Cormac McCarthy: Storytelling, the unconscious, and neuroscience

McCarthy (1933–2023) articulated provocative ideas about the unconscious mind's relationship to language

Widely regarded as one of the greatest modern American writers, Cormac McCarthy died on June 13th, aged 89, after a writing career that spanned seven decades—from his first novel The Orchard Keeper in 1965 to his final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, in 2022. Famed for his unflinchingly violent 1985 magnum opus Blood Meridian, McCarthy won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses (1992) and a Pulitzer Prize for The Road (2006). The Coen brothers’ film adaptation of his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, by which point McCarthy had achieved virtually everything an American novelist could hope to achieve.

And yet McCarthy eschewed mainstream literary fame. He never gave readings, never reviewed other writers’ work (instead telling the New Yorker that modern novels were “not readable”), and never accepted a university teaching post. Having turned his back on the literati, McCarthy moved from El Paso to live near the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary scientific research organization, where he maintained an office, served as a trustee, and even helped edit scientific manuscripts. He donated his beloved Olivetti Lettera 32, on which he had written his first 10 novels, to raise money for the Institute. The typewriter McCarthy had bought in a pawn shop for $50 sold at auction for $254,500.

McCarthy’s many debates with scientists at the institute helped shape his only nonfiction work, the 2017 essay “The Kekulé Problem,” published by science magazine Nautilus. Its title references a dream by nineteenth-century German scientist August Kekulé, who discovered the circular structure of the benzene molecule only after he dreamed about a snake eating its own tail. Asking why Kekulé’s unconscious did not provide a straightforward linguistic answer to the question—instead, presenting an obscure image for interpretation—McCarthy articulates provocative theories about the unconscious mind’s adversarial relationship to language.

McCarthy dates the unconscious mind to around two million years ago, while language itself is around 100,000 years old—implying that thought, reasoning, and creativity long predate the advent of language and do not themselves take place in language. The pre-linguistic nature of the unconscious explains how mathematicians have solved complex problems without being able to explain how they did so — or how we regularly experience “Eureka” moments around thorny questions while showering, driving, walking, or dreaming. But McCarthy goes further, claiming that the unconscious “prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether”, suggesting that it “doesn’t much like language” and “doesn’t trust it” because “it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years.”

McCarthy’s proposal that the atavistic unconscious may be hostile to language but receptive to archetypal image has powerful implications for how we understand where meaning comes from, and how innovation and change happen. Specifically, it has implications for the role of storytelling as a key driver of human action. For reasons of evolutionary biology, reading or listening to information may be inherently less powerful than absorbing symbol—including by way of literature, art, and film. Attending an anti-war lecture may thus pale in comparison to viewing Apocalypse Now; the symbols resonate at a deeper level than arguments, ethics, or rational justifications. McCarthy—who in Blood Meridian gave us some of the most potent and disturbing images in modern American literature—implicitly understood this power. Now, advanced neuroscientific research offers the potential to understand the workings of archetypal symbol scientifically, to locate where and how symbolic resonance happens, and grasp how to make change happen in ways that have been hitherto impossible. Elaborating on this research is a big part of the aim of this Substack; future posts will feature much more on this.