THE HUMAN ANIMAL

Cormac McCarthy, Henri Bergson, and the search for the poetic object

William Schaff - Salt for Salt

The French philosopher Henri Bergson put forward in his 1907 book Creative Evolution the theory that all living organisms evolved from one and the same vital impulse, but at some point in its advancing this impulse diverged in two separate directions – one favouring instinct, which we see most illustriously demonstrated in the life of insects with their hivemind organisation and their ability to efficiently carry out tasks which our all-too-human minds cannot fathom their grasp of; and the other favouring intellect, which we see at play in animal life and most emphatically in ourselves.

‘Intelligence is likely to point towards consciousness, and instinct towards unconsciousness.’

But, having sprung from the same source, neither of the two is without some admixture of the other, in fact Bergson goes as far as to assert:

‘There is no manifestation of life which does not contain, in a rudimentary state – either latent or potential – the essential characters of most other manifestations.’

His exegetic work on this hypothesis is so rigorously expounded as to make for thrilling reading – at least for me, although it would not be the first time I’ve found a philosophical treatise a high-octane thrill ride.¹ As much as I would like to present Bergson’s entire argument here, given that it stretches over several hundred pages I find myself obliged instead to summarise at least the parts that will interest us going forward.  

When it comes to the intellect, Bergson believed that as a living being becomes more complex, and its needs therefore harder to satisfy, its powers of perception expand in proportion to these growing needs so that the aspects of the world on which its survival depends are rendered within its purview. The human being, as excessively complex as it is and yet possessing in and of itself insufficient tools with which to survive the harsh environment, he playfully labels ‘homo faber’.² Unlike the wolf with its teeth and its fur, and unlike the scorpion with its sting, we are creatures for whom it is necessary to craft our own tools. Fundamentally creative beings. As such, our perceptive faculties necessarily evolved in such a way as to offer up to us a world within which we could find the means to build and create.

Bergson says:

‘The vision of a living being is an effective vison, limited to objects on which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalised, and the visual apparatus simply symbolises the work of canalising… consciousness is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions or potential activity... It signifies hesitation or choice.’

So, for Bergson, all consciousness is, first and foremost, consciousness of potential action. It exists as a field of possible activity, a sort of sandbox for making connections and manipulating the matter of the world to our advantage. This, he argues, makes us less efficient in function, but vastly superior in potential, to creatures of lesser intelligence:

‘The instrument constructed intelligently [as opposed to one naturally endowed]… is an imperfect instrument. It costs an effort. It is generally troublesome to handle. But, as it is made of unorganised matter, it can take any form whatsoever, serve any purpose, free the living being from every new difficulty that arises and bestow on it an unlimited number of powers. Whilst it is inferior to the natural instrument for the satisfaction of immediate wants, its advantage over it is the greater, the less urgent the need. Above all, it reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on him, so to speak, a richer organisation, being an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it is driven further and further, and made more and more free.’

As Bergson will go on to explain, the full scope of the intellect in humanity reaches far beyond the representation of the material world and the facilitation of the actions to be taken therein, but let us linger at this juncture a little longer and bring in from the wings the real subject of this essay: Cormac McCarthy (applause please). If ever there was a writer of action McCarthy is that writer. I don’t mean that he writes exclusively of violence – although when he does he does so with a famously unflinching acuity, and certainly violence is one of the godheads under whose gaze his literary worlds take form³ – but more so that he seems to understand down to his bones that the base strata of human life is in what we do. After this, all is subsidiary.

So, as Bergson wants to remind us that the intellect – whatever heights it may have scaled since – evolved out of the simple need for a representation of the world tailored to our survival in it, and should be understood as an instrument minted for this original purpose, McCarthy wants us to observe the activity of his characters closely, as we might observe a wild animal. He gives them no interiority outside of their dialogue. We are kept on the outside, to divine by signification alone what ruminations may or may not be turning the wheels of action. As we grow accustomed to this technique, each act comes to take on a heightened significance because the exterior perspective trains us to ponder the potential resonances of every movement, every gleam in every eye – the possible chain of interior causes never to be laid bare.

I have rarely come across another writer for whom my enjoyment of their work rests so absolutely on the amount of attention I give to it. In my early attempts at reading McCarthy, I found the constant descriptions of the minutia of his character’s actions so boring as to be difficult to follow if my attention was even a little bit elsewhere –

‘He held the rifle at his waist and levered the spent shell out of the chamber and caught it and put it in his pocket and levered a fresh shell in and let down the hammer with his thumb and undallied the rope and let the reins drop and walked back to see about the wolf.’⁴

is just one of any number of examples of his run-on sentences which describe in painstaking detail what someone is doing. Sometimes he might throw us a bone and declare what they are feeling, but almost always their inner worlds are barred to us.

I have over time come to appreciate the power of his decision to write in this way. It produces a sort of levelling affect in which the human feels no more noble and worthy of attention than the horse, the dog, or the bend of a river.⁵ And yet, unavoidably, over all these things and everything else it is given only to the human to speak. His characters often promulgate truths they hold to be universal, yet one of the greatest tricks of McCarthy’s style is that implicit in the once-removed telling of his narratives is the essential fatalism of all that is declared by the human voice therein. There are wise characters, yes, but they are wise as a tree is sturdy – their speech seems carved out of McCarthy’s worlds as a ventifact is shaped by the wind. We feel they could not but say exactly what they have said. He even neglects to use speech marks, so we are offered no formal marker by which to delineate a separation between what is spoken and the rest of the text. As with the levelling effect of the lack of interiority, the lack of speech marks ensures that the McCarthian human speaks in a sense as the world itself. Often their wisdom seems an inevitable counterpart to their suffering, an artefact like an oyster’s pearl.

The darkness of McCarthy’s fiction is just about ubiquitous. Suffering seems kindled in every hearth and campfire at which his characters warm themselves. Isolation abounds. He repeatedly describes the stars as dying, falling off into oblivion beyond the horizon. The world cries through its creatures, but though he does not favour them, the privilege he acknowledges in human beings is the articulation of that cry.

In the pessimistic worlds he renders, suffering is the keystone of existence, but it is only in human beings that the cry becomes song. And though we are left outside of the heads of his characters, it is clear from the care that he takes in his descriptions, the specificity of his words and the vigilant curation of their cadences – to put it simply, the beauty of his prose – that we are nevertheless seeing the world through a human lens. How could we not be? Us being the only creatures laden with language. For us, beauty takes on the significance of the language in which it is rendered, and vice-versa. The poet lives out a reciprocal emboldening between their observations and their proclamations thereon, each feeding the other in an attempt to soar into ever loftier cirruses of the ephemera in which the human soul swims and is sustained.  

And McCarthy’s observations are so keen that we really do believe in the sunsets his characters observe, the dusty roads they travel. Through language they become real to us, through language the beauty of the world is cracked open like the pecans an unnamed girl in The Crossing crushes against stones,

‘Splitting out with her fineboned fingers the meat from the hulls, the delicate fissured hemispheres in which is writ we must believe each feature of the tree that bore them, each feature of the tree they’d come to be.’

Possibly the definitive image of the McCarthian novel – if we were to measure the mean almost surely the one that occurs the most often – is of a character alone, traversing a vast and hostile landscape. The younger me sometimes found this repetitiveness tedious, but now when I turn a page and see from the block paragraphs the absence of his idiosyncratically snappy dialogue, I’ve come to expect luminous descriptive prose near-unparalleled in its vividness.

Though on the surface he describes the same things time and again, cliché is obliterated by his ever-burrowing attentiveness. He always has a new metaphor for the rising of the moon, the blowing of the wind. Much has been said about the symbolism in his work, and it is true that it seems almost bottomless. Each thing observed by his eye and transcribed by his pen seems emblematic, all of them like stones carefully selected and dropped into our attention, so that the ripples of their impact are as much a part of their form as the base objects themselves – resonances spread and intersect, the whole world becomes a latticework of concentric reverberations as if he was showing it to us in the disturbed water of some divinatory basin.

Symbolism is fundamental to the human condition. We are easily divorced from the intuition of ourselves as connected to the world – the price of intellect – and so we rewire that self-same intellect to perceive connections where there may in materiality be none. We generate symbol and metaphor like setting in motion the gears of a mill that churns all that we offer up to it back into the same prima materia, after returning to which everything contains everything else.

But how would Bergson reckon with this? And how would he reckon with the divergent, co-existing wisdoms of McCarthy’s characters, each with an equitable claim at truth? If our perceptive faculties and our intellect are purely tools by which to navigate pre-canalised channels, what room or purpose is there for superfluous conclusions? Or for any rumination at all beyond the basic considerations of material assembly? Bergson accounts for this, and in his address of this very issue the human being as we know it begins to take shape in his vision.

So vast is the field of potential open to us that never before has an animal been gifted with such capacity to stray from the path. In us, consciousness has burst the walls of its dam. And not only can we expand our awareness out into far-flung corners of worlds both material and immaterial, bearing no immediate relation to us, but we can even turn it back upon itself:

‘An intelligence which reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over and above practically useful efforts. It is a consciousness that has virtually reconquered itself… From the moment that the intellect, reflecting upon its own doings, perceives itself as a creator of ideas, as a faculty of representation in general, there is no object of which it may not wish to have the idea, even though that object be without direct relation to practical action.’

Not only is there no object of which the representing mind may not wish to have the idea, but, with the tool of language, there are near-infinite ways of framing that object, and a near-infinite plane of comparisons within which it can be compared and contrasted, comingled and set apart – the writer, like the musician, casts spells by means of successive impressions upon the intellect, and any object can come to take on a multitude of significances and be made the instrument of any number of affective qualities. Take these three widely different examples of McCarthy presenting to us the object of the sun:

‘By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.’⁶

‘…the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds beyond all reckoning.’⁷

‘They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.’⁸

Bergson understands the arising of language as a necessary development in the furthering of a species such as ourselves, so dependent as we are on cooperation and thus in need of a means of communicating to one another first of all the objects, and eventually, by extension, the matter-abstracted concepts of which the human mind is a generative organ. It is worth reading an extended passage by Bergson himself on this, so well-argued is the mutual relationship of advancement between the human being and its language:

‘In human society… fabrication and action are of variable form, and, moreover, each individual must learn his part, because he is not preordained to it by his structure. So a language is required which makes it possible to be always passing from what is known to what is yet to be known. There must be a language whose signs – which cannot be infinite in number – are extensible to an infinity of things… Without language, intelligence would probably have remained riveted to the material objects which it was interested in considering. It would have lived in a state of somnambulism, outside itself, hypnotised on its own work. Language has greatly contributed to its liberation… It profits by the fact that the word is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch hold of and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial thing, by means of which the intelligence can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own work… Language itself… is made to designate things, and naught but things: it is only because the word is mobile, because it flies from one thing to another, that the intellect was sure to take it, sooner or later, on the wing, while it was not settled on anything, and apply it to an object which is not a thing and which, concealed till then, awaited the coming of the word to pass from darkness into light.’

It is fascinating to consider the ways in which languages differ and compare – the concepts that exist in one but not another, the idiosyncratic emphases and undercurrents that they engender in the mind and the formative cultural and geographical conditions that might still have their legacy in the grammar and the lexicon that arose within them. Language as a growing fossil, ossifying as it renders in comprehensible forms the multiflorous reality into whose expanse it stretches. A genuine exploration of this topic is far beyond my sadly monolinguistic capabilities, but I am reminded by both Bergson’s dissection of the origins of language, and by McCarthy’s masterful playfulness with it, of another great writer who has famously turned his attention to the matter of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, presents to us the fictitious world of Tlön, and while doing so offers us a glimpse into the nature of its languages. As with Bergson, Borges is a writer on this subject worth quoting at length:

‘In the northern hemisphere… the primary unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by stringing together adjectives. One does not say “moon”; one says “aerial-bright above dark-round” or “soft-amberish-celestial” or any other string. In this case, the complex of adjectives corresponds to a real object, but that is purely fortuitous. The literature of the northern hemisphere (as in Meinong’s subsisting world) is filled with ideal objects, called forth and dissolved in an instant, as the poetry requires. Sometimes mere simultaneity creates them. There are things composed of two terms, one visual and the other auditory: the colour of the rising sun and the distant caw of a bird. There are things composed of many: the sun and water against the swimmer’s breast, the vague shimmering pink one sees when one’s eyes are closed, the sensation of being swept along by a river and also by Morpheus. These objects of the second degree may be combined with others; the process, using certain abbreviations, is virtually infinite. There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word; this word is a “poetic object” created by the poet.’

McCarthy sometimes plays around with this notion of the “poetic object” in a very literal way, by making one of his infamous compound words – cinderland, shackstrewn, sealedbeam – but his tireless attention to the affective nature of the word on the micro level is reflective of a much larger project, a project that befalls all writers of fiction whether they embrace it or not, but that in McCarthy seems never to waver in its focus. In the choosing of which details to present to us, which words to invent, which to pair together, which images to conjure in the incense of their enjoining, he curates for us a very certain kind of world. A further passage from Borges’ story will illuminate this further:

‘One might well deduce, therefore, that on Tlön there are no sciences – or even any “systems of thought.” The paradoxical truth is that systems of thought do exist, almost countless numbers of them. Philosophies are much like the nouns of the northern hemisphere: the fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has allowed them to proliferate. There are systems upon systems that are incredible but possessed of a pleasing architecture or a certain agreeable sensationalism. The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility – they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know that a system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects – any one of them.’

This final sentence is a kindred spirit to Bergson’s statement:

‘The intellect is characterised by an unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and recomposing according to any system.’

Humanity, given the intellect, is bound to metaphysics. We are system builders in thought, as we are instrument builders by hand.

McCarthy’s novels for the most part feel situated firmly in the same world, governed by the same system, if perhaps viewed under a slightly different lens each time. It is an embattled world of harsh landscapes enshrined with the crumbling works of mankind, a world whose beauty is surprising and yet everlasting, as if it were the very end of its struggle.

‘He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.’⁹

His descriptive passages, metaphors, and even his characters and their attitudes feel like refractions from the same source, different edges of the same crystal that he turns and turns like a celestial loom on which he spins the threads of his intoxicating language. This crystal is his “poetic object”. Moment by moment we catch the gleams from its surface, but it is not something that can be known in its fullness except through the reading of his entire work. And even then, it can only be known in a second-hand way, and not exclusively with the mind like a regular piece of knowledge obtained. A writer’s poetic object is the work of a lifetime – and an expression of that life – and no mind including their own is vast enough to hold in completeness such an object. Perhaps the only people we can truly say contain the dark crystal of McCarthy’s world-centre within themselves entirely are his characters – it is only through him that they speak, after all – but even they are given only delineated knowledge and experience within that domain. The mystery is bottomless, whichever oracle we consult.     

Each of us has an analogous mystery at the core of our imagination, of which only intimations can be communicated. As Bergson claims, we have not eschewed our instinctive, animal natures completely in advancing along the path to intellect. But:

‘There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.’  

So, inevitably, there are parts of us dark even to ourselves, perhaps the vastest and most plunderable parts. To be driven by both instinct and intelligence, essentially two divergent forces, keeps us blind to the object of our search. Because it is no object, really, but mystery itself. Encoded in our nature, in the private, signatural aesthesis of every life, does that mystery gleam. Creativity is boundless because the aesthetic mystery is beyond our reckoning – we are beings split apart and with the part of ourselves capable of knowledge we yearn to render for ourselves in some externalised form that other part of ourselves that is by nature internal and unknowable. We can’t help but feel its stirrings on the waters of our consciousness, and in this factioned double life is the friction of the artist felt – out of that friction is the spark of the creative impulse born.

In order to render in a work of art some simulacrum of our own poetic object we must create for ourselves a trail of its affects. Only by its affects can we know it. Analogously, if we were to attribute to a sunset, or the course of a river, or the bursting of clouds the workings of a higher being does that mean that we have thereby come to know that higher being? No. We seek signs because it is only signs that we can perceive.¹⁰

In our individuality we are each like tributaries that meet up along the path, always asking: ‘What news of the sea?’

1. Picture me on the beach of your choice, sunglasses on, absorbed in The World as Will and Representation.

2. ‘Man the maker’.

3. At one point in The Crossing, the protagonist Billy Parham rides out into a night where ‘a halfmoon hung cocked in the east over the mountains like an eye narrowed in anger.’

4. The Crossing

5. Some of his descriptions of animal behaviour are astoundingly well observed, in his works animals attain a level of dignity they very rarely achieve in literature. The first section of The Crossing is full of wonderful descriptions of the wolf that Billy Parham travels with. And when the wolf dies the elegy that McCarthy gives to her (really an elegy for all animal life) pulses with a profound love that he doesn’t often extend to his typically callous human characters: ‘He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.’

6. The Road

7. Blood Meridian

8. Blood Meridian

9. All the Pretty Horses

10. Kant, to whom Bergson as almost every other philosopher after the 1700s was indebted, said: ‘And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances.’