The Treasure of Comanche County
Joyce Carol Oates 乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨
October 20, 2005 issue
1.
“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?” 如果上帝有意干涉人类的堕落，难道他不早就这样做了吗？
—Blood Meridian 《血色边境》
Pascal’s enigmatic remark in the Pensées “Life is a dream a little less inconstant” would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, which unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol Blood Meridian, from the prose ballads of the Border Trilogy to this new, tightly plotted crime novel, McCarthy’s fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motion—on foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy’s worlds as “real” except in the way that fever dreams are “real,” a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition. 帕斯卡在《思想录》中的神秘言论“生活是一个稍微不那么无常的梦”可以作为科马克·麦卡锡小说的适当题词，这些小说以令人精疲力竭的激烈梦境展开。从他早期、东田纳西小说中的浓密福克纳式风景到宏伟的大狂欢血色子午线，从边境三部曲的散文歌谣到这部新的、紧凑的犯罪小说，麦卡锡的小说以强迫性和注定的追求、男性残酷仪式、永恒运动的狂热为特点——步行、骑马、开车和拖车。除了作为发热梦境对人类状况的高度和浓缩的光泽之外，没有人会将科马克·麦卡锡的世界误认为是“真实”的。
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was brought to live in East Tennessee at the age of four and from there moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. By his own account, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1952 and was asked not to return because his grades were so poor. Subsequently he drifted about the country, worked at odd jobs, enlisted in the US Air Force for four years, of which two were spent in Alaska; after his discharge, he returned to the University of Tennessee for four years but left without receiving a degree. McCarthy’s first four novels, which won for him a small, admiring audience of literary-minded readers, are distinctly Southern Gothic in tone, setting, characters, language; his fifth, the mock-epic Blood Meridian (1985), set mostly in Mexico and California in the years 1849–1878, marks the author’s dramatic reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances for whom the intensely personal psychology of the traditional realistic novel holds little interest. 1933年出生于罗得岛的普罗维登斯，科马克·麦卡锡在四岁时搬到了田纳西州东部，然后在1974年搬到了得克萨斯州的埃尔帕索。根据他自己的说法，他于1952年进入田纳西大学，但由于成绩太差而被要求不要再回去。随后，他在全国各地漂泊，做过各种零工，入伍美国空军四年，其中两年在阿拉斯加度过；退伍后，他返回田纳西大学四年，但没有获得学位就离开了。麦卡锡的前四部小说赢得了一小部分文学爱好读者的赞赏，它们在语调、背景、人物和语言上都明显具有南方哥特式的特点；他的第五部小说《血色子午线》（1985年）主要设定在墨西哥和加利福尼亚，时间跨度为1849年至1878年，标志着作者将自己戏剧性地重塑为西部作家：一个对广阔而非人类的距离有着远见的人，对传统现实主义小说中的强烈个人心理几乎没有兴趣。
Rare among writers, especially contemporary American writers, Cormac McCarthy seems to have written no autobiographical or memoirist fiction or essays. Suttree (1979), set along the banks of the Tennessee River at Knoxville, has the sprawl, heft, and gritty intimacy of autobiographical fiction in the mode of Jack Kerouac, but it is not. McCarthy’s most intelligent and sensitive protagonist so far has been John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses (1992) and Cities of the Plain (1998), a stoic loner at the age of sixteen who plays chess with surprising skill, is an instinctive horseman, and, in other circumstances, would have studied to be a veterinarian, but John Grady is not representative of McCarthy’s characters and shares no biographical background with the author. More generally, McCarthy’s subjects are likely to be men driven by raw impulse and need, fanaticism rather than idealism, for whom formal education would have ended in grade school and who, if they carry a Bible with them like the nameless kid of Blood Meridian, “no word of [it] could he read.” 在作家中，尤其是当代美国作家中，科马克·麦卡锡似乎没有写过任何自传或回忆录小说或散文。《萨特里》（1979年）以田纳西河畔的诺克斯维尔为背景，具有自传小说的广阔、沉重和质朴亲密的特点，类似于杰克·凯鲁亚克的风格，但实际上并非如此。麦卡锡迄今为止最聪明、最敏感的主人公是《漂亮的马》（1992年）和《平原之城》（1998年）中的约翰·格雷迪·科尔，他是一个年仅十六岁的坚忍孤独者，下棋技艺出人意料地高超，是一个本能的骑手，在其他情况下，他本来会学兽医，但约翰·格雷迪并不代表麦卡锡的角色，也没有与作者共同的生平背景。更一般地说，麦卡锡的主题往往是被原始冲动和需求驱使的男人，他们狂热而非理想主义，正规教育在小学就结束了，如果他们像《血色子午线》中的无名孩子一样随身携带一本圣经，他们“却不识字”。
The dreamlike opacity of Faulkner’s prose pervades The Orchard Keeper (1965) and Outer Dark (1968). These are slow-moving novels in which back-country natives drift like somnambulists in tragic/farcical dramas beyond their comprehension, let alone control. The setting is the East Tennessee hill country in the vicinity of Maryville, near the author’s childhood home. Very like their predecessors in Faulkner’s fiction set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, McCarthy’s uneducated, inarticulate, and impoverished characters struggle for survival with a modicum of dignity; though they may endure tragic fates, they lack the capacity for insight. 福克纳（Faulkner）小说中的梦幻般的朦胧感贯穿《果园看守人》（1965）和《外域》（1968）。这些小说节奏缓慢，背乡土人民像梦游者一样在超出他们理解和控制的悲剧/滑稽戏剧中漂流。故事背景设定在东田纳西山区，靠近作者的童年家园玛丽维尔。与福克纳小说中设定在密西西比州约克纳帕塔法县的前辈们非常相似，麦卡锡（McCarthy）笔下的无知、不善言辞和贫困的角色们以一丝尊严为生存而奋斗；尽管他们可能遭受悲剧的命运，但他们缺乏洞察力。
In The Orchard Keeper, the elderly Ather Ownby, “keeper” of a long-decayed peach orchard, is an independent and sympathetic man who winds up confined to a mental hospital after firing his shotgun at county police officers. His rebellious spirit has been quelled, he has little but banalities to offer to a neighbor who has come to visit him: “Most ever man loves peace,…and none better than an old man.” In Outer Dark, the hapless young mother Rinthy searches the Appalachian countryside for her lost baby, taken from her by her brother, the baby’s father, and given to an itinerant tinker: a mix of Faulkner’s Dewey Dell, of As I Lay Dying, who vainly seeks an abortion, and Lena Grove of Light in August, who vainly seeks the man who has impregnated her, Rinthy makes her way on foot through an increasingly spooky landscape, but never finds her baby. 在《果园看守人》中，年迈的阿瑟·欧恩比是一个独立而富有同情心的人，他是一个长期荒废的桃园的“看守人”。在向县警察开枪后，他最终被限制在一家精神病院里。他的反叛精神已经被压制，他对来访的邻居只能提供一些平凡的话语：“几乎每个人都喜欢和平，...没有人比一个老人更喜欢。”在《黑暗之外》，倒霉的年轻母亲林西在阿巴拉契亚乡村寻找她被她的兄弟夺走并交给一个流浪修补匠的失散婴儿。她是福克纳《我弥留之际》中德维·戴尔和徒劳地寻求堕胎的莉娜·格罗夫的混合体，也是《八月之光》中徒劳地寻找让她怀孕的男人的莉娜·格罗夫。林西步行穿越一个越来越阴森的景观，但从未找到她的孩子。
Beyond even Faulknerian obliqueness, McCarthy has eliminated all quotation marks from his prose so that his characters’ speech isn’t distinct from the narrative voice, in this way suggesting the curious texture of our dreams, in which spoken language isn’t heard so much as felt and dialogue is swallowed up in its surroundings. This manner of narration will persist through his career: 超越了甚至是福克纳式的曲折，麦卡锡在他的散文中省去了所有的引号，使得他的人物的言语与叙述的声音没有区别，以此方式暗示了我们梦境中奇特的质感，其中口语并不是被听到，而是被感受到，对话则被周围环境所吞噬。这种叙述方式将贯穿他的整个职业生涯。
The man had stretched out before the fire and was propped up on one elbow. He said: I wonder where a feller might find him a pair of bullhide boots like them you got. 那个男人伸直了身子躺在火前，用一只手肘撑着身体。他说：“我想知道哪里能找到一双像你那样的牛皮靴子。”
Holme’s mouth was dust dry and the piece of meat [he was eating] seemed to have grown bigger in it. I don’t know, he said. Holme的嘴巴干得像灰尘一样，他嘴里的肉块似乎变得更大了。我不知道，他说道。
Of McCarthy’s four Tennessee-set novels, Child of God (1973) is the most memorable, a tour de force of masterfully sustained prose set pieces chronicling the life and abrupt death of a mountain man named Lester Ballard with a proclivity for collecting and enshrining dead bodies, predominantly those of attractive young females, in a cave to be discovered by Sevier County, Tennessee, officials only after his death. 在麦卡锡的四本设定在田纳西州的小说中，《上帝之子》（1973）是最令人难忘的，它是一部精彩的作品，通过巧妙地构思的散文片段，记录了一个名叫莱斯特·巴拉德的山人的生活和突然死亡。莱斯特有一种收集和供奉尸体的倾向，尤其是那些年轻漂亮的女性，他将这些尸体放在一个洞穴中，直到他死后，田纳西州塞维尔县的官员才会发现。
The legend of Lester Ballard is presented with dramatic brevity and an oblique sort of sympathy in a chorus of local voices: 莱斯特·巴拉德的传奇以戏剧性的简洁和一种间接的同情，在当地人的合唱中呈现出来
I don’t know. They say he never was right after his daddy killed hisself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run off…. Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him down. He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hangin. We just cut him down, let him fall in the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time. 我不知道。他们说他爸爸自杀后就再也没好过。他们只有一个儿子。妈妈跑掉了……我和塞西尔·爱德华兹是把他解脱的人。他走进店里，像下雨一样把事情说了出来。我们上去，走进谷仓，我看见他的脚悬在那里。我们只是把他解脱下来，让他倒在地板上。就像割下一块肉一样。他站在那里看着，一言不发。那时他大约九或十岁。
Tragic farce, or farcical tragedy, Child of God is very likely McCarthy’s most perfectly realized work for its dramatic compression and sustained stylistic bravura, without the excesses of his later, more ambitious novels. 悲剧闹剧，或者说荒诞悲剧，《上帝之子》很可能是麦卡锡最完美的作品，因为它在戏剧性压缩和持续的文体壮丽方面表现出色，而没有他后来更雄心勃勃的小说中的过度。
2.
Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West, McCarthy’s fifth novel and the first set in the southwest borderlands to which he would lay a passionate literary claim, is the author’s most challenging work of fiction. A nightmare chronicle of American marauders in Mexico in the 1850s, it is rendered in voices grandiloquent and colloquial, ecstatic and debased, biblical and bombastic. Like William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Blood Meridian is a highly idiosyncratic novel much admired by other writers, predominantly male writers, but difficult of access to many other readers, if not repellent. Admirers of Blood Meridian invariably dislike and disparage McCarthy’s “accessible” best-selling Border Trilogy as if these novels were a betrayal of the solemn rites of macho sadism and impacted fury of Blood Meridian,1 for which the ideal cover art would be a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of some scenes of Zane Grey. 《血色子午线》是麦卡锡的第五部小说，也是他首次将故事背景设定在西南边境地区，对此他表现出了极大的文学热情。这部小说是美国掠夺者在19世纪50年代墨西哥的噩梦记录，以夸张和口语化的语调呈现，既狂喜又堕落，既有圣经般的庄严又有夸大的狂热。《血色子午线》像威廉·加迪斯的《承认》和托马斯·品钦的《重力彩虹》一样，是一部非常个性化的小说，深受其他作家，尤其是男性作家的喜爱，但对许多其他读者来说却难以理解，甚至令人厌恶。《血色子午线》的拥趸们通常不喜欢和贬低麦卡锡畅销的“边境三部曲”，仿佛这些小说背离了男性沙文主义和愤怒的庄严仪式，而《血色子午线》则是其理想封面艺术，可以是扎恩·格雷的一些场景的耶罗尼莫斯·博斯创作。
Yet Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Whereas Blood Meridian scorns any idealism except the jeremiad—“War is god”—the interlinked novels of the Border Trilogy testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh and dangerous environment. 然而，《血色子午线》和《边境三部曲》是相互对立的：前者是对传奇西部的愤怒揭示，后者则是对这些西部传奇在人类心灵中根深蒂固的探索，以一种温和、人道和微妙的方式展现。《血色子午线》嘲笑除了“战争即上帝”这样的哀诉之外的任何理想主义，而《边境三部曲》中相互关联的小说则见证了痴心妄想的理想主义，赞美兄弟情谊、忠诚以及牛仔工人的正直，他们的生活与严酷危险的环境中的动物紧密相连。
McCarthy’s western novels memorialize the southwestern landscape and its skies and weather, obsessively. Often, whether in nineteenth-century Mexico or twentieth-century Texas, men may camp “in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains,” as oblivious of their history as they are of what such ruins might suggest of their own mortality. In the most romantic of the novels, All the Pretty Horses, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole rides on his grandfather’s ranch beneath a sun “blood red and elliptic,” along an old Comanche trail: 麦卡锡的西部小说执着地纪念了西南地区的风景、天空和天气。无论是在19世纪的墨西哥还是20世纪的德克萨斯州，男人们常常会在“石山深处的旧文化废墟中露营”，对自己的历史一无所知，也对这些废墟所暗示的自己的死亡毫不在意。在最浪漫的小说《漂亮的马》中，16岁的约翰·格雷迪·科尔骑在祖父的牧场上，太阳“血红而椭圆”，沿着一条古老的科曼奇人小径。
At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life…all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. 在他总是选择的那个时刻，当阴影变得很长，古老的道路在他面前呈现出玫瑰色和倾斜的光线，就像过去的梦境一样，那里有彩绘的小马和那个失落的民族的骑士们从北方下来，他们的脸上涂着白粉，长发编成辫子，每个人都准备好了战斗，因为这是他们的生活...他们所有人都以血誓，并且只能用血来赎回。
Where Child of God is a horror story writ small, depicted with masterly restraint, Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence. The “degeneracy of mankind” is McCarthy’s great subject, timely in our era as it would have been in the decade following the end of the Vietnam War, when Blood Meridian was published. Early on in the novel, a US Army captain broods over the “loss” of Mexican territory in the recent (1846– 1848) war: 《上帝之子》是一个以恐怖故事为基础的小说，以精湛的克制手法描绘出来。而《血色子午线》则是一部恐怖元素的史诗作品，堆积了大量令人恐惧的场景，宛如荷马的《伊利亚特》一般强大。它的策略并非迂回曲折，而是通过数百页充满蛮横暴力的炮火轰击。”人类的堕落”是麦卡锡的重要主题，无论是在越战结束后的十年还是在我们这个时代，都具有时代的意义。小说早期，一位美国陆军上尉为最近（1846-1848）战争中”失去”的墨西哥领土而忧心忡忡：
What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico…. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them…. 他说，我们所面对的是一群退化的种族。一群杂种，几乎和黑鬼一样。也许并没有更好。墨西哥没有政府。见鬼，墨西哥没有上帝……我们正在处理一个明显无法自我管理的民族。你知道那些无法自我管理的人会发生什么吗？没错。其他人会来替他们管理……
We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land. 我们将成为黑暗和困扰之地解放的工具。
Soon, a nameless kid from Tennessee has signed up with a renegade band of Americans to embark upon, in a Mennonite prophet’s words, “war of a madman’s making into a for-eign land.” Though “the kid” is the closest to a sympathetic character in Blood Meridian, McCarthy makes no effort to characterize him in any but a rudimentary way. We are not meant to identify with him, only to perceive him, the youngest among a crew of psychopath-killers, as an unreflective participant in a series of violent, often demonic and deranged, episodes. Blood Meridian is coolly detached from any of its subjects, ironic in the way of a Brechtian play; terrible things occur but only as in fairy tales, bluntly summarized and soon forgotten: 不久之后，田纳西州的一个无名孩子加入了一支叛逆的美国人团队，根据一个门诺派先知的话来说，他们踏上了“一个疯子制造的战争之旅，进入一个外国土地”。尽管“这个孩子”在《血色子午线》中是最具同情心的角色，但麦卡锡并没有努力以任何方式来刻画他。我们并不是要与他产生共鸣，只是要感知他作为一名无思考的参与者，在一系列暴力、常常是恶魔和疯狂的事件中，作为一名年轻的杀人狂人团队中最年轻的成员。《血色子午线》对其任何主题都保持冷静的超然态度，以布莱希特式的戏剧讽刺方式呈现；可怕的事情发生了，但只是像童话故事一样，简单概括并很快被遗忘：
When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the [Gileno Indian] village people were running out under the horses’ hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy…. 当格兰顿和他的首领们穿过[吉莱诺印第安]村庄时，人们从马蹄下跑出来，马匹猛地踢蹬，一些人带着火把在小屋间徒步行走，将满身鲜血的受害者拖出来，残忍地砍杀垂死之人，斩首那些跪求怜悯的人...
Among the mercenaries is an unlikely seer/prophet known as the judge. Initially a figure of uncanny eloquence and utterly without conscience, the judge would seem to be McCarthy’s demented spokesman, interpreting what would otherwise be brute violence. The judge is a gigantic man nearly seven feet tall, bald, beardless, the “enormous dome of his head when he bared it was blinding white and perfectly circumscribed about so that it looked to have been painted.” He carries a rifle inscribed “Et In Arcadia Ego.” He rescues an Apache child from a slaughter only to wantonly scalp him on the trail as, later, he rescues two orphaned puppies only to toss them into a river. Even on the war trail he pauses like a gentleman naturalist to “botanize” and take notes for twisted sermons: 在雇佣兵中，有一位被称为“法官”的不太可能的先知。起初，法官是一个极富辩才却完全没有良心的人物，他似乎是麦卡锡疯狂的代言人，解释了本应是野蛮暴力的事情。法官是一个巨大的人，身高近七英尺，光头，没有胡须，当他露出他那“巨大的头顶时，那头顶是耀眼的白色，完美地圆形，看起来像是被涂上了颜料。”他携带一支刻有“Et In Arcadia Ego”的步枪。他救了一个阿帕奇族的孩子，但却在路上无端地剥下他的头皮，后来他又救了两只孤儿狗，却将它们扔进了河里。即使在战争的途中，他也像一个绅士博物学家一样停下来“研究植物”并做笔记，为扭曲的布道做准备。
The truth about the world…is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. 世界的真相是……一切皆有可能。如果你从出生开始就没有见过这一切，也没有因此使其变得平凡，那么它对你来说将会是一个医药秀中的戏法，一个发热的梦境，一个充满了既无类似物也无前例的幻象的恍惚状态，一个流动的嘉年华，一个迁徙的帐篷表演，经过多次在泥泞的田野中搭建，最终的目的地是无法言说且难以计量的灾难。
The judge’s constant theme is the “degeneracy of mankind,” of which he would seem to be a prime example, preaching an ethic out of Thomas Hobbes in which “war is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” Improbably, the obese, often naked judge survives while most of his comrades are killed; the last we see of him, through the kid’s eyes, is in 1878, in a tavern somewhere in Texas “among every kind of man” as their seeming exemplar. Where Conrad presented in Heart of Darkness the “impenetrable darkness” of the debased Kurtz sparingly, McCarthy so frequently invokes the judge that over the sprawl of hundreds of pages he becomes increasingly a caricature: 法官的不变主题是“人类的堕落”，他似乎是一个典型的例子，宣扬着托马斯·霍布斯的伦理观，即“战争是最终的游戏，因为战争最终是对存在的统一的强迫。战争就是上帝。”令人难以置信的是，这位肥胖的、常常赤裸的法官在大多数同伴丧生的情况下幸存下来；我们最后一次通过孩子的眼睛看到他是在1878年的德克萨斯州某个酒馆里，“与各种各样的人在一起”，仿佛他们的典范。康拉德在《黑暗的心灵》中只是有限地展示了堕落的库尔茨的“无法穿透的黑暗”，而麦卡锡则如此频繁地描绘这位法官，以至于在数百页的篇幅中，他逐渐成为一个漫画形象。
Towering over [the dancers] is the judge and he is naked dancing…huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. 站在舞者们上方的是裸体跳舞的裁判...巨大、苍白、无毛，就像一个巨大的婴儿。他说他从不睡觉。他说他永远不会死去。
Cormac McCarthy’s least-known and surely most undervalued work is his five-act play The Stonemason (1994), a remarkable feat of ventriloquism in its intimate depiction of four generations of a close-knit black family, descendants of slaves, in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. With its commercially impractical cast of thirteen named characters in addition to numerous others, and lengthy, eloquent but undramatic monologues, The Stonemason is more likely to be read than performed. 科马克·麦卡锡（Cormac McCarthy）最为人所知，却最被低估的作品是他的五幕剧《石匠》（1994年），这是一部令人惊叹的口技杰作，以亲密描绘了四代紧密结合的黑人家庭为特色，他们是奴隶的后裔，在1970年代的肯塔基州路易斯维尔生活。由于剧中有十三个有名字的角色以及众多其他角色，加上冗长而雄辩但缺乏戏剧性的独白，因此《石匠》更适合阅读而非演出。
Unlike Blood Meridian with its unflinching and numbing nihilism, The Stonemason celebrates bonds of family love and responsibility. Like the Border Trilogy, it celebrates the integrity of work and the sometimes mystical bond between people (exclusively men) linked by a common craft or trade. The play’s narrator is a thirty-two-year-old black man, Ben Telfair, who’d originally planned to be a teacher but turned stonemason in emulation of his revered 101-year-old grandfather Papaw; it’s a memory play, with elaborate stage directions intended to “give distance to the events and to place them in a completed past.” 与《血色子午线》的毫不留情和麻木的虚无主义不同，《石匠》庆祝家庭的爱与责任的纽带。就像边境三部曲一样，它赞美工作的正直和人们之间（主要是男性）因共同的手艺或行业而建立的有时神秘的纽带。剧中的叙述者是一个三十二岁的黑人男子本·特尔费尔，他原本计划成为一名教师，但为了效仿他崇敬的101岁的祖父帕帕而成为了石匠；这是一部回忆录剧，有着精心设计的舞台指示，旨在“使事件与过去完全分离开来，将它们放置在一个已经完成的过去中”。
Its central event is the death of the patriarch, the stonemason Papaw, which seems to precipitate the sudden disintegration of the Telfair family: the suicide of Ben’s father, a stonemason not content to live within his financial means, and the heroin-overdose death of Den’s nineteen-year-old nephew Soldier. Intelligently tenderhearted and realistic, its predominant theme a young man’s idealization of this stonemason grandfather and of the secret vocation of stonemasonry, The Stonemason more resembles an August Wilson play than anything by Cormac McCarthy. 它的核心事件是家族长者、石匠Papaw的去世，这似乎导致了特尔费尔家族的突然瓦解：本的父亲自杀，他是一名石匠，不满足于过着节俭的生活；而丹的十九岁侄子士兵则因海洛因过量而死亡。这部小说智慧而温情，现实主义，主题主要是一个年轻人对这位石匠祖父以及石匠这个秘密职业的理想化。《石匠》更像是奥古斯特·威尔逊（August Wilson）的剧作，而不是科马克·麦卡锡（Cormac McCarthy）的作品。
As The Stonemason is a rebuke of sorts to the “war god” of Blood Meridian, so the closely linked novels of the Border Trilogy are a warmly sympathetic depiction of the lives of young ranch hands in Texas and New Mexico in the 1950s, who exemplify such traditional values as friendship, loyalty, compassion, courage, physical endurance, and stoicism; though suffused with nostalgia for a way of life rapidly coming to an end in the Southwest in the decade following the end of World War II, for the most part the novels avoid sentimentality. The prevailing atmosphere of the Border Trilogy is something like the common sense of (male) adult maturity as it collides with (male) adolescent passion and idealism. What erupts as drama, often as tragic drama, in the ballad-like tales of John Grady Cole and his contemporary Billy Parham is adolescent yearning, beautifully rendered by McCarthy: 《石匠》对《血色子午线》中的“战神”形成了某种谴责，而与之紧密相关的边境三部曲则温情地描绘了1950年代德克萨斯州和新墨西哥州年轻牧场工人的生活，他们体现了友谊、忠诚、同情、勇气、体力和坚忍等传统价值观；尽管充满了对二战后西南地区生活方式迅速消逝的怀旧情感，但大部分小说避免了感伤。边境三部曲的主导氛围有点像（男性）成年人的常识与（男性）青少年的激情和理想主义的碰撞。约翰·格雷迪·科尔和他的同代人比利·帕罕的叙事中经常爆发出戏剧性，往往是悲剧性的，这是青少年的渴望，由麦卡锡精美地描绘出来：
There was an old horseskull in the brush and [John Grady Cole] squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands. Frail and brittle. Bleached paper white. He squatted in the long light holding it…. 在灌木丛中有一颗老马头骨，[约翰·格雷迪·科尔]蹲下来捡起它，轻轻地转动在手中。它脆弱而易碎，晒得纸一样白。他蹲在长长的光线中，握着它……
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent-hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. 他对马的喜爱就是他对人的喜爱，是那奔腾的血液和激情，流淌在它们身上的血液。他对热血的崇敬、深情和生活的倾向，都是为了那些热情洋溢的人，而且永远如此，不会有任何改变。
In Cities of the Plain, John Grady Cole on his way to town with “hair all slicked back like a muskrat” pauses for a conversation with an old ranch hand to whom he speaks with a touchingly filial courtesy. The old man tells John Grady a tale of barroom violence in Juárez, Mexico, in 1929: 在《平原之城》中，约翰·格雷迪·科尔（John Grady Cole）在去城里的路上，头发“像水獭一样梳得整整齐齐”，停下来与一位老牧场工人交谈，他对老人表现出一种感人的孝顺礼貌。老人告诉约翰·格雷迪一个关于1929年墨西哥华雷斯酒吧暴力事件的故事：
…Tales of the old west, he said. “西部的故事，他说。”
Yessir.
Lot of people shot and killed. 很多人被枪击并丧生。
Why were they? 为什么他们在那里？
Mr Johnson passed the tips of his fingers across his jaw. Well, he said. I think these people mostly come from Tennessee and Kentucky. Edgefield district in South Carolina. Southern Missouri. They were mountain people. They come from mountain people in the old country. They always would shoot you. It wasnt just here. They kept comin west and about the time they got here was about the time Sam Colt invented the sixshooter and it was the first time these people could afford a gun you could carry around in your belt. That’s all there ever was to it. It had nothin to do with the country at all. The west. 约翰逊先生用手指轻轻抚摸着下巴。嗯，他说道。我觉得这些人大多来自田纳西州和肯塔基州。南卡罗来纳州的埃奇菲尔德区。南密苏里州。他们是山区人。他们来自旧国家的山区人。他们总是会开枪。这不仅仅发生在这里。他们一直向西迁移，大约在他们到达这里的时候，山姆·科尔特发明了六发手枪，这是这些人第一次能够负担得起一把可以挂在腰带上的枪。这就是全部。这与国家无关。西部。
Nothing to do, in other words, with the “degeneracy of mankind” but only with the predilection for violence in a specific historic and sociological context. 换句话说，并不是与“人类的堕落”有关，而只是与特定历史和社会背景下对暴力的偏好有关。
3.
Through the more than one thousand pages of the Border Trilogy the essential conflict is between two distinct ways of life: the way of the wanderer-on-horseback and the way of settled, circumscribed life. The yearning to leave home and “light out for the Territory” is perhaps the most powerful of yearnings in McCarthy’s novels, far more convincing, for instance, than John Grady Cole’s romantic infatuations with Mexican girls. Though for most Americans vast, empty spaces of rural Texas and New Mexico would seem roomy enough, for McCarthy’s boy-heroes Mexico is the region of exotic adventure and mystery: “where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of men.” Even as John Grady becomes a lover he remains as chastely stoic as the hero of a traditional boy’s adventure story. 在《边境三部曲》的一千多页中，核心冲突是两种不同生活方式之间的对立：徒步漫游者的方式和安定、受限生活的方式。渴望离开家园，”为了领土而出发”可能是麦卡锡小说中最强烈的渴望，比如约翰·格雷迪·科尔对墨西哥女孩的浪漫迷恋要更有说服力。虽然对于大多数美国人来说，德克萨斯州和新墨西哥州的广阔空旷地带似乎足够宽敞，但对于麦卡锡的少年英雄们来说，墨西哥是异国情调的冒险和神秘之地：”古老的世界依附于石头和生物的孢子上，并寄居在人们的血液中。”即使约翰·格雷迪成为一个恋人，他仍然像传统男孩冒险故事中的英雄一样纯洁坚忍。
Initially, both John Grady and Billy are drawn to crossing the Mexican border on horseback as a means of escaping the increasingly somber facts of their lives (with the death of John Grady’s grandfather, the family ranch will be sold and he must leave; both Billy Parham’s parents are murdered) and of proving themselves as men. Though minutely grounded in the verisimilitude of ranch life and the gravitas of the physical world, each novel attempts to link its boy-heroes with ballad or fairy-tale elements that some readers may find implausible. 起初，约翰·格雷迪和比利都被吸引着骑马越过墨西哥边境，以逃避他们生活中越来越沉重的事实（约翰·格雷迪的祖父去世后，家族牧场将被出售，他必须离开；比利·帕罕的父母被谋杀）。尽管这两部小说都以牧场生活的真实性和物质世界的庄严为基础，但它们都试图将男孩英雄与民谣或童话元素联系起来，这可能让一些读者觉得不太可信。
The best way of appreciating McCarthy’s achievement in the Border Trilogy is simply to suspend disbelief when the novels swerve into their mythic mode. The first part of The Crossing is a tenderly observed love story of a kind between the teenaged Billy Parham and a pregnant female wolf he has trapped, and leads across the Mexican border with the intention of releasing her in the mountains. He has to kill the mysterious and beautiful predator to end her suffering: 在《边境三部曲》中，欣赏麦卡锡的成就最好的方式就是在小说转入神话模式时暂时放下怀疑。《穿越》的第一部分是一个细腻观察的爱情故事，讲述了少年比利·帕姆和他陷阱中的一只怀孕的母狼之间的一种特殊关系，并带领她穿越墨西哥边境，意图将她释放到山区。他不得不杀死这只神秘而美丽的捕食者，以结束她的痛苦。
He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight…. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from…. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. 他蹲在狼身上，触摸着她的毛发。他触摸着冰冷而完美的牙齿。那只眼睛转向火焰，没有反射出任何光亮，他用拇指合上它，坐在她旁边，将手放在她血迹斑斑的额头上，闭上自己的眼睛，以便能看到她在山间奔跑，在星光下奔跑……鹿、野兔、鸽子和地鼠，所有这些丰富多彩的生物都在空气中为她的欢乐而存在，所有这些由上帝创造的可能世界中的种族，她是其中之一，与其他生物并不分离……他从树叶中抬起她僵硬的头颅，握住它，或者说他试图握住那些无法握住的东西，那些已经在山间奔跑的东西，既可怕又美丽，就像以肉为食的花朵。
John Grady’s “ardent heart” for horses is equally convincing, but far less convincing is the boy’s predilection for falling disastrously in love with Mexican girls. A doomed boy–girl romance of All the Pretty Horses helped to make the novel McCarthy’s breakthrough best seller, but in the more skillfully composed and darker Cities of the Plain, John Grady’s second love affair, with a teenaged prostitute both abused and saintly in the way of a Dostoevskian girl of the streets, leads to his death in a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence with a pimp. Before he is killed by the American boy he hasn’t taken altogether seriously, Eduardo pronounces this cultural judgment: 约翰·格雷迪对马的“热忱之心”同样令人信服，但这个男孩对墨西哥女孩的倾向却不那么令人信服，他总是不幸地陷入痛苦的爱情中。《美丽的马》中注定要失败的男孩-女孩之间的浪漫爱情帮助这本小说成为麦卡锡的突破性畅销书，但在更加巧妙构思和更加黑暗的《平原之城》中，约翰·格雷迪的第二段恋情是与一个被虐待却又像陀思妥耶夫斯基式的街头女孩一样圣洁的十几岁的妓女，最终导致他在与一个皮条客进行精心编排的刀斗中丧生。在被这个美国男孩杀死之前，埃德华多发表了这样的文化评判：
Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one. But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world—he passed the blade back and forth like a shuttle through a loom—your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. 你们这些善良的人无法忍受世界的平凡。无法接受世界上只有眼前所见的一切。但是墨西哥的世界只是一个充满装饰的世界，而在它的下面却非常朴素。而你们的世界——他像穿梭机一样来回移动刀片——你们的世界在一个无言的迷宫问题上摇摇欲坠。
In McCarthy’s later fiction such seemingly allegorical figures begin to intrude. Dialogue gives way to ambling monologues and homilies in the second half of The Crossing, as Billy Parham encounters strangers on his pilgrimage to Mexico, each with a story to tell him. In an anticlimactic epilogue to Cities of the Plain, a garrulous stranger appears to tell the now seventy-eight-year-old Billy Parham what life is all about: 在麦卡锡的后期小说中，这些看似寓言的人物开始闯入。在《穿越》的下半部分，对话被漫步的独白和寓言所取代，比利·帕拉姆在他去墨西哥的朝圣途中遇到了陌生人，每个人都有一个故事要告诉他。在《平原之城》的反高潮结尾中，一个健谈的陌生人出现，告诉现年七十八岁的比利·帕拉姆生活的真谛是什么。
This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente. 这个故事，像所有的故事一样，始于一个问题。而那些以最深刻共鸣与我们对话的故事，总有一种方式能够将讲述者抹去，将他的动机从所有记忆中抹去。所以，谁在讲述这个故事的问题非常重要。
So long as McCarthy trusts to John Grady Cole and Billy Parham to embody truths they cannot perhaps articulate, the Border novels are works of surpassing emotional power and beauty; elegies to a vanishing, or vanished, frontier world, in the decades following World War II. By the end of the trilogy Billy has become an elderly homeless man, long since horseless and friendless, taken in by a family out of pity and given “a shed room off the kitchen that was much like the room he’d slept in as a boy.” A sobering vision as of an aged Huckleberry Finn in his later years, now a homeless drifter broken in body and spirit, for whom the romantic adventure of “setting off for the Territory” is long past. 只要麦卡锡相信约翰·格雷迪·科尔和比利·帕拉姆能够体现出他们或许无法言说的真理，那么这些边境小说就是情感力量和美感超群的作品；它们是对二战后几十年里一个即将消失或已经消失的边境世界的挽歌。三部曲结束时，比利已经成为一个年迈的无家可归的人，早已失去了马匹和朋友，因为同情而被一个家庭收留，并给予了“一个像他小时候睡觉的房间一样的厨房旁边的小屋”。这是一个令人警醒的景象，就像是年老的哈克贝利·费恩在晚年时成为一个无家可归的流浪者，身心破碎，对于“前往领地”的浪漫冒险早已过去。
4.
A partial inventory of the macho artillery employed in Cormac McCarthy’s new, ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, includes: a short-barreled Uzi with a twenty-five-round clip; an AK-47 automatic; a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol stock and a twenty-round drum magazine; a Tec-9 with two extra magazines; a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut and a Unertl telescop-ic sight; a stainless steel .357 revolver; a nine-millimeter Glock; a twelve-gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish fitted with a shop-made silencer “fully a foot long and big around as a beercan.” 《无老之国》是科马克·麦卡锡的第九部小说，其中使用的男子气概武器清单包括：一把短管乌兹冲锋枪，装有25发弹夹；一把AK-47自动步枪；一把带手枪枪托和20发弹鼓的短管霰弹枪；一把Tec-9冲锋枪，附带两个额外弹夹；一把重型.270口径步枪，采用'98毛瑟式枪机，采用枫木和胡桃木复合材质的层压枪托，配备Unertl望远镜瞄准镜；一把不锈钢.357左轮手枪；一把9毫米格洛克手枪；一把12号口径雷明顿自动霰弹枪，配备塑料军用枪托和带有镀黑表面的帕克化处理，安装了一个“足足一英尺长，像啤酒罐一样大”的店制消音器。
Llewelyn Moss, a former Vietnam War sniper, a Texan on the run from a psychopath, employs some of the weaponry in this arsenal but is “a strong believer in the shotgun.” Men are judged by their prowess with firearms but also by the boots they choose to wear: “Nocona” for Moss; “expensive Lucchese crocodile” for a self-described hit man named Wells in the hire of a wealthy Houston businessman/ drug smuggler; ostrich-skin boots for the psychopath Anton Chigurh. 莱维林·莫斯，一位越战老兵，一个逃离疯子追杀的德克萨斯人，使用了他的武器库中的一些武器，但他是“猎枪的坚定信仰者”。男人们以他们使用火器的能力来评判，也以他们选择穿的靴子来评判：“Nocona”是莫斯的选择；“昂贵的Lucchese鳄鱼皮”是一个自称雇佣于休斯顿富商/毒品走私者的职业杀手威尔斯的选择；而对于疯子安东·奇格尔来说，他选择了鸵鸟皮靴。
Not the Texas frontier of legend but contemporary rural Texas in the vicinity of Sanderson, near the Mexican border, is the setting for this fast-plotted novel about heroin smugglers and the considerable collateral damage among the innocent and not-so-innocent in their wake. The novel takes its title from William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “That is no country for old men. The young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the trees” evokes Yeats’s Ireland, seemingly suffused with erotic energy; McCarthy’s country is suffused with the malevolent Eros of male violence. Not horses or wolves but firearms and their effect upon human flesh is the object of desire in the novel No Country for Old Men, which reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino. With the exception of the sheriff of Comanche County, an older man named Bell, the moral conscience of the novel, characters are sketchily drawn as if on the run. At the center of the action is a psychopath who shoots his way through scenes as an invincible instrument of destruction, and is given to vatic utterances: “When I came into your life your life was over.” 这部快节奏的小说的背景并非传说中的德克萨斯边境，而是靠近墨西哥边境的桑德森附近的当代德克萨斯农村。小说讲述了海洛因走私者及其在无辜者和不那么无辜者身上造成的巨大附带伤害。小说的标题取自威廉·巴特勒·叶芝的《航向拜占庭》：“那不是老人的国度。年轻人/ 在彼此的怀抱中，树上的鸟儿”唤起了叶芝笔下似乎充满情欲能量的爱尔兰；麦卡锡的国度则充满了邪恶的男性暴力的爱神。小说《无老之国》中，人们对枪支及其对人类肉体的影响产生了渴望，而不是对马匹或狼群的渴望，这使得小说读起来像是昆汀·塔伦蒂诺的散文电影。除了康曼奇县的警长贝尔这个道德良心，一个名叫贝尔的老人，其他角色都像是匆匆画出来的。这个故事的核心是一个精神病患者，他以一种无敌的毁灭性手段在场景中射击，同时他还会发表预言般的言辞：“当我进入你的生活时，你的生活已经结束了。”
Shorn of the brooding lyricism and poetic descriptive passages that have become McCarthy’s signature style, No Country for Old Men is a variant of one of the oldest of formula suspense tales: a man discovers a treasure and unwisely decides to take it and run, bringing upon himself and others a string of calamities ending with his death. In No Country for Old Men the treasure is drug money—“Two point four million. All used bills”—discovered by Moss in the aftermath of an apparent shoot-out by rival drug smugglers in the wilds north of the Mexican border, where Moss is hunting antelope. In addition to the money, Moss takes some Mexican brown heroin and several firearms which in the course of his doomed adventure will be put to frequent use. 《无国之人》是麦卡锡的一部作品，与他标志性的沉思抒情和诗意描写不同，这部小说是一种古老的悬疑故事变体：一个人发现了一笔财富，不明智地决定拿走并逃跑，结果给自己和其他人带来了一连串的灾难，最终以他的死亡告终。在《无国之人》中，这笔财富是毒品钱——“240万美元，全是用过的钞票”，是莫斯在墨西哥边境以北的荒野中，发现了一场明显是毒贩之间的枪战后所得。除了钱，莫斯还拿走了一些墨西哥棕色海洛因和几支枪支，在他注定要失败的冒险中，这些东西将频繁被使用。
Thirty-six, married to a much younger woman, a naive risk-taker who puts both himself and his wife in jeopardy, Moss doesn’t exist as much more than a function of the plot, a kind of puppet jerked about by the author. Since the predominant mode of narration in No Country for Old Men is detached, a documentation of physical actions as in a screenplay, we follow Moss and his nemesis Chigurh, cutting from one to the other as in an action film, without being privy to their motives. (After several readings, I still can’t understand why, having stolen the drug money and escaped safely, Moss decides to revisit the scene of the carnage to help the only surviving, badly wounded Mexican, rather than summon professional help for the man. Except to get himself sighted and pursued by drug dealers, and precipitate the plot, this isn’t a very sensible decision.) 三十六岁，娶了一个年轻得多的女人，一个天真的冒险家，他把自己和妻子都置于危险之中，莫斯不过是情节的一个功能，一种被作者操纵的木偶。由于《无国度之地》中主要的叙述方式是冷漠的，像剧本一样记录身体动作，我们跟随着莫斯和他的宿敌奇古尔，像在动作片中一样切换视角，却不了解他们的动机。（经过多次阅读，我仍然无法理解为什么莫斯在偷走毒品钱财并安全逃脱后，决定回到屠杀现场帮助唯一幸存的重伤墨西哥人，而不是为他召唤专业帮助。除了让自己被毒贩发现和追捕，以及推动情节的发展，这个决定并不明智。）
In essence, No Country for Old Men is a showcase for the psychopath killer Anton Chigurh. As his almost exact contemporary John Updike has written with ecstatic tenderness of physical heterosexual love, so McCarthy writes of physical violence with an attentiveness found in no other serious writer I know of except Sade: 本质上，《无老之国》是对心理变态杀手安东·奇格尔的展示。正如他的几乎同龄人约翰·厄普代克以狂喜的温柔描写异性之间的肉体爱情一样，麦卡锡以一种无与伦比的专注度写下了肉体暴力，除了萨德之外，我所知道的其他严肃作家都无法比拟。
Chigurh shot [Wells] in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. 奇古尔朝韦尔斯的脸上开了一枪。韦尔斯曾经知道、思考和热爱的一切都慢慢地从他身后的墙上消失了。他母亲的脸，他的第一次圣餐，他曾经认识的女人们。那些在他面前跪下时死去的男人们的脸。另一个国家路边沟壑中死去的一个孩子的尸体。他躺在床上，半个头已经被打掉，双臂伸开，右手大部分已经失去了。
Chigurh is flatly portrayed and not very convincing: “I have no enemies. I don’t permit such a thing.” When he delivers most of the drug money to the unnamed Houston businessman/drug smuggler, instead of keeping it for himself, he explains that his rampage has been “simply to establish my bonafides.” Chigurh的形象描绘得相当平淡，不太令人信服：“我没有敌人。我不允许这种事情存在。”当他把大部分毒品钱交给那位未具名的休斯顿商人/毒品走私者时，而不是自己留下，他解释说他的暴行只是为了“证明自己的真实身份”。
All that keeps No Country for Old Men from being a deftly executed but meretricious thriller is the presence, increasingly confused and ineffectual as the novel proceeds, of the sheriff of Comanche County, one of the “old men” alluded to in the title. Dismissed as a “redneck sheriff in a hick town. In a hick state,” Bell is courageous and well intentioned but ineffectual as a lawman, unable to stop Chigurh’s rampage and hardly capable of identifying him. Where he hadn’t had a single unsolved homicide in his jurisdiction in forty-one years, now he has nine unsolved homicides in a single week. 《无国之地》之所以不是一部巧妙执行但俗气的惊悚小说，是因为小说中的县警长在故事的发展中变得越来越困惑和无能，他是标题中所提到的“老人”之一。他被视为“一个乡下镇上的乡巴佬警长，在一个乡巴佬州”，贝尔勇敢而有善意，但作为执法者却无能为力，无法阻止奇古尔的疯狂行径，几乎无法辨认他。在他的管辖范围内，四十一年来从未有一起未解决的凶杀案，而现在他在短短一周内却有九起未解决的凶杀案。
The new breed of drug dealer/assassin is beyond Bell’s power to control as the new Uzis and machine guns are beyond the old-style Colts and Winchesters. It’s possible that Cormac McCarthy, described in a recent interview as a “southern conservative,”2 intends Bell’s social-conservative predilections to speak for his own, explaining the high crime rate in Comanche County in this way: “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…. It reaches into ever strata.” 新一代的毒品贩子/刺客已经超出了贝尔的控制范围，因为新的乌兹冲锋枪和机关枪已经超越了旧式的柯尔特手枪和温彻斯特步枪。可能是因为科马克·麦卡锡在最近的一次采访中被描述为“南方保守派”，所以他希望贝尔的社会保守倾向能够代表他自己，以此解释科曼奇县的高犯罪率：“当你开始忽视不良行为时，问题就开始了。一旦你不再听到先生和夫人，问题基本上已经到了尽头……它渗透到各个阶层。”
Bell is evidently unfamiliar with the blood-drenched history of his state and its protracted border wars, so vigorously documented elsewhere in Cormac McCarthy. He’s a man left behind by his era confronted with a moral void beyond even Satan: “What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?” It’s a question that McCarthy has yet to answer with conviction. 贝尔显然对他所在州的血腥历史和长期的边境战争并不熟悉，这些历史在科马克·麦卡锡的其他作品中都有详细记载。他是一个被时代抛在后面的人，面对着一个甚至连撒旦都无法填补的道德真空：“你对一个自己承认没有灵魂的人说什么？你为什么要说什么？”这是一个麦卡锡至今尚未坚定回答的问题。
Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers–New Brunswick. She is the author, most recently, of the novel Babysitter and the story collection Extenuating Circumstances. (September 2022) 乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨是罗格斯大学新布朗维克校区艺术与科学学院的访问杰出教授。她最近的作品包括小说《保姆》和故事集《特殊情况》。（2022年9月）
Typical of the sharply divided opinion on McCarthy’s work is A.O. Scott’s entry on McCarthy in The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, edited by Laura Miller with Adam Begley (Penguin, 2000), in which Scott says of Blood Meridian that it is “by any criterion a masterpiece and one of the great American novels of the last quarter century” while the Border Trilogy is “sentimental, crowd-pleasing cowboy fiction” in which “some parts read like bad Hemingway, others like bad Hemingway retranslated from the Spanish.” ↩ 对于麦卡锡的作品，人们的意见分歧很大，这在《沙龙网》读者指南中的A.O.斯科特对麦卡锡的评价中体现得很典型。该指南由劳拉·米勒和亚当·贝格利编辑（企鹅出版社，2000年）。斯科特在书中称《血色子午线》是“无论从任何标准来看都是一部杰作，也是过去25年来伟大的美国小说之一”，而《边境三部曲》则是“感伤、取悦大众的牛仔小说”，其中“有些部分读起来像是糟糕的海明威，另一些则像是从西班牙重新翻译过来的糟糕的海明威。”
See Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac Country,”Vanity Fair, August 2005. ↩