Why Cormac McCarthy Writes Dark Novels (Cormac Answers)

have you ever wondered why Cormac McCarthy writes such dark novels well in a moment Cormac McCarthy is going to tell us why and this is the only time I have ever found where Cormac has gone on the record about his approach to writing novels that air on the more dark side and this is such a big question you always see in you know the McCarthy community on Reddit people are like what is wrong with this guy or is there any happy content and in early McCarthy scholarship a lot of people you know labeled him as a nihilist and that's really not as Pop as popular anymore but if you didn't dive deeper into his work you could see that most of it has this very dark tone to it so once we are done with the clip we're going to have a short discussion on McCarthy's thoughts then we are going to ask the question can you write successful literature that isn't dark and then last but not least apply a psychoanalytical psychoanalytic lens to McCarthy and to ourselves and asked the question why do we like or like to write dark novels so if you guys don't already know right conscious is slowly butting into a corn McCarthy headquarters of sorts on YouTube over the next couple months I have so many series interviews book breakdowns and miscellaneous videos on McCarthy playing that it even intimidates me so if you guys are interested obviously subscribe to the channel I have a quarterback McCarthy newsletter that I send out where I share ideas that I create or I come across from McCarthy Scholars so let's waste no further time and hear from Cormac himself as far as being as far as painting the world is is grim um I don't know it if you if you look at classical literature uh the the the core of literature is the idea of tragedy and that's you know you don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you but but tragedy is that the core of human experience and it's what we have to deal with that's what makes life difficult and that's what we want to know about it's what we want to know how to deal with it it's unavoidable it's nothing you can do to uh forestall it so how do you deal with it and uh all classical all classical literature has to do with uh things to happen that happen to people they would really rather hadn't but uh so Cormac does such a great job at creating tragic literature because he contrasts some of his you know tragic or idealistic characters with this new technological society that has unlimited dark potentiality in the orchard keeper we see the obliteration of a whole community in just a couple decades and even though we don't see that that's what's going on that's what's driving some of the characters into Extreme Action in No Country for Old Men the sheriff cannot keep up with or handle this new evil world most recently in the passenger Bobby and Alicia Western seeming seemingly are thrown into disarray rather than Clarity by Matt their um genius ability in mathematics and science and then obviously their father and you know they're in each one each one of McCarthy's novels tragedy tragedies are occurring that you may not even see but established kind of the tone of of the novel and I think that's why McCarthy is such a beautiful author because when you play place a character that's rooted in nature with this new world problems start to occur and in American history this is very exemplified with Ted Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber when we have this genius type figure that not handled the real world but then moves back out into nature problems start to occur and with a lot of McCarthy's characters they are moving in and out of nature in and out of narratives that slowly but surely start to darken the novel every single time Billy crosses over into Mexico in the crossing things start to get darker and darker first he loses the wolf then he comes back and loses his parents then he goes back and loses boy then when he goes back and you know gets Boyd's bones back he's turned into a character that's killing people and is almost a maniac and then at the end with the last Crossing we see someone who you know at the start all who started this chain of events with wanting to help nature help the wolf help take it away from the technological society and now he won't even help a dog and he cries and weeps in into the night so do you guys think that you can write novels that are successful that aren't totally negative because if we look at you know a list of the top 100 novels of all time most of them are going to be tragic maybe a couple might be neutral but there are very so what do you guys think can you write very successful positive novels because I only know one person who does this and it's probably because he's at some level a slight bit of a troll and that is another one of the greatest living American authors and that is Tom Robbins his book Jitterbug perfume and still life with woodpecker are genius in the sense that they are beautiful novels that almost have no tragic elements to them he in his opinion he was like why would I create these artiste man K you know suffering artist type figures when that's not how my reality works I live a very positive and elevated reality mostly through meditation and psychedelics so I'm going to exemplify that through my works and that is a much harder task I think and once again let me know down below because there's this you know if you believe that authors kind of pull from this creative ether there's so much negative energy G in that ether that you can pull from but in terms of the positive side you almost have to create that all yourself you have to create that reality and you know we're getting a little meta here but obviously McCarthy is a very well-read individual he knows how stories and myths work and that he applies that to his novels in general and another powerful thing that he does is that when you base a story in nature when you are a novel writer who is at some level an Eco novelist just because of all the natural elements that you put into your prose most of the time it those it actually airs on the negative and you you think like why because right now if you and I you came came out to my house and we went to the desert and we watched the sunset it would be a very fun experience you know it's pretty most ecstatic and positive most of the time but when you start to spend a lot of time out in nature it's actually a very mellowing and a very kind of neutral if not slightly dark experience because you start to see how reality actually works you get rid of all the simulacra and all the frames and all the stuff that Society puts around round is you know right now I'm looking at another house outside my window there's so much reinforcement happening and when you start to remove that then you start to process human reality and at some level we want to maybe transition into some psychoanalytic thought we are at a core very fragmented and traumatized individuals and before we get into that if you're writing a novel out and you know about with all these natural elements I think as it expands as you start to expand nature and expand that feeling I don't think it uses usually most of the time goes toward the positive because there is nothing there the positives of nature is this kind of unsaid connection you know there's this unsaid unity and connection and Oneness that you can feel with nature and you know there's obviously some very beautiful and kind things they're out there in nature but they're also all the negatives and the human mind probably sees those a little bit more especially when you are expanding a narrative because it can create setting and mood and McCarthy you know if we look at like the use of animals in his work you know obviously we just talked about the wolf in the crossing but you know just first in the orchard he's been doing this since the start and the orchard keeper there was a very luminous you know or foreshadowing moment with I think a hawk and an owl that kind of start off these negative chain of events and have a you know some nice symbology to it there's actually a good book called animals in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy by Wallace Sanborn III that you know just gets really meta into this and he this guy was actually I think just on the corn the reading McCarthy podcast and if I just released the McCarthy underground podcast on Spotify Apple a bunch of other places I have an exclusive you know podcast that's not on YouTube on there if you guys want to go check that out I haven't officially launched that one yet I'm gonna upload all these YouTube videos and then and yeah anyway check that out if you're interested but let's talk about some psychoanalytic thought really fast there's a guy out there named Otto Ronk and he was the Protege the Secretary of Sigmund Freud you know Daddy Freud and Ronk is very unknown under red underappreciated and he took a very different approach with his writing he wrote a very beautiful book called Art and the artist creative personality and development if I'm remembering that remembering that correctly and he basically argues that that the creative urge that the creative will is actually just a way to deal with trauma and like that's you know obviously every new age art therapy like do our oh I did are and I feel better now you know that's obviously not like this mind-blowing thing but you know in 1917 or something this is a little bit more new and he's um helped influence another uh great book that I think won the Pulitzer Prize called um the denial of death by Ernest Becker were they based in both Ronk and Becker to say that like art you know people their argument would be that Cormac McCarthy is trying to you know move through his trauma by more trying to immortalize himself in reality forever with you know literature and I'll get into how this relates to tragedy and literature in a second but if we also want to look at like the younger driest hypothesis that says I think like 10 000 years ago in 9800 bees uh BCE that there was massive meteors that caused a bunch of Destruction on the earth and onset and Ice Age like obviously there have been events in human history and when those things happen you know if 99 of the Earth's population goes down and we lose some civilizations civilization and stuff we have massive trauma that happens to us and when when does trauma end you know a lot of very logical types you know immediately you know leave the room when we when trauma starts coming up because you know there are a lot of people that overplay the trauma right like as with everything there are people who don't want to acknowledge that like trauma and even transgenerational trauma exists then there's a bunch of people out there who just exploit it you know there but there's another great book called the breakdown of Consciousness in the bicameral Mind by I think by Julian James that talks about how these cataclysmic events and these things created you know fragmentation in our Consciousness and that fragmentation needs to be restored and that's what creates our love of the dark things of pain and creates maybe some of our need for this tragic literature because that that trauma within us creates violence that is what creates the problems in our society and it's kind of you know states that we maybe weren't as evil or had some of the problems that we maybe used to have and so when we look at literature it's basically just a history of traumatized people telling stories and if we take ronk's hypothesis that you know that are you know is a way to heal trauma and that the people are doing it are trying to immortalize themselves and deny death and you know work through their trauma then we're getting a lot of our reports of history from you know or or narratives from these very traumatized individuals and it's kind of created this reinforcement pattern that we are just traumatized in tragic literature is the only thing that works and it seemingly works because we have not solved that yet 300 million people I think I three I know 300 million people died of democide in the 20th century alone that is innocent people dying by the hands of government that's not even soldiers how much trauma is there when 300 million people die innocent people die from government how much trauma is being created in the poverty in you know Africa South America and India and other you know countries that are struggling right now how much trauma and cycles of abuse and problems are just continuing to be perpetual situated so seemingly continuing to write tragic novels is the move because there will always kind of be an audience there for that and I'm really what are you guys opinions like can literature heal that does literature so by reading a tragic novel you know if I come over here and grab a novel that promotes non-violence Blood Meridian and I read through it is that going to make me less you know what is this is this going to help me heal trauma or like can books do this like what are the purpose what is the purpose of literature because I feel like literature has helped me work through some of the you know more negative aspects of myself and I read something from Harold bloom a while back that said like you know reading all the books in the world will not make you a better person but it will make you more and better something and you know it's really like why are we reading books like why are we reading Cormac McCarthy because I know people out there who read because they are narcissists or they aren't a power trip or they just want to have more knowledge than other people or have this view of the world or they're trying to escape from something and that is very problematic you know being you know being you know one of the worst decisions of my life was spending a bunch of time I'm in the University system studying English it was a waste of time but I saw all these guys and girls even women who were reading to have an edge on people who were reading maybe to get laid or to be smart or to you know get rich or you know all these different things they were just reading for that and it's like obviously that's very negative and that's what's weird about Blood Meridian is that those people love this book Blood Meridian has fueled I think a lot of tragic people's realities more than it's maybe helped I know so many guys you know Blood Meridian oh my God and I'm like well why do you like the novel like what do you get from this like have you you have experiences out in nature like are you growing and then I look at them who they are as actual people I'm like oh no you know I and I don't know you know not to get up on the soapbox right now but I feel like we one of the things I'm trying to do on this channel and what we should be trying to help you know people that we know do in general I think that books actually can heal books can be like a religion or yoga or meditation or you know psychoanalysis and actually heal people but you have to approach it the right way you could you know get into you could be a Christian but you could be Jim Jones you could be a yogi but you could be Osho you could be a reader and be a head you know and so it's like you know that's hopefully by you know I actually don't know the solution that's why I'm just trying to do on this channel is hopefully cater to the right people and shoot down the wrong people so that that is our discussion today on Cormac McCarthy and tragic literature and why he writes it I'm sure we could have taken this in a million other directions but we went here and if you guys want to see some of the influences of the orchard keeper McCarthy's first novel go check that out right over here peace

Channel: Write Conscious

Views: 15,050

Keywords: Cormac mccarthy on writing, cormac mccarthy nihilist, cormac mccarthy evil, is cormac mccarthy evil, cormac mccarthy on writing, cormac mccarthy on no country film, cormac mccarthy on the road, cormac mccarthy on love, cormac mccarthy on language

Id: nWB0TEVaL04

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022