Afterlife of the author: Controversy in the works of Anne Rice and Cormac McCarthy

A correspondence between Dante Kunc and Entertainment Editor Tess O’Regan

Recently, I (Entertainment Editor, Tess O’Regan) invited a colleague and good friend, Dante Kunc, to join me in a discussion about the authors we are researching for our theses, as part of our Masters in Modern English Literature, here at UCC. Neither of our subjects, Cormac McCarthy and Anne Rice, were strangers to controversy. Now both deceased, scandal still haunts their personal lives and texts. What follows is an abridged email exchange on this topic. As it turns out, the conversation surrounding the “death of the author” does not simplify with the actual death of the author! 

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Tess: I wanted to have this, I guess, "conversation" with you because I think we are both in interesting positions with our respective theses. We are focusing on the works of authors whose personas/legends interact with the texts in interesting ways. I think it would be fair to say if either Rice or McCarthy were alive today they would be "cancelled". But, as I heard someone put it recently, you can't cancel the dead. What we can do is consider them in a critical, but scholarly, way.

I will introduce my author first. In short: Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist, best known for writing The Road, No Country for Old Men, and the Border Trilogy. His work focuses on dark and violent themes. In fact, McCarthy is on record for stating that he had no interest in literature that did not 'deal with issues of life and death.' His work would be widely considered as "Men's Books", in that the subject matter and genres he deals in––westerns, apocalyptic narratives, murders, rape, incest, mathematics––are not what would be marketted towards a female audience. I firmly believe there is something for everyone in McCarthy, and that everyone should give him a try at least once (just do not start with Blood Meridian, like my sister did).

I have told you this before, but a recent story in Vanity Fair suggests that Cormac McCarthy had a "secret muse"; teenager Augusta Britt, whom he began an affair with when he was in his forties. The VF article however, is a complicated text in and of itself, since it was written by an aspiring author–the journalist, Vincenzo Barney, apparently plans to write a fictionalised version of the story–who romanticise the story to no end. While I believe McCarthy abused Britt, it is hard to trust Barney's account of it, especially when he maintains that this is not a case of grooming–he quotes Britt on this too–but rather 'the craziest love story in literary history.'

Of course, even before this story broke, McCarthy could have been read as controversial by virtue of being a Man's Author, reticent to write women into his stories, with a similar reticence for shying away from hyper-violence. But that is all in the text, the VF article is not.

One cannot, I think, let an author's life dictate the entirety of academic analysis made on their work, but neither can you ignore that an author's personal beliefs, ideologies, or ethics can and will find their way into a text. What are your thoughts on the interrelation of author and text and the way it informs critical study? Do you think your knowledge of Rice influences your reading of her novels? 

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Dante: First things first: Anne Rice is, I believe, best known today for her novel Interview with the Vampire and the subsequent installments in the Vampire Chronicles series. On the internet, she is a controversial figure, mostly known for her crusade against fanfiction and her decade long conversion to Catholicism. Her works, similar to McCarthy’s, include many heavy, dark themes, amongst which are (sexual) slavery, pedophilia, and racism. 

Critiques of Anne Rice and of her works differ greatly, but are as valid as each other. Yet, I find that engaging with the texts does not pose a moral dilemma for me. For one, Anne Rice and Cormac McCarthy are both dead. They do not profit off their estates, though, of course, somebody always does. Both of their works' are complicated, yes, but they have greatly influenced their fields, and the genres in which they wrote would not be the same without them. If we do not analyse and interrogate the novels, they will continue to influence current culture, and sometimes perhaps in negative ways. 

We cannot ignore them–they exist, they influence us. I do find that this conversation would be entirely different if the authors in question were alive and doing harm today. My knowledge of Rice's life influences the way I read her books, but, to me, it only provides context to what she writes. I believe that you cannot ever truly divorce a work from its author, the author is never fully dead, but rather looming over their creations, less like a god, more like a ghost. If we were to ignore the people behind the books, I think we would also lose some of the humanity that comes with literature. Do you agree? Or do you think there is a way to divorce an author from their works?

What I am curious about when it comes to McCarthy is whether you find that his works contain anything of the controversy of his character. Is he similar to Anne Rice in the way that he has both personal and textual issues when it comes to controversy? And did you find that knowing of the VF article complicated your decision to focus on his novels for your thesis?

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Tess: You asked if I could trace any of McCarthy's character or controversy in his work. Like I said, McCarthy refuses to shy away from violence in his writing. Even a casual reader of his work would probably have come across scenes of sexual abuse and violence against animals. While this can be distressing to read, it never seems as if McCarthy is condoning these actions. Rather, I think McCarthy includes these themes to emphasise their evil––he just happens to be very talented at depicting them. But, as with most USAmerican novelists, this issue complicates when we bring race into the picture. I do not know if McCarthy was a racist man. However, his portrayal of Mexicans, Native Americans and Romani people can be problematic, although McCarthy is one of those writers who (I think) manages never to fall fully into the trap of stereotype, and it is the nuance he affords all situations that saves him. 

Yet this nuance could also be his downfall. McCarthy's style presents you with a situation and very rarely a judgement. I would argue he is more preoccupied with asking questions than answering them, and that it is in the act of reading that we as readers can make our own moral judgements. What I see in McCarthy's literature might not be his meaning at all, but that is the nature of the creative collaboration that occurs between writer and reader. 

All this to say: yes, I do think McCarthy and Rice are similar when it comes to the complex matrix that is the interplay between their personal lives and textual output. I say this because, before the VF article, I rarely read the man into his literature. Yes, McCarthy's work is rife with gendered violence and abuse, but portrayal of a topic is not equivalent to condoning it. 

I agree with what you said about the author haunting their own work. If we refused to let their lives inform our reading of them we would lose the humanity and, in doing so, lose what is so fascinating about their work. This is what makes the argument surrounding the "Death of the Author" so complicated, is it not? If we divorce the text from the author, we do not take into account how their unconscious and conscious biases might inform their work. On the other hand, we cannot abandon their texts just because we might deem them "problematic". 

I would love to hear more about your thoughts with respect to adaptation and the skirting/addressing of controversy. It is not something I have to consider with McCarthy, but I know adaptation is central to your thesis and am curious about your thoughts on the interplay of problematic hypotext and a more considerate, some might say "updated", hypertext.

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Dante: I find it so interesting that his books are seen as "men's" by the publishing industry. As I mentioned, Anne Rice's works contain nearly identical themes of rape, incest, murder, body mutilation, etc. The two differences I see between them are that: 1) McCarthy's works are categorised as "westerns", which is seen as a more “manly" genre, and; 2) McCarthy is a man. We could definitely have an entire different conversation about the publishing industry and its treatment of gender, but I will try to keep on topic, I promise.

In my opinion, book censorship is never the way to go. Of course, there are books that I believe can be harmful, but I would rather have those on the shelf than have to deal with censorship. Anne Rice has/had been banned multiple times, and is currently on the viral banned books list from the USA, which was published after the Trump inauguration. I believe she has a similar issue to McCarthy–she never fully condemns the dark themes that are so prevalent in her narratives. I do, however, think that to write off everything she had created just because of ambiguity would be doing the field of literature a disservice.

You asked about adaptations–I believe that what AMC did with addressing race in the narrative was the only way to go in order to make those who were uncomfortable with that aspect of her works able to watch the series. Importantly, Rollin Jones and Hanna Moscovitch (the showrunner and the writer, respectively) did not just remove the racial content, but rather recontextualised it in two steps. First, instead of simply not making Louis a plantation owner, they gave him a similarly exploitative career. Secondly, race is addressed in the show itself, whether overtly or in-between lines. Yes, they have changed quite a big part of the original text, but they kept the soul of it, and it did not feel like they were trying to spite Anne Rice, or that they did not honour the texts. 

To me, the key to engaging with works by authors such as Rice and McCarthy is reading their texts critically. When I say I love Anne Rice's work, I am not saying I love romanticising slavery or incest, what I mean is I love looking at the text and analysing it. Looking at such big authors, ones who have a cult following, is important to our understanding of our culture as a whole.

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And so we come to the end of our discussion. I would like to thank Dante for engaging with me so thoughtfully in our conversation, and putting up with my late night rambling emails. I hope that the reader (yes, you!) got as much out of this as I did. If our discussion achieved anything, I believe it stresses that controversy should not be a deterrent for reading an author, but rather a propellant to study mindfully in order to understand, as Dante says, ‘our culture as a whole.’