Leiam aí, então, do The Independent, Londres, de hoje, 26/2/2008:
Uma OUTRA leitura deste 'fundamentalismo' pirado que mina por dentro, hoje, a 'civilização' norte-americana que já impôs ao mundo a tragédia do Vietnã, tanto quanto hoje impõe ao mundo a tragédia do Iraque, da tragédia da Palestina, também no cinema, em "Sangue negro".
Acho que só o cinema - só o cinema! O grande cinema norte-americano - está fazendo, hoje, o serviço em nos fazer penetrar por dentro dos EUA - o belicismo e a morte que sempre andaram juntos:
ENTRETENIMENTO+$$$$+SANGUE+$$$$$+MORTE+$$$$+BANALIZAÇÃO DA VIOLÊNCIA...
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Cormac McCarthy: American literature’s great outsider
Few writers have captured the grandeur and cruelty of the American frontier more vividly than Cormac McCarthy. As the film of his novel 'No Country for Old Men' sweeps the Oscars, Boyd Tonkin explores the psychological landscape that shaped his vision
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Sorry, Douglas Adams. The answer is not 42. It is 117. But what was the question? In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy's soul-chilling killer Anton Chigurh pursues another deadly piece of business to a motel door that bears that number. In The Road, the prior apocalypse whose aftermath the book recounts has taken place at 1.17, precisely, on an unknown date.
McCarthyites – their number is legion, and will surely grow after the four Oscars collected on Sunday night by the Coen Brothers' version of No Country... – have scoured the books of the Bible for an appropriate text. Perhaps Revelation 1:17 holds the key? "And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead: and he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, 'Fear not, I am the first and the last'."
For acolytes, McCarthy has over the past decade become the alpha and omega of American fiction. When, last year, the New York Times Book Review polled 200 writers and critics to determine the 25 best American novels of the past quarter-century, McCarthy's gory historical landmark from 1985, Blood Meridian, came third (behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld). The Border Trilogy that occupied McCarthy through the 1990s – All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain – also made the cut.
As he mines metaphysical drama from actions and characters as stark and menacing as the bleached skeleton of a lost steer in the Tex-Mex border badlands, where his plots unfold, McCarthy is running ahead of the rest of the literary posse. Why him, and why now? Why should this taciturn semi-recluse who insists that his blood-washed books have to explain themselves be routinely acclaimed as the greatest American novelist since William Faulkner, his spiritual – if not stylistic – ancestor?
That is a question almost more intriguing than to ask how Javier Bardem – the Coens' inspired Chigurh – put up for so long with the haircut from hell. A tentative answer might involve some revelations – and not always welcome news – about the state of the American soul.
As so often with the authors who magnetise the spirit of an age, biography will tell you everything – and nothing. Born in Rhode Island in 1933, as Charles McCarthy, he moved south as a child when his lawyer father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority – one of the hopeful New Deal grand designs to rescue the dirt-poor region. After university in Tennessee, this famous interview refusenik served in the air force in Alaska and – of all things – hosted a radio show.
As an aspiring writer in the 1960s and 1970s, he eked out a living in Tennessee and Europe, living in Ibiza for a while. His debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, appeared in 1965. Albert Erskine, the editor at Random House of that and several later books, had also edited Faulkner.
Still very far from fame, McCarthy moved through and past two marriages and, notoriously, plumbed the depths of authorial poverty – though in a barn in Tennessee, not an urban garret. The story of how the struggling visionary ran out of toothpaste and was saved by the arrival of a free sample in the mail has entered the apocrypha of Saint Cormac.
His first major novel, Suttree, appeared in 1979. It remains, with its fisherman drop-out quitting the city to learn nature's wisdom, the closest thing to an autobiographical novel we have. A "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1981 then bought the time and space that yielded Blood Meridian, a remorselessly violent tale of the Glanton gang in the late 1840s and their equally savage nemesis, Judge Holden.
As its reputation swelled, the novel – with its singular blend of biblically rhythmical prose, stomach-twisting cruelties and doomy philosophical resonance – secured McCarthy his seat at the top table of American letters. But, in general, he prefers not to show up. A Time magazine "dialogue" with the Coen Brothers recently showed the sage at his riddling, laconic best, or worst, choosing to sound more like Forrest Gump than Faulkner's rightful heir. Here's Cormac on cinema: "There are a lot of good American movies, you know. I'm not that big a fan of exotic foreign films."
This gnomic persona – broken, at last, for an illuminating interview with David Kushner in Rolling Stone last December – did its job for the McCarthy cult. His novels, so rich and yet so reticent, became sites of mystery and invitations to a decoding. What he found in the conventions of the western was a wide open space ready for a creative pioneer to plant his flag.
The author's self-appointed cryptographers were soon on his case. Frequently, they found Gnostic theology behind the slayings and showdowns that fill the Rio Grande with corpses in his work – with its bleak vision of a mortal realm governed, not by the goodness of God, but the forces of a Chigurh-like evil that stalks its way unvanquished through the world.
Yet McCarthy's take on religion remains as enigmatic as the rest of his beliefs. The rhythms of the Bible may pulse through his style, but his thinking seems to follow a different drum. You may read him as a satirist of cocksure faith as much as the literary prophet who speaks from, and to, the end-time imagination of born-again America. Writing about The Road in The Independent, the novelist Clive Sinclair shrewdly noted that its blasted scenery delivers an awful warning to "Coke-swilling horsemen of the apocalypse": "Follow me, invites McCarthy, and see just what that rapture will be like."
If Chigurh in No Country... can be viewed as some kind of angel of death, or devil incarnate, then the forces of law embodied in frail Sheriff Bell have no answer to his power. McCarthy's philosophical pessimism can feel less like an offshoot of the Christian right than an outpost of neo-paganism – the work of some Schopenhauer or Nietzsche of the Badlands. He can conjure up apocalypse without suggesting much prospect of redemption. "What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul?" asks Bell as looks back on the teenage psychopath he sent to the gas chamber at Huntsville, and forward to the fiercer winds of breakdown and disorder embodied in Chigurh. "But he wasn't nothin' compared to what was comin' down the pike."
Comin' down the pike is, reliably, something even worse. Here, the theological overtones of McCarthy's prose fuse with his long-standing engagement with science. Sitting in old Europe, it sounds as if that ought to be some kind of contradiction; in McCarthy's world, it isn't. That makes him a very American idol. His choice of sides in the "two cultures" is illustrated by what this former student of engineering and physics told David Kushner about the awards dinner at the MacArthur Foundation in 1981. "The artsy crowd was all dressed and drugged and ready to party. I just started hanging out with scientists because they were more interesting."
McCarthy has made a close connection with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico: an inter-disciplinary scientific think-tank co-founded by the revolutionary particle physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, in 1984. Reputedly, he even moved house to be closer to the place. A base camp for border-crossing mavericks, Santa Fe also became a home away from home for the novelist who tests humans, and their ethical principles, to destruction and beyond. Santa Fe concerns itself with complex systems, why they work – and why they don't. You might argue that the mechanics of destruction exposed in McCarthy's work draws attention, by bloody contrast, to the everyday miracle of human co-operation and community. Even the closing-time darkness of The Road was lit by the lightning of the survivor's love for his small son. Not coincidentally, McCarthy became a father again at the end of the millennium. The baby's mother, Jennifer Winkley, married him in 2006.
For him, science still guards the flame of creation that literature has lost. "Part of what you respect is their rigour," he says of the scientists he admires. "When you say something, it needs to be right. You can't just speculate idly about things."
A novelist who can spend weeks riding the lexical range in search of the mot juste may well enjoy the company of such spirits. Yet what they think and say has shaped his work as well. McCarthy seems to have imbibed a scientific pessimism currently expressed in, but by no means confined to, worries about climate change and environmental entropy.
At Sante Fe, the subjects that snagged in McCarthy's imagination include the logistics of mass extinction, best known through study of the meteorite strike that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Traces of this fascination crop up in The Road, but the rest of his oeuvre hints heavily that feral human beings can easily reach their own apocalyptic crisis, without any help from outside. "We're going to do ourselves in first," he said to Kushner when asked about the threat of climate change.
Yes, Cormac McCarthy can sound as much like Eeyore as the Prophet Jeremiah. This doomsday voice can, in his fiction, teeter on the edge of absurdity. Part of the Coen Brothers' genius was to spot this comic potential and re-program it into a signal virtue, thanks to Bardem's exquisite deadpan timing. Sceptics point to features of McCarthy's work that might disable a dutiful social realist, but will hardly bother a writer so doggedly steeped in archetype and myth: the spectral presence of the encroaching Mexicans who forever threaten to wipe out lines in the Anglo sand, or the vanishingly small part that women tend to play. No doubt the cetacean community had grave doubts about the representation of whales in one of McCarthy's touchstones, Moby-Dick. As McCarthy so ferociously undermines the self-image of a dominant civilisation from within, he hardly needs external points of reference.
Interpretations of his work will spawn like salmon in the stream. And, for the most part, McCarthy will sit tight, look after his son and read more hard science. It seems plausible to state that, whatever its other qualities, his work poses as tough a challenge to the American ideology of optimism, and "the pursuit of happiness", as any major writer in the national canon. Taking its mood and its words from the Old Testament, that frontiersman's dread has long haunted American culture, a gloomy ghost at the feast. Social trauma, and environmental risk, have given it another lease of life. This might pose a problem for any public thinker – let alone a presidential candidate – who cheerily sets up a stall sign posted "Change". If I were Barack Obama, I would pay a visit to Santa Fe soon.
The best of Cormac McCarthy
Selected by his UK editor, Andrew Kidd
From 'The Road'
In the evening they tramped out across a field trying to find a place where their fire would not be seen. Dragging the cart behind them over the ground. So little of promise in that country. Tomorrow they would find something to eat. Night overtook them on a muddy road. They crossed into a field and plodded on toward a distant stand of trees skylighted stark and black against the last of the v isible world. By the time they got there it was dark of night. He held the boy's hand and kicked up limbs and brush and got a fire going. The wood was damp but he shaved the dead bark off with his knife and he stacked brush and sticks all about to dry in the heat. Then he spread the sheet of plastic on the ground and got the coats and blankets from the cart and he took off their damp and muddy shoes and they sat there in silence with their hands out-held to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its reference and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.
From 'Blood Meridian'
In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white moon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.
They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well.
From 'No Country For Old Men'
He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.
She looked at him, at his outheld wrist. What? She said.
Call it.
I wont do it.
Yes you will. Call it.
God would not want me to do that.
Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.
Heads, she said.
He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.
I'm sorry.
She didnt answer.
Maybe it's for the best.
She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you're the one.
It could have gone either way.
The coin didnt have no say. It was just you.
Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.
She sat sobbing softly. She didnt answer.
For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there.
Everything I ever thought has turned out different, she said. There aint the least part of my life I could of guessed. Not this, not none of it.
I know.
You wouldnt of let me off noway.
I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.
She sat sobbing. She shook her head.
Yet even though I could have told you how all of this would end I thought it not too much to ask that you have a final glimpse of hope in the world to lift your heart before the shroud drops, the darkness. Do you see?
Oh God, she said. Oh God.
I'm sorry.
She looked at him a final time. You dont have to, she said. You dont. You dont.
He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don't believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?
Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.
Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her. ___________________________________________________________________
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