Evil and Good in Cormac McCarthy: a review of The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
By Vereen M. Bell (Reviewed by Michael Yost, University Bookman)
Another such asterisk—one that seems to counteract Bell’s thesis of McCarthy the nihilist, the ironic Diogenes of literature—is McCarthy’s novella/play The Stonemason. The play is set in the Louisville, Kentucky of the 1970s. Its action follows the Telfair family as they cope with the death and legacy of their patriarch, affectionately referred to as “Papaw,” a master stonemason. Papaw’s grandson, Ben Telfair, narrates. He is the only member of the family who has carried the fire. His own father abandoned the family trade, but Ben had a close relationship with his dying grandfather. As the play progresses, McCarthy allows Papaw to become an ideal figure, an image of a good man in a world that often lacks integrity. Papaw’s goodness and integrity come from his trade. Ben comments: “for true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch pressed in place by the thumb of God.” This relationship between the “truth” found in masonry and the cosmos alike is reiterated throughout the play. Indeed, masonry sets the moral standard of the play, and the various character’s proximity to or distance from the craft determines their fate. Ben’s nephew, Soldier, joins a gang and becomes a drug addict. His father commits suicide. Ben occupies the center of the story as leader of his sorrowing family and heir to his grandfather’s wisdom. That wisdom is particular, but also cosmic. Ben speaks of his grandfather:
I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness unknown and unknowable both in truth and in principle where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and let the rain carve them if it can.
McCarthy allows, in a rare moment, for the possibility of a connection between the principle of existence and the phenomena of existence. He sees it incarnate in knowledge of the world, in the logic of human craft. Even if the principal cause of the world is “unknown and unknowable,” it is still “silent nowhere in the universe.” From the creator of the demonic Judge Holden, this is an astonishing sentence. It echoes St. Bonaventure, who wrote that “the entire world is like a mirror full of lights presenting the divine wisdom . . . ” But of course, just as we cannot attribute the Judge’s words to McCarthy, neither can we do the same with Ben. However, this sentence is significant precisely because it runs so much against the grain of McCarthy’s broader work. It is as if, having presented his witness to the reality of evil and steeled himself against it. He felt compelled to quietly testify to the primary existence of goodness and its possibility for human beings. It is primarily because of The Stonemason that I believe McCarthy was not simply an ironist. Bell’s thesis may be true as far as it goes, but it still has to contend with the fact that McCarthy chose to represent both evil and good, both demonic vice and human goodness, both life and death in his work.
And ultimately chose light.
