(Original Review, 2006-09-30)
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You
could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their
fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished
and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were
maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not
be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all
things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
In “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
To me this novel raises the question in how far literature should be
exempt from moral judgements. "It's art!" has never been a good excuse
for producing something disturbing. Torture itself can be done artfully and
writing a story painful enough to disturb the reader for weeks or more should
not be done without a good reason. Sure, we need disturbing, because things
can't keep going the way they are. That's why I admire McCarthy's "The
Road". But does the abyss of horror have a bottom which we can plumb to
dispel the fear that it is bottomless, or is there always a greater horror that
need to be explored and we are eventually forced to retreat, beaten and deeply
hurt, when we can't take any more. Should we spend our lives engaging with the
very worst we can think of, or would we do better to know these things exist
and act to keep them down without looking at them to closely?
I wonder the same myself especially in the age of the Internet. We
used to be somewhat shielded from extreme horror, unless we were directly
linked to it or chose to pick up a book such as American Psycho- in that
instance we make a definite choice to engage with horror, albeit in a remote,
two-dimensional way, i.e. through the pages of a paperback which we can put
down at any time.
Now, with the careless clicks of our laptops or by simply touching a
screen, the world of true horror is laid bare whether it's through terrorists
posting its latest horrible execution or mistakenly finding yourself in a very
disturbing Twitter feed (done that myself & trying to dislodge it from my
brain weeks later...).
The distinction between "mythical" and
"realistic" is not a bad starting point if we want to write about “The
Road” - but it's quickly exhausted in the face of the variety of 'real' and
fanciful world-disclosive techniques in literature. “Blood Meridian” is
carefully 'realistic' in the sense that, for example, the characters kill and
die as people did and do beyond the pale of civility. Because it's so
unrelievedly violent and discompassionate, I'd call it "fantastic" or
"phantasmagorical" or some such categorization, but McCarthy's
sentences and phrases aren't unspooled at the expense of the characters feeding
themselves realistically, say, or of the natural verisimilitude of
south-western botany and geology, and so on.
It's not where Cormack writes about is HOW he writes it. And he
writes beautifully.
Can true horror really be woven into literature? Or does the horror
dominate so that is the only thing we really remember from such books? How do
we benefit from immersing ourselves in this horror?
I'm not sure.
