By the shadowy and inconclusive light of contingency

I don't know nearly as much as I would like about American history, and I'm no expert on Abraham Lincoln.

However, there are a couple of excellent passages in Wilfred W. McClay's essay at Humanities on the sixteenth president:

Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency of the history that he lived through, and helped to shape. To see a statesman in full, and thereby learn something about the nature of statesmanship, one needs to see him not only in the overly clear light of retrospection, but in the shadowy and inconclusive light of the conditions he faced as they were unfolding. “I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln mused during the course of his presidency, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

[...]

We need to remember that this is often how history happens. Background music does not swell at the crucial moment, and trumpets do not sound, when the events of history are actually taking place. The orator or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact warranted, whether time will judge him harshly. Few great men have felt this burden more completely than Lincoln.

We also need to remember how likely it seemed to Lincoln and others that he would lose the 1864 election, and thereby experience ignominious defeat and see the disintegration of the Union cause as he had fought for it. Had it not been for the miracle of Sherman’s and Grant’s decisive victories in the field, such a defeat at the polls would have been likely, as the American people had grown weary of this frustrating struggle. Add to this bleak outlook the weight of Lincoln’s relentlessly self-examining and depressive temperament and his constant, lonely struggles with a crippling sense of failure, and the sheer resiliency of the man becomes awe-inspiring, in ways a marble temple could never convey.

Having been no stranger (in my own humble way) either to relentless self-examination or an occasionally debilitating sense of failure, there is much to agree with there.

Radical indeterminacy, lots of bullets and several gallons of blood

I read No Country for Old Men late last year, as part of a spurt of fairly frantic Cormac McCarthy reading that began earlier in the year, with reading The Road. Shortly after, I re-read it, as I was both captivated and mystified by it.

At Faith in Honest Doubt, Dale makes a series of extremely perceptive comments about the book. (I haven't yet seen the film: I'm waiting for the DVD to come out in Germany to watch it in English -- dialogue being important in both Coen films and McCarthy books.) Dale's observations are in response to complaints by publius at Obsidian Wings that the book is 'logically incoherent':

So that's my complaint -- is No Country a story about choice and consequences, or is it a reflection upon how Nietzschean amoral Nature collides with Man. It seems like it can't be both -- but Chigurh certainly has elements of both. Maybe I'm missing something basic, but these strike me as inconsistent metathemes.

Dale says:

I don't think publius has missed anything, basic or otherwise. These are inconsistent metathemes but the incoherence belongs to life itself, not to the Coens nor to Cormac McCarthy. Good things happen to rotten people; rotten things happen to good people; good people can be brought down by their choices; bad people can be brought down by their choices; good and bad alike can be brought down by the timing with which a squirrel darts into the path of a moving car. Lightning can strike, hard work and persistence can pay off. A psychopath can show up and stake your life on a coint toss. As in the film's very last scene, you can do a favor for a stranger you later find is a cold-hearted killer.

You can go to work in the morning and find yourself in the very building that a fanatic has decided to destroy for the cameras and the creed. You surely made a choice to enter that building, and the fanatic will give reasons why your having been crushed under burning rubble was a proportionate and merited result of that choice. Your survivors and others will no doubt disagree with those reasons. Perhaps the people who called in sick that day will draw conclusions about providence, or perhaps they'll see blind luck. Which is the truth?

I think No Country is so unsettling because it presents these possibilities -- perhaps life's outcomes come from sheer chance, perhaps life's outcomes come from the choices we make -- presents compelling examples of each possibility, but in the end refuses to decide between them. This radical indeterminacy leaves knots in the gut no less than life itself does.

I agree completely with Dale's version of this, and the incorporation of such themes in several of McCarthy's books is what gives them much of their power.

One of the problems with publius's question is the false dichotomy between random nature and self-controlled 'Man' (with all the force that that capitalisation gives). As I noted recently, there are indications that this kind of distinction between 'nature' and 'Man' and between 'choice' and 'coincidence' is untenable, or at least not quite so clear as it would seem.

This includes the basic matter of plot. For instance, publius contrasts the character Llewellyn Moss's 'choice' to take the suitcase full of money with the apparent randomness of Chigurh's reliance on a coin-toss to decide whether particular people live or die. However, Moss's 'choice' is, of course, first only possible because of the coincidence of coming across the scene of a shootout while hunting. He certainly chooses to take the money, but with what motivation? Is this reason? Impulse? Who knows.

And while Chigurh's coin-tossing might seem 'random', he -- of all the characters in the book -- seems to embody a relentless devotion to a code of ethics. A sick code of ethics to be sure, but it is certainly one that is the product of a determined will (to adopt, for a moment, publius's Nietzschean language).

It is, in fact, the mixing of such notions of determination and coincidence that makes No Country such a powerful book. I keep reading complaints of the films 'abrupt' or 'indeterminate' ending, or of the 'unsatisfying' off-screen demise of some of the main characters (he said vaguely, trying not to give anything away), and -- having read the book -- I keep thinking, 'Yes, that's precisely the point.'

The last thing McCarthy would want to do, I think, is to suggest that the universe cares about us, even for a second.

Or about Nietzsche either, for that matter.

And, on this matter at least, I think he's right.

What, after all, is the contradiction in people (or characters) trying to make meaning in a meaningless world?

I'm not sorry there's nothing to say

The Wife and I settled down to watch Wong Kar-wai's film 2046 just the other night, which she gave me as a very welcome birthday gift not all that long ago.

We had both enjoyed his earlier film In the Mood For Love, and 2046--which is, in a sense, its sequel--certainly lived up to its predecessor, mixing wistful and romantic with cruel and sexy (and combining dreaminess with hard-edged realism) in a way that few films manage (and which even fewer attempt).

Stories of love lost or chances not taken, even when they're beautiful, are brutal, and of all the terrifying forces in the world, maybe one of the most frightening is simple contingency.

Which, somehow, maybe not quite by chance, leads me to this song, which I've liked since I first heard it and which the film made me think of:



('Your Ex-Lover is Dead' by Stars)