Cormac McCarthy and Friedrich Nietzsche's Backworldsmen

The connection between the work of Cormac McCarthy and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is frequently made, most often in connection with Blood Meridian. The Road, too, could be read in a Nietzschean light, and it has been suggested that its opening, when the man wakes in ‘the dark and cold’ is emblematic of the eternal return. Maybe so, but if it is, it is not Nietzsche’s eternal return that McCarthy is describing. The first thing to note about Nietzsche’s eternal return is that it isn’t necessarily meant literally. Nietzsche was much more playful than he is given credit for. The second thing to note is that, as regards the soul, Nietzsche doesn’t necessarily agree that it is a separate entity. And he doesn’t go along with the notion that – as a separate entity – it is reborn. Zarathustra tells us: ‘Only where there are tombs are there resurrections’. The first mention of soul in Thus Spake Zarathustra, linking it to God and the ‘poisoners’ who ‘speak of superearthly hope’, describes it pejoratively:

Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.

This is not to say that Nietzsche does not accept the idea of the soul – he plainly does, as it reappears throughout Zarathustra, but he does not seek to place it on a pedestal. On the contrary:

Oh, that soul was itself meagre, ghastly, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of that soul!

But ye, also, my brethren, tell me: What doth your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency?

Of what is this soul comprised? In Nietzschean terms it is only part of the body. Zarathustra tells us:

“Body am I, and soul” - so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?

But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”

The soul, then, is a part of the individual, and could be construed as the state of overgoing wisdom. In this, there may be some connection with the idea of eternal return, in as much as this concept is key to understanding Nietzsche’s idea of the progress of man from herd to overman. For Nietzsche, eternal return is a way of reconciling oneself with the past. The overman can only be attained if one learns to love life completely, such that the idea of eternally returning to each moment bcomes acceptable. This is a troublesome concept, of course, in moral terms, because it entails final acceptance (though not approval) of events such as, say, 9/11 or a murder of a close relative and so on. People therefore tend to get stuck on the concept of eternal return here, but again I stress that I don’t think Nietzsche is being literal: it is not the event, but one’s connection with it and understanding of it that matters. It is rooted in the love of the present, the here and now. Through understanding the past, accommodating it, reconciling onself to it, removing all anger and resentment and negative emotion from our understanding of it, we allow ourselves to live more fruitfully in the present. We find redemption, in other words, because redemption comes from ourselves and our connection with the world, not from a god who, at the end of a life, graciously bestows it on the worthy. By accepting the past we affirm the present. We feel no need to prepare ourselves for the great redemption of the end. John Updike, in one of his last poems, Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth, nails this beautifully, when he writes:

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life.

Now, it may be that I am falling prey to my usual kindly, naïve humanist perspective here. Nietzsche was more definite. He said: ‘To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I willed it thus!’ – that alone do I call redemption!’ Again, taking the 9/11 or murder examples, it is possible to reach the point I suggest – understanding, reconciliation –  without too much difficulty, but to reach the Nietzschean moment of ‘I willed it’ is more of a struggle. But he goes on: ‘The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire – that is the will’s most lonely affliction.’

It may be that I’m misunderstanding Cormac McCarthy (very likely) or that I’m misunderstanding Nietzsche (even more likely). But it may also be, it seems to me, that McCarthy, too, is misunderstanding Nietzsche. The result of the Nietzschean universe created in Blood Meridian appears to be an indifference to suffering or pain or injustice. This is a simplification of Nietzsche’s views. It is, to go back to the 9/11 example, to say that one doesn’t care that it happened, which is not at all the same thing as saying one accepts that it happened.

For Nietzsche, eternal return is a life-affirming belief. Thus, to transplant it into the context of McCarthy’s The Road, say, where life is in the process of being annihilated, is surely to go against his thinking. In The Road we have a ‘long shear of light’, and in Blood Meridian, ‘the evening redness in the west’. In All The Pretty Horses we have ‘reefs of bloodred cloud’ beneath a ‘red and elliptic sun’. Further, we are told of the ‘coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.’ In other words, these are the views of backworldsmen, those ‘sick and perishing’ who, in Nietzsche’s terms:

despised the body and the earth and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming bloodrops… From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them. Then they sighed: “O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!” Then they contrived for themselves their bypaths and bloody draughts!

And so we have our bypaths. The Road begins in a cave before the time of man. In Blood Meridian we hear ‘cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.’ The Orchard Keeper’s forest ‘has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep’. Outer Dark’s triune ‘could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time’. In Suttree, we are ‘come to a world within the world’ and, in The Crossing, the ancient wolves know that ‘there is no order in the world save that which death has put there’, and ‘if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do.’

All of these, it seems to me, could be part of ‘that “other world” ... concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world, which is a celestial naught’. In other words, we are indeed in the company of Nietzsche’s backworldsmen, those doomsayers constantly casting portents in our way, warning, always warning, of the death to come. Zarathustra describes them thus:

Backward they always gaze toward dark ages: then, indeed, were delusion and faith something different. Raving of the reason was likeness to God, and doubt was sin.

Too well do I know those godlike ones: they insist on being believed in, and that doubt is sin. Too well, also, do I know what they themselves most believe in.

Verily, not in backworlds and redeeming blood-drops: but in the body do they also believe most; and their own body is for them the thing-in-itself.

But it is a sickly thing to them, and gladly would they get out of their skin. Therefore harken they to the preachers of death, and themselves preach backworlds.

And so, in The Road, far from experiencing an eternal return of the soul, we find ourselves placed at the very edge of destruction, preaching the death of everything. It is hard to know where the soul could reside in such a landscape. Or why it would wish to do so.

Gnostic motifs in Doris Lessing's Briefing For a Descent Into Hell

 I’ve written a fuller review of Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell here, but I am also curious about the specific point of whether or not it is gnostic, so I want to explore that a bit further.

Robert Galbreath identifies it as ‘significantly gnostic’, making use of traditional gnostic features such as ‘the alien messenger, the prison-house of existence, sleep and awakening as metaphors of the human condition.’ The gnosticism presented here, however, is not that of early gnostic texts, he argues. Rather, the gnosis is ‘problematic’: this, then, is gnosis as the presentation of alienation, the corrupt state of modernity.

He further argues that, in modern gnosticism, where transcendence has been replaced by immanence, the gnostic prison house which embodies the alienation of mankind is no longer located in the cosmos, but in the mind, ‘where the polar opposites function as categories for states of consciousness and degrees of knowledge: ignorance/knowledge, sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, alienation/enlightenment (gnosis).’ Thus, this modern gnosticism could be seen as essentially psychological, something Lessing herself acknowledges when she calls her novel a work of ‘inner space. For there is never anywhere to go but in.’

One can certainly see these motifs throughout the novel. Watkins consistently describes existence in terms of bondage. He reminisces about his childhood, before the ‘prison shades’ descended and ‘the trap had shut.’ Elsewhere, children are ‘creatures about to be trapped and corrupted by what trapped and corrupted [the adults].’ People are bound by chains of ‘terrible bondage’, enduring the ‘dreadful breath of cold, of grief.’

Thus, we have humanity entrapped. It is enduring, in the words of RD Laing, whose work was a signficant influence on Lessing’s novel, ‘the condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind.’ And so, by the end of the novel, Watkins is clear that ‘People don’t know it but it is as if they are living in a poisoned air. They are not awake.’ This is classic gnostic despair, and as Watkins explains in the novel, ‘The advocates humanity has found to argue on the side of despair have always been more powerful than those other small voices.’

But the most gnostic element of the novel comes in the form of Watkins himself, who can be interpreted as a gnostic messenger from the gods, descending to Earth to warn mankind of its imminent (indeed, immanent) demise. A plot strand in the novel sees a character, presumably an incarnation of Watkins, receiving his briefing from the gods before a descent to Earth to save humanity. Clearly, however, this mission is not the first. He is told: ‘When the time comes, it will be our task to wake up those of us who have forgotten what they went for; as well as to recruit suitable inhabitants of Earth – those, that is, who have kept a potential for evolving into rational beings.’ Thus we have pneumatics already on Earth with, unknown to them, the seed of knowledge inside them, waiting to be awakened. And what is stopping them? The Archons, of course. In Briefing, the three Doctors (and, particularly, Doctor X, whom Watkins can’t even see) can clearly be identified as Archons, trying their best to keep man in a state of darkness and ignorance. Watkins attempts, throughout the novel, to find the knowledge he feels is there, but is consistently foiled by the medical men. And in the end, of course, he accepts their advice and takes the electro-therapy treatment which reverts him to his previous state of blissful ignorance: the Archons win, mankind stays in its prison house of the mind.

All of this can clearly be interpreted as gnostic in the modern sense of reacting against modernity. But in one respect, Lessing’s novel is very different. Lessing, of course, is an atheist, and for her the gnosis that man has lost and must somehow recover is not a theistic one, but a natural one. She quotes Rachel Carson at the beginning of the novel – Silent Spring would have only been a few years old when Briefing was published – and an ecopastoral message is clearly evident in it. The messengers are told in their briefing:

‘Now the Permanent staff on Earth have always had one main task, which is to keep alive, in any way possible, the knowledge that humanity, with its fellow creatures, the animals and plants, make up a whole, are a unity, have a function in the whole system as an organ or organism... Human beings... have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature, plants, animals, birds, insects, reptiles, all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony.’

James Lovelock first formulated his Gaia hypothesis in the sixties, while working for NASA, but he didn’t begin to publish his work until the early seventies, around the time Briefing was published (1971). There is a striking similarity between the holistic idea here of Earth as a single organism and Lovelock’s thesis. This link between humanity and nature is stressed throughout the novel. Human consciousness and that of the cosmos are internlinked. We are told:

There is nothing on Earth, or near it, that does not have its own consciousness, Stone, or Tree, of Dog, or Man. Looking into a mirror or into the glossy side of a toppling wave, or a water-smoothed shining stone like glass, we see shapes of flesh, flesh in time.

Man and animal are one, part of a wider connection of all matter. ‘It was the mind of humanity that I saw,’ Watkins tells us, ‘but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere.’

And this begins to take us to the message of the novel. If it is gnostic, it is a distinct flavour of gnosticism. The knowledge that we need to be awakened to is an ecopastoral one. We have founded societies based on materialism:

The chief thought was that our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts – things. There is no way of knowing an ancient society’s ideas ecept through the barrier of our own.

And there is, by extension, no way of knowing our own inner space and inner knowledge without being able to connect to something more elemental, less materialistic. It is the community of ‘we’ and not the ascendency of ‘I’; and that ‘we’ must encompass more than simply human nature, because human nature – acquisitive, aspiring, solipsistic – is not enough. This is the gnostic message that Lessing is imparting: we must break through the alienation of the modern world; we must awaken to the values of the world around us. For me, it is a striking message. I do not share her pessimism about humanity, and I have strong reservations about the elevation of animals and even minerals to the status of human beings (here we are in the territory of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘optical democracy’) but it is a powerful battlecry for progress through understanding. Ultimately, I do not think this is a gnostic novel, despite the starkness of its ending. That ending, for me, is admonitory, but we should not take it literally. There is, in Lessing’s world, unlike that of other so-called modern gnostic writers, some possibility of gaining the knowledge.