, vice president Dick Cheney never wrestled with when he pushed for torturing Al Qaeda prisoners.


Towards the end of the book Bell looks for a cause to all the violence and wonders if it is America’s very wealth that is behind it all:

“I think I know where we’re headed. We’re bein bought with our own money. And it aint just the drugs. There is fortunes bein accumulated out there that they don’t nobody even know about. What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has. Can it buy this one? I don’t think so. But it will put you in bed with people you ought not to be there with.”

McCarthy paints as grim a picture of America as you will find. Does he offer any hope? He does provide an image in the book’s final passage that, while it may appear grasping at straws, is powerful for all that. It comes to Bell in a dream about his father, now dead:

“…it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the groun and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

A few glowing embers in the darkness are not a lot to go on, but they still provide an image of hope. Powerful also is the sheriff’s humane voice, his wrestling with moral issues  and self doubts, and his loving relationship with his wife. For that matter, Llewellyn’s quixotic belief that he can outwit fate and his wife Carla Jean’s love for him seem far more vibrant than anything that Chigurgh has access to. Chigurgh claims to be acting, not according to his will, but according to a set of inexorable principles, but what gets sacrificed in this process is free will. He seems a robot, and the fact that he is unstoppable only accentuates how much more important it is to be human, whatever the consequences.

There’s a tiny but significant difference between the novel and the film in which the film comes out making this point better, I believe. Chigurgh will sometimes give his potential victims a 50-50 chance of living by tossing a coin. In the book, he gives Carla Jean this choice and she calls wrong. In the movie, on the other hand, she refuses to participate, even though this means that she will surely die. She affirms that to live is to make choices, not to ascribe your actions to random chance. The book has her making this point also but in a more compromised way. In the movie, she is more inspirational.

The future, McCarthy indicates, is up to us. After he has killed Carla Jean, Chigugh drives off and is nearly killed by a woman running a traffic light. In other words, blind chance nearly takes him out when nothing else can. Chigurgh gets out of his car, a fractured bone protruding from his arm, and buys a shirt from one of two boys who have stopped on their bicycles and offered help. The money is also to buy their silence. One boy, impressed by the power he has seen, remains silent when questioned by the sheriff. The other, like the sheriff, is thrown into self-reflection about responsibility and moral choices. It is as though the book is saying that we have this choice when we are confronted with evil in the world. If we throw in with mere power, we put our souls at risk.

In troubled times we need prophets like the Beowulf poet and Cormac McCarthy. I believe the United States put its soul at risk when it declared preemptive war on Iraq (and on false grounds at that) and I think it did so by violating the Geneva conventions and torturing terrorists. When we say that our safety trumps all other considerations, we lose touch with something that is far more meaningful. Sometimes we need a novel as grim and stark as No Country for Old Men to be clear what is at stake.

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