Why are Cormac McCarthy's books so bleak yet hopeful? Facing Terminal Decadence!

Why are Cormac McCarthy's novels so bleak? Yet at the same time, they have a glimmer of hope ! The reason is a lot of his novels are set up in a stage in society which we call terminal decadence.

So what is terminal decadence? If you think about different cultures and civilization? They rise up, they go to a peak, and then they start coming down. And terminal decadence is the stage where they start crumbling and they reach a point where there is no return.

For example, Rome started rising to its power in the first and the second century BC it reached its height at the time of the second century AD. And then started coming down and eventually collapses around the fifth and the sixth century ad.

Cormac McCarthy is writing all of his novels set up in a time period that is a form of a terminal decadence. It is a time when the society is starting to crumble and collapse in different ways. For example in the blood meridian, it is a society where, that is given into a sense of mindless violence.

If you think about the kid, he goes creating mindless violence in so many different ways. And the same thing with Judge Holden. And then when you look at no Country for Old Men, it is a world where everything is left to chance.

There is no reason, there is no order there, there doesn't seem to be a sense of morality. If you think about Chigur, he goes around just killing people with seemingly no reason. At the toss of a coin. So it's a kind of a sense of a collapse of the morality in the society.  

And then you see the road where there is complete ecological collapse. It is terminal decadence taken to its end. So that's why. Cormac McCarthy's novels seem very bleak. But what is but what makes Cormac McCarthy the genius is that in spite of the bleakness, he always gives a glimmer of hope!

So how does he do that? So I want to look at analyze The Road to give a sense of how he depicts the bleakness of very vividly, while also giving a sense of hope. In the road there is complete ecological collapse. The father and the son are trying to find a safe passage, avoiding the robbers, avoiding the cannibals in order to go to a place where the son can grow up safely.

So that's the setup for the novel. So what K McCarthy shows here is in this time of terminal decadence people have four different responses to it. The first response is The people that given to violence.

There are gangs of cannibals going around hunting people to eat people because there is it's hard to find food in a world where there is ecological collapse. So that's the first kind of people who are completely given to a violence, living like animals .

And the second group of people are people who are like the kid's mom. The kid's mom is someone who doesn't want to face this world filled with violence, she's filled with despair, so she wants to escape! In the novel

she just walks out the door, commits suicide! So that's the second kind of response people would have to terminal decadence. It is uncontrolled despair that leads to this desire to escape. In this case it is suicide. And then there is a third response from a old man by the name Ely.

So Ely calls himself a prophet, but he's actually a prophet of nihilism. There is a sense that nothing really matters anymore. When the father and the son create a fire to cook food, he looks at the fire and he remembers. He had not seen fire for a long time because he had lived like an animal.

And in this nihilistic world Ely isolates himself from everyone else. He's a bit of a cynic who tries to poke fun at different things. Like for example he actually makes fun of death! How one day when everyone dies what will death do? Death won't have anything else to do. So death itself will face its defeat! So it's his own way of using a cynical form of humor to live through the sense of nihilism  

so that's the third response. The first response is violence and aggression. The second is despair and escape. And the third is giving into a form of an nihilism with a cynical sense of humor. Then there is the fourth response which is what we see from the father and the son.

The father and the son are people that still have a sense of purpose and still keep going forward. And what gives them this sense of purpose? As the father is speaking to the son, he knows that it's a world filled with the violence. He knows it's a world that is filled with so much cruel people who will kill and eat other .

And he knows that it is very easy to give into despair, but in spite of all that, he keeps pushing through. He keeps telling his son all through the novel, Hey, we need to keep going because we are keeping the fire alive! We are carriers of this fire!

So what is this fire?

What is brilliant about Cormac McCarthy is he never gives a direct allegory or an analogy as to what the fire means. But the idea of the fire comes all the way through the novel when the father is talking to the son and using that as a way to motivate the son to keep moving forward.

And this fire is an important piece because the same idea of carrying the fire also comes in No Country for Old Men at the end, when the sheriffs looks at how people have just died for seemingly no reason at all, he's filled with a sense of despair. He's almost like the mother in the road filled with a sense of despair. And at that point he has this dream. in this dream, his father is carrying this fire so that he could go and join him . This theme of carrying fire through through this terminal decadence so that there can be fellowship between the father and the son happens in no country for old men.

And that same, theme or motiff again comes in. The road where the father tells the son, we are carrying this fire. So we need to keep going forward. And when the father realizes he's going to die because he himself has a terminal illness the day before he's going to die, he tells the son, you have the fire in you!

So you need to keep carrying it forward. And eventually the son meets a family that takes him in and he reaches a point of safety. The fire is a transcendent principle. Instead of being like all these cannibals that just eat everyone or being like the mother that just gives them to despair or being like Eli kind of an nihilist, just making a joke of everyone.

They are looking at are holding on to a transcendent principle as a north star that will help them to keep going forward. And this desire to hold onto a transcendent principle in the midst of decadence happens so many times in history. When Rome was facing its decadence. boethius is a philosopher who is put in prison for execution based on a baseless accusation.

As he's giving into the sense of self-pity, he has this kind of vision of the lady wisdom coming to him and telling him, Hey why would you give into the self-pity? There is a transcendent world that you can live into even as you're facing your own death. He talks about that and he calls it the pythagorean God.

So what do we mean by pythagorean God?

Pythagoras is a mathematician that lived in Greece so The Pythagorean God is the idea that math is eternal. Even if the whole world gets destroyed, the idea that one-on-one is two is always going to be there. The idea that the sum of the angles of a triangle is going to be 180 degrees. It's always going to be there. So what it means by this, Pythagorean God, is the idea that when you are facing a form of deep despair instead of focusing on self-pity, focus on transcendent principles that are eternal. That's the way to get through terminal decadence. Boitheus wrote the book, the Consolation of Philosophy it's considered as one of the hundred most influential books ever written. Because of this particular context of finding a transcendent principle to keep pushing through terminal decadence.

In The Road, I interpret this civilizational fire as the love that the father and son have for each other. In fact as the novel goes on, the father actually says his son is almost like God, where he has unconditional love for other people.

Even though they don't have enough food, he gives his food to other people. He refers to his son as a tabernacle which again is imagery from the Bible tabernacle is a place of God's presence. So he reference to his son as being a place of God's presence because he gives unconditional love to other people. When his father dies, the son stays with him for three days, which again, is this  biblical imagery of death and resurrection.

And eventually when the son reaches this family that takes him in the mother actually tells him, Hey, you can talk to God. And and the son actually says he talks to his own father. Where again, you see this theme of death and resurrection come in a mystical way.

And she's replies to him she said that the breath of God was his breath. Yet through it passed from man to man through all time. So she talk, talks again about this mystical idea that. That God's breath passes through all of us. And when we channel that unconditional love to other people that is a sense of carrying that civilizational fire. 

So the sense of civilizational fire is this transcendent principle that helps us to push through terminal decadence. I interpret that as giving unconditional love to people by being a channel of God's unconditional love. So it is a theme that gives that sense of hope in the midst of ble, in the midst of being bleak.

So that's the last page in the book, and he finishes the last paragraph with this story about this trout that is swimming through the river. There is a, a rebirth of nature. But he says the things cannot be put back together the same way. Civilizations go up, they come down, they face terminal decadence, and there will be those few people that carry the civilizational fire in order to have civilization come back.

But it, it'll never be the same way again. There will always be something that is different. And this is the last line in the novel where he says, in the deep glens where they lived. All things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

And that's what makes Cormac McCarthy brilliant. He describes the bleakness of the world vividly. He does not pull punches, but at the same time, he gives a sense of hope. There is this civilizational fire, which is a transcendent principle that helps us to push through the terminal decadence. And at the same time, there is also a mystery.

 All we can do is be a channel of love carrying the civilizational fire through a stage of terminal decadence. We won't know exactly what the next rebirth will look like. There will always be a sense of mystery there because there are bigger patterns. That we don't yet know.

And again, that gives that sense of hope that there is something bigger happening there that we don't fully see yet. There is a mystery that is worth living for! So that is why I love Cormac McCarthy. So even though he died three days ago, his works still continue to inspire us in so many different ways to help us to face through our terminal decadence by carrying the civilizational fire and whatever form that we do.