{"title":"Óðinn’s Avatar: McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian","authors":"William Sayers","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0187","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In contrast to studies that establish superficial resemblances between Judge Holden of Blood Meridian and such monolithic forces of evil and destruction as the archons of Gnostic religious tradition, this article equates this larger-than-life figure with Odin, the Norse god of war. Affinities are established with this paramount god in such spheres as the patronage of battle rage and poetic inspiration; law and judgment; the absence of a moral dimension; the search for knowledge as a means to power; interrogation of the dead; shamanism and spirit travel; the hosting of a select company of fallen warriors in Valhalla; dandyism, joviality, and storytelling, but also in such darker areas as illusion, deceit, betrayal, whimsy and the gratuitous act. Preeminent is the vision of war as central to all life. Despite Holden’s claim that he cannot be fully known, the most plausible source for McCarthy’s adaptation of Odin is H. R. Ellis Davison’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, first published in 1964 and reissued as Gods and Myths of the Viking Age in 1981.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126029890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Modern Transformation of Fatherhood in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road","authors":"Christian Anderson Allred","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0109","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road depict intimate father-child relationships that are best explained by what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “the transformation of intimacy in the twentieth century.” Whereas father-child relations are fixed within a rigid social structure in premodernity, in modernity they become a voluntary site for commitment that requires the deliberate cultivation of trust. In McCarthy’s two novels, this cultivating of trust takes the form of shared routines, dialogue, and watchwords. The intimacy and connection that these create give McCarthy’s fathers a needed sense of security in an otherwise disorienting and disillusioning modern world. The displacement of traditional familial networks by abstract systems then ultimately leads back to one of the most basic forms of social network: the parent-child relationship.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121165344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Refocusing Western Revisionism: McCarthy’s Debt to Butcher’s Crossing","authors":"Mark Asquith","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0145","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Many critics make a link between John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing and Blood Meridian, claiming a shared bloodiness and broad existential concerns. This article uncovers more direct links. Williams intended Butcher’s Crossing (1960) as a bleakly existential riposte to Emerson’s encouragement to “go west” in search of God in the form of a “transparent eyeball.” The novel asks what happens when the universalizing eye gazes upon the brutal rather than the godly. The same corrupted vision lies at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel that, as Neil Campbell notes, “peer[s] into the abyss of Western American History and bears fictional witness to its terrifying and spectacular events.” In the narrative worlds of both works the role of witness is debased; there is no moral focus and no heroic central character to be deconstructed, just a passive teenager whose gaze “sees all” without feeling, the authors deliberately withholding censure. There is at their center a group of hunters led by a demonic “Ahab-like leader” whose blinkered and bloody pursuit of the elusive prey (whether skins or scalps) is transformed into an exploration of the soul. Though visual metaphors dominate, the characters remain blind, leading to a discussion as to whether they evolve morally at all.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131372176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0107","url":null,"abstract":"Editorial| September 08 2023 Editor’s Introduction The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2023) 21 (2): 107–108. https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0107 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Editor’s Introduction. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 8 September 2023; 21 (2): 107–108. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.2.0107 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Cormac McCarthy Journal Search Advanced Search News of Cormac McCarthy’s passing came on the heels of the American Literature Association conference, held this year in Boston from May 25–27, 2023, where we had a record number of presentations on McCarthy—fourteen in total. It also came in the midst of our planning a symposium devoted to The Passenger and Stella Maris, which will be held at Creighton University in Omaha, from September 21–13, 2023. More information on that event can be found at cormacmccarthysociety.com. The news was deeply saddening, though I’m heartened by these wonderful conversations about his work that promise to be as rewarding as ever in future years.At the ALA this year, the McCarthy Society convened a business meeting—as is the practice for most of the author societies represented at the conference—and discussed plans for upcoming conferences, new initiatives, and the state of the society in general. This year, because of the society’s... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135200245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned by Patrick O’Connor (review)","authors":"Rachel B. Griffis","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0093","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121226484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Celebration of Cormac McCarthy”: A New Yorker’s Report from Broadway","authors":"Peter. Josyph","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0097","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"155 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133736351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Babycinos at the End of the World: Cormac McCarthy and Parenthood","authors":"Kevin Power","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0002","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this keynote address given at the Cormac McCarthy Society International Conference held at Trinity College Dublin in June 2022, author Kevin Power reflects on parenthood as represented in McCarthy’s works and as personal experience. He focuses particular attention on questions surrounding the decision to have children in a dangerous, violent, and anthopogenically warming world.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124784790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Blood will tell”: Suttree’s Drinking Class","authors":"Conor Picken","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.21.1.0015","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:How can we account for the ubiquity of destructive drinking in Suttree? This article argues that alcoholism—both medical disease and metaphor for materialist excess—can be used to interpret Suttree’s actions as a critique of his father’s bourgeois values. Alcoholic consumption ironically mirrors a brand of material consumption that Suttree disdains. The article interacts with other scholarship that explains how the educated son from an affluent family chooses the life that he does, but it does so by reading Suttree’s familial discord through the shifting etymological significance of “alcoholism” as a physiological disease that also reflects social value. I argue that by understanding Suttree’s choices as the pathology of this disease, his marginal existence reads less like rebellion and more like addiction. But Suttree’s alcoholic life along the trash-riddled Tennessee River is also a reminder of the other kind of consumer excess that those of his father’s ilk represented in the halcyon economic days after World War II. The article uses a historicist approach to contextualize Suttree’s life as both the backlash to upper-class socioeconomic standing and as the life of an addict whose despair only abates if we read his “fly them” moment as a sober one.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"210 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132625223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}