Yeats’ Voice in the Text
Cormac
McCarthy’s use of voice in No Country for
Old Men and The Road must be read
as an invocation of the Romantic Sublime through ventriloquizing Yeats’
poetics. Additionally, the use of Yeats provides these texts with an underlying
sense of a tragic universe in which humans are ultimately responsible for their
own fates; there is no divine intervention. Both McCarthy and Yeats privilege a
kind of literary redemption that is only made possible through storytelling. In
his Byzantium poems Yeats’ utilizes the tropes of Symbolism to imbue his poetry
with a redemptive power that is explicitly bereft of divine intervention. While,
his use of those tropes is what characterizes Yeats as a Symbolist rather than
a Romantic—though his work retains, and makes use of, several Romantic idioms—the
Symbolist movement is itself a reinterpretation of Romanticism with the
Symbolist poets offering their own peculiar, and possibly even blasphemous, poetic
displacement of the Sacred and Sublime.
According to
Olivier Sécardin in his article “La Poésie Impie Ou Le Sacre Du Poète: Sur
Quelques Modernes,” poets-like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud had the
beautifully blasphemous ambition to give birth to a new conception of the
sacred—though Rimbaud later renounced this poetic ambition. Previously, the
sacred had been confined to the Romantic experience of the Sublime—a Platonic
transcendence whose inscrutable profundity language had to strive to reach.
However, with the advent of poetic modernity, in a line that can be traced
directly through these Symbolist poets, it is the immanence of poetic structure
that contains and distills the sacral dimension. The poem is “sacred because it
is secret, locked up on itself and from the inside. It is secret in the
etymological meaning of the word secretus: it is the mystery” (213-14). For
these poets, poetry is the dreaming language, the language of dream, the
language of the unconscious “lost tongue,” and therefore a new “sacred text”
which deposes the idea of Platonic transcendence within structure. Thus the
experience of the Sublime ceases to exist out in Nature but rather exists solely
within the realm of language. Within this metaphysical paradigm, redemption is
deemed to be no longer possible from Nature and must instead become a human
project of linguistic aesthetics. The aesthetic religion that Yeats envisages
offers a different and altogether new approach to the problem of the
art/metaphysics relationship. Within Yeats’s metaphysical project of literary
redemption, the poem itself becomes a kind of redemptive ritual magic.
Yeats’ vision of
poetry as word magic is further refined in the “Byzantium” poems. As such, it
seems obvious that Cormac McCarthy further extends Yeats’ vision of the poet as
vatic visionary with his multiple unambiguous references to Yeats. It is also important
to notice that McCarthy most particularly references the early, and most
explicitly metaphysical, “Byzantium” poems. Additionally, it is equally
important to recognize that McCarthy explicitly engages with the entire
metaphysical project that underlies those poems. Most reviewers generally agree
that the ubiquitous “fire” referred to in The
Road is hope, spiritual belief, or truth, but I think only Barbara Bennett,
in her article “Celtic Influences on
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
and The Road” has recognized
the metonymic use of “fire” as a symbol to refer to the tradition of
storytelling. In my own analysis, it is understood that, for McCarthy, this
“fire of storytelling” must also include poetics, language, and signification systems
generally.
*I also drink cold fucking coffee and grade student essays.
