From Beowulf to Foucault: On the Literary Influences of Cormac McCarthy

One thing we learn from a study of influence is that critics do not approach reading in the same way that an artist does, or at least not in the way the artist Cormac McCarthy does. For instance, Rick Wallach, in an essay exploring kinships between Blood Meridian and Beowulf, discusses how both works depict martial codes. As a critic, he is inter­ested in particular in how Beowulf gives rise to ideas in McCarthy’s novel. However, looking at the references to the poem in McCarthy’s notes, we find nothing about martial codes, no notes-to-self about ex­posing the “contagion of systematized violence” in Beowulf.

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That McCarthy’s borrowings from novelists, poets, writers, and thinkers do not feel artificial is a testament to his artistic abilities.

Here are two quotations from the Francis Gummere translation of Beowulf as they appear in a short, ultimately excised fragment from an early draft of Suttree. They are in quotation marks, which are also in McCarthy’s draft:

Apace apace heart’s blood bright on the lampkept walk. Helm up thy gorestained

shortsword, he is surely done. Darkflecked and welling blood and pale blue tubers pouching from

his sectored gutbag. A peril­ous journey with peril done. A black screechowl (Black howlet in a

black tree ordains the dead with sooty cantata) “and nicors that lay on the ledge of the ness”

B/wulf, “mere-wife monstrous. Brinewolf

In all times man’s noblest work has been to take arms against his enemies, to defend that with which he is charged. My wife my land my aged. (Infirm elders)

Where is the enemy? What is the shape of him? Where kept and what the counter of his face? (Box 30, Folder 1)

The three questions that conclude this passage, which does not otherwise resemble anything in Suttree, should sound familiar to those who have read the novel. They appear in the italicized opening pages. The quotations from Beowulf come from the poet’s description of the nightmarish lake within which Grendel’s mother dwells, and from names ascribed to her during Beowulf’s fight with the “Brinewolf.” The line “A perilous journey with peril done” probably evokes the Perilous Chapel episode of the Grail legend, which McCarthy was interested in at the time. References in his papers to Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance make the association likely. What McCarthy finds in both the epic poem and the medieval legend is a tense, gothic mood that he aims to duplicate.

Here is the relevant passage from Suttree. The echoes of Beowulf are clear enough, though I never noticed them until I read the early draft of the novel quoted above:

The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape? Where he’s kept or what’s the counter of his face? (4–5)

Here we see McCarthy imagining Knoxville, Tennessee, as a version of Hrothgar’s mead hall, menaced by monsters roaming a nightmare gothic landscape.

Knowing that McCarthy was interested in Weston’s book provokes interesting questions about its influence on McCarthy’s thinking. There is no doubt that he was thinking about the book, but the ar­chives suggest that in addition to ideas, the substance of an artist’s the­matic concerns, he found what can only be described as raw material to be shaped into aesthetic form. A marginal note from an early draft of Suttree contains the following quotation from chapter 13 of Weston’s book: “Many knights have been slain there, none know by whom” (Box 30, Folder 1). This line comes from a discussion of the Perilous Chapel episode of the Grail legend, the subject of the chapter. Here is the quo­tation with some context added: “When Perceval asks of the Chapel he is told it was built by Queen Brangemore of Cornwall, who was later murdered by her son Espinogres, and buried beneath the altar. Many knights have since been slain there, none know by whom, save it be by the Black Hand which appeared and put out the light.”

The quo­tation, which appears in McCarthy’s notes for Suttree, actually shows up in Blood Meridian, the composition of which overlapped with the writing of the former. Here is how Weston’s line works its way into McCarthy’s novel: describing the bloody aftermath of a bar fight in­volving the kid and two other young men who have joined Captain White’s filibuster, the narrator tells us that “the boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom” (emphasis added). It is, for the critic, simultaneously frustrating and fascinating to con­sider that what McCarthy liked about the Weston quotation was the sound of the words.

This is not to say that McCarthy was merely mining Weston for striking turns of phrase. Knowing that he was interested in her book, and knowing that McCarthy’s original title for The Road was The Grail, ought to open up a whole new path in McCarthy criticism (the pathbreaker here is Lydia Cooper, whose “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative” discusses Weston’s work in re­lation to McCarthy). However, what we discover in the archives, in instance after instance, is that ideas are, for McCarthy, material, just as images, metaphors, and striking turns of phrase are. Looking at the way McCarthy records the influence of other writers in his notes tells us much about how he uses their work as material to be incorpo­rated into his own. And what we find, when we find references to other writers, looks more like colors on a painter’s palette than ideas indexed for later development. Even when we find McCarthy appropriating the work of thinkers, it is difficult to draw a line between intellectual and aesthetic appropriation, so suffused with the latter is the former.

A good example of this blurring of lines can be found in an exami­nation of McCarthy’s interest in Michel Foucault during the compo­sition of Suttree. In his notes, McCarthy copied out several very brief quotations from the first chapter of Foucault’s Madness and Civiliza­tion. Madness was on McCarthy’s mind when writing the novel. More precisely, he was interested in nonrational states of consciousness and their potential for illumination. His notes make it clear that in Fou­cault’s book he found a fruitful intellectual inquiry into this matter. However, he also found raw matter for composition, colors on a palette to mix and mingle; ideas, yes, but ideas clothed in the bright colors of words that create the right kind of frisson in both the writer and the reader.

McCarthy finds matter for his novels in the writers who have influenced him. But he also shapes those influences into matter in his novels.

One of the quotations from Madness and Civilization is “Thing [sic] become so burdened with meaning that their forms are dimmed” (Box 19, Folder 13). The quotation comes from Foucault’s discussion of how perceptions of visual art began to change during the Renaissance. He argued that the fragmentation brought about by the dissolution of the unified Christian culture of the Middle Ages led to an interest in the artistic expression of madness, or folly, as well as a renewed under­standing of the images found in medieval art. He saw this as liberation. Here is Foucault (I have italicized the sentence from which McCarthy quoted):

Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so nu­merous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself. (18–19, emphasis added)

There is no question that McCarthy is interested in the content of this paragraph. But he is equally interested in the form, in what Robert Frost called “the sound of sense.” As I have indicated, McCarthy’s notes for Suttree often overlap with early notes for Blood Meridian, which he began writing in the mid-1970s. Foucault’s influence can be de­tected in both books, but the following quotation from Blood Meridian shows us how much emphasis McCarthy places on the sound half of the sound/sense continuum. The passage describes the appearance of the judge and the fool as they cross the desert:

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. (281–282, em­phasis added)

McCarthy is fairly shameless about this kind of literary theft, but he covers his tracks well.

The following quotation from John Dewey’s Art as Experience de­scribes the artistic process in a way that resembles my description of McCarthy’s interest in the sound of sense. After drawing a distinction between subject and substance, Dewey explains the significance he at­taches to these different aspects of a work of art:

The distinction may, I think, be paraphrased as that between matter for and matter in artistic production. The subject or “matter for” is capable of being indicated and described in other fashion than that of the art-product itself. The “matter in,” the actual substance, is the art object itself and hence cannot be expressed in any other way. The sub­ject for Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is, as Bradley says, the fall of man in connection with the revolt of the angels—a theme already current in Christian circles and readily identifiable by any one familiar with the Christian tradition. The substance of the poem, the esthetic matter, is the poem itself; what became of the subject as it underwent Milton’s imaginative treatment. (emphasis in original)

Dewey goes on to say that “the artist himself can hardly begin with a subject alone. If he did, his work would almost surely suffer from artificiality.” That McCarthy’s borrowings from novelists, poets, writers, and thinkers do not feel artificial is a testament to his artistic abilities.

As we see in the examples of Beowulf, Weston, and Foucault, McCarthy finds matter for his novels in the writers who have influenced him. But he also shapes those influences into matter in his novels. He thinks through and with the materials of fiction, and the echoes of precursors and sources serve, for McCarthy, perhaps for all imagina­tive writers, as material. In fact, McCarthy’s sources are so seamlessly woven into the fabric of the novels that they are often hard to find, though insightful critics, such as Dianne Luce and John Sepich, have a gift for discovering them. For the rest of us, the McCarthy archives in San Marcos are a real treasure.

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Excerpted from Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences by Michael Lynn Crews. Copyright © 2024. Published with permission from the University of Texas Press.