Editor’s Introduction

[Erratum]

This issue is being built in strange times, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone feel like pilgrims exhausted on the face of the planet Anareta—or choose your favorite McCarthy passage to illustrate your feelings of fear, disorientation, and isolation. But of course McCarthy is good material for both acknowledging darkness and discerning the light. In a blog post for Cambridge University Press’s “Cambridge Reflections” series, Steven Frye thinks about reading The Road in the midst of such circumstances, concluding that even given nature’s indifference, we can be grateful “for each other, for self-sacrifice and commitment, and for the indefinable humanity that abides and sustains.” You can read his post in its entirety here:

http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/05/cormac-mccarthy-the-road/

So this issue does more of what we love—grappling with McCarthy in an ever-evolving set of contexts. Dianne Luce offers a new understanding of McCarthy’s work on his yet-unpublished novel The Passenger, based on his correspondence and other information about influences on central themes of the work. Jasmin Kirkbridge and Julian Caradec both cover The Road, with Kirkbridge reading the novel through the lens of Heraclitus (whom we know McCarthy thought about when writing Blood Meridian), and Caradec considers the idea of the suffering child in a historical, economic, and ethical context. Noemí Fernández Labarga addresses the representations of race in Suttree, arguing that the narrative techniques McCarthy uses render both blackness and whiteness strange, ultimately undermining a black/white binary. And finally, Peter Josyph tells the story of Rick Wallach’s first copy of Blood Meridian, discovered on a drugstore bookrack in Adelaide, Australia, and its adventures since that fateful meeting. (If you attended the 2018 Cormac McCarthy conference in Monterrey, Mexico, you might recognize this as one of the featured talks.)

In our next issue, we’ll run a review of the new collection Cormac McCarthy in Context, edited by Steven Frye and the impetus for the reflection piece mentioned above. The Society unfortunately had to postpone the conference planned for June 2020 in Dublin, but we’ll send out information about the rescheduling when we have it ready. Reading McCarthy certainly reminds us of the tendency for plans to go south and the need to persevere regardless.

Enjoy, and as always, keep in touch.