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  • Morality in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction: Souls at Hazard by Russell Hillier
  • Jay Ellis (bio)
Hillier, Russell. Morality in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction: Souls at Hazard. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 317, Hardcover: $119.99; $89.00.

McCarthy studies have evolved so much as to invite the old idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Entertaining this, we see early considerations of McCarthy's characters, particularly in terms of motivation, then psychology, and eventually morality, recapitulating stages of development of these in the human species. The supposed simpler stuff of action without directly explained volition lingers yet in our understanding of his characters, like the older limbic system within our own brains recalling that of earlier humans—and even earlier primates. Human development as a species entailed increasing complexity along the evolutionary timeline. So, too, McCarthy scholarship by its growth has naturally developed. But despite early exceptions, it has also grown to more regularly infer greater complexity in the interiority of his characters, particularly in terms of motivation and morality.

Early humans very well may have exhibited altruism, even morality, but the idea predominates that they did not, and further, that these are fabrications of culture, unique to humans, and relatively recent. Scholarship on Cormac McCarthy's work preserves some persistent interpretive habits. We find understandings of violence as timeless, inevitable, even natural to fundamentally amoral creatures (i.e., simplistic Hobbes) even in McCarthy's direct statements about human nature, especially in earlier interviews.

Consider assumptions about McCarthy's characters: Denis Donoghue's that they seem not even to have fully developed brains, but rather rudimentary brain stems; such a misreading persisted all the way into Joyce Carol Oates's of No Country for Old Men. Some early views remain more insightful, such as Vereen Bell's reading of David Brown and the "refusal of culture" in the first book-length study. But this general understanding of McCarthy characters as rather simple presents us with the early fossils of nihilistic reading. The work makes this understandable; newcomers easily misidentify nihilism in the greatest achievement, Blood Meridian. The sheer number and extremity of the book's [End Page 192] assaults on any decent reader's sensibilities overwhelm its obviously moral moments so much that otherwise careful readers often miss the latter: Toadvine putting a gun to Holden's head over the predation of the Apache boy, the kid's moral evolution, and above all, Sarah Borginnis (the only named woman), in her alternative midwifery delivering James Robert from an "it" to a "him." Those refusing to acknowledge the moral McCarthy may simply point to the failure of these attempts. For some, however, these acts generate an underappreciated light bending around the dark planet of McCarthy's vision.

In the early work, characters hardly divulge what's in their brains above the amygdala. But criticism has progressively helped us see the more evolved McCarthy specimens, with the most insightful scholarship—such as Edwin Arnold's peerless work—finding subtleties of consciousness, intention, and feeling early on. The "nihilism" misreading is common of authors eschewing the direct—or transparent—narrative positions predominant in fiction: first person, or the nearly ubiquitous close third. We ought to know better than to trust those voices so directly calling to us, but they can seduce so easily that they at least deliver otherwise less obvious interpretations. Put another way, compared with the more widely championed novelist born the same year as McCarthy, the author of Blood Meridian doesn't have a narrator handing you every possible reading of an event, or even a thought. Philip Roth claimed modestly to dig a little hole and shine a light into it. McCarthy digs many holes, but requires you to bring your own light.

This ongoing problem of misreading McCarthy is well answered by Russell Hillier's Morality in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction: Souls at Hazard. While dimmer readings balk at the bleak rocks of the worldview they find at McCarthy's surfaces, Hillier rightly notes the similarly ironic failure of Joyce Carol Oates to avoid the same "burr." The often-noted aspects of difficulty—or opacity—in McCarthy's style guarantees this problem and its persistence adds to the exigency of...

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