Cormac McCarthy Explains the Unconscious
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-West/d...
Did you get that feeling reading these books?
I haven't read Blood Meridian yet, but Child of God (another McCarthy novel) definitely lacks the optimism of The Road.
As for this article, I think that the subconscious fascinates almost everyone. The reason we have psychology (in my opinion, of course) is that it's apparent to almost all of us that there's something going on under there.
Everyone has anecdotes like the one mentioned in this article, where a solution to a problem appears in a dream or pops into someone's head immediately after waking.
Not gonna lie: Blood Meridian deals in some very grim and violent subject matter. There are no heroes in that story. Its about a gang of scalp hunters (the Glanton Gang. They actually existed if you can believe it...) so I'll leave you to draw your conclusions about what a story like that would entail. The way McCarthy makes those types of scenes digestible is by almost always describing them in the past tense. You the reader come upon them after they happened. He also writes with a detachment to the event and speaks of some downright unspeakable acts almost matter of factly. I am pretty squeamish and I could handle it so you'll probably be fine because of that.
The Road I found harder to read than BM. Its less violent (although there are a couple spots that get pretty gruesome) but just unrelentingly bleak and grim. I needed to lie down after reading it. Again his detachment from the events happening make it bearable. Worth it IMO.
Assuming you haven't read them, I'd recommend digging into All The Pretty Horses or No Country For Old Men. Both are incredible stories that have the same scenes of elemental good vs evil that crops up in McCarthys work over and over again but are less... intense.
> . . . and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. . . And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.
McCarthy expands on this theme slightly in a rare interview: McCarthy likes the scientists at the Institute for a simple reason: The stuff they explore, like his writing, cuts to the bone.
“If it doesn’t concern life and death,” he says, “it’s not interesting.” [0]
If you're looking for lighter (but still excellent) storytelling on similar Western/survival themes I'd suggest the Border Trilogy [1] by McCarthy. My high school English teacher had us read these instead of Blood Meridian (his favorite book of all time) because they're much less violent. You won't get the full experience, though, as some of McCarthy's characters are genius because of their depravity, violence, and seemingly chaotic natures.
[0] http://www.davidkushner.com/article/cormac-mccarthys-apocaly...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Border-Trilogy-Crossing-Everymans-Lib...
I really don't see what ppl like about the BT.
I read The Road when I was probably 22 or 23. I now have a son who is six (I'm a man, for context), and I suspect that if I were to re-read it, I would likely weep uncontrollably for an hour or two, and then spend the next several months sporadically crying and clutching my son. It is a hard, hard read, and even harder (I assume) if you're a parent.
That being said, it's also a masterpiece of a book. Ultimately it does have a glimmer of optimism, it's just a really rough time getting to that optimism. I don't regret reading it, but once is enough, for now.
That's what life really is, when you strip away the conveniences. The real horror is to realize that for many people in history (and even now) reality has been worse.
I read it again when my son was 4 months old. That's when I finally understood, at a visceral level, what it means to carry the fire. I think we're both going to be better because of it.
I will read the book one more time after my dad passes.
I think you should read one of them. If you want, I'll read The Road (or any other one) while you do and we can talk about it. Someone has to carry the fire.
It presents man's intellect as the apotheosis of 4 billion years of pain, suffering, death, and destruction. Man as the ultimate practitioner of the ordering principle of the universe: War
I would say Suttree is a lighter (relatively speaking) read.
The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. [...] What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.
But it is truly horrific.
>He was half way back up the caldera to his truck when something made him stop. He crouched, holding the cocked pistol across his knee. He could see the truck in the moonlight at the top of the rise. He looked off to one side of it to see it the better. There was someone standing beside it. Then they were gone. There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. Now you're goin to die.
The pistol mentioned was taken from a dead drug dealer. The someone next to the truck would drive most of the rest of the story.
I tought this was Carl Jung's idea.
This is true for majority of us. But for some people, unconscious doesn't even use images. E.g. Aphantasia.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
What would Cormac say about this? Say if human evolution would have picked up the "Aphantasia" gene to spread then Cormac's main question the "Kekule problem" would dissolve or won't arise.
How the unconscious goes about its work is not so much poorly understood as not understood at all. It is an area pretty much ignored by the artificial intelligence studies, which seem mostly devoted to analytics and to the question of whether the brain is like a computer. They have decided that it’s not
Is that true? Who has decided the brain is not like a computer? That is news to me.
However there are a lot of flat statements like this made in the article where I’m not entirely sure what the author meant or what grounds he had for saying it and this is one of them. Another is:
"The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously."
How can anyone possibly know that, especially if we have no real idea when it happened?
Edit:
Another thing that got my back up a bit were the disdainful references to 'influential persons', as though David Krakauer and Cormac McCarthy are renegade outsiders.
There are some really good points here that I largely agree with. Most of what we do or know or think or even say is processed or generated by the unconcious mind. I know what I am going to write here and now, but I don't know it in linguistic form until I actually write it. I'm generating it in a non-English language representation in my brain and converting that written into English and only part of that pipeline is really conscious.
His article is interesting in parts but really arrogant and not as novel or anti-mainstream as he seems to think it is. It sounds like someone who spent a long time chatting with physicists or biologists and no time reading research in artificial intelligence, at least from the last decade.
All experience is the working of consciousness. The feeling of subject-object distinction is no more real than the distinction between hot-cold sensation.
The two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a neural superhighway called the corpus callosum. If you cut the bundle, then the hemispheres can still communicate, but the bandwidth is cut to a trickle. In this situation, the hemispheres develop divergent personalities and they can often fight over broader executive control of the organism.
With the bundle intact, the halves settle into roles, with the left brain taking the conscious aspect. The right brain forms the unconscious.
>Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes.
> There is no selection at work in the evolution of language because language is not a biological system and because there is only one of them
Organisms don't 'wait' for new traits to come along. They just come along and if they are useful and benefit the organism, they propagate across the population through successful reproduction. Evolved traits propagate themselves precisely through being useful in helping the organism survive and reproduce. McCarthy doesn't seem to understand the elementary process by which natural selection functions.
>The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously.
>For while it is fairly certain that art preceded language it probably didnt precede it by much.
There is absolutely no evidence for any of this whatsoever. It's pure supposition. How can he know language propagated so fast and arose so suddenly? Some evolutionary biologists analyzing the physiology of early hominids think there is evidence of physical adaptations for language as far back as Homo Ergaster over a million years ago, but vocal language leaves no archaeological evidence. There is just no way to know how long it took to develop to modern forms and no reason to suppose that physical representation in the form of art predates spoken language.
Edit: McCormack's premise seems to be that Language did not evolve from any preceding capacity, including any preceding ability to communicate. We know that modern primates other than humans communicate in very primitive pre-linguistic ways, but McCormack specifically dismisses the idea that human language is descended from or evolved from similar capabilities in our common ancestors. This seems absurd to me on several grounds.
Our common primate ancestors did not have vocal cords or throat configurations capable of modern speech, or anything close to it. McCormack even points this out in the essay and highlights the fact that reconfiguring our throats for speech is, independent of any advantage language gives us, a serious disadvantage because it makes us more susceptible to choking. Yet then he goes on to say that language gives us no evolutionary advantage because it’s ‘not a biological system’. If it gives no evolutionary advantage, how does it compensate for the increased risk of choking?
Speech-like non-verbal communication must have preceded physical adaptation in order to make the adaptation advantageous, otherwise there would again have been no compensating factor for the choking risk. So early forms of language-like communication would necessarily have been non-verbal (by which I mean involving gestures sounds like those made by some other modern primates but not 'spoken'). This early communication was less efficient and advantageous than spoken communication, otherwise physical adaptations for spoken communication would not have increased fitness.
So it seems far more plausible that language-like communication originated as more complex forms of gestures and sounds our common primate ancestors already used and then evolved into a form dominated by spoken language in order to increase it’s efficiency. After all, our ancestors going back millions of years had complex physical culture including manufacturing composite artefacts, creating and managing fire, processing and cooking food. All of these would need to be taught somehow. Yet McCormack’s thesis is that this teaching involved communications no more sophisticated than the basic communications we see in other primates and other mammals today, until spoken language somehow burst on to the scene fully formed 100k years ago.