The city in Cormac McCarthy
Whores and horses
This article references fictional stories full of violence, including sexual violence. If this is potentially triggering for you, please feel free to read no further.
Additionally, this article contains spoilers for several of Cormac McCarthy's novels, especially Cities of the Plain. If you’re not familiar with McCarthy and are looking for an introduction to his work, I recommend All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men.
There is the reality of the world, and there is the truth of God. I don’t think Cormac McCarthy believed in God. But he definitely believed in reality.
Reality and truth coexist, of course, but they sometimes appear incompatible. Reality presents itself as heresy in the light of truth. Reality is a world in which the God who is love sometimes appears as something other. Reality reveals a God who seems to have rejected us forever and will never show his favor again. A reality where unfailing love has vanished and God forgot to be merciful. Where compassion is withheld. Where promises are not kept.1
McCarthy saw reality as clearly as anybody could. And now that he’s taken the same train ride so many of his fictional characters took before him, I wonder whether he’s now seen the truth.
McCarthy was famously fascinated by science and intellectual pursuits.2 How the world worked in reality was important to him, and the physical truths he observed in the universe became spiritual truths in his novels: “The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy,” says the heroine of Stella Maris. And it’s true…unless there’s a God (and ain’t any ol’ God fits the bill). In reality we’re headed for a frigid heat death. Earth erodes. Energy is finite. Entropy wins. People kill each other. That’s reality.
The death of humanity is explored in detail in the post-apocalyptic novel The Road where a father and son who love each other—and thus carry the last spark of the divine in a dead world—navigate the nihilistic void that is man without God. Man without God thinks he is God at the top of the tower of Babel. But he is only violence and death. The Road confronts that reality and gropes for something to hold onto. Something vertical. Something above. The Road is how we end if there is no God, whether it takes till the heat death of the universe or not.
But most people can’t handle reality. They need something transcendent or they need a distraction. The vapid who need distractions are mostly irrelevant in McCarthy’s novels, showing up only on the peripheries of the stories. The mother of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses is one such example. Her story is merely the common tale of one who spends all available energy in pursuit of human witnesses—becoming nothing in pursuit of self. She is an aspiring actress so it isn’t a metaphor in her case, but she is what we all are if the meaning of our life becomes only what others make of it. Like I said, vapid. So John Grady Cole leaves his mother forever in pursuit of something transcendent, something romantic even if meaningless: the frontier.
Once we discard the insipid we end up with a dichotomy in McCarthy’s novels among characters who remain. There are the romantics, the believers, the hopeful—cowboys and priests and lovers. And there are the grim realists who have forsaken false faith in the divine. This is most clearly on display in The Sunset Limited, where an atheist scientist and a Christian are forced to confront the realities of their worldviews over the supper table, but it is in The Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) that this dichotomy plays out within the theme of the city.
The young John Grady Cole is our hopeless romantic who can’t help but be in love with cowboying and horses and the open range and women and mystery no matter how hard the world tries to strip him of his naivety. He loses friends, he loses jobs, his lover leaves him, he is beaten and run ragged and penniless. He’s not a believer, per se, but he’s not not one. Questioning God isn’t a worthwhile activity for any of McCarthy’s characters self-aware enough to be interesting. In The Cities of the Plain, a man of faith—who is, of course, blind—begs John to pray:
Pray to God.
Yes.
Will you?
No.
Why not?
I don’t know.
You don’t believe in Him?
It’s not that.
Young John has other questions than those to put to God. He has fallen in love with a beautiful epileptic prostitute, Magdalena. She was sold into the sex trade as a child and he hopes to redeem her from the brothel and bring her from Juárez to El Paso—the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah3—where he will continue his modest life as a poor cowboy alongside her.
But there’s a problem: the pimp, Eduardo, loves Magdalena too and he won’t let her go. He doesn’t really love her, obviously. He is only motivated by lust and greed and his love for the prostitute is only symbolic of his true love, the great whore. The city.
It’s a biblical idea, but McCarthy nods to that with the title of the book. The Bible anthropomorphizes the city into a woman and sees truths the woman cannot see. From Babylon to Jerusalem, from Sodom to Gomorrah, and from Juárez to El Paso, the city has a tendency to forsake the vertical, the divine, the mystical, in favor of what she can see here and now. According to the Bible, this makes her a prostitute. McCarthy must have agreed.
John moves to rescue Magdalena, but the pimp will not allow John to have what he cannot: a life of love with a woman who loves him. So he cuts her throat and leaves her for John to find. Magdalena must suffer the same fate that the city Eduardo gave his heart to will one day face, and John must face the same loss that Eduardo, a grim realist, already knows will come for him too.
Will this final blow strip John of his naive romanticism, his blind faith in the vertical? As he duels to the death with the pimp, Eduardo mocks John for being a stupid “farmboy.” Eduardo knows that simple romantics who love the earth they work cannot let go of their faith in something, whereas the urbanite can move beyond such blindness.
Do you know what my name is, farmboy? Do you know my name?
He turned his back on the boy and walked slowly away. He addressed the night.
In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him. Whores. Superstition. Finally death. For that is what has brought you here. That is what you were seeking.
He turned back. He passed the blade again before him in that slow scythelike gesture and he looked questioningly at the boy. As if he might answer at last.
That is what has brought you here and what will always bring you here. Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one.
John kills Eduardo and staggers wounded and dying into a child’s playhouse. Fitting. Has he learned the pimp’s lesson? Has he learned to believe in the city and what she presents herself as? Is reality the only truth?
He heard the distant toll of bells from the cathedral in the city and he heard his own breath soft and uncertain in the cold and the dark of the child’s playhouse in that alien land where he lay in his blood. Help me, he said. If you think I’m worth it. Amen.
John refuses to relinquish the vertical. True faith cannot be defeated by death. It always astounds me that the materialist McCarthy could never let go of that truth in his books.
The stones of the city or the stones of the cathedral, the house of God. The house of reality or the house of faith. The city cannot defeat the one who does not believe in it.
In The Crossing there is an embedded narrative, or a story within a story, where an old priest tells a tale of a man of sorrow. The man’s sorrows brought him to the ruins of a cathedral where the roof hung in the air barely supported by crumbling walls and under that precarious shelter, now a de facto anchorite, the man of sorrow waits for death.
Beneath that perilous roof he threw down his pallet and made his fire and there he made ready to receive that which had eluded him.
The priest telling the story reveals that he went and stood beyond the danger of the roof and conversed with the man. They debated God and heresy and truth until the priest is forced to reckon with his own beliefs. Ultimately, life only has meaning if there is a witness. And no human witness lasts. Eduardo knows this and is therefore a nihilist seeking power in the builded stone of the city. But the priest, and John Grady Cole, never lose the Witness in the skies that gives their life meaning or at least the hope of one. Builded stone cannot defeat them. The priest concludes:
What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived.
Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived.
The stone that matters is foolishness and a stumbling block to all who believe first and foremost in reality.4 The stones that don’t matter, the builded and hewn stones, the building blocks of the cities, are made of air. They cannot crush the fool who is a living stone.5
This was a bit of a spinoff from my series on the city in the Bible.6 If explorations of nonbiblical literature like this is something you want more of, let me know!
Cf. Psa 77.
Nick Romeo wrote an interesting piece for the Scientific American arguing that science was actually fundamental to the stories McCarthy wrote. It’s available here at the time of writing.
Cf. Gen 19:29.
Matt 21:42, Rom 9:32-33, 1 Cor 1:18-25.
1 Pet 2:4-8, cf. Rev 2:11.
Articles in this series include: the city in the preface, in the life of Abraham, and in our hearts.