Whales and Men

Review

This is an unpublished screenplay from Cormac McCarthy that follows a few characters as they contemplate whales, existence, language, and destiny. There are early elements here that echo throughout much of his future work: a character called Western, themes around language and consciousness, and racing cars, among many others. I highlight these because these are the clearest found later, in The Passenger, though the commentary on language is deeply explored in The Kekulé Problem, which this reads almost as a mental discussion of.

As a screenplay, I do not think this is very good. I have a feeling Cormac wrote in this format purely to have dialogue has the primary feature, not with the intention of this being a film. All else is more easily cut away. There is a review on Goodreads referring to it as a platonic dialogue, which I think is good. Most of the characters speak exactly alike, and there are long, long, chunks of dialogue that would feel out of place anywhere else. It feels like Cormac talking to himself.

I find it interesting mainly as a forerunner to later writing.

Notes

This is a screenplay, you can find the PDF here. I have also done my best to retain all original word choice and punctuation.

• p23, Guy - I have a resistance to large questions. I’ve always been a skeptic. We know next to nothing about almost everything. And we have no patience. Ideas are useless. We want ideologies. The only way the (sic) fix anything is to fix everything. So we fix nothing. The only thing worth knowing is the secret of the universe. So we sit in ignorance. Whales have been evolving for thirty million years. To our one million.
  • TB: This goes on for a long time. Characters herein give long monologues and they all speak very, very, similarly.
• p44, Kelly - John and Guy both have a reverence for mind that I dont share I dont think that intelligence entitles. Oh I know it does in the natural world. But so do claws and teeth. They argue about evolution and causality and purpose in the universe but even as a sketic it’s hard for me to ascribe purposelessness to something that exists. Isnt existence a purpose? I think we confuse purpose with utility. It’s as if existence itself were somehow not noble enough or scared enough to justify its own undertaking I think the failure is ours. The failure in reverence. Even if God were only… What is it that Thomas says? The force that through the green fuse drives the flower? The purpose of our intellect seems to be largely to help us categorize and discriminate. I see your hand and I see my hand. (She stretches her hand out and takes his hand and she puts their outstretched hands side by side.) And I see that the similarities are so much greater than the differences and I know that there is a connection there that no separation in time or space can invalidate. I know that you are my brother and at another level which is harder to reach but just as real I know that you are me. Not figuratively. Not a metaphor. For real. In the flesh. It’s an understanding that has nothing to do with problem-solving. It’s an act of pure cognition. It’s an event. I guess what I would say is that yes I believe in God but I dont know who he is. I dont know what his name is. Why would he have a name? To distinguish him from what? (She pauses) I cant parse him out from all I see and feel. I want a God so large that there’s no place to even stand outside of him to say that he’s not so. I think Peter is right. The problem is that it’s so simple we cant see it. It includes everything and everybody so that there’s nothing left over outside of it with which to compare it. That’s why we cant think our way to God.
• p48. TB: Cormac apparently loved F1 and fast cars. This story has shared DNA with The Passenger, down to a name and some habits of characters. In the third PETER dialogue on this page, Peter describes auto racing in Europe and mentions a Maserati. Later the Mille Miglia will feature. Quite at odds with the cowboy persona that I think some readers associate with Cormac, though not so far, if you read the descriptions of the ‘gentlemen racers’ here.
• p54-59. TB: Long speeches from Peter on abstractions and language and what language is. Shows some early roots of Cormac seeming to suggest that language is akin to an infection or something else that otherwise seals the fate of humanity. This story overall is thinking about the language of whales and men.
• p77, Peter - [Guy] was telling me about the killer whales. Amazing animals apparently. He studied them for several years off the coast of British Columbia. (…) The question that plagues him is why they dont eat people. Seems they eat practically anything else and they actually appear to favor the flesh of mammals - seals and otters, even other whales. so why dont they eat people? What’s the reason? Why are we so special? (Smiling) He became quite earnest about it and my suggestion to him that we might not taste good was not well received.
• p80, Eric - We talk. I dont pretend to follow everything he says. He thinks that what’s in your head is the same thing as what’s in the world. That’s a big maybe for me. I think there’s a lot of misguided thinking going on. John’s ideas about Yoga are ideas about Yoga. In the meantime the Yoga’s still there.
• p80-81, Eric - It is if you overlook the one thing that all numbers have in common. (…) We’re the ones doing the counting. They’re our numbers. A number’s not the thing.
• p94, Guy - …When we describe something we see, we translate visual images into sounds and then speak them. But the whale sees with sound in the first place. We want a translation of the whale’s language but it’s not that kind of language. There’s really no analogy. The thing they are talking about cant be separated frm the language in which it’s spoken. For a whale the name and the thing are the same. We’re like Helen Keller without a nurse.
  • TB: Does this make sense? We assign sounds to things we experience via sense and call those sounds words. In this premise, whales ‘see’ a thing via sound and Cormac suggests that because the whales experience sound as language that there is a lack of analogy, that there is a 1:1 relationship between the sound and the thing. But if that’s true, then can there be vocabulary? If the sound is the thing, what do whales ‘talk’ about? Maybe the suggestion is that whales’ discussions are less worldly. They aren’t warning of obstacles or predators or conditions, but exclusively sharing organic concepts like emotion or biologic need. I don’t know. I’m not sure I am ready to accept that because whales communicate and seem to see via sound that this removes a layer of abstraction from their experience of the world.
• p115, Guy - I couldnt. I pretended it was a matter of keeping an emotional distance from the whales so that I could do the work. But there was more to it than that. I saw where the sort of commitment I contemplated could take me. That there could come a point somewhere where I would have to choose. Between whales and men. That I could be called upon to take sides in some irrevocable way and that ultimately it could mean taking human life. And I knew that if I did I was lost.
• p130, Kelly, reading a letter from John - Yet I cannot believe that whales and men are alien beings. I believe we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing. I know that we are lost but I no longer believe that we are doomed. That which we are lost to still exists and if there is a way out then there is a way back. Our natures cannot be so different from theirs and I think of them out there in the cold and the dark, those separate nations. I think of the temperateness with which they pursue their destinies. I think of their great hearts beating in the sea. Kelly, Kelly. I take back what I said about destiny. All this was known from the very beginning. I send you all the love my very small heart contains.