588 The American Century: Literature since 1945intimations of empty immensity, the denial of human value and distinction. There
is even an argument for associating McCarthy with those writers who work through
verbal experiment, the exploration of different styles, like Stanley Elkin, Harold
Brodkey (1930–1996), Walter Abish, Russell Banks (1940–), or David Foster Wallace.
Reading his work is quite often like strolling through a museum of English prose
styles with, say, sentences imitating Hemingway’s gift for simple words and connec-
tives modulating into recollection of the old, ineradicable rhythms of Faulknerian
speech. There are echoes of Melville and Eliot here, but also of Erskine Caldwell and
the rough and ready folktales of the frontier. The great tradition of Greek tragedy is
present, in the shadows, but so too is the fiction of Zane Grey.
Perhaps the most useful way of looking at all McCarthy’s work is precisely this, in
terms of a confluence of styles – and in the context of his own preoccupation with
homelessness, orphanhood, and wandering. McCarthy (and he is not untypical of
his contemporaries even in this) is a literary hybrid. And he is so because he is
reflecting the mixed, plural medium which, as he sees it, everyone inhabits now, and
perhaps always has: the border territory that is our place of being in the world,
made only the more starkly remarkable to us all by the collapse of those cultural
barriers that used to give us shelter – the illusions of belonging to one stable
community and set of traditions. The landscape of all McCarthy’s novels is a
liminal, constantly changing one, on which different human cultures encounter
one another’s otherness, and appropriate it through language. His characters cross
and recross that landscape, dissolving and reconfiguring what might have once
seemed a series of static oppositions: civilized and savage, past and present, South
and West, town and wilderness and, in the Border Trilogy, the United States and
Mexico. What is at stake here is at once metaphysical – or, more to the point, an
argument against metaphysics – and social. McCarthy is intent on melting down
the structures of perception, to reveal to us what one of his characters in Blood
Meridian calls “a world without measure or bound.” He is also clearly fired into
imaginative life by his own experience and knowledge of the fluid social geography
of the contemporary: his recognition that, as another character of his, in Outer
Dark, comments, “lots of people on the road these days.” “Where is your country?”
the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole is asked. “I don’t know,”
Cole confesses, “I don’t know where it is.” Homelessness is the source as well as
the subject of McCarthy’s work, because at the heart of it lies an uncanny sense
of the “dark parody of progress” (as Blood Meridian calls it) that is our lives, now
more than ever: the restless wandering, the displacement – cultural and
topographical – that turns every day into a crossing of borders.Crossing borders: Some women prose writers
A fiction writer from the South who has believed, on the contrary, very firmly in
place is Eudora Welty (1909–2001). “Feelings are bound up in place,” Welty insisted
in her essay on “Place in Fiction” (1962). “It is by knowing where you started that
you grow able to judge where you are.” For Welty, that place is the Southern regionGGray_c05.indd 588ray_c 05 .indd 588 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM