No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

Cooper, Lydia R. No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. 185 pp. Hardcover, $38.00, 978-0-8071-3721-5.In No More Heroes, Lydia Cooper finds in Cormac McCarthy's fiction narrative gaze that is shot through with glimpses of human compassion, pity, nobility, and hope (161-2). Her project places work within the current trend that seeks to ground literature's work and worth within imagination and affective experience-the notion that by coaxing us into imagining counterfactual social arrangements or inhabiting the lives of others, novels can make us more empathetic, thoughtful people. At first glance, Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre would seem rocky ground indeed on which to stake claims of empathetic engagement or find seeds of hope. Readers of work often feel obliged to disavow the affective properties of McCarthy's fiction: we balk at the aesthetic bliss of Blood Meridian and treat with suspicion the generic pleasures of the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men. Cooper admits that McCarthy's work is regularly characterized as brutally anti-humanistic, and particularly unkind to women and ethnic others. Delving into the syntax and perspective of McCarthy's narratives, however, Cooper finds ethical riches within: affirmations of empathy, the necessity of community, and heroic struggle in the face of despair. She insists that novels consistently the valiant inner struggles of men trying against all odds to be good (1). We gain access to this interiority by attending to shifts in perspective, fleeting moments when the distant third-person omniscient voice gives way to limited third- or first-person point of view. These perspectival shifts are marked by instances of particularly fragmented or compounded syntax, and call our attention to characters' struggle toward goodness, empathy and human connection (12). By formally underscoring these moments, McCarthy asserts the ethical importance of imagination and reading, and encourages readers to practice empathy themselves. Thus narrative becomes a vehicle for bearing witness to courage in extremis, and even moral act in itself (22, 162).Cooper works chronologically and carefully through all of McCarthy's fiction. Her first chapter establishes the link between empathy, narrative, and morality in McCarthy's first three Appalachian novels. She reads The Orchard Keeper as demonstration of how shifts in narrative perspective work according to character morality: the generally omniscient narrative shifts dramatically into the perceptions of the deeply Arthur Ownby, and maintains greater perspectival proximity to the problematic Marion Sylder than to the evil Kenneth Rattner (32, 33). In Outer Dark, flashes of perspectival shifts illuminate few instances of in bleak world (38). Child of God presents compassion as necessity, suggest[ing] that readers' refusal to acknowledge Ballard as child of God much like themselves is failure that sustains savage retaliation like his (45). These links between interiority and goodness hold throughout. Cooper shows that within the Border Trilogy, All moments of interiority underscore the significance of human connection and interaction (100, italics original). And in No Country for Old Men, the thoughts of Sheriff Bell comprise much of the text; the morally ambiguous Llewellyn Moss's mental life blossoms whenever he is conscious of dilemma (115); the inner life of the malevolent Chigurh remains utterly unintelligible.By framing narrative perspective in McCarthy along these lines, Cooper implicitly adopts the tenet of Christian theology that evil has no positive substance but is merely negation or absence of the good. Hence, in No More Heroes evil is always opaque. The interpretive limits this imposes are visible in her second chapter, where Blood Meridian serves only as Suttree's foil. …