• July 02, 2014 • Pacific Standard
The Rio Grande near Santa Fe, New Mexico, home to Cormac McCarthy. (Photo: Nina B/Shutterstock)
As one of our greatest living writers has his work lifted into the ivory tower, let’s reflect on how it’s the light, not the darkness, that keeps us going back for more.
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The Penn State University Press recently announced that it would publish the The Cormac McCarthy Journal starting in 2015. This is a rare honor for any writer, much less a living one, to achieve. The elevation of a glorified society newsletter (of The Cormac McCarthy Society) to a university press title speaks volumes about the enduring themes that McCarthy continues to engage with Faulknerian ambition and Homeric prose. It’s a tribute befitting a man many consider our greatest living writer.
Readers even passingly familiar with McCarthy’s work—especially his “Tennessee Novels”—will likely conjure up images inexplicably (if not offensively) violent and dark. This stands to reason. Those early novels are indeed unrelenting in their despair and morbidity. Yet, more than any other quality, what keeps us coming back to McCarthy’s work, what more than justifies its own academic journal, is an underappreciated saving grace running throughout this brilliant corpus: McCarthy is funny.
More
Readers even passingly familiar with McCarthy’s work—especially his “Tennessee Novels”—will likely conjure up images inexplicably (if not offensively) violent and dark. This stands to reason. Those early novels are indeed unrelenting in their despair and morbidity. Yet, more than any other quality, what keeps us coming back to McCarthy’s work, what more than justifies its own academic journal, is an underappreciated saving grace running throughout this brilliant corpus: McCarthy is funny.
More
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