Chapter 8 - Romanticism

Summary

This chapter examines how McCarthy consistently responds to and engages with Romantic ideals. Like W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, McCarthy eludes any neat categorization or restriction to his treatment of preceding styles and genres. Like those “modernists,” McCarthy shares sensibilities that are simultaneously Romantic and anti-Romantic. His sentiments both embrace and challenge the limited sureness of the natural world by erring into sometimes surreal environments; and they revel in the ineffable nature of the uncommon quotidian man. This paradox is possible because McCarthy makes meaning in the interstitial, liminal states of knowledge. The marginalizing of the actual perceived world in favor of the world of representational memory forms the tension that transforms Romantic internalization into modernist memory. His landscapes of isolation act not as faithful descriptions of the “real world,” but a privileging of the perception and memory of that environment. He creates imperfect memories of imperfect worlds. This chapter focuses on Blood Meridian; Or, the Evening Redness in the West, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road as primary examples.