| The character finally named as the "prophet of destruction" in No Country for Old Men, is present from the very beginning of Cormac McCarthy's writing, and his malevolent presence, in a variety of forms and strengths, recruits men to destructive acts and leads them to self-destruction over and over again as the novels progress. McCarthy's myth-making is on a cosmic scale, conjuring an entire world presided over by a god of destruction for whom good is not a concept. His ten novels each present some aspect of the prophet and the determinist universe he represents, and tests that universe against a variety of potential heroes. In the end, for there to be any hope at all, the prophet must be victorious and burn the world down. Only from its ashes can a new prophet, one of creation, rise.;McCarthy is not only a member of long and richly varied literary history, but also a singular phenomenon with his own history of ideas, a claim that both his biography and his work thus far corroborate. Echoes of Yeats' beast "slouching toward Bethlehem" inform the McCarthy canon from its inception, birthing the prophet of destruction in the process and envisioning an arc of destruction that begins with the Orchard Keeper and ends with The Road. For McCarthy, temporality is not just a helix, but a widening gyre, a spiral rapidly losing coherence.;For McCarthy, we begin with destruction, witnessing its prophet's slow rise, recognizing its culmination in the superhuman giant of Judge Holden, and watching it subside again into humanity, to eventually end in apocalypse. If there is hope in McCarthy, it is most often felt by its marked absence, but as Steven Frye insists, it is there nonetheless, and in the final pages of McCarthy's tenth novel do we finally feel the ascendancy of the prophet of creation, the second half of the cycle beginning. Hope paired with despair, a sense of human worth and dignity in the face of nearly unimaginable depravity, all roped into a system slowly losing its integrity, is pure McCarthy. |
