More on McCarthy.

I noticed something while reading All the Pretty Horses the other night, so I'm going to talk a bit about that instead of... not McCarthy, or something.

So I was reading about the horrifying escapades of John Grady Cole, and I came across this passage (it's when he's talking to Alejandra's great-aunt):

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.
(All the Pretty Horses, pg 231)

Reading that section, I was reminded of a bit from Suttree when he discovers the ragpicker dead (the ragpicker is probably my favorite character in Suttree):

The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sandbags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.
(Suttree, pg 421-422)

These passages are not perfectly similar by any means, but there's a very definite similarity--both referring to the world at large as a sort of show put on by a hidden higher power, both referring to someone who was able to peer "behind the curtain" and catch a glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes. Again, this sort of attitude is so characteristic of McCarthy. If I were better at philosophy I'd try to throw some of that in for effect, but I really don't know anything about philosophy, and I'd just make a fool of myself.

I mean, I do know that this is a sort of deterministic view. But both of these characters seem less in line with the idea of an actual higher power or fate controlling everyone's lives and more of the opinion that there is some sort of malevolent force just, for lack of a better term, screwing everyone over all the time. In All the Pretty Horses, she's probably talking about actual people--government higher-ups and whatever sort of shadowy people enact revolutions. In Suttree, it seems more likely that he is actually talking about some sort of higher power, given some of his earlier conversations with the ragpicker. But Suttree doesn't seem to approve of whatever higher power he may or may not credit for everything that's happened, and the ragpicker definitely wasn't a fan of the being in the sky.

Both excerpts, and both books in general (although Suttree more so), remind me of the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy, which I'm sure we all know but I'll put it here anyway.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Macbeth)

I think if you'd asked Suttree, he probably would have agreed that life seemed like a tale told by an idiot.