Read This: Cormac McCarthy emerges from his cave with smart, funny essay
Cormac McCarthy is one of our greatest living writers, but he is also a mystery and a bit of a ham. He disdains the press—popping up once, legendarily, for an Oprah interview, because she is the queen—and issues novels that rush headlong into weighty questions about life and death and violence and God and dogs and horses. They’re intense works, the last of which was 2006’s harrowing Pulitzer winner The Road. Since then, he has issued two screenplays and been hard at work on apparently several follow-ups, all of which are, presumably, about deranged drifters committing acts of appalling inhumanity.
When McCarthy does pal around with anyone, it is the physicists, biologists, and philosophers of the Santa Fe Institute, where he ponders human matters within the context of a more celestial scale. This larger intellectual backdrop helps, in part, to explain why his writing seems to slip so naturally from descriptions of hard, rugged work to pages-long, deeply abstract philosophical metaphors. His love of science and anthropology is sort of like David Lynch’s adherence to transcendental meditation, not necessarily an explanation for the mysterious works he creates but a lens into how they’re created.
All of which is to say that McCarthy’s new essay for Nautilus on the genesis of language comes as an essential piece of writing not just for fans of the author but also for people interested in knowledge itself. He is thought of, as the Santa Fe Institute’s president David Krakauer says in the essay’s introduction, “in complementary terms” by the institute’s gang of geniuses.
Still, in the essay itself, McCarthy goes out of his way to minimize his own credentials. Surprisingly, it is all very funny, particularly in a series of self-deprecating recurring gags about how smart the people at the institute are and the puckish gumption of little ol’ McCarthy to be speaking on the nature of language and the vast mysteries of the unconscious mind. Here’s a representative example: