Cracking article. McCarthy is the living writer I have any interest in reading. Schopenhauer tells us not to bother with modern books because we have so little time, but I make an exception with McCarthy. And maybe Will Self, but I am never going to admit that in public. My favourite novel by McCarthy is Child of God. That is a transgressive novel in content but not in heart, lacking the genre’s typical and rejoicing ambivalence, in place he touches upon that dreaded phrase, something deeper.

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

Auden declared Nathanel West’s mean-spirited novels mistook pity for compassion. Everyone is too superficial and misguided to not rejoice in their demises. McCarthy can make you emphatic to any horrible monster. Only Thomas Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy has crafted for me an out and out immoral beast, clear in his reasoning, and made him utterly and totally human. McCarthy’s Lester Ballard becomes a serial killer, the husband of AYT murders his own children, and the motives are out of spite and shame, but I understand why more than I care to admit.
As for ‘autofiction’, I cannot stomach it. None a patch on Rousseau’s Confessions and at least he claimed it was true. I feel this obsession with it stems partly from the voyeuristic enjoyment we have pouring into the lives of others like we are Jimmy Stewart in a wheelchair. Philip Roth is a perfect example. The reason I read him, in all truthfulness was how he scandalised himself in his narrators. You did not read novel on its own, you read it with the baggage of the author. It was never fiction to us. Not to insult him, I cannot say the last time I read him to judge, but it was a good grift. I would suggest this a product of a fame driven era and cultural epoch, but I imagine writers were similar in the past. Hemingway’s a clear example. Not one of his protagonists is in my mind not Hemingway. It is a charm as it is a drawback when I read him. In a similar way, I think this is an issue Hunter S Thompson has suffered in life and in his literary afterlife.
Some prefer- namely I- a reclusive writer with a small body of work. I suppose as an aftereffect of how terminally online many are now. Culture is totally fragmented. Instead of fifteen minutes of fame, we are all famous to fifteen people (that is not my saying, but Steve Sailer’s). Writers are too open about motivations because technology has made written communication lose a lot of its weight and provide ease. Everyone has opinions, only now are so many are recorded. Mine change each day and I am glad to have foresight in not uploading much online (this comment an exception rather than the rule). I was the last in my sixth form to have Facebook and the first to delete it when I reached university.
Reflection is good attitude to writing. We can type away so much, but how much is worth preserving or publishing? To ourselves, of course it is worth keeping if only to laugh at in a few years. To our friends, maybe. To the “public”, that is to the open literary self we cultivate and believe worthwhile sharing, perhaps not. My own view years ago was to write more and publish less. Now grub street dominates everywhere and we are all writers. I know how much of my pas writing is not worth it beyond mere novelty and I do not believe it is only me. Good writing is hard and occasionally easy for some who are lucky to be paid or not paid to write. I wasted a great deal of my time at school reading countless blogs and articles, keeping myself up to date with RSS feeds and daily emails. I wrote a great deal and had quite a few articles published. It impacted my grades, though I know my limits in intelligence and have no interest in travelling to the land of might-have-been because my excuses are plenty in that space. I do not really mind all that. My poor education has its charms, and they have made me what I am today. Looking back, I cannot seriously suggest any of this countless reading had much use or importance. Very little I read went beyond my stimulation and need to be in communication with something. It was an accumulation and sharing of needless knowledge for no real end and then it disappeared and what was left was very little worth keeping. I even won English Literature student of the year because all the little facts and figures I knew impressed. One teacher enjoyed me a great deal and I say as a matter of record, if she was 20 years younger and I was 20 years old, and she wasn’t a lesbian, well you never know. I adore literature, but am I widely read? Not really, especially then. I simply gleamed facts and used them in lessons. Lots of it stored in my mind. Even in my years at university I committed similar atrocities in seminars, but many other course mates were similar, fundamentally reading off a sheet.
Now I read little online, this article a rare exception, and barely anything through the week. I do not feel less informed because the cycles change so often that a week is meaningless. My job does not require a knowledge of the ins and outs of foreign countries or cabinet members. We like to think we have a duty to be “well-informed” about news or grand topics, need to read about subcultures or opinion pieces, but my life goes on without it. It is not to say my extra free time is more productive, I am naturally lazy, but I have not grown sick or be given a headache from what I now read. A lot more sticks in that is worth sticking in.
Am I well-read now? I don’t know. The more you truly learn about a subject, the greater the distance to full understanding is felt. That might be only me though.
What I do recall well at sixth form (close to a decade ago now) was my strange obsession with Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. I had a real passion for it. I wrote notes, read it countless times, and even presented on it for a history class because I forced the teacher to let me. Looking back on my notes, I can feel a slight gust of fond memories, strange optimism. A different household that I now live in, a different person. It is a pleasure but of my own self-dialogue. When I studied it at MA, I found the book atrocious.
My writings on him are childish and naive but I am grateful to have written them to myself and not to have tried passing myself off as an expert but as a learner, the opposite of which I acted like at in every other lesson at school. It is so easy to play-pretend as a know it all when a computer is ever-present. It has affected consciousness on some level. The dopamine rush colours all our society, young and old. There is a feeling we must be heard by all but maybe we should restrain ourselves. Then again, who will listen to us when we are ready? Who will listen to my comment? I do not know. McCarthy has done well for himself through hard work with little output. I do not have the formula here. Maybe this is the new normal and the reclusive artist is consumed by the gregarious blob which pervades our free time. People underestimate how much the internet has changed how we live and how derive our interests and habits.
But “men dig tons of earth for an ounce of gold,” says Heraclitus. Whilst we shall always need the earth, I cannot seriously wish away journalism and websites because they do not search for the McCarthy tier of writing, we do require the gold and that should be a rare find. But both Pynchon and McCarthy have almost past their twilight years. They are from different eras and cultures from our own. Who now will replace them? Will we be able to? Shall we search among the Amish for a westerner not tainted by computers?
Whilst I dislike ‘autofiction’, I have grown to appreciate autobiographies and memoirs. I used to hate them, but a good one is usually great. Bellow said novels will only die when there is no one worth writing about and I think there is truth to that. Wolfe conversely saw the epic novel, the ones he usually wrote, in a terminal decline akin to epic poetry in the beginning of the 1800s. I think there is truth to that as well. My concertation for a Middlemarch or a David Copperfield has gone. I must work myself up to reading a long book and I feel I need to justify my reasoning when I do it. What a shame for a great book because ‘aesthetic quality’ can lose its charms after a while.
The autobiography endures because it speaks to what Schopenhauer states in The World as Will and Representation:

It is therefore worth noting, and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract. In the former he is abandoned to all the storms of reality and to the influence of the present; he must struggle, suffer, and die like the animal. But his life in the abstract, as it stands before his rational consciousness, is the calm reflection of his life in the concrete, and of the world in which he lives; it is precisely that reduced chart or plan previously mentioned. Here in the sphere of calm deliberation, what previously possessed him completely and moved him intensely appears to him cold, colourless, and, for the moment, foreign and strange; he is a mere spectator and observer. In respect of this withdrawal into reflection, he is like an actor who has played his part in one scene, and takes his place in the audience until he must appear again. In the audience he quietly looks on at whatever may happen, even though it be the preparation of his own death (in the play); but then he again goes on the stage, and acts and suffers as he must. From this double life proceeds that composure in man, so very different from the thoughtlessness of the animal.

The second life we live is the autobiography and a uniquely human trait. We may never be completely honest with ourselves, but we can set things straight and how we feel about events in our lives. It is pleasurable for both an eager-to-know audience and ourselves. Yes, it may be artificial and sound like a long list of regrets, but it can probe from the closest aspect to our own view and experiences. An honest and well-reflected autobiography is a wonderful gift to the world. Practically a philosophical work of its own personal and direct school.
I am not a Rousseauian, but I do think I share an affinity with his idealised egalitarianism, not necessarily in agreement in either the political or cultural conclusions, but in conducting myself. His outsiderness is charming (of course I say this after he has been dead for so long and we can finally look at him without his negative influence in politics hanging high). The aforementioned Confessions has a frankness that remains with me in my own conduct. Jonathan Dollimore, perhaps an example of an academic I like for the sheer little he has written and published, wrote a brilliant memoir about his own life which I recommend to all. I come back to both often.
People interest me. My father tells me whilst I was a lonely child, preferring it or having eventually grown accustomed to it, very few can match my willingness to have a conversation with about anyone. Many decades older than me which I know a few young people my age struggle with. I suppose I am naturally ‘extroverted’. Then again, I am also the man on the tube who tries to make eye-contact. I do think (can you ever be certain of your motives?) I believe in hearing what a person thinks of themselves. I want a conversation, but I do not want it to be frivolous. The best conversations are with the fewest words, but with the greatest impact. Words online, back and forth on discussion boards have never been satisfying to me.
I work as porter at Durham University and on my quiet nightshift alone strange thoughts pop into my mind. One was my distaste for not being able to hear another’s thoughts. Nature had conducted a great design, but not providing us with perfect clairvoyance seemed unfair. If only we knew the truth of others! Then in life we could conduct ourselves all fairly. Man would be forced to be honest with himself and the world.
But, as these errant wishes and thoughts do, it disappeared as the night went on. If people have rights, then I suppose the right to their own perception of the world is one of the baselines. You can’t change it, and you can’t invade it. Man deserves a chance to be honest with himself, even if he might want to share it with the world. Writing can illuminate so many new thoughts and understandings, but some of it should kept to ourselves. This will not line up a UN Declaration, but those documents are worthless and meaningless anyway.
edit: conversely, I’ve written a comment which went over 2000 words. Must be tired.

Some people are insanely violent, some of the time.
Most people try to lift civilization by their own bootstraps, most of the time.
Everything else is detail.