Nothing from Nothing leaves Nothing
Today in the Discourse Court: Is a nihilist literature possible?
Last week, Cormac McCarthy put out his newest novel, The Passenger, his first since 2006’s The Road. (The Passenger’s companion, Stella Maris, is set to release in about a month.) The Road is far and away McCarthy’s most popular book, and that book’s rapturous reception twinned with the 2007 release of the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of No Country For Old Men to make McCarthy into something of a literary superstar, or at least into a literary writer with an uncommonly wide readership. Minus a couple strange screenplays, McCarthy has kept quiet since then, popping up here and there with an article on language and/or physics.
So the announcement of a new novel is something of a Big Deal, and the books (the reviewers have mostly been reviewing The Passenger and Stella Maris in tandem) have received a generally positive, if confused, reception.
John Jeremiah Sullivan gave the books an appreciative if reserved recommendation in The New York Times Book Review, arguing that they were markers of McCarthy’s ‘late style,’ while Ron Charles threw his hands up in bafflement in The Washington Post. The review that caused the most fervor, though, was Laura Miller’s review in Slate, which called the books “confused and confusing,” “recall[ing] the most tiresome parts of Thomas Pynchon,”1 and “overtaken by dissolution.” The final line – “If [McCarthy] has really come to believe that our existence is utterly brutal and meaningless, why bother to write about it at all?” – is the one that caught the attention of the literary internet, and spilled out into a long day of arguments on Twitter, mostly spurred by this tweet:
Miller went on to argue (in many, many tweets) that McCarthy’s fiction advances a nihilistic worldview inimical to novel writing itself, and that even if a nihilist novel could exist, McCarthy doesn’t have the humor to pull off such an exercise. Now, I haven’t yet read The Passenger, but Miller’s review and tweets do introduce a paradox, or at least something that can be argued about: does a nihilist writing exist? Can a work profess a belief in meaninglessness if someone took the time to produce it?
Let’s get McCarthy out of the way first; I find The Road and No Country for Old Men, novels that Miller praises in her review, to be among his weakest, precisely because, as she glowingly writers writes, they “[harness] and even subdu[e] McCarthy’s oracular nihilism to no-nonsense genre-fiction plots.” Blood Meridian and The Crossing trilogy are good if generally overrated Westerns. I do think that if you’ve read any Faulkner, you don’t need to rush to read McCarthy at all, but I still do need to get around to Suttree. Anyway, even with those caveats, I do think that Miller is misreading McCarthy’s work in general: Cormac McCarthy is not a nihilist! This may just be a fundamental misunderstanding of nihilism itself; having a belief in a sort of elemental and overriding earthly evil may be grim and pessimistic, but it’s a belief in something. Nihilism, a slippery term, is a purely negative philosophy, a belief in nothing (NIHIL!) or maybe more accurately a nonbelief in anything - morals, human goodness or evil, ‘natural laws,’ even objective reality if you want to go that far. ‘Meaninglessness’ comes close to nihilism, but unless McCarthy’s latest book goes far beyond what he’s written before, his meaninglessness seems more cosmic, and doesn’t seem to exclude meaning-making among people in this world. In fact, most of his fiction could be filed under ‘people trying to persist despite meaninglessness.’ The novelist Matt Bell summed it up nicely in a thread:
“Carrying fire” is a fine motif to pick out; it literally appears, as Bell notes, in all three of McCarthy’s ‘big’ novels – the son and father in The Road are “carrying the fire” for “the good guys,” Sheriff Bell relates a dream at the end of No Country for Old Men about his father making a fire out in the cold wilderness, and the end of Blood Meridian sees a post-augerer setting fires for wanderers behind him.2 Each of these books are suffused with darkness, yet end with this kind of stunningly obvious note of light – hardly nihilist! Again, haven’t yet read The Passenger and Stella Maris, but I doubt McCarthy comes out and says that the fire is extinguished and there’s nothing out there for us. Miller explains that Stella Maris has a dream sequence featuring a malevolent presence that reveals to one of the characters a “‘a deep and eternal demonium’ at the ‘core of reality’”, and both characters struggle with their father’s work in the development of the atomic bomb. But even this vision, though grim, is still a belief! It’s a lot more like David Lynch’s metaphysical visions of America and the cosmos in Twin Peaks than nihilism!
But we can go beyond Miller’s misreading of McCarthy into more theoretical realms, broadening beyond these specific books into the annals of literature, to see if a truly nihilist novel can exist. The most boring avenue is that a true nihilist wouldn’t even try writing, as any communication would be meaningless anyway. Then again, why wouldn’t a nihilist write a novel? Why does anyone write a novel besides an urge to communicate some internal feeling about their world, negative or no? The idea of a novel that argues for nihilism is more promising, though, again, why would a nihilist care about convincing anyone else? Or, more pressingly, could the essential earnestness of producing a novel3 ever truly argue for nihilism? Turgenev and Dostoevsky depict nihilists, but don’t endorse them, or explicitly repudiate them, in Dostoevsky’s case.4 We arrive finally at the work of writers like Beckett, Camus, Céline, Cioran, Bataille5, Krasznahorkai, and Bernhard6, works that are so overwhelmingly committed to meaninglessness, pessimism, and transgression as to enter the realm of nihilism, though they all don’t quite fit neatly into the category. Absurdism and existentialism and pessimism and atheism are not nihilism, and mixing them together doesn't get to nihilism either; these authors exist on a spectrum of meaninglessness that still, for the most part, argues for or at least depicts a sort of self-created meaning making in the absence of any inherent meaning. Bataille's Story of the Eye is a purely degenerative book,7 wherein sex provides no future or even hope for a future, and is perhaps destructive enough to fit the bill of a nihilist novel.
Thomas Bernhard’s Correction is a book that requires a wellness check before recommending it; it is a strong argument for suicide, which is the ultimate act that lurks behind the idea of nihilism. (Miller suggests that Alicia, one of the main characters of the McCarthy novels, is the only ‘true’ nihilist because she kills herself.) But even Correction is suffused with an anguish and righteousness that belies any claims of true nihilism; there is also a radiant and doomed familial love at the center of the book, one which makes clear the importance of human relation. The question of the book is not whether the existence has meaning (it doesn’t) but whether we have the strength to endure that fact. As Bernhard writes, as per Roithamer, the anguished mathematician at the center of the novel:
We enter a world which precedes us but is not made for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can’t cope with this world then we’re done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we’re living in our own world, not in some previous world, one that is always bound to be of no concern to us and intent upon ruining and destroying us.
That movement from the previous world and into our own world may be the key to what we can understand as the ‘nihilist novel’ - the destruction of past structures of meaning that are inimical to continuing life. (We could even think of Story of the Eye like that). We don’t have to meet critics like Miller on their terms, where nihilism can only lead to death, cultural or otherwise; it could very well be more liberatory, or at least more honest. Telling it like it is is just as worthy as sending hope into the world or showing The Way We Live Now or whatever treacly mission you might give the novel. I’m thinking of a decidedly non-nihilist author, Donald Barthelme, who wrote one story - “Nothing: A Preliminary Account” - that attempts to list out what nothing is (or isn’t), which turns out to be expansive and unfinishable:
But if we cannot finish, we can at least begin. If what exists is in each case the totality of appearances which manifests it, then nothing must be characterized in terms of its non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness. Nothing is what keeps us waiting (forever)…
That last line there acts as a little nod to Godot and Beckett, the pessimist extraordinaire, and injecting a sort of hope into the “tardiness” of oblivion. Barthelme finishes the story cheerily:
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What a wonderful list! How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely and that the task will remain always before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail.
Again, a nod to Beckett and his oft-quoted exhortation to “fail better.” In Barthelme’s “like a meaning for our lives,” born out of the quest for nothing, we can see the outline of the nihilist novel’s true aim, which is to write towards nothingness in order to save the world from it. Because what could be more nihilist, really, than the mass culture we are forced to inhabit, the forces that despise and crush art, intelligence, nuance, and care, that believes in no higher feeling, spiritual or otherwise, that literally destroys the world a little more every day, that pretends things are alright, or even better than ever, that values the corporation and power above all else; and what could be more perfectly useless (“not a nail” to be hammered), more inimical to a mass death drive, than a novel, even or especially a meaningless and grim one?
How dare you!!
This scene is also about the West being partitioned and the wilderness destroyed, but on we move.
Sort of what Miller is getting at when she calls novels ‘gestures of hope,’ but I hope this comes across less preciously.
Nihilists are the boogeyman of Dostoevsky’s fiction, taking the stock nihilist character from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and using it as an opposing force to goodness in many of novels. Raskalnikov in Crime & Punishment, Ippolit in The Idiot, the underground man of Notes From Underground, and Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov are all entranced by the void of nihilism, and crime this belief leads them toward is murder - either of others or the self. Crucially, though, all these characters reject nihilism in some way. Rasklonikov does commit murder, but is overwhelmed by guilt (proving that he does hold a belief in right and wrong); Ippolit botches his own suicide and then works to help Myshkin (evincing care for others, and for the world); the underground man comes up against the ‘stone wall’ of natural laws; and Ivan turns away from despair after seeing the face of true evil. That evil is Smerdyavok, a true nihilist, and Ippolit too has an actual nihilist foil in Roghozin. The difference between the professed nihilists and the actual nihilists is in action; there is a threshold of morality that the professed nihilists will not cross.
Thank you Maya!
All men, I know - please let me know if I’ve missed a non-male nihilist.
Again, thank you to my friend Maya for thinking of this example.
Once again - excellent writing, Evan.
Awesome write-up. As a fan of books and movies "committed to meaninglessness, pessimism, and transgression" I look forward to checking out some of the titles you mention above. If there are any other essentials you recommend, please pass them along - thanks!