Welcome back to The Deep Dive. This is the show
where we take a huge stack of sources. We're
talking articles, deep critical analyses, interviews,
and we try to build you a shortcut to, well,
to really understanding a topic. And today we
are stepping into a world that is, let's say,
unrelenting. It's often terrifying, but it's
always profoundly intellectual. We're talking
about one of the absolute giants of American
literature. Cormac McCarthy. Right. Born Charles
Gilson McCarthy Jr. Lived from 1933 to 2023.
And McCarthy, I mean, he didn't just write novels.
It feels like he forged myths. Right. Out of
these extreme American landscapes. Absolutely.
And he spanned genres that most writers wouldn't
dare to touch, let alone master. You have the
Southern Gothic, that kind of claustrophobic
despair in a book like Child of God. And then
you have the complete opposite, the vast mythic,
brutal reality of the Western. in blood meridian
and then of course the book many people know
him for the stark chilling poetry of the post
-apocalyptic in the road so our mission today
is i'd say pretty ambitious we're going to try
to unpack what feel like the three great paradoxes
of his life and his work okay so first there's
his prose style it is relentlessly unique i mean
it's defined by an almost total rejection of
what we think of as traditional grammar yeah
we'll get into the semicolons and quote mark
then second his themes they are just uncompromising.
The philosophy of violence, this deep dive into
morality, and the constant failure of authority
in his world. And third, and this is the part
that I find so fascinating, is the completely
surprising turn his life took later on. His move
toward the world of modern science and complex
systems. This is long after he was already a
giant in the literary canon. It's so true. When
you pick up a McCarthy novel for the first time,
you are immediately hit with these defining characteristics.
There's the graphic, unflinching violence. And
then there's the syntax. It is so sparse, it
almost feels like a geological structure, like
something carved out of rock. And the man behind
it all, he was basically a phantom. A total phantom.
He deliberately avoided the public eye, refused
the literary spotlight, and he had this stated
aversion to the entire publishing and academic
world. For a writer whose work is so monumental,
the man himself was just fiercely guarded. It
is a spectacular contradiction, isn't it? Here's
this figure revered all over the world for his
absolute mastery of language, yet he refused
to engage with the structures, both grammatical
and social, that defined all of his peers. Yeah.
He really cultivated this persona that suggested
the work was everything. The author. The author
was, you know, irrelevant. And nothing, I mean
nothing, defines that iconoclasm better than
this ultimate material paradox. You might think
a writer of his stature, producing these masterpieces
for half a century, would have been surrounded
by the right tools. You'd picture a custom desk,
first edition libraries, maybe an early Mac or
something. Exactly. But no. Not at all. We have
to talk about the story of the $50 typewriter.
We have to. We'll confirm this. He produced millions
of words of some of the most important fiction
of the century. All his letters, even his screenplays.
All on a single portable Olivetti letter of 32
typewriter. Which he bought for $50 at a Knoxville
pawn shop back in the early 60s. And that little
machine, I mean, it looked like it had survived
a war. It became this sort of talisman for his
uncompromising dedication. Okay, so let's just
unpack that symbol right at the top because it's
so important. The idea that these vast, complex,
profound novels were typed out on a piece of
equipment that he only maintained by, and this
is a direct quote. I know this one. Blowing out
the dust with a service station hose. It says
everything. It says everything. It was never
about the technology for him. It was about the
purity of the craft. And as we're going to find
out later, that little $50 typewriter, when it
was finally retired, well, it ended up funding
his other great passion. So to really understand
the writer, you have to start at the roots. Let's
get into section one, the Appalachian and Texas
roots. This is his life before he really hit
that major acclaim in the 90s. This is the origin
story of the great American pessimist. He was
born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., Providence,
Rhode Island, 1933. His family was successful,
Irish Catholic. His dad, Charles Sr., was a well
-respected lawyer. But you almost never associate
him with Rhode Island. No, never. The family
is overwhelmingly identified with Tennessee because
they moved to Knoxville when Cormac was just
four. His dad took a job as a lawyer for the
Tennessee Valley Authority, the TVA. And that
detail, the TVA, it's actually really important.
It places his family right in the middle of the
infrastructure of the New South. They lived in
a nice area, Sequoia Hills. It was considered
the affluent part of Knoxville. And McCarthy
himself reflected on this. It gives you this
insight into how he saw himself as an observer,
even as a kid. He noted that his family was,
quote, considered rich because all the people
around us were living in one or two room shacks.
So that proximity, that closeness to intense
poverty. but seen from a place of relative privilege
that had to have shaped him. It absolutely did.
It became the moral and the visual backdrop for
so much of his early work, most obviously in
the semi -autobiographical novel Sutry, which
is set among the outcasts and derelicts living
on the Tennessee River. But he wasn't, you know,
a typical kid destined for literary greatness.
He wasn't a conventional scholar. Not at all.
He said that... As a child, he saw no value in
school. His energy went into hobbies. He was
famously obsessive about them. He joked that
if he gave everyone he knew a hobby, he'd still
have 40 or 50 to take home. That's amazing. And
it points to this dedication to self -teaching,
to personal mastery. It's a trait that clearly,
you know, transferred directly to his writing
career later on. So he enrolls at the University
of Tennessee in 51, studying liberal arts. But
he drops out after two years. He joins the Air
Force. And that break was... It seems transformative.
He was stationed in Alaska for four years. And
this is where he goes from a kid who's not really
interested in books to someone who is just reading
voraciously, consuming all the classics. So when
he comes back to UT in 1957, he's focused. He
majors in English. He publishes a couple of stories
in the student magazine. And he wins the Ingram
Merrill Award for creative writing. Not once,
but twice. And this is where we find this really
surprising, almost academic origin for his later
revolutionary anti -establishment style. It's
so ironic. It is. While he's at UT, a professor
gives him this very specific task. Repunctuate
a whole collection of 18th century essays for
a textbook they were putting together. So the
man who would later become famous for rejecting
punctuation. His first deep dive was into its
precise historical function. Exactly. That detailed
structural assignment sparked this deep interest
in how punctuation shapes rhythm, flow, and ultimately
meaning. It's an intellectual exercise that happens
long before he's a novelist. And then, of course,
there's the name change. He was born Charles
Joseph Jr., but he permanently adopts the name
Cormac. And the sources give a couple of slightly
different reasons for this. Both of them are
pretty resonant. Okay, so the first one is a
more pragmatic one, the one he cited a lot. It
was simply to avoid being constantly confused
with that famous radio dummy. Charlie McCarthy,
the ventriloquist dummy. Exactly, from Edgar
Bergen. But there's another reason, maybe a more
fitting one. It suggests he wanted to honor an
Irish chieftain, Cormac McCarthy. So he's adopting
this more dramatic, more historic, and distinctly
Irish identity. Whichever it was, the identity
of Charles Jr. was gone for good. He was Cormac.
And this brings us to this really crucial phase,
the absolute total commitment to writing full
time. He has ended up so brutally. I always knew
that I didn't want to work. That's it. And that
one decision led directly to these legendary
periods of, I mean, ascetic poverty. It really
did. But let me let me just play devil's advocate
here for a second. Yeah. Because critics sometimes
look at this period, you know, living in a shack,
refusing lucrative speaking gigs. And they argue
that for a man who came from a comfortable, well
-to -do family in Knoxville, this whole aesthetic
lifestyle was almost a performance. Was the extreme
poverty truly necessary? Or was he sort of deliberately
cultivating this persona of the uncompromising,
uncommercial artist? That is a fair and a really
complex question. The sources, I would say, lean
pretty heavily towards sincerity or at the very
least a deeply, deeply held belief that any kind
of commercial pursuit inherently contaminates
artistic purity. And we have the accounts from
his first wife, Lee Hallman, to back this up.
We do. She detailed their life in a shack just
outside Knoxville. No heat. No running water.
And the anecdote about him refusing money is
just, it's the core proof of this artistic asceticism.
It is. Holloman said that someone offered him
$2 ,000, which was a huge amount of money in
the 1960s, to come speak at a university about
his books. $2 ,000. And they were broke. Completely.
And he refused. He just said that everything
he had to say was there on the page. And her
punchline was, so we would eat beans for another
week. Exactly. It wasn't about an inability to
make money. It was a flat out refusal. He was
putting this absolute unbridgeable distance between
his artistic output and the whole mechanism of
celebrity. And that refusal, it was paired with
this kind of literary piety. There's this one
remarkable piece of trivia from that time. The
childhood home of another great Southern writer,
James Agree. was being demolished in Knoxville.
And McCarthy went to the site? He went to the
site and salvaged bricks from the demolition.
And he used those very bricks to build fireplaces
inside his otherwise derelict shack. So he was
literally building his early writing environment
out of the salvaged history of the literary South.
I mean, that's not just about poverty. That signals
a profound reverence for the tradition that he
was trying to join and maybe even conquer. So
his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, comes out
in 1965, and it's edited by the legendary Albert
Erskine. Who had also edited William Faulkner.
That's a huge deal. And Erskine would stay his
editor for 20 years, which really speaks to the
immediate critical validation McCarthy got, even
if the sales weren't there. And the book won
the William Faulkner Foundation Award, which
immediately drew those crucial comparisons to
the giant of Southern literature. He followed
that with these incredibly intense Southern Gothic
works. Outer Dark in 68 and Child of God in 73.
Both were praised by critics for their stark,
brutal realism. But commercially, they were invisible.
Totally invisible. They established him as this
serious, dark horse rider, but one who was operating
way, way outside the mainstream. Then in 1979,
Sutry comes out. This was a semi -autobiographical
novel he'd been working on for almost two decades,
drawing heavily on his experiences living along
the Tennessee River. And critics, they dubbed
it a kind of doomed existentialist Huckleberry
Finn. It just further cemented his reputation
for this dense, beautiful, and profoundly bleak
prose. And then, here's where things get really
interesting. This is where the funding that he
so desperately needed finally arrived. In 1981,
he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. The famous
Genius Grant. The Genius Grant. Worth $236 ,000,
that infusion of capital was... absolutely key.
It allowed him to dedicate himself completely
to researching and writing his fifth novel, which
would become Blood Meridian. This is when he
moves to the American Southwest, living in what
was described as a barely habitable stone cottage
in El Paso, just fully immersing himself in the
history of the borderlands. Blood Meridian is
published in 1985, and the sources all show its
impact wasn't immediate, but in the long run,
it was just seismic. Yeah, the initial reception
was lukewarm, but its reputation just grew and
grew year after year until it achieved this legendary,
almost mythical status. The New York Times called
it, and this is not an exaggeration, the bloodiest
book since the Iliad. And the literary establishment,
they went into overdrive. The critic Harold Bloom
intensely praised it, calling it the greatest
single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
And many other critics and writers started to
suggest it was, if not the great American novel,
then certainly a primary contender for the title.
It's the book that really defines his early uncompromising
genius. But, and this is the staggering part,
despite all that praise, the Faulkner comparisons,
the genius grant, the declaration from Harold
Bloom, the commercial reality of this entire
period is just mind -blowing. The key data point
is this. Before 1991, none of Cormac McCarthy's
novels had sold more than 5 ,000 hardcover copies.
5 ,000. And for most of that career, he didn't
even have a literary agent. He handled everything
himself. And that's exactly why he earned that
label, the best unknown novelist in America.
He was a writer's writer, deeply influential,
but financially completely invisible. Which brings
us perfectly into the next section. Because that
financial invisibility, it wasn't a failure.
It was really a testament to the uncompromising,
self -contained architecture of his language.
Okay, so that lack of commercial success, it
really suggests a writer who just refused to
compromise his aesthetic vision for readability.
Let's move into section two. The architecture
of language, his style, themes. and work process.
The structure of his prose is the most immediate,
and for a lot of new readers, the most challenging
takeaway. It really is. And we have to start
with what you could call the syntax of omission.
It's not just a stylistic quirk. For him, it
was a rigorously enforced set of rules that he
followed, I mean, religiously throughout his
career. Okay, so what are the rules? He used
capital letters, periods, the occasional comma
if a sentence was really complex, or a colon
if he was setting off a list. But his most famous
rejection? The semicolon, which he dismissed
as idiocy. Just flat out idiocy. He felt it was
a pointless intrusion, that it just blurred the
clarity between a period and a comma. And then,
of course, the signature element. His refusal
to use quotation marks for dialogue. This is
where the structural commitment really turns
philosophical. He just believed there was no
reason to, quote, blot the page up with weird
little marks. That's it. For him, quotation marks
were an aesthetic intrusion. They interrupted
the purity of the narrative block on the page.
And this absence of traditional attribution,
it forces a very peculiar kind of immersion on
you, the reader. One critic, Eric Haig, he notes
that somehow, even without the quote marks, the
reader remains oriented as to who is speaking.
It turns the dialogue into this unbroken stream.
It melds speech and action into a single accelerating
chronicle. You're forced to pay much closer attention
to the tone, to the context, just to figure out
who's talking. And mechanically, he achieved
this relentless momentum through a very specific,
highly controlled rhetorical device. Polysyndeton.
Polysynaton, this is the repetition of conjunctions,
almost always the word and, to link a series
of clauses or actions instead of separating them
with commas. So let's analyze how that actually
functions when you're reading it. When you read
a list of events that are all linked by and.
Instead of commas, the clauses just pile up on
each other. There's no structural hierarchy.
Right. The reader is given no natural place to
pause, no place to breathe. It creates this relentless
driving pace. We see this so clearly in his action
sequences. There's a great example from No Country
for Old Men. He goes, he left the beer on the
counter and went out and got the two packs of
cigarettes and the binoculars and the pistol
and slung the .270 over his shoulder and shut
the truck door and came back in. It's just one
thing after another after another. And that polysynaton,
it becomes a structural metaphor for his central
themes. Oh, so? Well, if everything is linked
by an inevitable and, it suggests a narrative
where one action leads inexorably to the next.
Fate can't be escaped. The violence is just a
relentless, deterministic march forward. The
style perfectly mirrors the philosophy of his
world. Now, here is the most incredible counterpoint.
This is what connects his sparse literary style
back to the world of technical precision. That
same drive for clarity, for minimal intrusion,
that led him to reject quotation marks. It also
defined his parallel career. As a copy editor
for scientific texts. This is such a remarkable
nugget of knowledge for you to take away. Cormac
McCarthy spent time removing commas and refining
the prose in highly technical work. Including
W. Brian Arthur's incredibly influential economics
article on technology and increasing returns.
It was published in the Harvard Business Review.
And he also copyedited work for Nobel -level
physicists, people like Lawrence M. Krauss and
the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. Just
think about what that requires. Copyediting a
scientific paper demands absolute precision.
You have to remove all ambiguity. It's a relentless
focus. So his stylistic rules in his fiction,
no semicolons, no quote marks, they're fundamentally
about achieving the maximum clarity through omission.
And that same drive served both his sprawling
Western epics and the most precise physical theories
of our time. So let's pivot from the style to
the themes, which are just inextricably linked
to that starkness. The central brutal theme is
bloodshed and morality. What did McCarthy, the
philosopher, actually say about violence? His
views were uncompromising and deeply pessimistic
about the human condition. He stated it plainly.
There's no such thing as life without bloodshed.
He saw violence not as a societal failure, but
as a core inherent condition of existence itself.
And this leads to his most critical philosophical
critique. He found the notion that the human
species can be improved. Right. The idea that
we could somehow evolve beyond our violent nature
and live in harmony. He thought that was a really
dangerous idea. He warned that the desire for
that kind of utopian perfection would inevitably
enslave you and make your life vacuous. This
perspective immediately frames him as the great
pessimist of American literature, a title that
he was often given. And that's why works like
Blood Meridian are so often characterized as
being nihilistic. The violence is overwhelming,
it's often random, and it seems to be without
any spiritual consequence. If God is absent from
that world, and the character of Judge Holden
operates completely outside of moral law, how
can it be anything but nihilism? That interpretation
is very common, but it's important for you, the
listener, to understand the academic counterpoint
to that. Some literary critics dispute the simple
label of nihilism. They argue instead that Blood
Meridian is a Gnostic tragedy. Okay, we need
to define that for clarity. What does Gnostic
tragedy actually mean in this context? Gnosticism
in general involves the idea that the material
world is inherently corrupt, that it's ruled
by an inferior, maybe even evil deity, the Demiurge,
or that it's just completely separate from the
true transcendent God. So in a Gnostic tragedy,
the moral struggle is internal. It's this desperate
search for secret knowledge, for salvation, that
is completely separate from the corrupt world
and all of its institutions. So if the world
of Blood Meridian is relentlessly violent and
lawless, and organized religion or society offers
no comfort, no moral anchor, then the struggle
to carry the fire defines some small, individual,
secular morality. That is the tragic Gnostic
search for meaning in a fundamentally flawed
reality. So it shifts the focus from just meaninglessness,
which is nihilism. to a desperate individual
moral resistance against what feels like an overwhelming
cosmic evil. Exactly. And his later works, they
clearly reflect contemporary anxieties, grounding
this cosmic pessimism in very modern fears. The
bleak outlook and the utterly inhuman deterministic
villain Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.
Critics often see that as a reflection of the
post 9 -11 act. For sure. Chigurh's random coin
toss justice. It symbolizes this existential
dread where unpredictable violence. can just
appear anywhere at any time, and it renders traditional
law completely powerless. Which brings us to
another one of his recurring themes, his deep,
deep distrust of authority figures. He consistently
features the ineptitude or inhumanity of those
in authority. We see it with the murderous bounty
hunters of the Glanton Gang in Blood Meridian.
They're essentially state -sanctioned killers
who just devolve into total chaos. And we also
see it with the overwhelmed law enforcement in
No Country for Old Men embodying by sheriff ed
tom bell he's just too old too decent and too
conventional to even comprehend the new level
of brutality that he's facing and in all the
pretty horses you get explicit examples of deeply
corrupt police and officials in mexico it's this
fundamental critique that goes beyond genre organized
power structures are either incompetent corrupt
or actively inhumane and yet Despite all of this
overwhelming pessimism, The Road introduces this
remarkable, almost tender shift toward kind of
secular morality. The novel is intensely moralistic,
even though society has completely and utterly
collapsed. Exactly. The morality in that book
is entirely secular. It originates purely from
the individual, from the father's fierce, self
-imposed code of protection and humanity for
his son. The idea of carrying the fire. That's
the father's secular mission statement. It is
completely separate from any idea of God or organized
religion. It's a morality that is earned and
fiercely guarded against the ultimate corruption
of cannibalism and despair. One last essential
element of his craft that really sets him apart
is his dedication to what you could call a bilingual
narrative practice. McCarthy was fluent in Spanish.
He lived for a while in Ibiza, Spain in the 60s,
and then spent all that time in El Paso and Santa
Fe. And his novels... especially the border trilogy,
reflect that immersion profoundly. They are filled
with abundant, untranslated Spanish dialogue.
And this isn't just laziness or some kind of
decoration. It is a deliberate technique that
makes his work an inherently multicultural and
bilingual narrative. By refusing to translate,
he forces you... the reader, directly into the
world of the characters. You have to figure out
the context, the tone, the situation, just based
on the flow of the conversation, much like a
non -Spanish speaker would have to navigate that
physical border space. And what's more, scholars
have observed that key American characters, like
the cowboy protagonist John Grady Cole, or even
the fearsome Judge Holden in Blood Meridian,
They're implied or confirmed to be native Spanish
speakers, often operating in a political space
where those language boundaries are totally meaningless.
This vastly complicates the traditional, often
monolithic narrative of the American Western.
OK, so finally, let's just touch on his process.
Despite the exhaustive historical research he
did, I mean, meticulously detailing the settings,
the environments, the specific historical events,
and the meticulous revisions he did over years,
even decades. He absolutely refused to outline
his plots. It's a classic contradiction. He saw
writing not as a planned architectural project
where you map everything out chapter by chapter.
He saw it as a subconscious process. Right. It
required spontaneous inspiration. It needed time
for the narrative to reveal itself to him. He
said he had to wait for the narrative to catch
up to his research. This reliance on the subconscious
is a critical intellectual point that he's going
to explore in much more depth later in his life
when he connects with the scientists. Okay, so
we've established the intense, highly disciplined
world of the pre -1991 Cormac McCarthy. A master,
acclaimed by critics, but commercially invisible.
Now let's dive into section three. Crossover
success and Hollywood adaptations. This is the
period where he finally became a household name.
The breakthrough, the absolute pivot point, came
in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses. And this
novel was just fundamentally different. While
I was still concerned with his themes of loss
and the harsh reality of the borderlands, it
had this lyrical quality, a more traditional
narrative structure than the dense, dark works
that came before it. And the market just responded
instantly. The sales figures tell the whole story.
of that pivot from literary cult figure to mainstream
success so after selling fewer than 5 000 hardcover
copies of his first four novels all the pretty
horses sold 190 000 hardcovers within six months
wow it wasn't just a critical success i mean
it won the national book award in the national
book critics circle award it was a true commercial
phenomenon And this novel was the first book
in what became the Border Trilogy, which just
solidified his mainstream fame. It was followed
by The Crossing in 94 and Cities of the Plain
in 98. The trilogy broadened his audience dramatically
and finally brought financial stability to a
man who had intentionally courted poverty for
decades. He also continued his dramatic writing
during this period. He published his second play,
The Stone Mason, in 1995. And that efficiency
of language leads us directly to No Country for
Old Men, which was published in 2005. It's unique
because it was originally conceived and actually
drafted as a screenplay before he turned it into
a novel. And that screenplay origin. It explains
the book's highly stylized, minimalist nature,
even for McCarthy. It has less of the sprawling,
descriptive geography of his other works. It's
composed largely of dialogue. It's a structurally
stripped down novel that translates almost perfectly
to the screen. And the Coen brothers saw that
potential immediately. Their film adaptation
in 2007 was a cultural juggernaut. It won four
Academy Awards, including Best Picture. And that
film. It brought his dark, uncompromising themes,
the randomness of evil, the failure of modern
systems. It brought them into the global consciousness.
For millions of people, the chilling figure of
Anton Chigurh became the face of Cormac McCarthy's
world. But the novel that truly defined his later
literary legacy, and the one with this profoundly
personal origin story, is The Road, published
in 2006. The inspiration for this is incredibly
poignant. It started with this late night moment
he shared with his young son, John Francis. They
were staying at a motel in El Paso. And McCarthy
looked out the window in the dead of night and
just imagined the city utterly ruined. He saw
fires up on the hill and everything being laid
to waste. That terrifying, desolate image, which
he initially just jotted down in two pages, that
became the seed for the whole post -apocalyptic
narrative. Four years later, while he was in
Ireland. He expanded that two -page idea into
the full novel. And the core, terrifying horror
of the cannibals, which is a defining threat
in the book, that came from a discussion he had
with his brother. But the truly personal touch
and what gives that novel its emotional power
is that many of the conversations between the
lone father and his young son were verbatim discussions
that McCarthy had had with his own son, John
Francis. The emotional intensity is rooted in
real life paternal anxiety. The road got immediate,
overwhelming international acclaim. It won the
2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which is the
highest honor in American letters. And in perfect
McCarthy fashion, he did not accept the prize
in person. He sent his editor, Sonny Mehta, to
represent. him. The success of The Road led to
something truly unimaginable. Cormac McCarthy
agreed to do his first ever television interview.
After decades of refusing the media, viewing
interviews as just a distraction from the work.
This was the Oprah interview in 2007. The Road
was selected for Oprah's book club, and it offered
this crucial, though very fleeting, glimpse into
the intensely private man. And crucially, where
the interview took place. It wasn't in a bookstore
or a university or some Manhattan studio. It
took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute.
And that location was a massive clue about his
actual intellectual priorities. It was a huge
signal. He spoke pretty candidly. He shared stories
of the extreme poverty he'd endured early in
his career, which validated all those anecdotes
we discussed earlier. But the critical piece
of information he used that platform to relay
was about his intellectual allegiance. He explicitly
stated that he did not know any other writers
and that he much preferred the company and the
conversation of scientists. In that public declaration,
it just confirmed what his work had often implied.
His true intellectual loyalty was not to the
literary world that he dominated, but to the
world of objective inquiry, of physics and complex
systems. And this preference, it sets up the
final, most intellectual, and arguably most surprising
phase of his entire career. It's also worth noting
he maintained his engagement with dramatic forms,
which confirms his interest in that efficient
dialogue driven storytelling. His 2006 play The
Sunset Limited was adapted into a film in 2011.
And he sold the original screenplay The Counselor
in 2012, which was released as a film in 2013.
So he's still very much active in that world
as well. Yeah. So let's move now into section
four. Science, language, and the Santa Fe Institute.
This is the period from about 2014 until his
death in 2023, where his scientific interests
became explicit and really started to profoundly
influence his final works. This is a phase that
is just. It's unique for a writer of his stature.
McCarthy became a highly engaged trustee at the
Santa Fe Institute, SFI, and this is not a traditional
university. It's a multidisciplinary research
center focused on a field called complex adaptive
systems. We should probably define that term
for you, the listener. Complex adaptive systems,
or CAS, is the study of systems that have many
components that interact and adapt over time.
Like what? Well, think of ant colonies, stock
markets, the human brain, ecosystems, or even
language itself. They're focused on emergent
behavior and patterns that you can't predict
just by analyzing the individual parts alone.
And McCarthy, despite lacking any formal scientific
background, was deeply integrated into this environment.
He was eating lunch and having these long conversations
with physicists, biologists, and computer scientists.
The Nobel Prize -winning physicist Murray Gell
-Mann noted how unusual but fitting the match
was. He said, McCarthy didn't just admire science.
He placed it at the absolute top of his intellectual
hierarchy. He stated it very plainly. Writing
is way, way down at the bottom of the list. I
mean, that's incredible. If a man who dedicated
his entire life to narrative places it at the
bottom of his own intellectual totem pole, you
know his admiration for science was absolute.
And this perspective, it explains why, after
a 50 -year career spent exclusively writing fiction
and screenplays, he finally published his first
and only piece of nonfiction in 2017, an essay
titled The Kikule Problem. OK, we are now moving
into some truly high level philosophy. This is
the moment where McCarthy becomes less a novelist
and more theoretical philosopher of mind. So
what exactly is the Kikuli problem? It centers
on the famous story of August Kikuli, the German
chemist. Kikuli had been struggling to figure
out the ring structure of the benzene molecule.
Right. And the legend says he fell asleep by
the fire and he dreamed of a snake eating its
own tail, the Ouroboros, which gave him the breakthrough
visual insight into the cyclical structure of
benzene. And McCarthy analyzed this dream as
a model for how the unconscious mind works and
critically for the origin of language itself.
He used this specific historical scientific anecdote
to present his core theory about the separation
of mind and language. And the theory is profound.
McCarthy posited that the unconscious is a universal
non -human machine for operating an animal. He
believed that all animals have an unconscious
that manages life functions, survival. This unconscious,
this operating system, is essentially universal
across all species. And here's the critical distinction
that applies to his entire literary career. He
theorized that language itself is not biologically
determined. He argued that it's a purely human
cultural creation. It's an invention, a tool,
something acquired and passed down through culture,
completely separate from that universal animal
machine that dictates survival. and violence.
The implications of that are huge. If language
is a cultural invention and the unconscious is
a universal survival machine, then the unconscious
can't actually speak to us in full sentences.
Exactly. Kigali's insight didn't come as words.
It came as a symbolic image, the snake eating
its own tail. So if the unconscious is a machine
and language is a tool, then what we call writing
is just the conscious mind struggling to interpret
the pure nonverbal data or symbols it receives
from the deep animal unconscious, which aligns
perfectly with his earlier statement that writing
was a subconscious process that couldn't be outlined.
You know, it's interesting. Many literary figures
kind of dismissed the Kikule essay. They saw
it as a novelist waiting out of his depth. But
if you think about his background. The relentless
copy editing, the sparse prose, the rejection
of blotting the page, it actually made him uniquely
suited to dissect the origins of language. His
whole career was an obsession with efficiency,
with the minimal unit of meaning. He understood
that symbols and direct visual representation,
which is what the unconscious provides, are often
more powerful than the cumbersome cultural tool
we call grammar. His sparse prose, the polysententon,
the lack of quote marks, they are all attempts
to strip language back down to its most fundamental
efficient components, almost mimicking the stark
nonverbal input of that unconscious machine.
And this scientific analytical lens clearly influenced
his final literary output. His final two novels,
which were published in quick succession in 2022,
The Passenger and its companion novel, Stella
Maris, were explicitly influenced by his time
among the scientists at SFI. Stella Maris was
notable. It was his first novel since Outer Dark
back in 1968 to feature a female protagonist.
She's a brilliant mathematician named Alicia
Western, and her discussions of logic, math,
and philosophy just dominate the text. And The
Passenger was described by an SFI biologist,
David Krakauer, as full -blown Cormac 3 .0, a
mathematical and analytical novel. It delves
into these incredibly complex topics like theoretical
physics, mathematics, the ethics of scientific
research, using the narrative form to explore
ideas usually reserved for the laboratory. It
really marks a final, profound evolution in his
style. He moved from the mythic scope of the
Western to something approaching, I don't know,
philosophical mathematics. All right. So to wrap
up this incredible journey, let's look at Section
5, his legacy, critical acclaim, and the iconic
Olivetti typewriter. We have to circle back to
the typewriter because it is the perfect encapsulation
of his minimalist, uncompromising approach. And
it provides a final, perfect anecdote. It truly
is an iconoclastic tool. He wrote virtually all
of his fiction, all his correspondence between
the early 60s and 2009 on that single Olivetti
Letter 32. Bought for $50, the amount of output
it generated, something like 5 million words
of published fiction, is just astounding. The
book dealer Glenn Horowitz, he summed up the
significance of this machine perfectly. He said
the modest typewriter acquired a sort of talismanic
quality through its connection to McCarthy's
monumental fiction, as if Mount Rushmore was
carved with a Swiss army knife. So when he finally
retired in 2009, it was auctioned at Christie's.
And the experts, they were expecting maybe $20
,000. And it sold for a staggering $254 ,500.
And the best part of the story, the perfect final
detail of his anti -materialism. All the proceeds
from that auction went directly to the Santa
Fe Institute, funding the scientific research
he so admired. And he replaced that priceless
artifact with an identical functional model,
which a friend of his bought for $11 plus shipping.
It's a perfect, almost legendary loop of genius,
self -effacement, and his institutional support
for science. And his critical placement in the
American literary canon is just. It's undeniable.
The literary critic Harold Bloom, back in 2003,
named McCarthy one of the four major living American
novelists. He placed him in the highest company
alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip
Roth. And Bloom didn't just offer faint praise.
He included Child of God, Sutry, and Blood Meridian
in his list of works that he predicted would
endure and become canonical. And he reserved
his highest praise for Blood Meridian, reiterating
that it was the greatest single book since Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying. Even earlier than that, the legendary
novelist Saul Bellow praised his absolutely overpowering
use of language, his life -giving and death -dealing
sentences. McCarthy might have hated the literary
scene, but the literary world certainly recognized
his magnitude. We should also touch on the intensely
private man and the mythology he cultivated.
We know he was a teetotaler. He quit drinking
in El Paso in 76, though a longtime friend later
claimed he did resume drinking near the end of
his life. And, of course, his famous and highly
unusual aversion to other writers, preferring
the company of physicists and mathematicians.
And this personal secrecy, it created this very
strange relationship with the digital age, even
though he refused to use a computer. The irony
is just delicious. He was constantly targeted
by hoaxes. Twitter hoaxes about his death would
spread, and one was even repeated by USA Today.
It prompted the Los Angeles Times to write the
headline, Cormac McCarthy isn't dead. He's too
tough to die. Fake verified accounts would impersonate
him multiple times. So the Luddite, who completely
eschewed the digital sphere, became a constant
source of digital misinformation, which... probably
just validated his pessimistic views on the modern
information environment. Cormac McCarthy died
peacefully on June 13th, 2023. He was 89 in Santa
Fe, and his physical legacy is now contained
in the Whitliffe collections at Texas State University.
It's 98 boxes, a total of 46 linear feet of papers,
a tangible record of a life dedicated to meticulous
craft and revision. His legacy is that of an
author who really defined the extremes of the
American experience, both historically and his
portrayal of the frontier. and stylistically
in his relentless demanding prose. So what does
this all mean for you, the listener? McCarthy's
genius, I think, lies in a powerful trifecta.
First, his stark, unforgiving style, defined
by that syntax of omission, no quotation marks,
no semicolons, just pure declarative drive that
creates a sense of narrative determinism. Second,
his uncompromising philosophical themes, the
nature of violence, morality, the inhumanity
of authority, all of it often framed through
that complex lens of a Gnostic tragedy. And third,
and this is the most surprising part, his unique
and impactful convergence of high literary artistry
with deep scientific thought at the Santa Fe
Institute. He wasn't just a writer. He was a
thinker who used narrative to explore profound
philosophical questions usually reserved for
the sciences, like the origin of language and
the nature of the unconscious. He saw violence
not as an aberration that needed to be fixed,
but as a condition of being an animal. He saw
language not as instinct, but as a purely cultural
tool. He made the frontier not just a physical
place, but an intellectual one, pushing the boundaries
of what the American novel could contain. So
let's end with this final provocative thought.
McCarthy described his final novel, The Passenger,
as a mathematical and analytical novel. If we
connect this intellectual return to the analytical
scientific lens, the world of complex adaptive
systems, with the bigger picture of his career,
what does it suggest about the ultimate role
of narrative? Does it imply that the greatest
American stories, once you strip them of all
sentimental punctuation and traditional morality,
must ultimately be about the brutal, complex
mechanics of the universe rather than just human
society or politics or emotion? What stands out
to you? The fusion he achieved, it suggests that
literature, at its absolute highest level, strives
to understand the same fundamental, unchanging
laws as physics. He sought the truth of the universe.
He just happened to use prose instead of equations.
A deeply compelling thought to leave you with.
That's been the deep dive into the world of Cormac
McCarthy.