Cormac McCarthy's Noir Masterpieces

From Nick Kolakowski's 6-23-23 CRIMEREADS article entitled "How Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction's Tropes to Make Masterpieces":

Attempting to analyze McCarthy’s work through the lens of ‘crime fiction’ is an interesting exercise. His books were saturated with ‘crime’ in the most primal sense: murder, theft, baby-eating, massacre and genocide. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told The New York Times in 1992. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Crime fiction also revolves on the axis of crime and punishment, law and outlaw—but even in his most grounded novels, McCarthy wasn’t interested in the niceties of societal justice. The marauders of “Blood Meridian” pillage with impunity until more savage forces tear them apart; the police in “Child of God” are little more than a cleanup crew once the full scope of the protagonist’s horror is revealed; the cops who scurry through “No Country for Old Men” are powerless before the ruthlessness of Anton Chigurh, a professional hitman and fixer who pontificates about fate before murdering people; and in “The Road,” set in a post-apocalyptic America coated with ash, the laws and tenets of the old world are a fading dream.

Much of crime fiction is obsessed with balance: the forces of law and order win, or at least the guilty get what’s coming to them. The arc of McCarthy’s literary universe bends not toward justice but something far darker. In “Blood Meridian,” man is described as the “ultimate practitioner” of war, the “ultimate trade.” War, in the book’s context, isn’t the orderly movement of troops around a field—it’s slaughter and pillage, much of it conducted on territory where burning down a village and killing its inhabitants for their scalps is considered just another Tuesday. Humanity perfected violence, and violence pushed humanity onto a merciless evolutionary path: Sheriff Bell, the old-fashioned lawman in “No Country for Old Men,” laments that a man he sent the death row “wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.