A simple correction in the biography of McCarthy. It was not the hills of Texas that he retreated to when he was young. It was the hills of Tennessee, and he attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for a time. He grew up in Knoxville before he ever went west.
I am grateful to have found your channel. I still remember the impression I had listening to the blood meridian, I did it during a series of afternoons, climbing to the top of a mountain. As I moved away from society and uphill I felt like I was having a mystical experience. It's still in my memory and I hope it never goes away.
When talking about Ludwig Wittgenstein it is worth mentioning that his three brothers committed suicide. His depression most likely was genetic by nature
It doesn't make sense for suicidal depression to be genetic, since these genes would have taken themselves out of the gene pool the moment they appeared. It is more likely a combination of environmental factors (heavy metals, "poisoned houses", general pollution, leaded fuels, lack of certain nutrients etc) combined with some genetic component of reduced antioxidant capacity that wasn't obvious until the environment started changing after the industrial revolution.
"“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” I'm happy every time I read that line.
Thank you for this. It was useful. I knew nothing of McCarthy when I happened upon 'The Road', which made a big impact, but it was 'Blood Meridian' that caused me to read just about all else he wrote. 'Blood Meridian' ran deep for me, I could put words to it - "mythical", 'arousing the fear of the unknown', a modern 'Iliad' - but these are just labels like a carpet over my feelings, which I lack the intellectual resources to unearth and articulate. You've helped me prepare for my next reading of his stories.
I'm reminded of Joseph Conrad's quote from Heart of Darkness: " Droll thing, life is; that mysterious arrangement of a merciless logic for a futile purpose; the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late, a crop of inextinguishable regrets." Cormac (Mac Airt) was High King of Ireland and said to be "absolutely the best king that ever reigned in Ireland before himself...wise learned, valiant and mild, not given causelessly to be bloody as many of his ancestors were, he reigned majestically and magnificently". Exceptional video. well done.
I really loved how you threaded the concepts and with the depth of his words. Much appreciated. The dark beauty he captures in his characters moves me. And the simplest moments of gratitude in the day to day exchanges. Fresh eyes to read. Thank you.
Just read my first McCarthy novel, Suttree. Great novel, very rich, parts of which went right over my head, but nevertheless a book I plowed through in satisfying ways. Pretty grim book -- not sure I saw the humor that others have found in it. But thanks for a great discussion. I’ll be listening to more. Upon finishing it, I agreed with Suttree’s (McCarthy’s) father. Suttree’s very escape to freedom in the netherworlds of Knoxville was made possible by those same people and their life choices that his father applauds and his son seems to disdain. Each diner that McCarthy loves was built with a loan from a banker who shows up every day at his office. Architects, engineers, construction workers, cops, city public works and maintenance workers, street pavers, cooks, waitresses - they all made that diner possible as a place for you to find your romantic community and freedom. They did so by showing up to work every day. Without them, we'd all be living in mudhuts. So leave the workaday world, if that’s what you feel you need to do, but let’s not get romantic about the choice.
The Sunset Limited was a beautiful exploring of depression and suicidal ideation, even attempt. The contrast between the suicidal character and the relatively poor but happy black man who saves him is novel and impactful. The former has no objective reason to be suicidal, and the latter has no objective reason to be happy and stable. It’s all about perspective, state of mind, and attitude.
Wow, what a gem of a video! Thank you very much. So much food for thought. Especially the part starting at 31:35. I just discovered you and hope more people will. Keep it up!
The above was a very good exposition. Certainly better than the last few videos on McCarthy that I viewed here on youtube. I'm very poor at literary analysis so your ideas were very helpful. I would also very much like to know the background of the photo 26 seconds into the video. Holden, "the judge" in "Blood Meridian" is one of the most haunting characters of any work in fiction and the man standing in the background of that old black and white photo could easily have been him if not for what seems like a lack of any malice in his countenance. But then, demons often have angelic faces.
Having read most, but not all of McCathy’s novels, a few of them several times, I found Mr. Gast’s analysis riveting and insightful. He pulled out the recurring themes that I realize take me back to them over & over for their resonance to my own experience. Thanks Mr. Gast.
"Though much is taken, much abides..." - Tennyson. His goneness is merely physical. His art is here, not gone. His ideas are very ungone. I only hope his enduring presence will forgive my use of quotation marks.
Fantastic analysis of an incredible novelist. The Road is one of my favourites, hauntingly sparse in style, just like the world he describes. No Country for Old Men is another of my favourites, and the film adaptation is true to the novel.
Well. You got my follow. I'll watch the rest now and hope you make more. You remind me of the channel called "Like Stories Of Old." That's a better compliment than maybe you know yet.
Helpful…Thank You You did not try to provide too many answers, but pondered some questions and possibilities - no wonder he did not do interviews, for in the end, when it comes to the unconscious, there really are few answers in the long run - it does not speak - I wonder if our unconscious is God?
I wouldn’t be surprised if All the Pretty Horses was the book that finally brought him more mainstream attention at least partially because of the deceptively cute-sounding title.
cogent review... the stark descriptions of visuals (i.e. BM) stand as minimalism tainted with ideas from antiquity akin to Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars of intense conflict and human suffering that (on surface) lacks redemption... Suttree echoes a "refusal of the call" by visiting myriad side portals of experience--- its overt refusal of individuation ultimately (in a non-linear way) succumbs to that which it tries to avoid---maturation and redemption...
So serious Conrad Melville Faulkner the Russians Thomas Hardy softened with women the Brontë sisters Dickens with children Hemingway with lovers John Locke with enduring beauty Steinbeck with humanity But Shakespeare did all of this plus repeat plus humor
Shakespeare's humour was bad. But yes, he did do a lot. The thing about Shakespeare is that he did not have real characters, they were more archetypes, albeit intelligently written archetypes. Although, McCarthy's characters were cartoons of course - Steinbeck was the writer McCarthy would be like if he was a great American novelist. Melville had great and well realised characters and brought fiction into a different level entirely than anything that had come before. He also had better humour than Shakespeare. The modernist playwrights like O'Neill had the most sophisticated characters and drama in plays. Betty Smith's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is probably the greatest character study in published fiction after Moby Dick.
How the hell is Pynchon a great writer? His work is horrendously bad. Even McCarthy was not a great writer but a decent bit better than Pynchon. It's sad how people could claim such nonsense with a straight face. Literacy is dead.
@@NathanLucas5 No, that's the thing. I actually can read and think for myself. That's WHY I say he's bad. YOU can't, you just want to be popular in pretentious lit circles. Pynchon's writing has no music, it's juvenile, it's painfully unfunny, is drenched in cliches. He has no clue how to develop characters, all of them are 1 dimensional stick figures, and his plots are inane. There's no poesy, it's just masturbatory BS and most people are aware of this outside of Pynchon's cult. People like the mystery around him and think his work is this cypher with hidden meanings. Which is how a lot of bad lit is sold these days.
@@DanLyndon amazing, you managed to write a critique of Pynchon that accuses him of doing things he didn't do, and accuses him of failing to do things he did. Like, I get if it's not your cup of tea, that's cool, different strokes for different folks. But to try and say he's terrible is just laughable and you should genuinely be ashamed for such a trash tier take my dude
The comp to Faulkner is good because both fail in the same way- a good paragraph or 2 and then 20+ pages of a desert of bad tropes and cardboard goonish grotesques. Neither was a great writer.
Sherif Bell in No Country was left with excellent lines at the end of the movie that I was sure would have gotten edited out of the film. I’m glad the Coen bros kept them in. T.L. Jones was superb character and true to novel. Blood Meridian is a masterpiece.
I offer instead an alternative biographical interpretation of “Cormac” (who can blame him I suppose for not wanting to be known as “Charlie McCarthy”, during an era where that name was UNIVERSALLY associated with a famous ventriloquist’s dummy of the same name who’s character was that of a pretentious juvenile flirt. Actually … kind of a mirror of Cormac’s own pompous adoption of some alleged pure Irish aristocracy of blood that the name “Cormac” was supposed to represent. McCarthy is the classic upper middle class nihilist who both refuses to grow up and adopt his parents bourgeois values and contribute something positive to society, but chooses instead to live like a bum, but the pretentious intellectual prince of the bums, because even while he rejects his parents bourgeois lifestyle, he can never quite bring himself either to identify with or completely associate with the destitute or the working class people either and adopt their lifestyle going forward, and fully embrace those who HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LIVE THAT WAY (McCarthy’s solidarity misanthropic and anti-social lifestyle he made clear frequently was ALWAYS BY CHOICE. It seems it suited his art of course, but his pompous “simplicity” was always lived so as to avoid the responsibilities of the class his intellect was borrowed from, while he used that same intellect to live a life above and apart from those powerless people that were the basis of his lower class characters that he looked upon so ironically and unsympathetically as beneath him for being consumed in their actual lives by daily issues of no historical consequence… for only he could see the greater, almost mythic significance their sick twisted lower class actually represented in the story of US exceptionalism as he saw it. The truth is his father was an upper middle class lawyer and immigrants and sees the progressive movement that seeks to empower laboring people as somehow beneath him and “phony” but also representing of some great loss of the purity of a bygone era of the “common rugged individual man” when technology, politics, civilization and bureaucracy weren’t employed to settle people’s differences, but rather, direct violent confrontation was used for its alleged “purifying” and cleansing effect that settles things via direct confrontation. Such bourgeois fascist-adjacent romantic nonsense! And McCarthy couldn’t seem to bring himself either to fully embrace the values of the ruling class and side with the growing new conservative movement either and their aristocracy of wealth. A self-imposed misanthropic nihilist. And he wasn’t the first of course. Many writers had been suspicious of the the progressive claims of the improvability of man in previous generations. Dostoevsky was one, for his time and place. Mirabeau in the early 20th century in the leadup to WWI, and Huysman (“Agaisnt Nature) both in French and Joseph Conrad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in English. Disillusioned middle class writers turning to nihilism is nothing new. And McCarthy also shows he distrusts civilization, and regards it merely as something that delays what he sees as the inevitable violent confrontation to come and the purging of these ugly emotions which he seems pessimistically to believe are forever part of human nature and cannot be grown out of through compromise, discussion and mutual respect. We’re truly better off with him gone. Read the books. Understand the danger his and allure of his eloquence represents. Warn everyone who’ll listen about what I’ve just told you. McCarthy is a dangerous last sample of a dying generation that we are better off without in an era when the violence he portrays as politically purifying can now bring about the destruction of cities and countries. He is himself I suspect a psychically damaged self-loathing member of the mid-20th century American bourgeoisie … a singularly PRIVILEGED GENERATION OF PEOPLE … and he seeks to encourage the violent confrontation between the past and the future as a means of achieving resolution of some sort. He’s a pessimistic misanthrope whose beautiful sentences while intoxicating carry with them a poisoned message to the middle class who seem to love him so much. Fear the future he says. Mythologize a past that might not even have existed as I depict it. Embrace the violent palingenesis and do the work of the invisible ruling class, in the false sick belief that the “inferior” races and peoples can still be swept away at the cultural interfaces as a means of taking one’s “rightful” place as the new heirs to the ruling class as the sick and decrepit of the preceding generations die away under the weight of their own lassitude, inactivity and decadence. He was the most dangerous kind of nihilist of all … the post-modern nihilst. He wove a tapestry of violence depicting acts of such cruelty and transgressions of all manner of American morals, but as the very means by which the present we live in was created. And he would seem to imply the existence of this present moment is reason enough to seek to continue the methods by which we got here, as long as we employ the purified versions of them, unsullied by progressive ideals that foolishly seek to “improve” people by some plan that is not entirely seeking pure self interest. The world of his imigination is long gone. And it was a sick, twisted, oppressive, cruel world when it did once exist. If it did once exist. It’s hard to know with McCarthy for he clearly has adopted the post-modern notions, but in a reactionary conservative manner. We’re better off with him gone. Read the books. Understand the danger and allure his stark eloquence represents. He doesn’t build up or encourage understanding or encourage even self-respect of humanity itself. Warn everyone who’ll listen about what I’ve just told you. But we have lost nothing of lasting value with his passing other than to mark the fact he represented an epitome of a demented trope; the reactionary post-modernist.
I offer for consideration a provocative thesis. The world has lost nothing of lasting value with the passing of Cormac McCarthy. He represents the death of a rare but dangerous, seductive and destructive literary type; the nihilistic post-modernist reactionary.
Good lord, what a horrible, headache-inducing comment. your version of mccarthy is such a parody of the real writer that it honestly saddens me to imagine you might have read some of his work and taken this away from it. it's like you saw his vision and it scared you so much that you had to strawman it to hell and back in order to feel free of it, and then you had to go out of your way to find people who disagree with you so you could lecture them about it. And i say that as someone who isn't particularly infatuated with McCarthy's vision of life (and what little can be gleaned without doubt of his politics from his work). It's literature, bro. It doesn't need to be THE truth. It just has to be a powerful enough vision of A truth to illustrate some aspect of human life. McCarthy captures a certain element of human life excellently: its brutality, its savage creative and destructive energy, and its capacity for seeing beauty in nature and in work, whether that work be creative or destructive. This is only dangerous if you have the laughable worry that postmodern novels are liable to convince anyone to treat them like the Bible.
Only if you let him be. That's kind of sick, actually, because it's like admitting we're not even going to try and see if another great writer can emerge. Tyrannical is what this is. MccArthy was a good writer, but not very wise. Science is not our saviour but our shackle. Man can call anything science, and without literature, all will naively believe it.
I always thought The Judge was a reference to God. When the kid is in the jail cell, I remember the judge saying something about the kid not letting him full into his heart. I grew up in a rough ass Lutheran church in South Texas. The vibe always fit. I doesn't matter what God asks of you, be it acts, violence, or kindness, all is done thru God.
I love the books of Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver and that class of American writers. However, this video did nothing for me. I must be more stupid than I thought I was because, to be honest, it just sounds like tired pseudo-intellectual, overly self-serious gobbledygook to me. Then again, I could say pretty much the same about the novels of Cormac McCarthy. About as believable as someone pushing a supermarket trolly full of stuff for miles on end down a bumpy road. You should try it (guess who obviously didn't). (Sorry, I'll get me coat.)
Texas? Mountains of Texas??? hahahahahhahaa It was East Tennessee, dude. And no, he didn't go to the university of Texas either. It was the Univeristy of Tennessee in Knoxville. Several of his books specifically mention Knoxville, Tuckaleechee and Sevierville and no, none of those places are in Texas. They're all near Knoxville, TN. His family had moved to Knoxville from Rhode Island in 1937. How did you get this sooooo wrong? hhahahahaha
