Scott Esposito on Cormac McCarthy's Paradox of Choice
Scott Esposito at the Quarterly Conversation recaps Cormac McCarthy’s career, focusing particularly on how McCarthy has “prob[ed] the fence-posts lining the borders of free will and develop[ed] his own distinctly postmodern view of identity, plot, and country.” The review is enlightening—especially the part on The Road because I have been able to find very little criticism on it.
Here’s a highlight:
Such profound and sincere engagement with his writing bespeaks an author who has very much struck a nerve with all kinds of readers. I think this can be traced to his lifelong obsession with the search for identity: no one thing has been as consistent in McCarthy’s work over his forty-year career as his insistence that we are only offered certain moments to really influence our identity, though we may not know them when we see them and we may be illusioned as to what the choices represent. Furthermore, his most financially successful books and his avowed masterpiece have powerfully stated this idea while also arguing for a distinctly revisionist idea of American identity. Yet what is noteworthy about the latter is that McCarthy has not revised using the typical subversive agents of literature; rather, he has made his revisionists cowboys, the very representatives of the rugged West that first gave birth to the myths McCarthy subverts.
A nice feature of this essay is that it traces this thesis through McCarthy’s ten novels, making a mini-argument for each one. In his section about Blood Meridian, Esposito points to the judge’s “typically convoluted” view on free will that informs the philosophy of many of McCarthy’s other novels:
This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation… .
The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Esposito explains the paradox of the judge’s logic:
Essentially, the judge argues that knowledge and willful action are only possible once all the facts of a life are known, but the problem is that the only way to make these facts known is to live a life. Thus, as the judge says, life is an already-woven “tapestry”; merely tracing one thread through it, a person will have “taken charge” of his life. But again, the paradox: this is only possible once the tapestry is woven, once a life has been lived and all choices are already made…
Is there a point in which a person can preview the tapestry whole-formed, and thus be in a position to truly choose his course in the world? Or must we always be in the dark as to what form our life will take when all is said and done, and therefore not truly be in a position to make choices that will define our future?
