But First, Bunga

Cormac McCarthy's Anti-Narratives

I’m not the only person who liked The Counselor, the one film scripted by Cormac McCarthy (as opposed to those adapted from his books), but I’m one of few. In fact I’m not even sure I exactly like it—the last time I re-watched it, it befouled that night’s sleep with dire and queasy-making ideation—but it is, at least, more interesting than most Hollywood films. It declines to do the one thing that all but the most experimental avant-garde movies—whether commercial or arthouse, mainstream or indie—are supposed to do: any screenwriting guide will tell you that your hero has to have agency; he’s faced with a choice, makes a decision, he acts. But The Counselor’s titular character (played by fascistically handsome Michael Fassbinder) makes one bad decision—he gambles on a one-time drug deal, the classic foolhardy Last Big Score of all heist films, which [anti-spoiler alert] goes south—and for the next hour and a half can only watch helplessly, without options, without hope, as his entire life and everyone he loves are inexorably destroyed. As Brad Pitt’s character, a middleman in the deal and a voice of unwelcome wisdom in the film, tells him: “At this point, it’s out of your hands.”

McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger,^[1] follows a similar trajectory: the hero does one thing that precipitates his losing everything, after which he becomes impotent witness to his own destruction—a mere passenger. The opening scene reads like the setup for a thriller: Bobby Western, a salvage diver, investigates a small plane sunk in Lake Ponchatrain, anonymously called in by someone claiming to be a fisherman, although the plane isn’t visible from the surface. There’s no apparent damage to the craft, its door is still sealed, the corpses of the pilot, copilot, and seven passengers are still strapped floating into their seats—but an eighth passenger is missing. The scene is so intriguing and portentous that it seems designed to lead us into a deepening mystery; instead, it only precipitates a Pynchonian spiral into formless paranoia. Rather than intensifying and accelerating, clues connecting and dovetailing to form a pattern and lead toward a solution, as in a whodunit or procedural, the plot dissipates, emptying out, one character after another disappearing, until finally the book drifts to a complete stop, with our hero living alone in exile, unknown and knowing no one, doing nothing. The closest it comes to being a traditional crime or detective novel is when Bobby explores some of the nearby islets and finds a rubber raft hidden under some brush. But this discovery leads nowhere. In another sequence, he’s ‘coptered out to a job on an offshore oil drilling platform, but no one else is there, and for days he’s alone on the rig in a rising storm, the whole structure creaking and swaying in the gale like a vast industrial haunted house. He begins to suspect that someone else is on the rig with him: objects seem not quite where he left them, doors he’s sure he shut are now ajar. But are they? We never know. Although his life steadily worsens—he’s questioned by unnamed authorities, his friends begin to die off, his bank account is frozen, his car seized, passport revoked, apartment ransacked, the bastards let his cat out—[anti-spoiler alert] we never find out what was up with the downed plane, or what became of the missing passenger, or who’s after him, or why. It’s the opposite of a traditional story—an anti-narrative.

I recently wrote about artists who became famous for their groundbreaking early work only to turn their backs on the revolutions they’d incited, reverting to older artistic traditions, vanishing into obscurity to pursue their idiosyncratic obsessions. Cormac McCarthy did this, too, in a way that I don’t know that many critics have recognized (although, unlike the artists I discussed, his reputation was already so Olympian that these contrarian late works were mostly received with cautious incomprehension rather than dismissal or ridicule). McCarthy was an heir to the high Modernist tradition, an admirer of Joyce, an emulator of Faulkner, but his late works—the stage play The Sunset Limited, the screenplay The Counselor, and the companion novels The Passenger and Stella Maris—are not just anti-Modernist but anti-modernity, harkening back to ancient classical forms like Greek myth and the philosophical dialogue.

Both The Counselor and The Passenger are deterministic as Greek tragedies, their protagonists foredoomed. The critical consensus on Metafilter calls The Counselor “mercilessly short on suspense.” Merciless for sure, but what it and The Passenger offer instead of suspense is dread; the dread certainty of knowing in advance what’s coming, if not exactly when or how. That dread inevitability hangs over The Counselor from its first shot of a motorcycle tearing by—it’s the same drug courier whose decapitation halfway through the film will trigger the cascade of disasters that culminate in our hero’s destruction. We can still hear the distant insect whine of that bike through an open window in the following scene, in which the protagonist and his gorgeous fiancée luxuriate in bed. Even in this erotic idyll, the hero’s destruction is already speeding toward him, unstoppable. The same sense of foreordained fuckèdness pervades The Passenger. The dialogue in its opening scene, when the plane is discovered, is brusque, businesslike, curt with fear; these are competent, experienced men who understand that they are in way over their heads. When Bobby asks his partner what he thinks about their find, he replies: “I think that my desire to remain totally fucking ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I’m going to say that it is just damn near a religion.”  That character later dies in an underwater accident—condemned, like Actæon, by what he’s seen. One of the more horrific conceits in The Counselor is an execution device called a bolito—a loop of wire attached to a small motor that contracts the noose, giving the victim a full minute or so to consider his imminent death. It’s described in such horrific detail that you know (again, with dread certainty) that you are going to see this ghastly machine deployed before the film is over, a plot device out of Chekov’s nightmares. It’s synecdochic of the movie’s plot, which, once set in motion, proceeds with mechanical inexorability, merciless and lethal.

These are both self-conscious anti-narratives, pessimistic not only in theme but in structure; they disdain fiction’s essential premise of agency, the potential for change. In both stories the central character either makes an initial bad decision and then suffers unspeakably for it, or never has any choice at all, and also suffers unspeakably. (They remind me of the old joke that purports to offer a grim choice between death or “bunga” [don’t ask], whose punchline is: “Very well: death. But first—bunga!”) They’re more akin to the merciless tales of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (or Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”) than to most modern fiction—stories in which some unfortunate mortal is randomly singled out by the lust or jealousy, vanity or wrath of the Gods, and is horribly destroyed or grotesquely transmogrified—Marsyas flayed alive, Pentheus dismembered, Arachnæ changed into a spider, Daphne to a tree—all for the crime of having been noticed, the hubris of failing to abase oneself or presuming to excel. The concept of justice, even poetic, is absent from these stories; it would be, in their world, a naïve, childish notion. The purpose of such myths is not didactic but cathartic, not moral instruction but Stoic acceptance. “I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you're in,” a surprisingly philosophical cartel member advises the hero of The Counselor; it is, pretty overtly, Cormac McCarthy’s advice to us all. In Greek myth and tragedy, life’s unfairness, absurdity and hopelessness, are neither redeemed, as in Judeo-Christianity, nor made sense of, as in Western philosophy, but aestheticized. It is not the world’s arbitrary cruelty that is beautiful, but its clear-eyed recognition, our collective apprehension of our collective fate.

A lot of artists, having achieved their ambitious midcareer epics (e.g., Blood Meridian) strip their late works down to essentials: I’m thinking of Matisse’s cutouts and Monet’s lilies, the intimate domestic dramas of Bergman and Kubrick, Beethoven’s Sphinxlike late quartets, Mahler’s exquisite fadeout. Some writers, having mastered the novel, abandon the artifices of fiction: “I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows,” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  wrote in his fifties. McCarthy’s prose, once ornate and labyrinthine as Faulkner’s, became terse and spare in The Road and No Country for Old Men, with rare chiaroscuro flashes of his old grandiloquence. The Sunset Limited and Stella Maris mostly drop the formality of plot altogether; they’re essentially Socratic dialogues, denuded of any conventional dramatic tension except for the same old existential question posed by Hamlet and Camus. In both stories, one character holds another under benign duress, attempting to persuade them that life is worth living: in the former, it’s a preacher keeping a professor he’s rescued from a suicide attempt in his apartment; in the latter, it’s a psychiatrist meeting with a patient in a mental institution.

TOP: “Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates,” François-André Vincent, 1776 BOTTOM: Gary Beadle and Jasper Britton in “The Sunset Limited,” 2020

Which is not to say they’re didactic or dull. Rather than the traditional Socratic “dialogue”—wherein the philosopher meticulously erects the air-castle of his ideal state while some token flunkie interjects the occasional “Surely it must be so”—The Sunset Limited is a true debate between equals, a forceful, agile, harrowing and funny back and forth between two intelligent, eloquent men of deep convictions born of hard experience. Their dialogue is crunchy, pungent, fun to read out loud. Stella Maris is dense with ideas, a heady discourse on the relation of mathematics, physics, and the mind to unknowable reality, with asides and digressions on the miraculous ex nihilo invention of the violin, language as a mental parasitic invasion, and a hideously vivid description of drowning. The Passenger is less a dialogue than a rondo of conversations between Bobby and his various friends and associates, who are reminiscent of the Dickensean cast of eccentrics and derelicts from Suttree—conversations that are really more like monologues or interviews with Bobby as interlocutor, asking prodding, open-ended questions like “What else?” Each of these misfits and reprobates relates their history and experience—we hear about the Vietnam War, about being trans in the south in the 70s, and rather more than you might expect about the Kennedy assassination—expounding their crackpot theories and idiosyncratic ethoses, holding forth on the darkness of the future, the decline of our civilization, and the grace of God.

McCarthy’s disdain for the conventions of dramaturgy—the old Aristotelean ramp diagram of ground situation/rising action/climax/dénoument—arises less, I think, out of some postmodern perversity or a reactionary backlash against contemporary fiction than because thought it was a distortion of reality, a lie—a lie about what life is like, about the way things are. My own old writing teacher, the late John Barth, defined a story as “the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium.” I don’t think McCarthy bought into this whole fictive idea of crisis leading to growth, of a new equilibrium; he saw only catastrophe after mindless catastrophe, entropy and decay and the inevitable heat death of the universe. In all these debates over life and death, McCarthy, as author, comes down decisively on the side of his suicides, lending them his own formidable eloquence to deliver grand nihilistic manifestos. E.g., from The Sunset Limited:

“The world is basically a forced labor camp from which the workers—perfectly innocent—are led forth by lottery, a few each day, to be executed.”

“When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore.”

“…and if that pain were collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash.”

Geez louise! It’s kind of unfair of McCarthy to stack the deck so heavily in favor of despair with his own rhetorical power. (I’m reminded of the Chuck Jones cartoon “Duck Amuck,” in which Bugs Bunny himself turns out to be at the animation board, the author of all Daffy’s humiliations. “Ain’t I a stinker?” he smirks.) “How come you give him the words, and not me?” pleads the preacher to God at the end of Sunset Limited, having lost his great debate and failed to save a soul. But McCarthy clearly believes that intelligence = pessimism, and dismisses all counterargument as foolish. “Are there alternate views? Of course,” says the professor. “Will any of them withstand scrutiny? No.” Bobby Western, of The Passenger, reports he had similar debates with his sister.“She told me from the time she was about fourteen that she was probably going to kill herself,” he recalls. “We had long conversations about it. […] She always won. She was smarter than me. A lot smarter.” As the professor says: “The darker picture is always the correct one.” For McCarthy, the smart money is on black.

I’m neither a classics nor a Shakespeare scholar, but I’m going to go ahead and float the reductive, just-bullshitting-over-a-coupla-beers-here thesis that Shakespearean tragedy is tragic because things didn’t have to go that way; ancient Greek tragedy is tragic because it couldn’t have gone any differently. Though this distinction depends entirely on your beliefs about free will, and whether, per Heraclitus, character = fate. Modern physics and neuroscience seem to suggest that free will is an illusion, albeit perhaps a necessary one. I don’t think Cormac McCarthy sees a whole lot of difference between these two tragic worldviews since a.) choice or not, you know you’re just gonna fuck up like you always do (Llewelyn Moss, of No Country for Old Men, commits to his own fatal mistake saying, “I'm fixin to go do somethin dumbern hell but I'm goin anways”) and b.) in the end it doesn’t matter what choices you make since we’re all gonna die and be forgotten anyway, and so’s the whole universe and time itself.

The one soft spot he retains, in even his most adamantly hopeless works, is for language. In The Sunset Limited, the suicidal professor, determined as he is to resist the preacher’s entreaties and arguments, can’t help but admire his diction: when the preacher refers to the professor’s fellow men as “terminal commuters,” he bemusedly echoes the coinage. “Got a nice sound to it, ain’t it?” the preacher teases him. “It’s all right,” he concedes. In the course of their debate over life and death they pick up one another’s idioms—“you think Im fixin to put you in the trick bag”—and toss them back and forth, turn them into recurring motifs and running jokes, develop an idiolect between them. In The Counselor, when the protagonist says he’s “taken aback by the cautionary tone of this conversation,” Brad Pitt says: “Cautionary—good word,” and delves into its unsettling etymology, involving hostages. Later, Pitt’s delighted when a woman calls him a “masher”: “‘Masher’! Good lord, where’d you hear that?” Even a high-ranking Mexican cartel member, delivering the brutal news that the protagonist’s kidnapped wife is already as good as dead, quotes the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. It may be a vestigial pleasure, like an adult looking back with some lingering fondness at a beloved childhood toy, but it remains nonetheless. McCarthy’s like the dying literary critic in Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet to the Brain” remembering, with the last guttering flicker of his neurons, the first euphonious phrase that ever caught his ear.

And so he’s particularly bitter about the death of literature, of culture, civilization’s memory, angry at the thought of the cosmos forgetting itself and descending into the dementia of extinction, the eternal amnesia of dead matter. The suicidal professor in Sunset Limited rues having placed his faith in things he thought were enduring, but proved to be fragile. For McCarthy, our situation isn’t tragic; it’s far worse. Consider this summation from The Passenger, uttered by a ghost:

“The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?”

One answer McCarthy doesn’t give would be: for him. For us, now. Tragedy is not only apprehended in retrospect. Since we all die alone and are all doomed to be forgotten, the only time we get to commiserate and memorialize is now—in stories, onstage, and onscreen. We’re the only consciousness (or conscience) the universe has, so it’s up to us to mourn our own demise, and to remember the ever-vanishing present.

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^[1] One of his last two novels, actually, released six weeks before its companion volume, Stella Maris.