Intersect Conversations: Stacey Peebles

Harold Bloom regarded Blood Meridian as one of, if not the, Great American Novel. He famously referred to it as the authentic American apocalyptic novel. So what makes Blood Meridian so great in your opinion, if that is your opinion, that it’s being mentioned along the likes of Melville, along the likes of Faulkner, these great American novelists.

I'll start by saying I do agree that that's probably the masterwork. In all of McCarthy's canon, when people ask me: “What do you think it’s at the very top?” I do think Blood Meridian is the crowning achievement. I don't think he's written a bad work, certainly not a bad novel, but Blood Meridian, for me at least, is definitely in a class of its own. 

And let's see, so why is that? The reasons for me are obviously multiple, multifold. I'm teaching a class on Westerns right now, in fact. We're not doing Blood Meridian. This is a lower level class, but he takes the idea of this genre and not only does he do so much to reinvent the genre itself, but he writes a book that, as you just kind of indicated with your question, is really not even aptly described as genre fiction. It goes way beyond the bounds of what a Western is or could be even though he's setting it at a place and time that we do associate with this kind of storytelling. 

“He’s really firing on all cylinders.”

He's basing it on real historical people and, for the most part, real historical events. Although it's not often referred to as a historical novel, it certainly is for those reasons. But there's so much else in it. There's so much philosophy and language and allusiveness to other kinds of literature. There's metaphysics and theology, and there's just so much going on. He's really firing on all cylinders. The narrative is doing what Westerns often do which is landscape description and [depicting] certain kinds of characters. And you certainly have outbreaks of violence and a real, specific engagement with this idea, but he doesn't stop there. And then if you want to think about the nature of God or the nature of evil or humanity’s place in the world or the nature of the cosmos, then you can do that too, right? All of that is also threaded through. 

So I often describe it as this wonderful layered reading experience where you've got the basics obviously of plot and character and all the things that stories are built out of, but there's so much else threaded through and built up around that. That's why scholars love it, that's why it's produced so much scholarship and inspired so much scholarship over the years. Just about any approach you want to take, that approach has been taken by someone. That's why it rewards multiple readings. It is a hard one to teach, because it's a lot to get through and it's one of those books where students will often say: “I wish that we could read this twice, once to just get a handle on it and then, again, to start to put it together, in terms of its structure, and then these layers and everything else.”

My first McCarthy reading experience was No Country for Old Men which I think was actually a pretty good place to start because it's a pretty [streamlined] narrative. But just adjusting to the lack of punctuation and to the archaic, biblical allusiveness –– that definitely takes some time. 

And No Country, he wrote that first as a screenplay. He wrote it as a screenplay in the 1980s. That was before he was famous and he was trying to sell it. It was a very different story. In fact, it had a happy ending. It's great. You can read it if you're ever interested in reading it. It's in his archive at Texas State University. He tried to sell it. He was looking for a way to make some money and he never could sell it. So he apparently put it in a drawer and then, many years later, after he was famous, starting in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses, he pulled it back out and then wrote it as a novel. 

It's a very different kind of story. It has a very different ending and feeling to it. But that streamlined quality, that propulsiveness and, at least in McCarthy terms, it's minimalistic language compared to Blood Meridian –– I think that accounts for its popularity. It's an easier read. And that's also why it made a good movie itself when the Coen brothers came along and adapted it.

Without a doubt. Let me think. You touched on All the Pretty Horses in 1992, so do you have a favorite novel of the Border Trilogy? Or, and this could be a different novel, where do you think readers of McCarthy should spend most of their time? Is there a definitive novel of the Border Trilogy? 

Well, people have asked me this question before and, like I said, Blood Meridian is the masterwork, but Pretty Horses is my favorite of all of his. And that's because, and this is often the case if you have a favorite author, that was the first one I read. I read it in college and I grew up in Texas and I was at college in Texas. I thought: Oh, what a great Texas book by, I'm sure, a Texan author. This guy gets the humor and the dialogue so well and the description. But I do think there's a reason that one made him famous: it is a pretty accessible story. It's set in 1949. That is less distant from us than 1849 when Blood Meridian is set. John Grady Cole is a sympathetic character. He's not perfect, he has his faults, but most readers, I think, can relate to him pretty well. And, two, McCarthy's use of language which, of course as an English professor, is one of the things I'm really drawn to. Pretty Horses has some gorgeous passages, but they're typically not as difficult as some of the ones in Blood Meridian. 

So Pretty Horses, I like teaching it because I think it pushes students. You really do have to work with some of the descriptions, some of the vocabulary, but they want to know what happens. They identify: Here's a 16-year-old, and he's going to have an adventure with his best friend down in Mexico, and then he falls in love. Then there's conflict, and what does he do about that? So it's recognizable. That's a story that I think people can understand in a way that's not quite so distant from most people, that something like Blood Meridian is. 

And yet, it's a thick book, but I don't think it pushes you quite as hard as Blood Meridian. So I think it's a really nice sweet spot. There's still sentences in there that'll just stop you cold because they're gorgeous, but the story is also a really appealing one, one that people really like. So I think that if you're gonna start anywhere, that's often where I'll tell folks to start. It's violent –– McCarthy's known for his representations –– but Pretty Horses is never appalling. It never really gets into some of the stuff that he is not shy about depicting in some other novels. And so readers are also not likely to be put off by some of those descriptions, which is maybe the case with other books. 

I’m curious. What did you think of the film adaptation? I saw it and I thought it was OK. I think the Coen brothers set the bar super high. So what did you make of that? 

I saw it when it came out because I was studying McCarthy at that time. I think that it's really well cast –– Matt Damon is actually at that age, that was a great choice for John Grady Cole. Henry Thomas –– he's the kid from E.T. –– he plays Lacey Rawlins and that's actually a great choice. A lot of the supporting cast are very well-chosen. Penelope Cruz is a really good Alejandra. Lots of people really wanted to be in that movie because although it wasn't the first McCarthy movie –– that was The Gardener’s Son way back in the 70s — Pretty Horses was the one that everybody knew and that was the one that all these people wanted to be a part of. So it had a lot of potential.

Billy Bob Thornton, who directed it, was not a terribly experienced director at that point. I think they went in with a lot of good energy, but there's something that doesn't quite come together with it very well. Some people attribute this to its length. It was released by Miramax and reportedly the infamous Harvey Weinstein did not want it to be a three-hour movie. And that was kind of what Billy Bob Thornton wanted it to be. But Weinstein apparently demanded that it be shorter, two hours or less. And there was a fight about that and Weinstein won. And so Thornton had to cut it or reduce the length. And so some people think that if we could only see the long version, maybe that would be amazing. He's never released it as a director's cut or anything like that, so we don't really know. 

But I do think there's something about the rhythm of it that does feel a little awkward sometimes. It's hard to put your finger on, but I don't think its awkwardness is due to casting or acting, because I think that all seems to work really well. The pace and something maybe about the editing keeps it from feeling really natural and sort of flowing in a way that that you might want it to.

Yeah, that's interesting. I had no idea about the production backstory of that.

Yeah, obviously, a studio wants movies to be shorter, because then there are more running, there are more showings in a theater. And so a three hour movie you're going to make a lot less money. And if there are other issues at play, who knows? This was in the high Weinstein era, right? When he had his hands all over the Miramax movies. He was known as Harvey Scissorhands, because he would take the finished product and recut things and people would get mad. So yeah, it's kind of folded into that story of Miramax which is its own kind of fascinating story.

Yeah, hopefully one day I get to watch the director's cut. 

I've never met Thornton. I've never asked him. I'm pretty sure there's one that exists. But the rumor is that Thornton was so burned by that experience. He was so pissed off about it that he was just like: “Well, I'm never releasing the long version.” So it's been 26 years, a really long time.  

So, No Country for Old Men. The famous coin toss scene. I feel like this would be really cool for people to hear about if you have a take on that. It's so laden with philosophical implications and it's just one of those classic scenes both in the book and the film. It’s what's most memorable for me, so what's the significance of the figure of Chigurh if I'm saying that correctly

People say it differently, but that's another thing that has been much written about. This oddly philosophic killer or oddly philosophic villain.Anton Chigurh is this really well-drawn bad guy because he both fits the archetype of a villain but is also distinct and memorable. Villains are always defined by their choice of weapon and his choice of the cattle stun-gun, the pneumatic thing that, of course, Javier Bardem has in the movie. But then also this insistence that a coin toss is gonna determine somebody's life or death and you get to see it in a couple different set pieces. It's both in the book and in the movie. People have written about this as maybe McCarthy playing with ideas of determinism to the events of our lives and particularly bad ones. How do we explain that? But more so, because this is Chigurh enacting this, what does he think about fate? He kind of says: “Well, I got here the same way the coin did.” 

But one thing I like a lot about the movie version is that, unlike the book, one of the few changes that the Coens’ make is Carla Jean near the end resisting [Chigurh’s ethical philosophy]. She said: “It's not the coin, it's just you. You're still making a choice here, obviously.” And so Chigurh's insistence that: “Well, I'm just following the whims of fate.” But no, you're still making a moral choice, or an amoral choice as the case may be. But the irony of all that is brought out by the fact that he's hit by a car, both in the novel and the film, right at the very end. He thinks that he can wield fate in some kind of way, but then he doesn't see the car coming. 

“But the coin as a symbol of not just luck or chance or fate, but also currency and commodification. ”

And then we don't see what happens to him really much after that. In the novel, it's doubly ironic because it's made clear that the kids who are in the car that hit Chigurh are on drugs, the very stuff that Chigurh is, in his way, responsible for circulating. So even he is not immune to things coming back around. But yes, the coin tosses. There're coins all over McCarthy's fiction. In All the Pretty Horses, Dueña Alfonso uses them as a metaphor when she's talking to John Grady Cole. In Blood Meridian, the Judge throws a coin out into the darkness and then it comes back to him and the gang are wondering: How do you do that?

The Kid has a dream late in Blood Meridian about a forger or somebody who's making coins and forging coins and the Judge is standing over him and there's all this discussion about what does that mean. But the coin as a symbol of not just luck or chance or fate, but also currency and commodification. So again, pick your pleasure. People have sort of talked about that in all these different ways, but McCarthy loves the coin as a symbol, something that clearly means more than just being an object in whatever kind of context you want it. So I really like that about No Country because I think, interestingly, in his works, coins show up a lot, and that seems to be an important symbol or metaphor for him.

Is there a symbolic reading for the Kid or Judge Holden [in Blood Meridian]? I'm sure scholars have ventured numerous ideas and claims about what they could possibly mean. 

Again, it depends on who you talk to. My reading, the one I use when I teach it to upper-level students, is that they are opposed. They are the central two figures of the novel even though Glanton is an important presence and there's other important characters, but really it just comes down to those two. And, of course, the whole book finally reduces down to just the two of them and a confrontation. But I read it as the judge advocates untrammeled war, untrammeled violence, just “War is God,” he says. He is the figure of what he calls “the dance,” just celebrating violence without delineation. 

The Kid resists that, at least to a certain degree, which is kind of funny to say because he is very violent and given to mindless violence, as the book says, and yet there's something that he pushes back on. He doesn't actually like the Judge. Doesn't want anything to do with him, and so refuses perhaps to assent. And so some people see it as if the Judge represents violence and the Kid represents at least some sort of gesture towards mercy or compassion even though he's not educated –– he has no models for that in his entire life.

“And yet, the son in particular says, ‘No, this is important. It’s important to be good to people.’”

So where does it come from? It’s difficult because it is such a complicated book, but there are moments in the book where the Kid helps people when you might not expect him to. He refuses to kill Shelby. He helps David Brown get an arrow out of his leg. He won't even shoot in the desert when the ex-priest is telling him, “shoot him, shoot him,” and he won't do it for some reason. So there seems to be something about this level of violence or this level of bloodshed that even somebody like him wants to resist. 

So that tends to be how I read it. That's not how everybody reads it, but I like the idea of this Kid who's given to mindless violence and who basically has had no real upbringing of any kind, still finding something in himself that looks like a spark of morality, even if it's not enough. It's completely overshadowed by the Judge, but maybe the effort, maybe just the presence of that was the point even if it's not successful. 

That same question for The Road. If you have no law, if you have no structure, if everything's been decimated, then where does morality come from? You have no organized religion. Why be good? Why even think about it? But those characters, in a much more overt and thoughtful way, do [act morally]. The father and the son in The Road say: “Well, we're not just out to survive, we're out to do something else.” But why? Nobody's going to stop you from being a bad person in that post-apocalyptic world. And yet, the son in particular says, “No, this is important. It's important to be good to people.”

And I remember that passage from Blood Meridian. There's that really austere and archaic language. It's about the judge saying something about how nothing exists without his consent and this totalizing rhetoric around how he's all powerful, he's everlasting. That kind of idea contrasted with the Kid is interesting. 

The Judge is named. He even has a title. He's physically very large. He's educated, he's very verbose, and the Kid is nameless, small, illiterate, uneducated, and very taciturn. McCarthy draws that contrast out just in their very beings.

David and Goliath, perhaps.  I want to turn to his most recent works briefly. So The Passenger and Stella Maris. I read The Passenger, I think, about a year or two ago. And then I read Stella Maris just over this past winter break. So Alicia Western, to me, seems like his most autobiographical protagonist because, even though she's a woman which differs from many of his other books, she is heavily interested in mathematics and science. McCarthy goes and joins the Santa Fe Institute. He writes “The Kekulé Problem”, he's super interested in these deep metaphysical questions like Alicia is. So how do you read Alicia and Bobby as protagonists, as the final characters that he wrote?

Well, it's interesting because you started off by saying:  “I want to talk about the Western novels.” And these are also Western novels because of their names. And some people have said: “Oh, it's kind of interesting how he's still talking about the West and the history of the West in these last two novels. But here, it's the hemisphere, the intellectual tradition, the nuclear age, the Manhattan Project. The West, more broadly conceived.” But a lot of people say: “Yeah, the name's probably not a mistake.”

McCarthy's always into pairings. We were just talking about the Kid and the Judge, the father and the son in The Road, even John Grady and Lacey, and then later Billy Parham, in the Border Trilogy. So I think he's very interested in writing pairs even if one character is maybe given more weight than the other. So Bobby and Alicia: I love that The Passenger is sort of Bobby's novel and then Stella Maris is hers. As siblings who are never together in the present moment of the narrative, and yet are so completely intertwined, I've written about them as being perhaps entangled in the quantum-physical sense. If one is spinning one way, the other one's going to be spinning the opposite. They’re always going to be circling each other or related to each other by some kind of force that's mysterious and powerful even if they're at a distance from each other. 

“McCarthy’s always into pairings.”

I love the characterization. In some ways, Alicia is the larger-than-life character, like your John Grady Cole, like your Judge Holden even, and then Bobby is a little more regular. He's still brilliant, but more of a person who's struggling, like Billy Parham, like the Kid, sort of like the father in The Road. I read those novels and thought about not only what McCarthy is doing differently with them, which is this just real engagement with math and science, but then some of the things that he's doing that feel very familiar and very much of a piece of his with his other work. Even his description of New Orleans and the restaurants and the street life and the people. 

And that's so much like what he does with Knoxville and Suttree. Just this cast of characters who are living all kinds of odd and interesting and rich lives in their own ways. [The Passenger and Stella Maris] is a really big work if you take both novels together. McCarthy was apparently working on these all the way back, pretty much his entire career. We know for sure from his correspondence that he was already working on them in 1980, and probably he had the idea well before that. So that means that the finished works, their composition, span his entire writing career, which is also fascinating.

That's how he wrote Suttree. It took him a long time. Not everything is like that. He wrote No Country pretty quickly. He wrote The Road relatively quickly. But this one, I think it makes sense that you can see so many familiar things in it because, again, he kind of took it forward for an awful lot of his writing career.

I don't know if this is, this has been released to the public yet, but how deeply did he go into Cantor or Grothendieck or any of those really high level mathematicians? How deep did he go into that stuff at the Santa Fe Institute? Was he really reading those works and trying to make sense of them? 

To some extent, yes. I've been working on cataloging his personal library which is enormous, like 20,000 books. The goal is to publish this as a searchable database so people can see what he was reading, like did he have Cantor? He was extraordinarily well-versed and well-read in the history and philosophy of mathematics and science. So he could do stuff at a pretty high level. But one thing David Krakauer, who's the director of the Santa Fe Institute, has said to me is: “It's important to recognize that he was not a functioning mathematician, he wasn’t doing the discipline in that sense.” But he certainly did have a really high-level understanding of its history. How was mathematics thought about and what were the major developments? What are the things that changed the field? 

The philosophy of mathematics is something that he knew and he would annotate [those works] within an inch of their life when he was doing those kinds of readings. He was really interested in Wittgenstein who did a lot with philosophy of mathematics. I think he was very deep in those fields but as a writer and not as somebody who is going home and writing equations. He's not doing that. But he is thinking  about these developments and how they [change the world]. Twentieth-century physics and mathematics changes the way we think about the world in a pretty big way. Coupled with the Manhattan Project, these kinds of histories, that's what he's interested in. How does this stuff change the way we understand the notion of our world, our notion of reality, our notion of what we're capable of, all those kinds of things. 

It's interesting that you mentioned Wittgenstein. I had this fantasy when I was in undergrad.  I went and checked out the Tractatus from the library. I was like: “I'm going to try to make sense of it.” And it didn't get very far. A challenge for somewhere down the road. But yes, just the amount of different kinds of allusions to works of science or works of mathematics in Stella Maris [is remarkable]. It's also a formally inventive novel that’s written as a transcript of a conversation. I mean he's writing at the same time as some of these postmodernists are writing who are doing this zany stuff with form and style he's more traditional, but I do think that, in Stella Maris, he is forward-thinking and pushing the medium. 

Apparently it was all one novel for a really long time until he finally decided to separate out Stella Maris. But I do think that makes those two novels really [interesting]. I can't really think of another pair of novels because it's not like [Stella Maris] is a sequel. They're really intertwined in some interesting ways. There'll also be some good scholarship to be done on that, the narrative form of how these novels fit together. And when you find out what you do in this very nonlinear storytelling method, you're kind of in the middle of Stella Maris when you find out a plot point that's really important to how you understand The Passenger. So that in itself is an interesting characteristic.

Okay, so I have one more question. So I usually end these with just any book or film recommendations that you have? Maybe, based on our conversation and the class you’re teaching, any Westerns that you think are really worth taking a look at?

Well, I just taught Shane which is a classic Western film from 1953 that is often thought of as being really simple or simplified, and I actually think is super nuanced and much darker than people give it credit for. So I love that one. Pretty soon, we're going to do Willa Cather's O Pioneers! which I really love. One of the things I like doing with that class is saying: “Well, what happens when these stories with all of these tropes and archetypes that we've sort of set out [are altered]? What happens when you change the identity of the protagonist? When you put a woman at the center, are the concerns different? Or, does the interest in morality and justice work out the same way? 

What about a black cowboy? There's been so few black Westerns until fairly recently even though there were lots of black cowboys. So yes, I think I like Shane, I like Willa Cather's O Pioneers. And then we're going to do The Harder They Fall which is a Western from just a few years ago. I think it's still on Netflix. And that's a black western, based on fictionalization of real cowboys. But I dig that one, too.

Stacey Peebles is a professor and chair of English and director of the film studies program at Centre College. She holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research areas include the representation of war and violence, film adaptation, Westerns, and contemporary American author Cormac McCarthy. Peebles has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal (Penn State UP) since 2010 and is President of the Cormac McCarthy Society.