True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity 0826356796, 9780826356796

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian
2: Modernity: From Nihilism to Globalization
3: Modernity and the West: Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy
4: Modernity and the South: The Appalachian Novels, The Gardener’s Son, and The Stonemason
5: Violence Fast and Slow
6: Learning from Cormac McCarthy
7: A Resonance like Music
8: Journeys of Spiritual Formation
9: The Earth Shall Weep
10: The Beautiful Image
11: Doing Things with Words
12: Marginal Worlds, Marginal Languages
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

literary criticism

monk

C

“Nicholas Monk’s work on McCarthy and modernity constitutes a major undertaking that will inspire, provoke, and illuminate generations of readers to come.” —peter josyph ,

True and Living

author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy

Prophet of Destruction

“With his usual elegance of expression and detailed analysis of multiple works, Nicholas Monk reveals the urgency with which McCarthy responds to the contingencies of the postsecular world. The book is original, distinctive, and one of the most politically and spiritually relevant studies of McCarthy’s work to date.” —steven frye ,

True and Living Prophet of Destruction Cormac McCarthy and Modernity

author of Cormac McCarthy’s House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls and Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy is an associate professor in the Department of English and the director of the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick. He is the editor of Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. nicholas monk

nicholas monk isbn

978-0-8263-5679-6 90000

university of new mexico press

unmpress.com | 800-249-7737

9 780826 356796

>

ormac McCarthy’s work sounds warnings of impending apocalypse, but according to Nicholas Monk, it also implies that redemption remains available. Monk argues that McCarthy’s response to modernity is more subtle and less laden with despair than many realize. McCarthy’s understanding of the world, Monk shows, transcends the political divisions of right and left, escapes the reductiveness of identity politics, and looks to futures beyond the immediately adjacent. Such a reading positions McCarthy as an acute and farsighted chronicler of the condition of America at the beginning of a new century. Tracing the development of modernity in philosophical terms, Monk begins by hypothesizing some of the ways in which various political and philosophical undercurrents function in McCarthy’s fiction, how they are generated, and what they oppose. Other chapters focus on language, aesthetics, violence, the spiritual, and the natural environment and the animals that inhabit it. Finally, Monk examines in detail the experience of reading McCarthy’s work and analyzes the reasons so many readers report that “reading Cormac McCarthy changed my life.”

True and Living Prophet of Destruction

True and Living Prophet of Destruction Cormac McCarthy and Modernity

nicholas monk

University of New Mexico Press  |  Albuquerque

© 2016 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2016 Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Monk, Nicholas, author. Title: True and living prophet of destruction : Cormac McCarthy and modernity / Nicholas Monk. Other titles: Cormac McCarthy and modernity Description: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015026528 | ISBN 9780826356796 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826356802 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: McCarthy, Cormac, 1933– —Criticism and interpretation. | McCarthy, Cormac, 1933– —Literary style. | Civilization, Modern, in literature. | Violence in literature. | Modernism (Literature)—United States. Classification: LCC PS3563.C337 Z774 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026528 Cover illustration by Felicia Cedillos Designed by Felicia Cedillos Composed in Sabon 10.5/14.5

This book is dedicated to Laura Michaela Monk

contents

ack nowledgmen ts  ix in troduction  xi

1. Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian  1 2. Modernity From Nihilism to Globalization  19 3. Modernity and the West Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy  37 4. Modernity and the South The Appalachian Novels, The Gardener’s Son, and The Stonemason 61 5. Violence Fast and Slow  79 6. Learning from Cormac McCarthy  99 7. A Resonance like Music  115 8. Journeys of Spiritual Formation  133 9­. The Earth Shall Weep  151 10. The Beautiful Image  169 11. Doing Things with Words  187 12. Marginal Worlds, Marginal Languages  203 notes  227 works cited  247 index  261

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acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Peter Josyph, whose advice and expertise has been invaluable. Thanks, also, to Katja Rebmann for her contribution to the research that underpins this book. Thanks to previous publishers of my work: Cambridge University Press, Literature Compass, Routledge, and Texas Western Press. Thanks to the University of New Mexico Press, in particular Elise McHugh for her help and guidance and Helen Glenn Court for copyediting. I’m grateful to Laura Monk for her ideas on autoethnography; to my friends and colleagues in the Cormac McCarthy Society, particularly Dianne Luce, Rick Wallach, Stacey Peebles, and Steven Frye; to Professor Kristin Girten; to Carl Cerny; to my students in “Drama, Performance, Identity” over the years; to Katy Salzmann and her colleagues at the Alkek Library in San Marcos; to the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme of the UK Higher Education Academy; and to my colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick.

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introduction

Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. — cor m ac mcca rth y, No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy began his career as a published novelist with the following line: “The tree was down and cut to lengths, the sections spread and jumbled over the grass” (5). The words are part of a preface, italicized and separate from the beginning of the novel proper, that describes a conversation between three woodcutters who are dividing an elm into logs with a handsaw but are thwarted by a section of wrought iron fence that has “Growed all up in that tree” (5). As its first act, The Orchard Keeper places before the reader a representation of the infiltration and corruption of the natural by the manufactured, what might be classified as the technological. Significantly, it is the wrought iron that has “growed,” not the heartwood of the tree that has shaped itself to accommodate the metal. The “natural” and the man-made are here offered as, respectively, passive and active. The quasi-teleological power with which McCarthy invests the fence implies that even the most basic technology thrills with motive force. My reading of McCarthy argues that it is the collection of phenomena that may loosely be described as “modernity” that supply this force. The metal that has penetrated the tree represents modernity’s seemingly inextricable intertwining with, and contamination of, the planet and its occupants. These notions reach their conclusions in The Road, when the apocalypse that McCarthy has hinted at since the opening of The Orchard Keeper arrives. The annihilation predicted both indirectly and directly in the works between is visited finally upon the xi

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earth, the way paved by technological advances, brutal exploitation of resources, and short-termism, all of which have disconnected humanity from its environment with the consequence that both teeter on the brink of obliteration. The prophecy at the end of The Orchard Keeper that entire peoples move into the categories of “myth, legend [and] dust” (246) is realized, with the caveat that it may only be dust, of the three, that remains under the pitiless sun while the notions of myth and legend, constructed in language and memory, are obliterated. For McCarthy, it seems, such consequences must necessarily follow from an obsession with progress and the overarching will to control and rationalize, born of the ideas of the European Enlightenment, the supreme instrument of which in McCarthy’s fiction is Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden. Yet the counterweight of humanity’s ephemerality swings constantly across this purview. Not long after McCarthy has offered us an insight into his understanding of the inevitability of modernity’s penetration in the scene with the elm tree, the transience of humanity’s works manifests itself in the decline of Increase Tipton’s shacks as they become subject to “Gangrenous molds,” creeping mud, and a “terrible plague that seemed to overtake them one by one” (11). What, in The Orchard Keeper, is a mere hint at the power of time to erase our works becomes, in Blood Meridian and the border trilogy, and inspired by the sense of permanence generated by the ancient geology of the landscapes of the Southwest, a certainty. It is a grim view, of course: modernity must perish in “the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be,” but so must humanity (The Road 231). The brevity of human tenure is set alongside the colossal age of the planet as McCarthy returns time and again to the inevitable and infinitely slow facility of geological time to erase all—a phenomenon that exposes all of human endeavor to the charges of futility and vanity. As Rick Wallach notes, “McCarthy’s works are littered with the detritus of numerous failed potentials: trashed and abandoned bodies, vehicles, mansions, careers, and in the western novels especially, churches” (foreword to Holloway xii–xiii). For some, this represents the diminishment of humanity to the point of its negation. Human presence in McCarthy becomes its opposite: “by



introduction

calling attention to geologic time, McCarthy’s fiction . . . manifests the spirit of inhumanism. When held up against millions of years of prehuman existence, the lifespan of Homo sapiens seems relatively inconsequential” (Berry 68). McCarthy, in this view, tolls our doom through his fiction: the annalist of the inevitable and by extension, its usher. As a “true and living prophet of destruction” (No Country for Old Men 4) over the large part of his work, McCarthy has shown us the ultimate destination for the present direction of human travel both for us as individuals, and for our systems of government and social interaction. A position such as this has much in common with going-to-hell-in-a-handcart conservatism, and is reinforced by the fondness of McCarthy’s protagonists for a seemingly unreconstructed masculine engagement with the environment and other human beings. In addition, the overdetermined independence of the characters, their tendency to settle disagreements with violence, their sometimes rudely Christian understandings of the spiritual, and their frequent view of hard work and unrestricted trade as the most desirable way to operate a society suggest a writer who is unafraid to appeal to a more conservative readership. Such elements in McCarthy’s fiction may also be attractive to a species of libertarian sensibility that imagines the skies thick with invading UN forces, and exists bunkered against “big government” in the mountains of the Western states. None of this prevents those of all political hues engaging with and enjoying his work, but the novels are infused with a piercing sense of loss, a mood of irrevocable decline, and a yearning for a past that, perhaps, never was. Taken together, these phenomena create a mythologizing and elegiac tone, which some have argued in sometimes persuasive ways to be reactionary (Hawkins, McGilchrist, Messent, Spurgeon). Joyce Carol Oates develops this in a discussion of No Country for Old Men, arguing that “it’s possible that Cormac McCarthy, described in a recent interview as a ‘southern conservative,’ intends [Sheriff] Bell’s social-conservative predilections to speak for his own” (“The Treasure of Comanche County”). It is often claimed, also, that McCarthy’s novels do not feature many developed or complex female characters:

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A merely cursory reading of Cormac McCarthy’s novels reveals an unmistakable ambivalence about women, even an outright misogyny, manifested in the objectification of women as dead bodies in Child of God, as the one-dimensional stereotypes witch, virgin, or whore in Suttree, or as absence itself in much of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. Particularly telling is McCarthy’s turning from Southern gothic novel to the Western, a genre which contemporary critics such as Tompkins and Lee Clark Mitchell recognize as a reaction against feminism and female authority. (Sullivan 230) Those who have expanded on these themes in the criticism have frequently developed carefully argued and thoughtful treatments of McCarthy’s fiction: Nell Sullivan (just quoted), Christine Chollier, and Helen Fisher-Wirth. Alongside these feminist approaches are critiques of the colonizing impulse that is a necessary correlative of westward expansion (Cant, Cooper Alarcón) and that is perceived as implicating McCarthy in its perpetuation. Some reflections on attitudes to Mexico and Mexicans in the fiction (Blair) tend to view McCarthy as an unconscious communicator of rudimentary constructions of the US-Mexican border and the relationships that exist in constellation within and around it—though it is fair to say that others view McCarthy’s understanding of the issue as subtle, highly complex, sophisticated, and politically subtle (Monk, “All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter”; Soto). Peter Carr distills best, perhaps, the elements in McCarthy’s fiction that tend to produce resistance from the Left: As a reluctant but bona fide celebrity, McCarthy—a lonely figure in the West writing about lonely figures in the West—can be made to stand for a certain mainstream ideal. In fact, the very integrity of his uncompromising exceptionalism becomes part of a code through which Anglo-America reads not the “image banks of others,” but only an entrenched version of itself. The Western is a code that rejects [the] background of a hybridized society, and instead tends to preserve conventional, and confrontational, frontiers of race, language, gender, and ethnicity. (34)



introduction

This nexus of readings of and suppositions concerning McCarthy’s work tends to make him available for candidacy as yet another cultural producer in a long line characterized by glib appropriation, unthinking immersion in neocolonialist hegemony, and a closed circle of reflection that redistributes a largely Anglo view back to a largely Anglo audi1 ence. And yet the work represents a significant cultural endeavor. The nature of this endeavor is defined in particular aspects of style and content. To begin at a purely aesthetic level, it is widely acknowledged that McCarthy’s writing is among the most striking to have emerged from American literature in the last fifty years. As Dana Phillips reminds us, “[McCarthy’s] prose [is] remarkable for its syntactic complexity, its recondite vocabulary, its recording of minute detail, and its violent intensity, as well as for an uncanny, almost scriptural stateliness” (18). Beginning with this singular use of language, the writing performs an aesthetic that threatens the quotidian, that invokes the “beautiful image” in a purposeful cultural endeavor that seeks to connect its readers with the world and the world of 2 ideas. Alongside this aesthetic challenge is a linguistically performa3 tive strand in the work. An example is the use of Spanish in the text. Isabel Soto in her analysis of The Crossing argues that in McCarthy “Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other” (58), and what emerges in this fusion is a discourse that is other to both languages and represents a kind of vulgate that is peculiar to the border and represents it. It becomes the language of the “contact zone” and as such “is suggestive perhaps of a growing mestizo hegemony” (58). Soto is a native speaker of Spanish and finds nothing like McCarthy’s usage in other Anglo fiction. Her argument is that McCarthy’s Spanish is performative of a kind of border identity that borrows from both languages and sets of cultural conditions to reflect the complexities inherent in such a condition. For Soto, McCarthy’s Spanish is “unfamiliar or defamiliarized,” and generated by crossing or transgressing various thresholds, linguistic and/or rhetorical” (58). The Spanish argot of McCarthy’s characters, in its collision of usage and its disavowal of norms, identifies an alternate linguistic space that challenges the long dominance of English in its role as the lingua 4 franca of capitalist modernity.

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Intellectually, McCarthy engages in a vivid and wide-ranging fashion with subjects as diverse as geology, history, physics, law, religion, and metaphysics—unsurprising, perhaps, if rumors of his library are to be believed, with its contents of ten thousand annotated volumes. Set within this transdisciplinary fusion are quest-narratives and versions of the bildungsroman, featuring an exhibition of demi-heroes, freaks, and avengers, deposited in a collection of spectacularly re-created, animated landscapes. There is also a striking sense of a real yet mythologized North America about to be defamiliarized utterly by its imminent passage into history. This is realized by the summoning quality in McCarthy’s fiction—an extraordinary ability to create the most saturated and intense of tableaux. Examples of such tableaux are manifold, but this description from The Crossing demonstrates the point: “A windmill turned on the plain below them like a Chinese toy and dogs barked in the distance. In the long steep light the raw umber mountains stood deeply shadowed in their folds and in the sky to the 5 south a dozen buzzards turned in a slow crepe carousel” (214). An alternate reality is created in defiance of the prevailing narrative of progress, which, through its generation of affect in the reader, has the potential to create change. Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension is manifested in this and similar passages, and a route to a political response in the reader may thus be theorized. My argument, therefore, is that McCarthy’s response to modernity is more subtle and less laden with despair than is often thought, and that his understanding of the world as represented in the novels transcends the rudimentary dichotomies of political Right and Left, escapes the reductiveness of identity politics, and looks to futures beyond the very adjacent. His novels are indeed warnings to the world of hastening ecological disaster, but they also contain suggestions for change that seeks to inspire a greater understanding and awe of the world through a more profound and thoughtful material and spiritual understanding of the land itself, its 6 animals, and our relationship to both. The exploration of these notions of modernity and challenge, and their evocation in McCarthy through animals, the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the broadly ecological, will be the business of this book, and, through these investigations, I offer a reading of McCarthy’s work that places him as among



introduction

the most acute and farsighted chroniclers of and respondents to the condition of America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Alongside this is my resistance to a stance that implies literary critics should—or even could—exist in an objective relationship to the books they study. As well as challenge this position at an abstract philosophical and critical level, I render my resistance in a performative fashion by devoting a chapter to the way reading McCarthy made 7 me feel and how the experience affected my life. Sociology has developed a formal methodology for this process known as autoethnogra­ phy, so this book features a chapter of autoethnography that consists of some of my responses to McCarthy’s work as they are manifest in my life and that are, to an extent, without the filters and jargon of my 8 discipline. Material from this chapter has been cross-referenced with the others when connections emerge that seem to me meaningful, legitimate, or otherwise worthy of inclusion. I am not the first to adopt this kind of self-analysis, but it seems to me wholly appropriate as a way of more deeply examining responses to an author whose writing seems to have the ability to make people “feel” in ways that 9 are quite unusual and are greatly valued by readers. There is another way I veer from the norm in literary critical monographs, and it is connected to my desire that this book should be intelligible to an imagined individual who is educated and engaged with good writing, but who may not be connected to the major cities of the East and West Coasts, may not have a formal relationship with the universities in their states and cities, and might well be alienated by certain conventions and habits of academic literary criticism. I am keenly aware that appeals to the common reader have proliferated in recent years, and such appeals may merely exist as patronizing fantasy in the minds of academics like me. I do, though, want to include material that does not make such potential readers unwelcome, yet I also want to write in a way sophisticated enough for the complexity and subtlety of the task I have set myself. What I have done, therefore, is to place the large majority of the necessary theoretical and philosophical discussion of the precise character of the modernity I engage with into two chapters that can be cross-referenced from the main body of the text. These chapters establish the background against which McCarthy

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writes and, though they engage with McCarthy’s work, the book can be read without them. In the further service of readability, I have arranged the chapters thematically so that the book can be used by a reader who wants to know more specifically about animals in McCar­ thy’s work, for example, or aesthetics, or violence. This is a book, then, about modernity and Cormac McCarthy’s responses to it across a body of work comprising ten novels, two plays, and a number of unpublished works (including a complete novel and a finished screenplay that now reside in the Wittliff Collec10 tion at Texas State University, San Marcos). The book also examines the form taken by both McCarthy’s identifications of the phenomenon and responses to it. In these analyses, I seek a theoretical definition of modernity that corresponds to McCarthy’s representation of it in his fiction (chapters 1 and 2), and that applies these theoretical positions in chapters 3, 4, and 5. The book then considers other major themes in McCarthy’s work as they relate to modernity. Most significant among these are animals (chapter 7), the spiritual (chapter 8), cultural geography (chapter 9), aesthetics (chapter 10), language (chapter 11), and the politics of the border (chapter 12). The chapters tend to move from a more to a less nihilistic or pessimistic interpretation of the work, the last six explicitly dealing with resistance to modernity. Part of the function of each chapter is to trace the political agenda McCarthy develops, about which it is unsubtle to argue adheres to any spectrum predicated on a Left and Right axis. In attempting to hypothesize how these political undercurrents work, how they are generated, and what they exist in opposition to, I recast the works of Cormac McCarthy as a performative node of resistance in a rhizome of resistant feeling that exists beneath the surface of the lives of many people across large sectors of society, but as yet lacks a determinate way of action commensurate with the power of feeling that it produces.

1

Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. — ja mes joyce , Ulysses

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his chapter makes the case that the version of modernity that is the background to McCarthy’s works is imperialist, Eurocentric, scientific, rational, and technological. It transcends the local and situated, and it is centered in a hermetic sense of self. McCarthy’s fiction characterizes modernity as a profound threat to certain sets of cultural practices and attitudes that include a respect for the environment and its wild creatures; reverence for the ancient; the freedom to cross borders, both actual and metaphorical; an attitude to violence that is beyond quotidian revulsion; a reengagement with the spiritual and the sacred; and an approach to literature that values the profundity and scope of language. Part of the fascination in McCarthy’s work is the presence of an aesthetic founded in the intertwining of each of these concerns with the others. But the power of McCarthy’s language, the scope of his ideas, and the force of his narrative may sometimes appear to be all there is. Similarly, the subject matter of the novels stands in relation to the real in ways that might distract us; and his critique of modernity can pass unrecognized because it avoids narrow party divisions, wrangling over identity, and the mechanics of revolution. There is, though, an engagement with the idea of modernity from the very beginning of McCarthy’s published work, because his Appalachian

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novels are nothing if not obsessed with the outsider who seeks a life beyond the strictures and the frenzied pace of the modern, in an elusive engagement with the mystical power of the land. The last of the Appalachian works, Suttree, is McCarthy’s most profound attempt in the Southern fiction to understand the implications of modernity for the United States. The tension between old and new, past and present, town and country, mechanized and pastoral, are examined in minute detail. But McCarthy’s move from the South to the Southwest in his next novel, Blood Meridian, is crucial in his exploration of modernity. It is the logical and necessary extension of a search for new ground on which to interrogate modernity and to identify ways of resistance. The Southwest is an exemplary environment in which to do this. The struggle between modernity and its other have been taking place there since the earliest conversions of Native Americans by Spanish Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the modern and the premodern have waged war on this soil ever since. The binaries are clearer in the Southwest than in any other region in the United States, possibly the world. Take, for example, oral history versus written history, peyote versus alcohol, polytheism versus monotheism, farming-hunting versus technological exploitation of the land, group versus individual, supernatural versus rational. As Richard Slotkin argues, “even at the source of the American myth (of conquest) there lies the fatal opposition, the hostility between two worlds, two races, two realms of thought and feeling” (17). The Southwest as an imaginary space is suffused with premodern culture and adorned with its ruins, yet the physical and temporal reality of its Native American communities exists on the sufferance of a powerfully capitalist modernity. These clear paradoxes, and the fragility of the resistance represented by marginalized Native Americans, are important components in McCarthy’s picture of the precariousness of alternates to modernity. And, although Native Americans are not generally protagonists in McCarthy’s fiction, their appearances are frequently freighted with meaning. The Southwest, then, in the grandeur and hostility of its landscapes, and its residue of ancient cultures, can seem profoundly antithetical to a modernity that rests on the pillars of progress, the rational, and the processes and methodologies of modern science.



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

There is, though, some conflict and paradox in this area. McCarthy’s residency at the Santa Fe Institute, and the evidence in the recently expanded McCarthy holdings in the Southwestern Writers’ Collection at the Alkek Library of Texas State University in San Marcos, demonstrates a more-than-passing engagement with science, and should be borne in mind as his reenchantment of the world gathers momentum in the novels of the Southwest. In the introduction, I mention rumor of McCarthy’s vast and copiously annotated library, but it is clear from his published work that he reads widely and that his reading is catholic in the extreme. David Kushner’s interview with McCarthy in Rolling Stone from 2007 explores McCarthy’s presence at the Santa Fe Institute, and Peter Josyph’s “Judging Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West by Its Cover” centers on his search for the photographer who took the author photo on the dustjacket of the first edition of Blood Meridian. Josyph not only finds the photographer, but also gains sight of the uncropped originals: a contact sheet with twenty shots of McCarthy in his Bearden scriptorium, with more books stacked up on the table behind McCarthy and me going blind as a monk trying to make them out—John McPhee’s Giving Good Weight, an old John Player Motor Sport Yearbook, Ernst Cassirer’s Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Banesh Hoffmann’s The Strange Story of the Quantum, Harold Blumenthal’s Sacco and Vanzetti, Hans Reichenbach’s The Philosophy of Space & Time, Carolyn Kolb’s New Orleans, Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, Peter Forbath’s The River Congo, Freeman Dyson’s Dis­ turbing the Universe, a book on Kant, John Locke’s Essay Con­ cerning Human Understanding in two volumes, F. Max Muller’s translation of The Upanishads, also in two volumes, John R. Cooke’s The Border and the Buffalo, Weston La Barre’s The Human Animal, George F. Ruxton’s Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wis­ dom, the novel Silence by Shusako Endo. (Cormac McCarthy’s House 22)

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McCarthy tends not to reveal his sources explicitly, but these photographs and the substantial intellectual hinterland they suggest justify a continued exploration of the work at abstract and philosophical levels as well as in more concrete terms. Further insight into the breadth of McCarthy’s reading has become available in the archive. Even a brief acquaintance with the materials reveals a writer who is meticulous, precise, and widely read. A significant example is the unpublished draft of the screenplay “Whales and Men,” which includes quotations from Thomas Beston’s Outermost House, a complete rendering of Ezra Pound’s translation of the eighth-century Chinese poem “The River Merchant’s Wife,” and three lines of poetry from Padraic Colum, one of the leading lights of Ireland’s Celtic revival in the early twentieth century. Fragments from Dylan Thomas are also used, along with references to Cervantes, Handel, Melville, Mozart, and Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away.” Perhaps most telling is a handwritten note in the margin of page 95: “WITT: A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’” WITT is Wittgenstein, and in the passage just below the marginal note McCarthy has the character John say the whales have made mutes of us. There is nothing to say. . . . We all have these assumptions about logic and language and intelligence and there is no ground for them. What argument could you advance for the principles of logic that did not presuppose them? We occupy a small band of visible light, a small band of audible sound, a small band of shared existence. We are 1 imprisoned by what we know. (91/97/6/96) Language is unequal to the task, maybe? Perhaps philosophy itself is unable to establish much beyond its own ignorance. In any case, such conjunctions suggest clear links between McCarthy’s influences in philosophy and the profundity of his fiction. In attempting to outline, in theoretical and philosophical terms, a version of modernity that approximates what I see as an antagonist in McCarthy’s fiction, I need to engage with certain philosophical currents I see running through the fiction—currents that a number of



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian 2

senior McCarthy scholars have noted and designated as unde­rexplored. In an effort to at least partially address this, I identify a philosophical construction of modernity in twentieth- and twenty-first-­century fiction that develops from the European Enlightenment and begins in Hegel, passes through Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and the Frankfurt School to its modified form in critics such as Frederic Jameson, Marshall Berman, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and John Tomlinson, and continues in the work of more recent theorists of the postcolonial and globalization, such as Enrique Dussel and Edouard Glissant. This construction of modernity focuses on its transformative power, its seeming irresistibility, and its function as the cultural analogue of capitalism. Added to this list might be modernity’s facility to disenchant the world through its devotion to science, technology, and instrumental reason. I argue, too, that the version of modernity discernible in McCarthy’s fiction is Eurocentric in that it manifests a number of the empire-building tendencies that allowed Europe to dominate the rest of the world post-Enlightenment. Such tendencies include a readiness to embrace pragmatic violence, a devotion to utility and calculability, a homogenizing effect, a relentlessly exploitative nature, and a hermetic I. Last is a recognition implicit in the work of many of the critics I mention that art can be a performative challenge to modernity. Plainly, McCarthy’s fiction engages with all these issues, either directly or in indirect ways that prompt further speculation. Taken together, these ideas define a species of modernity that might be construed as identifying, or partially explaining, the nature of the alien and motive metal in McCarthy with which I begin this book. I do not, though, impute these ideas to McCarthy as a human being. My argument is that, across the fiction as a whole, these ideas constitute the social and political hegemony of modernity from which McCarthy’s characters are in flight, and to which they begin to offer resistance. To leave the nature of this modernity untheorized and untraced would be to neglect to situate the work in its proper historical context. What might read as a Marxist understanding of modernity, therefore, does not suggest a consciously Marxist response in the fiction, still less a Marxist author. What lies at the root of much of what I have to say in this book concerning modernity is the radical separation of mind and body that

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has been thoroughly incorporated into Western thinking since Descartes formalized Christianity’s notion of a wholly separable Godgiven soul animating a mechanical body. Descartes’s description of himself as the “thing that thinks” (18) must be recognized as lurking 3 in the background of any analysis of Western modernity. Clearly, both Christianity and Cartesian dualism were profound influences on Hegel, whose philosophy systematizes and develops a significant number of the ideas I mention. Hegel possesses the progressive epistemology of the activist. Nothing is static in his view. There must always be progress, which is reflected in the dynamism of his analysis of the process of self-creation. In Hegel, the dialectic of social relations is placed in motion by the initial moment of self-consciousness (the moment at which the subject says I). This can only arise when recognition by equals is possible (Kojève 4). The desire for recognition, therefore, is at the root of self-consciousness. This form of human desire is different from simple animal desires—for food or warmth, for example—because desire is only a human desire if it desires another desire. Something useless biologically, such as a doctoral degree, is desired because it is desired by others: “Human his4 tory is the history of desired desires” (Kojève 6). Similarities remain, however, between animal desires and human desires: both, for example, negate (assimilate or transform) the object of desire, producing a feeling of satisfaction. For a human to be human, however, human desires must defeat animal desires: “Man’s humanity comes to light only if he risks his animal life for the sake of his human desire” (Kojève 7). Hegel continues, “to desire the desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I ‘represent’ be the value desired by the other: I want him to ‘recognise’ my value as his value. I want him to ‘recognise’ me as an autonomous value” (Kojève 7). Human self-consciousness must arise, therefore, in a fight to the death for recognition. Should one adversary be killed in the course of this fight to the death, recognition becomes impossible because the desired desire is destroyed along with the adversary. If, however, one adversary gives up the fight and recognizes the other without gaining recognition himself, then two forms of self-consciousness arise: master and slave.



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

Human society, therefore, is predicated on any number of these master-­ slave relationships. History, according to Hegel, ends in the dialectical overcoming of both master and slave in synthesis. Humanity moves from becoming to become. The transformative nature of the process is obvious: humanity’s dialectical progression through countless transformations and absorptions is inevitable from the first I. As self-conscious beings, we act in ways that transform others and our surroundings. The human I is the I of desire in Hegel, and desire must result in change. For my purposes, a key part of the process I outline is Hegel’s insistence that, to achieve recognition, the individual must transform the natural world and its human occupants from an original position of indifference: “This transformation of a world that is hostile to a human project is called ‘action,’ ‘activity’” (11). This concept has resonance for any study of the development of modernity and its allegedly civilizing mission. The transformative process must eventually change everything that is “not I.” The transformation of a world hostile to civilization is, of course, a principal concern of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, most notably as part of Judge Holden’s project in Blood Meridian. But numerous instances in the border trilogy present a world transfigured by human activity, culminating at the end of Cities of the Plain in the new freeway, tattered plastic clinging to the desert plants, and an array of radar domes stretching across the horizon. The fiction recognizes the momentum of the transformative elements of modernity, and in doing so it acknowledges, by extension, ideas such as Hegel’s, which looked to progress to redeem humanity from its uncivilized origins. Another key notion in these analyses is sublation or dialectical overcoming. This is the process in which the loser of the fight to the death is not killed but is annulled, stripped of autonomy but preserved as slave. Indeed, one might almost view Hegel as the originator of a particular species of class-based thinking that Marx merely developed: “If idle mastery is an impasse, laborious slavery in contrast, is the source of all human social historical progress. History is the history of the working slave” (20). For me, these peculiarly Hegelian processes are as least as important in their influence on the development of modernity as the Kantian idealism and British empiricism that are often seen

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as central to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Indeed, the master-­slave dialectic might be perceived as the shadowy rationale lurking behind such phenomena as class antagonism, the many and various species of imperialism that gathered real pace in the eighteenth century and continue to this day, and global economic domination by multinational capital. Just one example of the latter is the flight of the wanderers of the border trilogy from their subsumption in large-scale ranching. In addition, Hegel’s thinking was co-opted by those who saw nineteenth-century European civilization as the apotheosis of the human condition (those influenced by Darwin, for example, and those at the heart of the European imperial project) and, therefore, as the end of history. Judge Holden’s view in Blood Meridian of the progressive momentum toward a perfectible world, controlled by man, has much in common with this notion of civilization. It is a similar view that I argue provides the conditions for the postapocalyptic world of The Road (see chapter 5, this volume). Marx developed his own end-of-history position given that, in his version of events, capital contains the seeds of its own destruction in the form of ever-worsening crises of overproduction. The clearest example is in the Manifesto of the Communist Party from 1848. Here it is the energy of the bourgeoisie—formerly the slaves, in a Hegelian sense, under the feudal system—that has begun a continuous and continuing process of transformation. Marx has dual concerns with transformation: disturbance of social conditions by the bourgeoisie, followed by revolution. But neither Marx nor his followers can escape the straitjacket of the Hegelian dialectic in which there is a constant, transforming, motive force in all events, processes, and actions that leads inevitably to an end-of-history position, in this case the overthrow of the ruling class and the instantiation of a new golden age. The importance of such positions, insofar as they reflect on what emerges from the fiction of McCarthy, is that his characters are swept along in a dialectical process that permits them little agency over their lives, and still less in the context of a wider system that insists capitalism and modernity are in some way irresistible natural forces. At another level, the thinking of Marx and his followers demonstrates a vital link between economics and culture, a link that is essential to



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

my view that modernity is the cultural analogue of capitalism. Marx’s argument is that from bourgeois control of the substructure (the process of production and consumption, as detailed in the introduction to the Grundrisse) of modern societies, control of the superstructure must necessarily flow: The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. (69) The rise of capital and the bourgeoisie permeates all levels of exis5 tence and, thus, becomes inseparable from modernity. Interesting work on applying these ideas has been undertaken on McCarthy (see Christine Chollier and David Holloway), but in Marx’s litany of what is sacrificed to free trade are elements of the loss that McCarthy’s fiction laments. Indeed, in the border trilogy is an implication that the world might well be improved should some of these be reinstated in our relations with one another and the world. I think of the evocation of a lost pastoral-feudal idyll in All the Pretty Horses; the exploration of the magical in The Crossing; but, most important, and across the trilogy, a resistance to the dominance of a system that replaces smaller

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and less efficient modes of production and exchange in favor of larger, more streamlined operations. From these conditions arise a collection of responses in McCarthy’s border characters in which the cultural follows the economic in the trajectory of crisis into flight. A further strand in the fabric of the critique of modernity emerges in Nietzsche, continues in Weber, and reaches its apotheosis in the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: an increasing fear of the potential of technology, and its alliance with instrumental reason, to destroy and ultimately annihilate. Nietzsche’s critique begins with the rejection of asceticism, and the principle reason that the ascetic features so significantly in this section is that it functions both as the link between Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, and the Frankfurt School, and more importantly that it is one of the motors that drives Western progress toward an ever more technologically advanced modernity. Nietzsche believes the ascetic is a function of slave morality, and his categories here are precisely the Hegelian ones of master and slave (Genealogy of Morals). Asceticism for Nietzsche is founded in guilt and bad conscience, which derive in turn from the position of the slave who has been forced to take up the responsibility of progress: “If idle mastery is an impasse, laborious slavery in contrast, is the source of all human social historical progress. History is the history of the working slave” (Kojève 20). For Nietzsche, however, what continues to exist in the slave is “this instinct for freedom forcibly made latent . . . this instinct pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself” (Genealogy of Morals 87). Interestingly, the ascetic for Nietzsche is self-denial and self-flagellation, yet it produces, paradoxically, a kind of agonized beauty—which is, perhaps, what Native Americans in the Southwest detected and found so attractive in masochistic strains of Christianity. Nietzsche claims that the founders of society are the masters—“blond beasts of prey,” instinctive destroyers—who sweep away any notion the historian might have of the origins of a society founded on contractual arrangements. “They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too ‘different’ even to be hated” (86). Judge Holden’s aesthetic of violence, the Glanton gang, and the will to



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

annihilate all resistance seem particularly Nietzschean in this regard. In Hegelian terms, as a consequence of their terrible ravages, the “blond beasts,” the “masters,” cause the “instinct for freedom” to be “pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within” a newly created slave population. This results in the development of a self-torturing “bad conscience” within the slaves. Nietzsche describes it this way: This uncanny, dreadfully joyous labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself that makes itself suffer out of joy in making suffer—eventually this entire active “bad conscience” . . . as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena, also brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation, and perhaps beauty itself. (87) Nietzsche’s argument is that the whole of Christian art is a product of this contorted consciousness. Nietzsche then, in an apparent paradox, embarks on a critique of asceticism that ranges from matters of taste—“It is easy to see that the ascetic ideal has never and nowhere been a school of good taste” (102)—to a full-scale assault on Christianity and its mediators as the hierophants direct a miserable assortment of the tamed, and the “ill-constituted, disgruntled, underprivileged, unfortunate” (120) into a species of life-denying anesthesia. Man suffers less, but the experience of life is drained of vitality. Nietzsche sees asceticism, in all its manifestations, as radically separated from life. For Nietzsche, the disruption and eradication of the ascetic ideal depends on that which has its foundations in lies and illusion: “art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science” (Genealogy of Morals 153–54). This is a powerful suggestion that the antidote to a particular kind of thinking about modernity lies in art—a notion I develop in later chapters in relation to McCarthy through the work of Herbert Marcuse (Aesthetic Dimension 210–16). Useful here is Frederic Jameson’s commentary on The Protestant Ethic in his article “The Vanishing Mediator.” Jameson’s analysis, written in the 1970s, seems entirely appropriate as a guiding conceit

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for interpreting Weber (with whom I deal later): “It becomes obvious that in one way or another Protestantism will itself serve as a kind of mediation between the traditional medieval world from which it emerged and the modern secularised one that it in its turn prepared. . . . once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of innerworldly life to take place, it has no further reason for being and disappears from the historical scene” (25). The effect for Jameson is simultaneously catalytic and evaporating. The vanishing mediator is problematized as an analytic tool, however, by the question of whether the ideas and edifices of Protestantism have actually disappeared. Another version is that organized religion remains merely as an empty shell from which spirituality has been drained as its metaphysics are siphoned into a relentless fetishization of the commodity. Again, such generalizations are complicated by local effects and conditions: the powerful revival of evangelical Christianity in the United States, for example, or the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, both of which suggest either a widespread resurgence in asceticism or the possibility that it has never gone away. I think it is possible to suggest that, after Weber, the abandonment of the proscriptive elements of Protestantism (including, paradoxically, the ascetic) has given rise to a capitalism that is unmediated and has at its center a quasi-spiritual worship of the commodity. Shorn of its spiritual elements, Weber’s ascetic falls into a circularity dictated by the requirements of the capitalism it once mediated. This notion can be recorded in a simple formula: hard work and long hours buy an almost limitless array of commodities, the production of an almost limitless array of commodities requires hard work and long hours. Indeed, this condition dominates in the United States—as it does, now, in most other places. In the world of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, however, the process is not yet complete, and McCarthy’s wanderers and outcasts flee, unconsciously seeking worlds that resist such conditions. Furthermore, Weber’s logic makes it possible to state that if what one worships shapes economic circumstances, and if one reveres an economic system, or some element of that system, to the point of worship, an unbreakable circle has been created. The cultural, intellectual, political, and religious are perhaps simply indivisible from



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

the economic in such circumstances. The comparisons here between a society in which spiritual practices have tended to dictate economic behavior (the quasi-traditional societies valorized obliquely in McCarthy’s engagement with Native Americans) and a society in which a supposedly rational economic substructure determines all else (the Knoxville of McCarthy’s Suttree, for example, or the experiences of the cowboy heroes of the border trilogy, or the murderous forays of the Glanton gang) are instructive. Compelling elements in McCarthy’s fiction seem to respond to a Weberian version of modernity: “the fate of our times is characterised by rationalization and intellectualisation and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (“Science as a Vocation” 155). Inherent in this remark is a significant element of the antimodern thrust that is expanded in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment: “The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world, the dissolution of myths” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 1). Weber sees in Calvinism and Lutheranism “the complete elimination of salvation through the Church and sacraments” (“Science as a Vocation” 104–5) and argues that “that great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here to its logical conclusion” (105). Certain strains of recent fiction and drama, however, have attempted to revivify a “vanished” spiritual mediation that has been eroded by the ongoing project of modernity that Weber was writing in broad terms. This notion can be hard to pin down in McCarthy, but through a kind of magical consciousness in animals, and the power of landscape to reconnect humanity to worlds beyond the quotidian, a reinstatement of the spiritual becomes detectable. Together with the representation of the instrumentally rational and technologically inclined Judge Holden as a monster—albeit a deeply attractive one— these elements in the fiction suggest a challenge to the tenets of rational modernity as set out in this chapter. What show this most clearly, however, are McCarthy’s “narratives of spiritual formation,” or

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seeleromane (see chapter 8, this volume). The sense in certain characters, like Billy Parham, or the man in The Road, of a desire to resurrect a “vanished” spirituality reflect directly on a background economic and cultural situation in which universal commodification and global capitalism might be regarded as the inevitable culmination of Nietzsche’s protest against the ascetic, or the draining of the spiritual from Weber’s formative Protestantism. Or that these responses in McCarthy’s characters resist the rise of deeply political forms of fundamentalist religion in both the United States and the Islamic world. As an alternative, McCarthy offers representations of the magical untainted by Protestantism, asceticism, or textual fundamentalism and capable of performing the necessary mediating function between the world of modernity and capitalism and what is to follow: a “materializing mediator” to set inelegantly against Jameson’s vanishing version, perhaps. Weber and Nietzsche offer a challenge to the central assumptions of modernity: progress is always good, science is always able to reveal truth, reason is a tool to be used instrumentally, everything may be classified and systematized, technology is the solution to every problem. Clearly, McCarthy’s fiction resists these absolutes too. Beyond this, it is evident that the species of modernity I describe is essentially Eurocentric—an important fact when examining the ways in which modernity may be resisted. For Weber, modernity is a wholly Eurocentric phenomenon. The fundamentally intertwined functions of capitalism, social-cultural modernity, and the heritage of a particular strain of religious morality give rise to a continuing impulse in northern Europe to expand the empire. Both Nietzsche and Weber wrote around the time of the scramble for Africa, in which European states divided up a continent with little or no regard for its inhabitants. Weber’s concerns are sociological in the sense that they do not originate in the study of political economy, and they are reflected when McCarthy transfers his attention to the Southwest and a constellation of behaviors and attitudes in his white American protagonists that seems at least partially constituted and intellectualized in these ways. Weber shares with the political economists a world focus, a belief that global systems based on capitalism



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

dominate the modern world both economically and culturally, infiltrating and capturing all aspects of human existence, individual and social. Herbert Marcuse’s analysis, however, focuses on the meaning and realities of capitalist modernity in the lives of the subjects of its imperium. Marcuse asserts that “the enslavement of labour and its liberation are alike conditions that go beyond the framework of traditional political economy and affect the very foundations of human existence” (Reason and Revolution 275–76). For Marcuse, change is required at the level of consciousness. This has significant implications for my study of McCarthy. If, as I claim, McCarthy’s novels operate at the level of consciousness-­raising, there is hope that at least the direction of the dialectic of modernity might be altered and its coercive force weakened. But Marcuse’s views are characteristic of the intellectual pessimism (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” as Gramsci is reputed to have put it) that is so frequently associated with the Frankfurt School: “if the revolution has been indefinitely postponed, then nothing can save us” runs a version of the argument. For Marcuse, as for Weber, the industrial application of technology is the villain of the piece. As Weber argued, “This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism” (Protestant Ethic 181). Marcuse’s argument is that the circumstances of “machine production” create a situation in which “all personal relations between men take the form of objective relations between things” (Reason and Revolution 279). Thus reified, “man’s alienation from himself is simultaneously an estrangement from his fellow men” (279). Such dislocations and broken connections are characteristic of Horkheimer and Adorno: “For Enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion” (3–4). Similar dislocations might be said to play a significant role in the behavior of McCarthy’s 6 outcast nomads. Religion is also contaminated with the principals of modernity and the Enlightenment: Both reason and religion outlaw the principle of magic. Even in

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its resigned detachment from existence, as art, it remains dishonourable; those who practice it become vagrants, latter-day nomads, who find no domicile among the settled. Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work. Art has in common with magic the postulation of a special self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane existence. (13–14) The conflation of art and magic is important here, because the responsibility for resistance might pass to the artists, thus producing another possible avenue of optimism to add to the implicit suggestion that the reenchantment of the world is the natural response to its disenchantment. Horkheimer and Adorno leave, therefore, some space for intellectual optimism. McCarthy’s fiction in its oblique play of the spiritual and mysterious as part of a quasi-magical landscape populated by animals that exist as entities beyond mere symbols, and beyond our understanding, permits the reentry of the enchanted into a world of disenchantment (for a detailed exposition of this idea, see chapters 7, 8, and 9, this volume). Earlier I suggested that Nietzsche saw art as a means of resistance to modernity. By the time Horkheimer and Adorno are writing, however, art is contaminated to the extent that it becomes yet another function of modernity and Enlightenment rationality, its redemptive power overwhelmed in the homogeneity of mass culture: Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. (Dialectic of Enlightenment 109)



Modernity’s I and the Civilized Barbarian

One link here is to Walter Benjamin, who in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argues that the dominance of mechanization is so profound that it escapes the limits of human agency. Another is to Marcuse’s idea that machine production creates a situation in which relations between men are reduced to the same level as relations between objects (Reason and Revolution 279). Man thus becomes alienated not only from the products of his labor but also from his fellow man (279). Weber’s conviction—that “[the modern] order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force” (Protestant Ethic 181)—is the clearest link to Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. Might it be that Suttree’s rebellion against the bourgeois expectations of his family is partly a subconscious desire to dissolve the disconnects between human beings created by work of the kind Adorno and Benjamin describe? Suttree, Harrogate, and their ilk will have no part of “machine production,” nor will the protagonists of the border trilogy. I recognize that the motivation of such characters is both complex and opaque, but the background against which they exist is susceptible to the kind of analysis I offer here. My argument is that McCarthy’s fiction is oriented against the “modern order” of this constellation of thinkers, and most concerned with the possibility of resistance to it. I am not persuaded, though, by the pessimistic view of art that the Frankfurt School elucidates. Neither, I believe, is McCarthy. Hindsight tells us that some art sometimes functions as outlined here, but the proliferation and diversity of the arts in the contemporary world suggests that the position is now far more complex than the likes of Benjamin allowed. Benjamin, though, is suspicious of mechanization and technology: “Only war makes it possible to mobilise all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system” (Illuminations 234). And, like that of Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin’s approach to modernity is rooted in historical materialism: Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the

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triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. (248) For Benjamin, no escape from the dialectic of modernity seems possible—everything civilized is tainted with the rank scent of exploitation. The creation of the overarching I, the instrumental use of technology, the use of reason to justify even the most egregious aspects of capitalism, the banishment of the mediating aspects of the magical, the dominance of substructure over superstructure, and capitalism-modernity’s resulting appearance of irresistibility combine to produce what can be identified in McCarthy’s work as Western civilization. Here I cannot help but be reminded of the profoundly civilized Judge Holden in the full pomp of his reasoned cruelty, or the poverty of McCarthy’s excluded Appalachian underclass, or Suttree’s Knoxville in which a patina of civilization masks a barbarous layer beneath. Or in modernity’s will to tear down and rebuild—so evident in the same novel—in which the results are manifest in the detritus of progress that flows endlessly down the Tennessee River past the spot where Suttree fishes every day.

2

Modernity From Nihilism to Globalization

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. — her m a n melville , Moby Dick

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his chapter, as well as pursuing the themes identified in chapter 1, introduces several other notions I consider important. These include cultural geography, nationalism, local resistance, and the manner in which time and space are perceived in modernity. The analysis begins with a discussion of some of the thinkers interested in the last chapter’s construction of the destructive nature of modernity, and the ways in which such thinkers have responded to a capitalist dialectic that can often seem unbreakable. Marshall Berman, for example, offers a succinct and lucid contemporary analysis of the nature of modernity and begins an engagement with its modern champions. In the introduction to All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Berman challenges what he describes as the “neoconservative fantasy of a world purified of modernist subversion” (30): Daniel Bell wrote in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: “The modern movement disrupts the unity of culture,” “shatters the ‘rational cosmology’ that underlay the bourgeois worldview of an ordered relation between space and time,” etc, etc. If only the modernist snake could be expelled from the modern

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garden, space, time and the cosmos would straighten themselves out. Then, presumably, a techno-pastoral golden age would return, and men and machines could lie down happily together forever. (31) Berman argues that production and culture are inextricably enmeshed in ways that are simply not unraveled by a postindustrial society. Berman’s version of modernity is founded in Marx’s idea that, to continue to exist, capitalism is forced to engage in a constant process of tearing down and rebuilding (nihilism): The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the relations of production, and with them all the relations of society. . . . Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face . . . the real conditions of their lives and their relations with 1 their fellow men. (21) This is probably the definitive version of the modern environment, that environment that has brought forth a plenitude of modernist movements from Marx’s time to our own. For Berman, it is not the “modern movement” in art that “disrupts the unity of culture,” as it is for Daniel Bell and the neoconservatives, but the nature of capitalism itself. This is entirely apposite in McCarthy’s fiction: time after time his antiheroes flee escalating and terrifying changes in the economic and cultural landscapes that the fiction classifies as economic and substructural, and that Bell attributes to the superstructure of art and culture. Any of the various border crossings that feature in the Western novels, for example, are representative of this process, and the conditions faced by the Holmes and Lester Ballard are similar.



Modernity

Part of what makes McCarthy an extraordinary writer is the complexity of these characters and the entangled relationships they have to their worlds. With this in mind, it is important to note that the kinds of conditions I identify here are not intended to be exhaustive explanations of the behavior of McCarthy’s characters, but merely representations of the conditions of a modern world that in so many instances confounds them. Berman offers a version of modernity not severed from itself, not “post” itself in any way, but instead predicated on the relentless movement of its dialectic: Our nineteenth-century thinkers were simultaneously enthusiasts and enemies of modern life, wrestling inexhaustibly with its ambiguities and contradictions; their self-ironies and inner tensions were a primary source of their creative power. Their twentieth-­century successors have lurched far more toward rigid polarities and flat totalisations. Modernity is either embraced with a blind and uncritical enthusiasm, or else condemned with a neo-Olympian remoteness and contempt. (23) My response, which I hope is implicit, is to tease out from the work of McCarthy a nuanced critique of the cultural and economic conditions of modernity that acknowledges the complexities of the available responses. For Berman, the voices of Nietzsche and Marx are “contradictory, polyphonic and dialectical” (23), as, I argue, is McCarthy’s. The nature of the world plays out in their ideas, their work is performative in this sense, ever striving to characterize the impossibly rich complexity of the world. Moving on, Berman seems to have little time for the notion that we are helplessly trapped within the conditions of mechanical production (the “iron cage” of Weber and his Frankfurt School successors), any more than he has for Bell and his complex yet Panglossian interpretations. Berman has no more patience with the passivity of the Foucauldians: “the freedom [they] confer is the freedom of a beautifully formed, perfectly sealed tomb. . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains;

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however, once we grasp the total futility of it all, at least we can relax” (35). At times Berman seems to be advocating something akin to the satyagraha of Gandhi’s resistance movements: Men and movements that proclaim their enmity to capitalism may be just the sort of stimulants capitalism needs. Bourgeois society, through its insatiable drive for destruction and development, and its need to satisfy the insatiable needs it creates, inevitably produces radical ideas and movements that aim to destroy it. But its very capacity for development enables it to negate its inner negations: to nourish itself and thrive on opposition, to become stronger amid pressure and crisis than it could ever be in peace, to transform enmity into intimacy and attackers into inadvertent allies. (118–19) But Berman lapses into contradictions. It may not be the iron cage of mechanical production he posits here, nor a “perfectly sealed” Foucauldian tomb, yet the rough and chaotic dialectic of capitalism seems paradoxically to own a smooth logic from which Berman sees no way to escape. Battered and enervated, Marxist critics such as Berman see little hope for escape from the dialectic of modernity. On the evidence of his published work, McCarthy is not shackled by these ideological bonds. What his fiction offers is a rich and nuanced collection of responses to the condition of the modern world that are uncontained by what might be characterized as belief, be it in Marx, organized religion, poststructuralist philosophy, or any other system that seeks to explain an intellectually ungovernable world in its entirety. Berman perceives modernity as an ongoing condition, disrupted by different modes of production, maybe, or subject to the vicissitudes of culture and politics, but, essentially, a great dialectical stream moving toward unknown ends. Like Berman, Jurgen Habermas recognizes the adaptive flow of modernity, its continual reinvention of itself: “The secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun; It is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future” (Philosophical Discourse 2 of Modernity 5). Habermas sees Hegel as “the first philosopher to



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develop a clear concept of modernity” (7), on the grounds that Hegel recognizes that “modernity . . . will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself” (7). Much in Hegel supports this view, such as this from “Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit”: It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a birth and transition to a new period. The Spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form. . . . Frivolity as well as the boredom that open up in the establishment and the indeterminate apprehension of something unknown are harbingers of a forthcoming change. This gradual crumbling . . . is interrupted by the break of day, that like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. (Kojève 6–7) The same destructive modernity that rises endlessly and repeatedly from its own ashes is the focus of all those whose work I have examined so far. For Hegel, and to some extent, Habermas, this process is a joyous one of “continuous renewal” (7), as inevitable and irresistible as the processes of nature that require a continuous cycle of death and rebirth. Many of the defenders of modernity in the fiction of McCarthy possess this same certainty concerning the inevitability of its progress. Judge Holden is one of course. The Dueña Alfonsa is another. Although a pupil of Adorno, and a postwar inheritor of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Jurgen Habermas cannot countenance the intellectual pessimism of Horkheimer and Adorno: The Dialectic of Enlightenment does not do justice to the rational content of cultural modernity that was captured in bourgeois ideals (and also instrumentalized along with them). I am thinking here of the specific theoretical dynamic that continually pushes the sciences, and even the self-reflection of the sciences, beyond merely engendering technically useful knowledge. (Philosophical 3 Discourse of Modernity 113)

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Habermas wants to separate “instrumental reason” from a form of reason that permits beneficial development in society, politics, and culture. This is crucial for my reading of Cormac McCarthy. My argument is never that McCarthy’s fiction is positioned to oppose reason per se, but that it is skeptical and suspicious of a form of the rational that is highly instrumentalized and is used to justify manifold activities and behavior that have profound and negative consequences for the world and its human population. The veiled references to atomic power at the end of Cities of the Plain are one example of the subtlety and complexity of McCarthy’s attitudes to the problem (see chapter 9, this volume). Earlier, the screenplay “Whales and Men” devotes itself almost entirely to an exploration of the conflicts and tensions surrounding the rational exploitation of natural resources. McCarthy is at one level deeply skeptical of the rational. At another, like Habermas, he aligns himself with the rationalist tradition in the Enlightenment, which is manifest in the rise of science in which he McCarthy is evidently so interested. The project of modernity begun by eighteenth-century philosophers “consisted of their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic,” their aim being, according to Habermas, “the rational organization of everyday social life” (Waugh 165). The central tenets of the Enlightenment need to be preserved, Habermas argues: The ideas of reason, truth, justice also serve as ideals with reference to which we can criticize the traditions we inherit; though never divorced from social practices of justification, they can never be reduced to any given set of such practices. The challenge, then, is to rethink the idea of reason in line with our essential finitude—that is, with the historical, social, embodied, practical, desirous, assertive nature of the knowing and acting subject—and to recast accordingly our received humanistic ideals. (Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 20) Habermas does not accept that the premises of the Enlightenment are dead and that only their consequences continue. Habermas’s critique



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stands in direct opposition to some of the late twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. Thomas McCarthy argues this point in the introduction to Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Like [the radical critics of Enlightenment, Habermas] views reason as inescapably situated, as concretized in history, society, body, and language. Unlike them, however, he holds that the defects of the Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenment. The totalized critique of reason undercuts the capacity of reason to be critical. It refuses to acknowledge that modernization bears developments as well as distortions of reason. (xvii) Such a position is a direct counter to Foucault. For example, “Foucault cannot escape the ‘performative contradiction’ involved in using the tools of reason to criticize reason” (xv). This is a powerful and effective challenge to the critics of modernity, and a necessary antagonist to 4 many of the positions I set out in this section. It is possible to argue that McCarthy’s fiction is in a similar bind to that which Habermas ascribes to Foucault. In the creation of the judge, for example, as a monstrous embodiment of the rational, is an implicit critique that derives from the power of author and reader to reason in concert. Reason is deployed against reason. All that can happen in such cases is that reason triumphs. No challenge is offered. The novel’s understanding of this may explain why the judge lives on, and murder, wholesale destruction, and the consumption of the man are the outcomes. Instrumental reason, though, is one of the factors that McCarthy’s fiction identifies as a dangerous component in modernity, and The Road shows us the outcome of a system in which views akin to those of Holden are permitted to triumph: the annihilation by technology of most of the living planet (see chapter 5, this volume). Clearly, though, McCarthy’s critique of reason is not “totalized,” and this is a way to escape the paradox Habermas sets up. Another escape is discernable in the many hints about the possibility of reinstatement in phenomena and experiences that defy rational explanation and do not depend on technology or commodification for the conditions in which they occur (see chapters 7,

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8, and 9, this volume). An extraordinary balancing act across McCarthy’s work between the rational and the antirational transcends Habermas in its willingness to explore the contradictions implicit in a critique of the rational. There is an implicit concern, too, in McCarthy’s fiction, with the function and perception of time and space in modernity. David Harvey, in Condition of Postmodernity, argues the following: As space appears to shrink to a “global village” of telecommunications and a “spaceship earth” of economic and ecological interdependencies . . . and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is . . . so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds. (240) This kind of spatial compression conflicts with the sense of awed reverence in McCarthy’s fiction for a landscape that predates and postdates humanity, the reader is led to believe, by unimaginable stretches of time. Similarly, the valorization of an environment that seems to have resisted technological innovation carries similar implications, and the choice of the Southwest suggests a desire to work where the landscape can still provide an impression of infinite space (see chapter 9, this volume). Harvey argues that the Enlightenment was the first period in which time was perceived as homogenous and universal. He also sees a relationship between capitalism and space: The conquest and control of space, for example, first requires that it be conceived of as something usable, malleable, and therefore capable of domination through human action. Perspectivism and mathematical mapping did this by conceiving of space as abstract, homogenous, and universal in its qualities, a framework of thought and action which was stable and knowable. Euclidean geometry provided the basic language of discourse. Builders, engineers, architects, and land managers for their part showed how Euclidean representations of objective space could be converted into a spatially ordered physical landscape. Merchants and



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landowners used such practices for their own class purposes, while the absolutist state—with its concern for taxation of land and the definition of its own domain of domination and social control—likewise relished the capacity to define and produce spaces with fixed spatial co-ordinates. (254) Such an analysis of time and space is particularly resonant for my treatment of McCarthy because his landscapes so often escape the regulation imposed by the structures of thought that Harvey claims underpin modernity. Time and space in Blood Meridian, for example, are defined by the relentlessly repeated phrase “and they rode on” (more than fifty instances). McCarthy’s version of the natural world defies the kind of order Harvey mentions. The infinite complexities of landscape and weather seem, contrary to Harvey’s characterization, like disorder, and lie beyond the dominion of man: “That night they were visited with a plague of hail out of a faultless sky . . . the hail leaped in the sand like small lucent eggs concocted alchemically out of the desert darkness. When they resaddled and rode on they went for miles through cobbled ice while a polar moon rose like a blind cat’s eye up over the rim of the world” (Blood Meridian 146). This is a mysterious and paradoxical world. Harvey continues: Objective conceptions of time and space are necessarily created through material practices and processes which serve to reproduce social life. The Plains Indians or the African Nuer objectify qualities of time and space that are as separate from each other as they are distant from those ingrained within a capitalist mode of production. The objectivity of time and space is given in each case by the material practices of social reproduction, and to the degree that these latter vary geographically and historically, so we find that social time and social space are differentially constructed. (204) Clearly, if Harvey is to be believed, the ways in which time and space perceptions are created, and the fashion in which these perceptions operate, has a profound effect on cultures. It might be possible

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to argue, therefore, that by developing or resurrecting ways of perceiving time and space—ways that owe nothing to modernity and capitalism—it may be possible to create local pockets of resistance. The time of McCarthy’s Mexico, for example, is quite different from that of the United States, as is the relationship between time and place when Mexicans and Native Americans feature in the writing (see chapter 12, this volume). Different kinds of present, and different kinds of histories, are available in these encounters. Edouard Glissant, although focused mostly on the Caribbean, has a relevant take on the ways in which perceptions that resist the dominant cultural paradigm might create the possibility of alternate histories. The homogenizing function of the Western view of history, for Glissant, begins to disintegrate and is replaced by these disparate “histories,” resistant like polarized magnets to dialectical incorporation: One is struck by the geographical progression along which Marx orients his theory of models: Asiatic (remote), then ancient (that is, Mediterranean), then feudal (that is “European”), then capitalist, in the heart of the industrial cities of Europe. This presents the march towards History (towards its fulfilment) on which all converges. The histories of various peoples and their resolutions have overturned this process. History has fragmented into histories. (Caribbean Discourse 76) For Glissant, the exemplary site of this process is an idealized Caribbean: Caribbean Discourse presents the Caribbean in terms of a forest of becoming in the untamed landscape, in the human carnival, in the interplay of linguistic and aesthetic forms. Unfettered by an authoritarian language or system, the human forest . . . becomes an exemplary Caribbean space. Individual and community, tree and forest, parole (individual utterance) and langue (collective expression) interact as old hierarchies are dismantled and old associations erased. (Dash xi)



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These hybridizing and paradoxical processes that fuse individual and community allow the individual space and clarity. They are highly reminiscent of the forms of linguistic hybridity that I argue in chapters 10 and 11 are present in McCarthy’s fiction as examples of a performative challenge to modernity and capitalism. Glissant maintains that throughout the colonial process such practice was suppressed and that the social, the political, and the cultural in the Caribbean have become merely mimetic of the European dominant: “All mimesis presupposes that what is represented is ‘the only true reality.’ When it involves two realities of which one is destined to reproduce the other, inevitably those who are part of the process see themselves living in a permanent state of the unreal. This is the case with us” (242). This is a fascinating argument to apply to McCarthy’s work, which refuses to reproduce a reality that might always conform to the logic of modernity. Mimetic endeavors in literature, novels, or other works of fiction succeed only in replicating that logic. Fiction that creates alternate realities dissolves the “unreal” label by writing another reality. Such writing becomes performative rather than mimetic. McCarthy reinstates as real, for example, the supernatural but naturalistic relationship of wolves or horses to the land that the narratives of modernity have categorized as unreal. This is a form of linguistic resistance that McCarthy shares with the Caribbean peoples Glissant writes about, but also Native American writers, particularly of the Southwest, whose fiction is suffused with the kind of unreality—in the form of a spiritual relation between human, land, and animals—that runs 5 counter to modernity. The South American theorist Enrique Dussel posits three simple limits to the continued rise of modernity: destruction of the planet, extinction of human life, and “the impossibility of the subsumption of the populations, economies, nations, and cultures that [modernity] has been attacking since its origin and has excluded from its horizon and cornered into poverty” (“Eurocentrism and Modernity” 21). For Dussel, modernity’s motor, capitalism, cannot function without raw materials and labor. An environment stripped of its natural resources, in which a vast and immiserated underclass is starving and incapable

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of work, will herald the demise of capitalism and modernity (an apparent paradox in which the dialectic of modernity can be halted only by modernity itself). This is another Marxian, materialist, endof-history dialectic, the provenance of which can be traced once more 6 to Hegel. For Dussel, however, modernity can be resisted, and the crisis addressed, by thought and deed that reconvene the complexities of the dialectic of a world system on the point of subsumption. Dussel claims that one of the central destructive facets of modernity is its compulsion to simplify—particularly in areas such as “the dualism of an ego-alma without a body, teleological instrumental reason, the racism of the superiority of one’s own culture, etc.” (“Eurocentrism and Modernity” 17). These simplifications, for Dussel, derive from a paradigm inaugurated by the first expeditions to the Americas in the fifteenth century: This new paradigm corresponds to the exigencies of efficacy, technological “factibility” or governmentalism of the management of an enormous world-system in expansion; it is the expression of a necessary process of simplification through “rationalization” of the life-world, of the subsystems (economic, political, cultural, religious, etc.). Rationalization, as construed by Sombart, Troeltch, Weber, is effect and not cause. But the effects of that simplifying rationalization to manage the world-system are perhaps more profound and negative than Habermas or the postmoderns imagine. (15) Dussel’s hope is that the most egregious aspects of modernity will perish under assault from the periphery rather than from the death of the planet or the destruction of millions of lives. It might then be possible to reconstruct a framework of thought and action that begins to reflect the complexities of the world: “The subsumptive supercession (Aufhebung) of modernity will mean the critical reconsideration of all these simplifying reductions produced since its origin” (17). Dussel’s work in itself, then, becomes performative, as is McCarthy’s, as he seeks to influence the dialectical process before, during, and



Modernity

after subsumption. Dussel’s plea beyond this is for participation: “the globalizing world-system reaches a limit with the exteriority of the alterity of the Other, a locus of ‘resistance’ from whose affirmation the process of the negation of negation of liberation begins” (21). Pushed to its absolute limit, the periphery begins to refute the negation of its liberation and the course of the dialectic begins to change (see chapter 12, this volume). There are flaws in Dussel’s proposals. Most notably, perhaps, that academic calls for marginalized peoples to rise up against their oppressors have a long and inglorious history of failure. One doubts whether under these circumstances it is possible to change the direction of the dialectic of modernity at all. Such ideas feed naturally into a now fully fledged analysis of modernity in global terms. Indeed, the globalization of Eurocentric modernity is a persistent destination for the kinds of ideas I am tracing. John Tomlinson argues that simple participation at a local level must have effects on the global system 7 because globalization is a dialectical process involving both. Tomlinson relies on Anthony Giddens’s enlargement of modernity thesis for his definition of the phenomenon: “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Globalization and Culture 47). Tomlinson believes that “what ordinary people think, believe and do in their local situations counts in the sphere of global governance. This is the insight into social transformation that is encapsulated in the famous maxim of the envi8 ronmental movement: ‘think globally, act locally’” (183). There is support for this kind of view across the critical spectrum. Manthia Diawara argues that action at a local level, in tandem with the preservation of traditional approaches to trading, can have a profound effect. The African market, for example, both informs and contaminates the global system: Markets in West Africa clearly undermine official forms of globalization. . . . By producing disorder through pricing, pirating, smuggling, and counterfeiting, they participate in the resistance to multinational control of the national economy and culture. In

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this sense, it is possible to argue that markets are engaged in a struggle to keep the life-world in Africa from being recolonized by multinational systems that have an eye only for cheap labor, cheap natural resources, and devalued cultures. (121) The Mexican-US border functions as such an area also, and its unique local conditions give rise to economic and cultural phenomena that have impacts that can be unpredictable, dangerous to capitalist modernity, and even generally undesirable. There are examples of exchange and cultural métissage in McCarthy’s more pastoral moments, but there is also no shortage of violence associated with the illicit movement of drugs and bodies. Few, if any, effective regulatory mechanisms are to be found in a world in which political organizations (predominantly national governments) have long since abdicated from interfering with capitalist modernity. Capital can move around the globe almost unfettered, but labor cannot. The border trilogy recognizes, thus, the effects of the global on the local, and vice versa. As Leslie Sklair writes in “Social Movements and Global Capitalism,” “the central argument is that, although capitalism is increasingly organized on a global basis, effective opposition to capitalist practices tends to be manifest locally” (291). Sklair addresses the problem of why we have few organized movements of the kind that Dussel prescribes: The dilemma is that the only chance that people in social movements have to succeed is by disrupting the local agencies they come into direct contact with in their daily lives rather than the more global institutions whose interests these agencies are serving directly, or, more often, indirectly, while workers are often confused about who (which representations of capital) to oppose when their interests (conditions of labor, livelihoods) are threatened. Increasingly, as capitalism globalizes, subordinate groups find difficulty in identifying their adversaries. (295) Suttree’s Knoxville is an example of an environment whose existence



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is predicated on the infinitesimal acts of the local in the context of the massive preglobal pressures of modernity that bear down and project randomly into the novel at crucial moments. The novel is exemplary, also, of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of modernity. Frederic Jameson pursues this point in “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue”: Suppose that consumerism were inconsistent with democracy, that the habits and addictions of postmodern consumption block or repress possibilities of political and collective action as such? We may remember . . . that historically the invention of mass culture as a component of Fordism was the very source of the famous American exceptionalism: that is to say, that what permitted a federalism, a melting pot, a management of class struggle, in the United States, as against most other countries in the world, was precisely our unique system of mass culture and consumption as that displaced energies in new consensus-governed directions. It becomes ironic, then, when mass culture is offered as a space of democratization, let alone resistance, as many participants in the globalization debate have tended to do. (69) Jameson’s argument is more persuasive than many others that advocate a confrontation with global modernity from within its own networks and structures. It is not possible in Jameson’s model to locate in mass culture a route toward democratization. If we require a fairer world, the entire philosophical edifice of Western civilization may have to be rethought. If the phenomenon of globalization promotes mass culture, then it is difficult to make it function in the interests of those who want a fairer world. Again, these issues occupy McCarthy in significant ways in his two most recent novels. No Country for Old Men offers us a world in which there is no way to confront one’s adversaries successfully in the face of mediated consumption and use of technologized weaponry, both of which are predicated on economic power. It makes little difference in this novel on which side the law operates because modernity has exercised hegemonic power across the political spectrum. The Road then offers the reader the

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possible consequences if we do not rethink the networks of consumption that render us apolitical and incapable of resistance. Beyond this, the displacements and ruptures that globalization creates tend to obviate any kind of local resistance. Local populations are increasingly subject to deterritorialization—“the disembedding of social activity from contexts of presence . . . the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (Tomlinson 55), or “the loss of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories” (García Canclini 229). The notion of deterritorialization has important implications for my work on McCarthy in the context of cultural geography, in particular the way in which he adopts rhetorical techniques to place landscapes beyond the reach of modernity. The creation of a “border,” for example, that becomes a space of resistance and reenchantment, as McCarthy has Billy Parham et al. wander south in an unconscious search for a “natural relation” to land and culture. Certain strains of thinking on modernity, however, take the notion of subsumption to a point at which modernity’s triumph is complete. The thrust of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s philosophy is that there is no longer any inside or outside (Empire 58) to global capitalism or modernity—the Empire of the title for Hardt and Negri—and “the formal subsumption of the non-capitalist environment is complete” 9 (55). There are no territorial limits because empire penetrates all levels of the social order: “Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its own ethical order. In other words, Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal, and necessary” (11). Also, “history has ended precisely and only to the extent that it is conceived in Hegelian terms—as the movement of a dialectic of contradictions, a play of absolute negations and subsumptions” (189). Hardt and Negri have, it seems, their own version of the end-of-history narrative, the logic of which may well end in global conditions akin to No Country for Old Men or The Road. The notion of individual action at a local level seems largely redundant in this scenario: “‘The personal is the political’ has been reversed in such a way that the boundaries between private and public have been fractured, unleashing circuits of control. . . . The crisis of the



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prison means that carceral logics and techniques have spread to other domains of society” (Hardt and Negri 197). Modernity and global capitalism have fused and created a population that disciplines itself accordingly. “Power is now exercised directly through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity” (285). Power has thus achieved effective command; it has become biopower. A network, or grid, of communications has been created both internally and externally: This is why communications industries have assumed such a central position. They not only organize production on a new scale and impose a new structure adequate to global space, but also make its justification immanent. Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itself as authority. (286) There is hope, however: “We have to recognize where in the transnational networks of production, the circuits of the world market, and the global structures of capitalist rule there is potential for rupture and the motor for a future that is not simply doomed to repeat the past cycles of capitalism” (239). Paradoxically, Hardt and Negri claim that these ruptures allow resistance to develop, a resistance centered in the notions of migration, mobility, desertion, exodus, and miscegenation—all notions that could be applied to McCarthy’s border nomads. Hardt and Negri, though, see neoliberalism as a system predicated on the attack on social provision, the disposal of public goods to the private sector, deregulation, unfettered free trade, and the freedom from sanction of both the corporation and the states that have come to resemble it. McCarthy does not identify a system precisely akin to the one Hardt and Negri describe, but the later novels include powerful intimations of a clear understanding of a wholly new and sinister domination of the planet by a version of modernity so insidious that it pervades every aspect of existence and dictates the fundamentals of that existence. Hardt and Negri’s version of alienation, for example, could apply to many of McCarthy’s

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characters, but particularly to John Grady Cole, Billy Parham, and Llewellyn Moss in their confused relationship to freedom and authority and their sense that something beyond their power to name is terribly wrong in the world. On a larger scale, McCarthy’s writing is much concerned with the manner in which the global permeates the local, and with shifts beyond the purely North American. How the writing addresses global issues at a local level is evident in No Coun­ try for Old Men, for example, in the representation of cocaine smuggling on the US-Mexican border, which has become by this time a truly global enterprise. It is also clear in Blood Meridian, in the willingness to address geographically and historically distant issues at the same time that the novel establishes a relationship to the geopolitics of Southeast Asia in its indirect focus on the Vietnam War. The strongest recognition of the global in McCarthy’s fiction, however, is the capacity of humanity to be so thoroughly colonized by an ultimately nihilistic modernity that it destroys itself in apocalypse, which it does in The Road, where alienation is driven to its ultimate pessimistic destination.

3

Modernity and the West Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy

Everything is permitted. —fyodor dostoyevsk y, The Brothers Karamazov

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he border trilogy records, in meticulous detail, the powerlessness in the face of modernity of characters who roam the borderlands in response to forces the nature of which they cannot articulate, yet who feel the effects of these forces in a variety of profound ways. This accounts, in part, for the sense of wistfulness that infuses the novels, and that travels beyond mere rosy nostalgia for the romanticized life of the cowboy. All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain show McCarthy expanding his range of themes while maintaining a shifting backdrop of ever more complex constructions of modernity. Before the border trilogy arrives, however, McCarthy offers the reader Blood Meridian, a novel entirely unwilling to flinch from the blood and horror that is concomitant with the development of late modernity’s 1 dialectic. One character dominates the novel, one who is the European Enlightenment made flesh. Judge Holden, Blood Meridian’s archon of the modern, has been described as many things in many ways, from simply evil (most people on reading the novel for the first time), to “memorably bizarre” (Wallach, “Blood Meridian’s Evil Archon” 1), to a “great pale djinn” (Blood Meridian 96). And Samuel Chamberlain describes the “real” Holden as a “cool blooded villain” (306). The list in its entirety is catholic, but it demonstrates that arriving at a settled view of Judge Holden is impossible. For my purposes, Holden is the supreme avatar of the European Enlightenment in modern fiction, the 37

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embodiment of that from which the protagonists of the border trilogy flee as they grope blindly for a way to displace a nameless system that threatens to consume their world as they know it. Steven Shaviro is close to my position when he remarks of Blood Meridian: “We might be tempted to say that whereas all the other characters kill casually and thoughtlessly, out of greed or blood lust or some other trivial cause, only the judge kills out of will and conviction and a deep commitment to the cause and canons of Western rationality” (149). In the person of Holden and the idea of “suzerainty” McCarthy summons a figure that embodies Horkheimer and Adorno’s terrible vision of a line of direct genealogical descent, not from savagery to civilization but from the arrow to the atom bomb, and from Hegel to Hitler: The liberation of citizens from the injustice of the feudalistic and absolutist past served to unleash modern machinery through liberalism, just as the emancipation of women led to their development into a military force. The spirit and all that is good in its origins and existence are inextricably caught up in this network of horror. The serum which a doctor gives a sick child is obtained by attacking defenceless animals. The endearing words of lovers and the holiest symbols of Christianity contain traces of the pleasure felt in devouring the flesh of a kid, just as this pleasure itself reflects an ambiguous respect for the totem animal. (222–23) Freed by the Enlightenment from the spiritual and physical bonds of a society constructed on belief and in which God was the ultimate and irrefutable authority, man represented by Holden is empowered to reject faith, to usurp control of the world and its inhabitants, and to experiment in the name of knowing and the rational. In this context, Holden’s violence is merely part of a scientific investigation into the nature of all objects and phenomena, and becomes a necessary 2 part of a larger project. McCarthy portrays Holden as neither insane nor irrational but instead as the representative of a wholly rational, teleological process forced to its apotheosis in what is destined to be modernity’s triumph of the technological, the rational, and the instrumental:



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Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. What’s a suzerain? A keeper. A keeper or overlord. Why not say keeper then? Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. Toadvine spat. The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said. The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his 3 own fate. (Blood Meridian 198–99) The rational man is a master of masters, a king among kings, elevated by the pursuit of knowledge and its ruthless application. History moves toward its end point, the dominion of man over all things.

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It is as well at this point to recall Enrique Dussel’s Hegelian formulation of Eurocentric modernity, a version imported for Dussel wholesale into the Americas as part of the colonial project: We are now in a position to summarize the elements of the myth of modernity. (1) Modern (European) civilization understands itself as the most developed, the superior civilization. (2) This sense of superiority obliges it, in the form of a categorical imperative, as it were to “develop” (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations. (3) The path of such development should be that followed by Europe in its own development out of antiquity and the Middle Ages. (4) Where the barbarian or the primitive opposes the civilizing process, the praxis of modernity must, in the last instance, have recourse to the violence necessary to remove the obstacles to modernization. (5) This violence, which produces, in many different ways, victims, takes on an almost ritualistic character: the civilizing hero invests his victims (the colonized, the slave, the woman, the ecological destruction of the earth etc.) with the character of being participants in a process of redemptive sacrifice. (6) From the point of view of modernity, the barbarian or primitive is in a state of guilt (for, among other things, opposing the civilizing process). This allows modernity to present itself not only as innocent but also as a force that will emancipate or redeem its victims from their guilt. (7) Given this ‘civilizing’ and redemptive character of modernity, the suffering and sacrifices (the costs) of modernization imposed on “immature” peoples, enslaved races, the “weaker” sex, et cetera, are inevitable and necessary. (“Eurocen4 trism and Modernity” 75) The mission to “civilize” is implicit in many of McCarthy’s accounts of the interaction between Western culture and its other. The modernity espoused by Holden is alien in the Americas, it is a wholly European phenomenon in its origin. Judge Holden’s education is plainly Eurocentric: “It was Paris this and London that in five languages” (123); and “he adduced for their consideration references to the



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children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences” (84–85). Holden declaims “in the old epic mode” (118), adopting a discourse belonging to the world of the neoclassical with all its reverence for the proportion of the Greek and Roman. According to John Sepich, Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession, which is McCarthy’s source for Holden, “gives the reader an appreciation of the judge’s uncommonly advanced education” (17). Sepich notes that Chamberlain implies what Holden knows of current thought across a range of disciplines must proceed from origins beyond the shores of North America. Sepich writes, “for example, Sir Charles Lyell’s revolutionary Principles of Geology was published in England in 1833, but Lyell’s work did not become current in North America until his visits there in the 1840s” (17)—a period later than the point at which Judge Holden makes his remarks. Holden’s Eurocentric philosophy is profoundly foreign in the “new world” and anathema to its very fabric and peoples. The inscription on his gun reveals the colonizing impulse generated in modernity, and his own alien and corrupting nature: Et in Arcadia Ego, “even in paradise there am I.” McCarthy creates of Holden a direct response to Immanuel Kant’s question “What is enlightenment?” Kant’s answer identifies a key feature in Holden’s psychology and behavior: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity . . . laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life” (Kant 54). Cowardice and laziness do not exist in Holden’s embodiment of the lexicon of civilized human characteristics: none control Holden’s destiny but Holden, his debt is not to “alien guidance,” but to himself alone as the everyman of the Enlightenment, liberated to make sense of the world according to reason. By contrast, the Native American “savage,” sunk in idleness and immaturity and reliant on interpretations of the world that lie outside the scope of the rational, becomes the figure in Blood Meridian against whom modernity must, to

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impose its civilizing mission, take up arms with the utmost prejudice. Holden is subtle, though: he studies and records Anasazi ruins, noting a civilization the remnants of which now “stand in judgment on the latter races” (146). His subsequent conclusion, “All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage” (146), allows him the opportunity to argue for the removal of the “lower order” (the Apache, the Yuma, indeed all the extant Native American tribes or nations) using the bloodiest and most callous means of outmatching the “nameless rage” to which he refers. It is this process that renders Holden’s violence the most shocking in the long catalog in Blood Meridian. Still conditioned to recognize only the “civilized” aspects of their own culture, the Western reader tends to find the extreme acts of the judge particularly horrifying. Indeed, McCarthy’s use of some of the most graphically violent images to appear in Western literature is explained in the desire to shock Western readers into an awareness of the dark side of a culture always so keen to celebrate its glories: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” 5 (Benjamin, Illuminations 248). More is adduced by McCarthy of Holden’s Enlightenment credentials: Holden’s use of the Swiftian term Yahoos to describe the Apache, for example, functions both to reinforce his Eurocentric outlook and to highlight the immaturity of the “savage.” Swift’s Yahoos were degenerates, covered in hair, dark-skinned, and possessing disproportionately large hands with long, claw-like fingernails, the antithesis of 6 the notion of the civilized and educated man of the Enlightenment. The judge could scarcely be further removed from this savage­r ymade-flesh with his small manicured hands, his hairlessness, his elegant and agile feet, and his pink skin. Holden is above all things evolved. The comparison here is fascinating, between the judge and a character from Chippewa mythology, the Great Gambler, who, according to the oral histories recorded by Gerald Vizenor, “ha[d] never been beaten in his game and who lives beyond the realm of darkness . . . a curious being, a person who seemed almost round in shape, smooth and white” (4–5). To further the comparison with Holden, it might be argued that to gamble (or to choose not to, as



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gamblers often do) is the apotheosis of rationality because it depends on statistical and mathematical certainties provided by odds. The Great Gambler, however, unlike Holden, is defeated, in this case by the trickster figure of Naanabozho, who saves the world from darkness. It is believed by Chippewas that Naanabozho created good and evil, men and women, even the white man. Interestingly, in “The Seventh Direction, or Suttree’s Vision Quest,” William Spencer compares Cornelius Suttree with the generic trickster figure of Native American legend: As Paul Lauter explains, “The trickster figure, stereotyped as alone and wandering on the margins of the social world, frequently engages in socially unacceptable acts to call attention to the arbitrary and tentative nature of established cultural patterns.” Suttree certainly matches this description: he lives alone; he’s a wanderer; he’s at times a lawbreaker; and he challenges the ingrained value system of his society through his deliberately chosen lifestyle of voluntary poverty. (105) What may appear superficially as a series of arbitrary connections reveal McCarthy’s extraordinarily broad knowledge of North America and its peoples, past and present. Even at the outer margins of human endurance, as he pursues the kid and the ex-priest across yet another tortured and torturing landscape, the judge creates a strange and oddly elegant parasol from the remains of desert creatures with which to defend himself against the harmful rays of the sun. The freshly liberated idiot accompanies him “like a pet dog in a grotesque parody of a boulevardier indulging in a morning constitutional” (Monk, “An Impulse to Action” 87). Holden’s understanding of himself and his relationship with the world is founded in the notion that the civilized man must always embody or perform his condition no matter how adverse the circumstances; he can never be too idle to construct the appurtenances of a mature society and so make it real. In the same episode, the mechanics of Holden’s methods are revealed. If buying what he requires fails, he will obtain what he needs through coercion. Toadvine sells him his hat;

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Brown, his horses and gun. Modernity’s economic analogue, capitalism, cannot tolerate what may not be brought into its unity by pur7 chase or coercion. Whatever loss modernity has suffered must be replaced by further consumption. The judge finds, however, that the kid is resistant: he cannot be bought, neither he nor his possessions can be redefined as commodities in a system of exchange that benefits disproportionately those already in possession of the greater resources. The recusant kid rejects the seamless unity that modernity requires to fulfill its project. His actions disrupt the flow of the dialectic of capitalism, and by extension modernity, that demand that difference is folded continually into relentless, self-regenerating syntheses. As a result, Holden’s hatred is forced to move from implied hypostasis into clearly articulated specifics: You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgment on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgments of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. (307) With a nameless purpose, the kid has resisted the dialectic of modernity. This cannot stand for the judge. So long as the kid lives, even should he repent, the enmity must remain, transcending all other conditions until the judge consumes, absorbs, or synthesizes (negates, in Hegelian terms) the kid in the jakes at the end of the novel. What is demonstrated here is modernity’s desperate need for synthesis, but synthesis in which a dominant thesis absorbs an antithesis that cannot alter the essence of the existing thesis but must add to its momentum. Holden’s faith in reason makes him a matchless exemplar of modernity in the fiction. It is no accident that the character who seeks domination of the earth through an unleavened rationality is the most terrifying of all McCarthy’s creations: “There is no mystery to it, [Holden] said. The recruits blinked dully. Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery” 8 (252). Nothing supernatural, spiritual, or enchanted can remain. It is not the sleep of reason, McCarthy’s fiction suggests, that produces



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monsters but reason’s very consciousness. McCarthy twice uses the following quotation from Cervantes in his work: “Beware Gentle Knight there is no greater monster than reason.” The first occasion is in the unpublished screenplay “Whales and Men” (91/97/6/59); the second appears in All the Pretty Horses (146) and is spoken by Alejandra’s father to John Grady Cole. The use of the quotation in “Whales and Men” is particularly relevant because it is given by McCarthy to a character, Guy, who is horrified by what he perceives as the impending ecological destruction of the planet—“the empty sea will reflect back to us our empty souls” (129)—and who is revolted by the human capacity for instrumental reason irrespective of “secondary” consequences. Guy compares an abandoned whaling station with what remains of the concentration camp at Dachau— both of which he has seen—and despairs that “our works cannot save us” (115). It is clear that McCarthy’s interest in instrumental reason is an abiding one, and instances of Holden’s use of the rational in this fashion are legion in Blood Meridian. Means are always justified by ends. On many of these occasions, physical discomfort is nothing to the judge; nor is the “normal” revulsion he might be expected to feel as he creates firing powder for the rifles from a huge mound of bat guano, sulfur, and other elements, moistened by human urine: “He was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls . . . and laughin and working up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it” (132). Holden’s willingness to engage in such activities, and to kill without discrimination and for material gain is, of course, both his most egregious characteristic and part of McCarthy’s comment on the soiled underbelly of democracy and capitalism. Invested with a commission from the governor of Chihuahua for the scalps of the Apache, neither Holden nor the rest of the Glanton gang have any hesitation in murdering the local populace they are employed to protect. All are equal. Neither babies nor children are exempt from the equation of death for profit: the scalped Apache boy is testament (164). As the judge declares, “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak” (250). For Holden, violence and blood are the whole of the law, a kind of

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secular Eucharist. I am reminded of Dussel’s assertion that violence has a “ritualistic quality,” and that the participants are engaged “in a 10 process of redemptive sacrifice.” As Holden says, “Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance” (331). To paraphrase, only that man immersed in and stained with the ritualistically shed blood of lesser races and nations is fit to bear the standard of Western civilization. Holden continues: “[War] becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby the dance will become a false dance and the dancers false dancers” (331). These processes also have a ritual, ceremonial element. As Holden informs the kid at their penultimate meeting in the bar, in which the dancing bear is slain, One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. . . . We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to . . . the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? (329) Modernity is a profoundly bloody condition in which the bonds between its participants are cemented by the quasi-ritualistic violence necessary to ensure the progress of a dialectic that insists the “immature” be party to this redemptive sacrificial process. But beyond this, modernity assumes a naturalistic-hegemonic position in which, to combat the emptiness at its center, it produces the negations (assimilations or transformations, in Hegelian terms) that fuel it. Other threads in Blood Meridian preempt the emergence in the later novels of the resistance McCarthy’s fiction suggests may be possible to Holden and his version of modernity. It is evident from the



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remarks of the narrator that much mystery remains in the world. As the kid squats on the beach at San Diego toward the end of the novel, the narrator describes the ocean as “out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea” (394). Indeed, the epilogue to the novel refers explicitly to the antithesis of the rational and scientific in its acknowledgment of the creator that modernity seeks to abolish at the very moment in which it represents the westward journey of America: “In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there” (337). John Gast’s American Progress from 1872 features a caption by George A. Crofutt: “American Progress” is depicted as a light-haired woman, classically dressed, who is leading the Americans west. She guides and protects miners, farmers, covered wagons, railroads, and even a stage coach, displacing Indian families and the buffalo of the Great Plains. She is stringing the transcontinental telegraph cable wire with one hand and holds a book in the other. The concept of Manifest Destiny—the idea that American conquest of the west was a sign of progress, taking civilization and prosperity to unenlightened peoples—provided a rationalization to Americans who displaced the Indians and other people of color who had long lived in California and other parts of the country west of the Mississippi. Most important, though, the painting shows the land yet unconquered as dark ahead of progress (modernity) who is yet in these regions to “strike the fire from the rock”—a metaphor, on another level, for the process of the transformation of the resources of the natural world into manufactured commodities. The paradox is fascinating and has led to endless speculation over the meaning of the epilogue. George Guillemin describes it “as allegorizing the mindless westward progress of civilization” (98). The openings made in the

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ground by McCarthy’s holemaker are a relentless reiteration of the rational, of an order controlled by cause and effect: “On the plain behind [the holemaker] the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search . . . and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a verification of sequence and causality” (337). Yet this does not account for the reference to God. What is manifest here, as McCarthy’s fiction begins its journey from the extensive and thoroughly intellectualized analysis of Eurocentric modernity in Blood Meridian to a more mysterious Southwest in the border trilogy, is that a search is beginning for the existence of ways to resist it. There is further evidence of Blood Meridian’s understanding of modernity, such as the recognition that the post-Renaissance construction of human existence as discrete sets of individual consciousness is novel, and that the reality may have been different in earlier times. As we learn of the Glanton gang during an episode in the wilderness, they were “like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gond­ wanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all” (172). This seems to me to prefigure the implicit notion that appears in The Crossing, that each human life is in some way all human life, and is an explicit comment on the notion of the hermetic I so vigorously advo11 cated and supported by the forces of capitalism and modernity. This I, this imperishable, devouring everyman demanded by the processes of production and consumption is, perhaps, the I that Holden in his triumph refers to in the closing paragraph of the novel—the notion of an I that will never die, an I that will remain forever dancing to the tune of Western civilization. Holden’s ongoing dance and his repeated assertion of immortality—his extraordinarily dynamic nature driving forward not only himself but also the processes of history—can be read as an allegory of the irresistible progress of the same modernity. Holden is, then, the starkest of McCarthy’s representations of modernity, but he is by no means alone. The first few pages of The Crossing,



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for example, conflate a stance that includes both opposition to the project of modernity and overt ecological concerns. The wolf becomes both signifier and prescient being, alien to modernity: “The beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood” (7). The post-Columbian project on the North American continent is constituted of bloodthirsty colonialists, alien, self-deifying, and naked in the image of Judge Holden. The border trilogy features a large cast of supporting characters to McCarthy’s heroes, whose status tends to depend on their attitudes to modernity. They are privileged as beneficial or are condemned as harmful according to their position. The blind ex-revolutionary in The Crossing, for example, reserves his condemnation for an everyman whose description matches that of Holden: “This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new” (293). Such remarks seem a direct rebuke to Holden’s “that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by that decision alone have taken charge of the world” (Blood Meridian 199). The blind man’s idea is that attempts to force the world to show itself in its true order must fail precisely because it has none. There is also the dying Mexican from whom Billy seeks advice on how to trap the wolf, and who rejects the notion that the world can be ordered in accordance with the desires of humanity: “He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there” (The Crossing 134). Modernity’s insistence on an underlying order that can be read by means of rational thought is questioned. Holden’s notion that the

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blood of the slain is of consequence only to those who shed that blood is also challenged. The Mexican kidnapper from whom Billy and Boyd rescue Boyd’s girl represents both the determinism of the kind beloved of Holden, and the process of cause and effect featured in the epilogue to Blood Meridian: “He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny” (The Crossing 379). Relevant, too, is the “German Huertista named Wirtz who was a captain in the federal army” (The Crossing 276), a man capable in the novel of literally sucking out the eyeballs of other men. A footnote, maybe, but one that supports Dussel’s characterization of the European as created in the image of the violence and blood that define the colonial project. McCarthy reminds his readers that wars of conquest continue apace on the European continent dictated, some would argue, by the misdirected but ongoing “civilizing” projects of the Enlightenment and modernity. The Dueña Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses remarks to John Grady in this connection that “the political tragedy in Spain was rehearsed in full dress twenty years earlier on Mexican soil” (230). Her views informed by a European education, Alfonsa was at first a romantic, but she abandoned herself to the certainties of modernity: “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality” (238). John Grady’s powerful belief in the redemptive power of romantic love attracts the sympathy of Alejandra’s aunt, but the intervention of a grim and rational pragmatism is not long delayed: “You will see that those things which disposed me in your favor were the very things which led me to decide against you in the end” (231). I argue in chapter 8 that romance is sidelined in modernity, consigned to the same category as religion, and Alfonsa’s response indicates this. As Horkheimer and Adorno claim, “the program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 3). Why does John Grady seek escape in romantic love? What motives lie beneath Billy’s



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journey with the wolf beyond his occasional laconic admission that he really doesn’t know? What drives the kid’s movements in Blood Meridian? There are quotidian reasons in some cases, of course: the search for the stolen horses in The Crossing and Billy’s desire to retrieve Boyd’s bones. My argument is that the metaknowledge that generates flight and movement in McCarthy’s wanderers is an understanding that modernity is hard on their heels and will consume their lives. Generated in this flight are a series of crises in the lives of the kid, Billy Parham, Boyd Parham, John Grady Cole, even Jimmy Blevins, that guarantee the failure of their attempts. These crises, be they wistful or brutal, reflect the inescapability of the modern. There are dissenting voices however. In The Crossing, the “wild Indians”— themselves marginalized by modernity to the point of extinction— warn Billy Parham that to seek to escape is merely to invite ever-­ deepening crisis: He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. (134) Disengagement from the world is an impossible abdication and there is no escape from the way of the world: “The world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one” (134). Characteristically, Billy ignores this advice, continuing to wander back and forth across the border. This section, like the epilogue to Blood Meridian, is interesting in that it offers two opposing notions. On the one hand, to wander in flight from modernity is pointless, as the latter’s triumph is inevitable. On the other hand, there is evidence of the notion of the need for movement away from individuality, and toward a clearer

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sense in which all things (people included) are of the same larger body if modernity is to be resisted. For McCarthy’s wanderers, the possibility of escape from modernity exists in nomadism, frequently in animals and occasionally in romantic love. These themes appear consistently across the range of McCarthy’s work: Outer Dark’s vagrants, the homeless Lester Ballard, or Cornelius Suttree’s chosen life of a secular twentieth-century anchorite. The kid in Blood Meridian is condemned by circumstances and personality to run with animals and killers; John Grady Cole seeks love in his multiple crossings of the Mexican border while engaged in quasi-mystical relationships with his horses; Billy Parham longs for an impossible proximity to the ineffable she-wolf; and Boyd perishes wandering Mexico with his girl beneath “the deep cyanic sky . . . where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of men” (The Crossing 301). These escapes, though, seem always to defeat themselves: The nature of the opposition offered by the characters to the rational world of modernity is seeded with self-destruction: Billy returns from Mexico penniless and bereft in The Crossing, John Grady Cole is twice torn away from a potential wife and is destroyed repeating a well-rehearsed pattern in Cities of the Plain, the kid is consumed by the monstrous Holden, and Boyd dies young in Mexico. The characters enter into an otherwordly relationship with their means of escape which does nothing to postpone crises in the “real” worlds to which they must return. Horses and wolves offer no permanent solution, neither does romantic love, vagrancy defeats itself, the relentless questing fails to satisfy the “undefined wants” contained in Bertrand Russell’s venerable definition of the nature of artistic endeavour, a definition that both characterises the development of McCarthy’s novels and encapsulates the nomadism of his characters. For Russell the will to artistic exegesis consists in: “An impulse to action, an undefined want” but “until the want is satisfied it is impossible to know the nature of what will satisfy it” (707). Billy Parham



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might be speaking for all McCarthy’s wanderers in his response to the wife of the blind revolutionary in The Crossing: “He said he did not know what the end of his journey would look like or whether he would know it when he got there” (354). At a particular level what McCarthy’s protagonists seek is the dereliction of modernity, but the want remains just beyond the grasp of consciousness and rational thought—which is where it must remain, for to acknowledge this rationality would be to embrace by recognition the very thing from which they desire to escape. Thus, it might be argued in McCarthy the flight from modernity into irresolvable crisis becomes the work of art. (Monk, “Impulse to Action” 92) For the protagonists of the border trilogy, the nature of modernity is less clearly embodied than for the kid in Blood Meridian—there is no Judge Holden from whom to flee. So the impulse to action, the undefined want that characterizes their actions, engages the antitheses of modernity: the mysterious, the mystical, and the enchanted. A confrontation with the real world of modernity might be averted for John Grady Cole and Boyd Parham through a commitment to romantic love. The pimp Eduardo’s taunts are disturbingly perceptive here: “In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it is his hunger for mysteries that has undone him. Whores. Superstition. Finally death” (Cities of the Plain 253). Eduardo mocks John Grady on two levels: for his irrational love of an epileptic whore, and for his belief in the mysterious and mystical. Romantic love and a quasi-spiritual attachment to wolves and horses form a kind of metonymy in the novels for antimodernity. In the ineffability represented here is a response to the reason and instrumentality embodied by Judge Holden. McCarthy’s wanderers long to unite with this mystery, and by doing so, they defy the rational at an ontological level: 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

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mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it. (The Crossing 127) Horses have a similar preternatural power: “And they [the horses] moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised” (All the Pretty Horses 162). These demi-­ spiritual voices in the wilderness with which McCarthy’s protagonists challenge the oppression of modernity seek to deny against all odds Horkheimer and Adorno’s formulation that permits the rational and instrumental aspects of Enlightenment to rout out and destroy the supernatural and the magical: “The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 5). Animism is a key component in the resistance of the border trilogy to modernity as it is offered by McCarthy as a way to denature the toxins of a poisonous dialectic. In All the Pretty Horses, these resistant and charmed figurations combine to this end: The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been. (23) John Grady is placed in an inescapable constellation of being with the horse: one does not exist without the other. The passage also suggests



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the ancient and unmistakable narrative of the quest in which the hero wanders the world in search of his prize. This kind of wandering, this nomadism, is anathema to the settled societies that gave rise to the European Enlightenment: [Deleuze and Guattari] extol nomadism which liberates Being, in contrast, perhaps to a settled way of life, with its law based upon the intolerant root. Already Kant, at the beginning of Critique of Pure Reason, had seen similarities between skeptics and nomads, remarking also that, from time to time “they break the social bond.” He seems thus to establish correlations between, on the one hand, a settled way of life, truth and society and, on the other nomadism, skepticism, and anarchy. (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 11) The wandering Jew, the itinerant gypsy, the economic migrant, all have been or continue to be perceived by modernity as dangerous or threatening. Although few would deny it, it may be necessary to remind some of the fate of the Jews and the gypsies under Hitler and Stalin, and fear concerning immigration is on the rise in many places across Europe and elsewhere. Contempt for gypsies is open in Europe, and caravan-dwelling travelers have been systematically evicted and harassed almost to the point of extinction by the authorities. The US government’s compelling need to place Native Americans on reservations can be read as a manifestation of Eurocentric modernity’s antinomadic thrust writ large on North American soil. Throughout the border trilogy, from Blevins to the diva of the traveling opera, to the peripatetic tribes of Indians, to the priest who talks to Billy Parham of the nomadic anchorite, to the transient agricultural workers who rescue Boyd after his wounding, to the casual vaqueros who are constant in the work, nomads and wanderers are set in opposition to 12 this social tendency and treated sympathetically. In contridiction to this, permanent settlements are dealt with pejoratively. This is most evident in The Crossing, where the rooted structure tends to be figured as contaminating, a threat, or alien: the generic town, for example, or the prison, or the earthquake-damaged church, but most

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significantly the haciendas that capture all local resources in their orbit. The Babicora is, of course, the most poisonous of these enterprises. It is no surprise that it belongs in the novel—as it did in reality—to one of capitalist modernity’s most emblematic families of the period, the extraordinarily powerful Hearsts. Glissant’s observation on Deleuze and Guattari is apposite here: “[They] criticized notions of the root, and even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it” (Poet­ ics of Relation 11). McCarthy’s nomads present a direct challenge to this rootedness: the Parhams and John Grady threaten the stability of such enterprises with their very being. No coherent challenge emerges, of course, such coherence is contradictory to the ontology of the nomad in any case. But even though Blevins is shot dead, John Grady and Boyd die young, Billy’s wanderings leave him a solitary vagrant, the “wild Indians” are marginalized, and the primadonna is forced to acknowledge that “long voyages often lose themselves” (230), McCar­ thy posits an alternate to the hegemonic system. This is, however, a weak and unfocused kind of resistance. By the time the reader reaches the end of Cities of the Plain, two years into the new millennium, Billy Parham is to be found, excluded by the imperatives with which he could never come to grips, sheltering beneath a freeway bridge. In Billy’s line of sight, the architectonics of the fiction’s construction of modernity are reflected in the architectural brutalism of the construction site. Billy peers into the half-light: A big yellow Euclid truck was standing out on the mud and the pale and naked concrete pillars of an east-west onramp stood beyond the truck, curving away, clustered and rising without capital or pediment like the ruins of some older order standing in the dusk. . . . Out on the desert to the west stood what he took for one of the ancient spanish missions of that country but when he studied it again he saw that it was the round white dome of a radar tracking station. (289) McCarthy shows us what Billy wants to see at the same time as he



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offers the unadorned reality. Billy continues to reach for the spiritual at some level, to project the premodern onto the modern: Beyond that and partly overcast also in the moonlight he saw a row of figures struggling and clamoring silently in the wind. They appeared to be dressed in robes and some among them fell down in their struggling and rose to flail again. He thought they must be laboring toward him across the darkened desert yet they made no progress at all. They had the look of inmates in a madhouse palely gowned and pounding mutely at the glass of their keeping. He called to them but his shout was carried away on the wind and in any case they were too far to hear him. . . . In the morning the storm had passed and what he saw out on the desert in the new day’s light were only rags of plastic wrapping hanging from a fence where the wind had blown them. (289) The robed and struggling figures of Billy Parham’s night are no more than modernity’s refuse. As Billy internalizes change he cannot comprehend, the system seems to triumph. The cupolas of Spanish missions have been synthesized into radar domes, the “older order” that represented the antithesis to modernity’s thesis is actually the fabric of a freeway overpass, and the incarcerated unreason of the crazed and trapped figures Billy sees in the moonlight are subsumed into symbols of reasoned devotion to consumption as rags of plastic. The epilogue of Cities of the Plain sees older worlds and ontologies syn13 thesized, leaving only faint traces and echoes of what went before. Past and present, old and new, become absorbed into a hermetic whole. Time, and human perception of time, become agents of modernity. The past is viewed only in the light of now, and the future is hurried into the past in the evanescent millisecond of the present: “But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered?” (273). The stranger Billy meets under the bridge seems to indicate that time in the dialectic of modernity is a perfectly

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synthesized whole that exists only in the present, but is moving inexorably toward perfection and the end of history. Such a position is characteristic of Hegel: The time-process, according to Hegel, is from the less to the more perfect, both in an ethical and in a logical sense. Indeed these two senses are, for him, not really distinguishable, for logical perfection consists in being a closely-knit whole, without ragged edges, without independent parts, but united, like a human body, or still more like a reasonable mind, into an organism whose parts are interdependent and all work together towards a single end. (Russell 706) The stranger’s philosophy of time and history, however, challenge Hegel’s notion of the absorption of the past in synthesis. The stranger wishes the world to perceive the past uncontaminated by the present: “The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future. At the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core are no idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out” (Cities of the Plain 281). In this, he is closer to Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that history be used as a tool to disrupt modernity: The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. . . . History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. (Illuminations 261) Benjamin recognizes that the Hegelian view of time renders empty (by virtue of a dialectical process that produces only homogeneity) any period but the synthesized present. The total domination of past by present is required to drive the unifying project into the future. For



Modernity and the West

both Benjamin and McCarthy’s stranger, the past must somehow be wrenched out of synthesis that it might challenge the present. Billy, however, does not heed the stranger’s words, or is incapable of understanding them. The possibility of resistance evaporates in the desert night. McCarthy’s novels seem to understand the hydra of modernity perfectly. From the figure of the nomadic gypsy engaged in the bizarre task of moving the wreckage of airplanes from wilderness to civilization comes the most succinct summation of the border trilo14 gy’s perception of modernity’s grasp of the world. “From a certain perspective one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will” (The Crossing 410). Modernity attempts to hold up the present as proof of the development from a past it has absorbed in synthesis. That past, however, is rendered unrecognizable by the very process of synthesis, so what is held up for scrutiny is more the present than it is the past. What persists is merely what is permitted to persist, not some “real” past “blasted from the continuum,” but a synthesis that masquerades as such. Indeed, as the gypsy says, in the world that modernity has created, “the past is little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. For the world was made new each day and it was only men’s clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more” (411). The past is emptied of its power, and surviving artifacts are wholly contaminated by the present. For some, these husks, or artifacts, pile up as wreckage. Benjamin, for instance, is one: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to

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stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Illuminations 261) Heaped before the angel that is formed in a coalescence of the various and varying characters of McCarthy’s heroes is the wreckage of the 15 catastrophe of modernity. The image of the potentially powerful rendered powerless in the face of greater forces seems entirely appropriate to Blood Meridian and the border trilogy. Redemption and salvation seem possible, but, reaching out to defy the gale, the characters are never quite able to seize the means to reconstruct the wreckage.

4

Modernity and the South The Appalachian Novels, The Gardener’s Son, and The Stonemason

Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again. — willia m faulk ner , The Sound and the Fury

P

rior to Blood Meridian and Judge Holden, McCarthy’s engagement with modernity seems something of a background matter—present but lacking the sharply defined response to the conflict between old and new that is a feature of the Southwestern fiction. The opening passages of The Orchard Keeper, however, do set the tone for McCarthy’s commitment to an engagement with modernity as the new intertwines with and penetrates the old, 1 changing it forever in an irresistible tableau of the dialectic. Although the opening lines of McCarthy’s first novel engage with the conflict between the natural and the manufactured, these concerns remain covert in Child of God and Outer Dark before they reemerge more fully in Suttree. The image of the wire “growed all up” in the tree is the earliest example of McCarthy’s facility with tableaux, and makes available to the reader a potentially long reflective moment. The technological, in the shape of barbed wire, a material that informed in significant ways the engagement with the environment in the westward expansion of the United States, overtakes the natural. The man-made dominates, its power greater, the hands that wield it ultimately able to rout out the last living thing not created by the dispensation of humanity. That this tableau might lead to Judge Holden and his deeds is unpredictable, but in retrospect, profoundly resonant with the epilogue of Blood Meridian, in 61

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which fire is struck from the ground with some sort of tool during a westward movement that technologizes the United States from sea to sea. To treat McCarthy’s South lightly in the context of modernity would be neglectful, therefore, so included in this section, along with the better-­known Appalachian novels, are reflections on The Gardener’s Son (1976), The Stonemason (1993), and the two early short stories 2 “Wake for Susan” (1959) and “A Drowning Incident.” The two short stories are self-evidently both pre–Blood Meridian. The same is true of The Gardener’s Son, set in Graniteville, South Carolina. The Stone­ mason, set in Louisville, Kentucky, antedates All the Pretty Horses, appearing in the same year as The Crossing. It is not clear precisely when McCarthy began work on it, but the concerns with crises brought on by encounters with modernity that are a feature of his later work are very evident in the play. The three remaining major works, The Sunset Limited, The Road, and No Country for Old Men, are discussed elsewhere. The Road, as the only post-Southwestern work, does, though, mark a return to the South. Although it is not made clear to the reader exactly where the novel is set, enough clues are included for us to be certain it is Appalachia. The text mentions, for example, “a rich south3 ern wood that once held mayapple and pipsissewa. Ginseng” (39). Such descriptions reestablish the Southern woods of The Orchard Keeper in the mind of the reader and recall the tableaux I mention in which the natural is passive, and McCarthy awards agency to the manufactured. McCarthy, however, is always quick to note that, in the absence of the kind of driving will possessed by Judge Holden, the natural is capable of reseeding the world with mystery and absent or opaque motive. Increase Tipton’s moldering shacks, for example, or the hermit’s hut where Culla Holme finds a welcome in Outer Dark, which is in the process of reclamation by forces not obedient to the will of man, where there are “scalloped shelves of fungus,” and “a graygreen mold like rotting fur” (119–20). As early as McCarthy’s first short stories, this process of reclamation is evident: “He walked out onto the little bridge, stepping carefully. The curling planks were cracked and weathered, bleached an almost metallic grey. The whole affair bellied dangerously



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in the middle, like a well used mule” (“A Drowning Incident” 32). McCarthy’s work features many examples of such ruins, the forces of modernity no longer working at their upkeep, and their disappearance a matter of time. They range from the grand in Suttree—the neoclassical mansion now filled with decay and ghosts where it is suggested Suttree once lived (134–36)—to “packingcrate shacks” at the mercy of the vigor of “sumac and ivy” (116). The former is interesting for the detailed insight it offers into Suttree’s previous life (a rarity in the novel), as well as for the presence of premodern human ghosts that have repossessed the defining architectural forms of the European Enlightenment, and in which these specters feast in a time out of time before words made the world. The relationship between ancient and modern, natural and manufactured, is clear from the beginning of McCarthy’s published work. “Wake for Susan” concerns a young man’s fantasy of the life and circumstances of a long-dead woman whose gravestone he discovers while wandering in Southern woods. There is the notion that the works of man must ultimately disappear in the action of natural forces over time. “The path led past the remnants of an abandoned quarry. Wes paused to chunk a rock into the green algae covered water of the quarry hole. Then he turned off onto the railroad track. It was longer home this way and harder walking among the rotting ties and lecherous honeysuckle. The sagging rails were brown and rusty with disuse” (4). Also this: “The bearded stones themselves seemed arrested in that transitory state of decay which still recalls the familiar, which pauses in the descent into antiquities unrecognizable and barely guessable as to origin” (5). Man’s temporary lease is implicit in McCarthy’s early evocation of a world that existed before humanity and will endure after it. “You walk here, as so many others have walked. The ancient oaks have seen them. The lifesap courses through these twisted limbs as it flows hot through your veins—for awhile. The branching creek-rooted cottonwood cares not for the trees that sucked at this damp earth before its birth, but only for the earth, and the sunwarmth, and the seed. You walk here. Moonwarmed and wind-kissed, you walk here . . . for awhile” (6). The

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world of Susan Ledbetter’s death in 1834 is, for Wes, McCarthy’s protagonist, filled with the romance of the premodern: the smell and sight of the smokehouse on fall mornings, a season full of preindustrial plenty and sparkling frost uncontaminated by anything but the most rudimentary machinery. In the “time-haunted woods” of “Wake for Susan,” the ghosts of “frontiersmen” still range (5). In the Appalachian novels, the ancient regularly bleeds into the modern in this way, its presence sometimes threatening, sometimes fascinating, always mysterious. Great scaly gars from the river invaded the flats, fierce and primitive of aspect, long beaks full of teeth, ancient fishes survived unchanged from mesozoic fens, their yellowed boneless skeletons graced the cracked clay-beds later in the season where the water left them to what querulous harridans, fishcrow or buzzard, might come to glean their frames, the smelly marvel of small boys. (The Orchard Keeper 173–74) The Orchard Keeper maintains this tension throughout as the past returns in persistent fashion. Ather’s discovery of the body in the spray pit is echoed by the gars later in the novel. Indeed, Ather himself seems a remnant of some other era as he walks the woods with his hunting dogs, horn, and staff, his hickory pole “graced with . . . hex-­carvings— nosed moons, stars, fish of strange and pleistocene aspect” (46). An ancient from a dying world, apparently. Ather, though, is no escapee from myth; his premodern is the premodern of a time before the relatively few years have passed that separate the now of sports cars and industry from the time when the mountains of Tennessee were the uttermost extent of the western frontier, and which no law whose authority could not be debated had yet colonized. Ather occupies the same niche in the Appalachian novels as the tinker in Outer Dark, the coalman in Suttree whose horse is named Golgotha (164), the turtlehunter with his approximation of a musket, or the goatman about his ancient business in confrontation with the modern bureaucracy of the town. Ather embodies a second-level premodern in McCarthy, a modernity that is pre-Fordism in a Faulknerian sense, implying that



Modernity and the South

the nineteenth century’s division from the twentieth happened not as some clean separation, but as a ragged tear with elements of each stretching back and forth between in shreds of anachronistic time. These irregular boundaries are subtle, but distinct: between a heightened and accelerated version of modernity that in its ultimate and apocalyptic condition confronts Billy Parham at the end of Cities of the Plain and begins to be manifest in Suttree’s Knoxville, and a post-Enlightenment one that uses technology in limited and circumscribed ways merely to ease the worst hardships of life. Plainly, some of the reasons for these distinctions are economic—people will obtain and use the best they can afford—but it is true nonetheless that two worlds infiltrate each other in the Appalachian novels, and that one is born of a time before the frantic modernity of the postwar United States had triumphed so completely. Dianne Luce notes in “The Painterly Eye” McCarthy’s link to a range of US artists, and I emphasize this connection to the impressionistic nature of Suttree, in particular. Up to this point, the reader can imagine the unholy trio around a fire in Outer Dark, or the rendering of fire in Lester Ballard’s tinderbox quarters, and see a grim version of a night painting by a Rembrandt or a Remington. And there is more than a hint of the Hudson School in the pastoral scenes from The Orchard Keeper. Something has changed in Suttree, though. In a highly impressionistic scene, for example, on his journey to visit his aunt and uncle, Suttree comes upon a Bible-camp baptism on the Tennessee River (123–25). The scene is strangely reminiscent of Seurat’s The Bathers, with the tone one of relaxation, or holiday. Picnickers enjoy lunch and watch the scene, a woman breastfeeds. Suttree’s understanding of what he sees is not elucidated in detail, nor is the participants’ response to him. He wants a drink from the men, and one of them wishes that Suttree be baptized in the river, two women are disgusted with him—perhaps for voyeurism, but we can’t be sure—and another man finds it all amusing. Suttree leaves, and we read that he considers the participants to be “malingerers” (125). This opacity seems to me to be in service of a desire to communicate impressions in the writing, to offer the reader a sensation of Knoxville on the cusp of the new and old modernities I refer to, and to find

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simultaneously, just as the Impressionists did, a style and a form that matches that desire. Perhaps it is significant that in the next scene the neoclassical, represented by the mansion that used to be Suttree’s home, is shown as disused, empty, and inhabited only by ghosts. These sophisticated and significant moments in tableaux are where it might be argued that Modernism as an art form and modernity as a philosophical and critical way of explaining the world intersect in McCarthy. The baptism has a premodern feel that refers to an unbroken Christian tradition lasting close to two thousand years, yet takes place in a river that is a habitat not merely for antediluvian turtles, prehistoric gars, and an abundance of catfish possessing a lineage far more ancient than that of man, but also “gouts of sewage faintly working, gray clots of nameless waste and yellow condoms roiling slowly out of the murk,” and even staring human fetuses among fruit rinds, tin cans, and defunct light bulbs (7). The irony is plain enough when set alongside immersive baptism, and the presence of creatures infinitely older than man. Yet McCarthy is careful not to spell out the connection, preferring to communicate an impressionistic version of the city that is unreal in a similar way to T. S. Eliot’s London in “The Waste Land,” whose river “sweats oil and tar” (266). The elevated and the quotidian swirl together in Suttree as they do in “The Waste Land,” adducing high and low culture, the mundane with the spiritually ecstatic, the learned with the ignorant, the real with the unreal. Where McCarthy transcends Eliot is in his refusal to ennoble one collection of objects, behaviors, or activities above another. In Eliot, we are offered the mysterious and the impenetrable alongside the ordinary, but the division is precisely delineated. In McCarthy, the two become interchangeable, leading to the creation in Suttree of a “postmodern pastoral” as practices with a long and elevated history collide with the products of a rapidly developing and unchecked technological frenzy. The aesthetic this creates is both beautiful and repulsive. Philosophically, also, the condition of Knoxville as represented in the fiction rejects the key Enlightenment strategy for the interpretation of history, the dialectic. The novel transcends Horkheimer and Adorno’s refusal of Hegel’s unfolding of the world historical spirit



Modernity and the South

manifested in human freedom, by arguing that no synthesis is produced from tree and metal, condoms and river water, or mold and finished timber. Even a synthesis that cannot be predicted or pre­ determined by some theoretical endpoint—as Adorno’s modification into a theory of the “non-identity of identity and non-identity” might 4 have us believe—is unavailable. In Horkheimer and Adorno, the synthetic nature of metal and tree might exist potentially but would be perpetually provisional, resisting a totalizing subjectivity created by its identification in synthesis. In Suttree, one component will outdo or outlast the other and retain its separate identity. A tree in which metal fencing is grown has no synthetic identity separable from its metal and tree components. The temporary nature of modernity becomes apparent once more to the reader. Once the forces of natural disaster and geological time have softened and worn away all evidence of the imbricated sediments of modernity and the natural, no synthesis remains. Horkheimer and Adorno write of “the manifold affinities between existing things” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 7). McCarthy, however, recognizes in the category “existing things” two orders, the natural and the manufactured, and between them he countenances no synthetic affinity that might bridge their separation. This is evident as early as “A Drowning Incident” as McCarthy details the reaction of a young man who discovers that his father, rather than finding a new home for a litter of puppies as he promised, has drowned them. The unnamed protagonist has just seen the body of a puppy floating in the river and notices that “in one pool an inexplicable shoe sat solemnly” (32). As McCarthy matures as a writer, modifying adjectives like sol­ emnly or inexplicable disappear. Solemnly seems otiose, and in the later work the detritus of the modern among but separate from the natural is so much a fact in the South of the fiction that its inexplicable nature becomes a given. “Fabled sturgeons with their horny pentagonal bodies, the cupreous and dacebright carp and catfish with their pale and sprueless underbellies, a thick muck shot with broken glass, with bones and rusted tins and bits of crockery reticulate with mudblack crazings” (Suttree 8). The natural and the man-made reside in immediate proximity to one another as part of the same purview, but there is no synthesis. Such a view represents a faint, probably

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unconscious resistance in keeping with the novel’s subtle disavowal of the neatness of the dialectic. This does not mean that the detritus of modernity and the components of technology cannot be repurposed into instruments of a more primitive kind. Harrogate’s bat-hunting coracle is a fine example. Manufactured to generate income, the hoods from two Ford auto­ mobiles are welded together for uses unimaginable to those who shaped the metal and manufactured the artifact hundreds of miles away (Suttree 209). The boat is part of a plan in which Harrogate deploys components of modernity against the natural world. His ingenious plan to poison bats to gain the dollar bounty for each corpse by firing “pieces of high and wormy hog’s liver” (214) laced with strychnine into the air is flawless but not a product of modernity. It is more akin to the resourceful tool-creating of a Neolithic human, an unreconstructed deployment of what occurs in the landscape to better generate a living. Harrogate’s engagement with modernity, here, is in no way his subsumption into it. Harrogate’s behavior and existence are evidence of a modernity in the Appalachians of this period not yet dragging all behind it in the inertia of its own momentum, but permitting more primitive creatures to inhabit its outskirts relatively untouched. Harrogate is the finest example in McCarthy of the nonmodern’s encounter with modernity, and McCarthy is at pains to impart to him an unworldliness, have him engage in acts almost incomprehensible in the modern world, and surround him with language and images of times before the rise of technology: “Over the sparse colonies of jakelike dwellings a new curse falling, a plague of bats, small basilisks pugnosed with epicanthic eyes and upreared dogs’ ears filled with hair and bellies filled with agony. . . . In the floor of Harrogate’s boat the brown and hairy mound grew, strange cargo, such small replicas of the diabolic with their razorous teeth bared in fiends’ grins” (215). Harrogate is never representative of a thesis in a dialectical flow with modernity as his antithesis because McCarthy never permits him a moment of synthesis. We see Harrogate finally, “his pinched face watching him back from the cold glass, out there racing among the wires and the bitter trees” (439), on the way to jail, neither part of the modernity that



Modernity and the South

speeds him there, nor interested in the natural world of the landscape through which his image flies. Suttree, though, is a different kind of outcast and wanderer, unlike any central characters who previously appeared in McCarthy’s fiction. It is quite clear that the destructive and oppressive poverty of Appalachia has, to a significant extent, created the likes of Rinthy and Culla Holme, Uncle Ather, and Lester Ballard. These are individuals from a highly marginalized underclass, bypassed by schooling and the acquisition of wealth, and by history. The version of the outsider in these early novels offers the reader something almost beyond our comprehension. The decisions these characters make are overdetermined by their circumstances. Their agency is enfeebled by poverty and a lack of education, and it manifests itself in acts of self-destruction and violence. Suttree possesses a more modern subjectivity, in which the natural condition is existential crisis. Harrogate is part of a clearly defined premodern world that may encounter modernity at the level of basic technology but is never its subject. Suttree, by contrast, has license to be both outsider and insider as he forms loose alliances with derelicts, brawlers, prostitutes of either or dubious gender, and the black underclass of Knoxville. Suttree is the product of a family that is well respected, wealthy, and locally powerful. He has education and agency enough to choose his existence on a houseboat. It can be argued, then, that he stands for existential revolt, that he is a warrior against the embourgeoisement of US society, the successor and precursor of characters created by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others. Suttree becomes, in his rebellion, a knowing figure in the entanglement of an increasingly hectic and technologically instrumental modernity. Suttree becomes the American existentialist par excellence: Camus’s outsider, complete with the pain of guilt, both proportionate and disproportionate. But what McCarthy recognizes, in placing the existentialist mantle on Suttree, is that he represents a symptom of modernity even in his response to it. McCarthy’s fiction reflects unfailingly that what the system thrives on is the explosion of community and the separation of individuals into consuming bodies. The existential project, the logic of which is to see the world only as a projection or invention of the self, can at best run neutrally in tandem with the economic and

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social forces that drive modernity and, at worst, create the very subjects on which the system thrives and perpetuates itself. Suttree is at once engaged in a considered rebellion against his family, but his alliances with the outcast and marginalized suggest he is possessed of an unformed inkling that in the absence of communities of the likeminded we are all at the mercy of the logic of economic systems. The final pages of Suttree do not escape this conflict. A road gang mixes concrete and drags ditches, the newly formed ramp of the expressway curves out into empty air “hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere” (471), and electricity, telephone wires, and railway lines speed the progress of modernity. Meanwhile, a hound appears momentarily, freed of its working or comic context, a last representative of the premodern in the novel, and sniffs at the trace of Suttree as Suttree leaves Knoxville. The Stone­ mason (1993) examines a similar bind in its protagonist, Ben, who struggles with the modern and premodern, community and self, and the city and the country in a version of modernity fatal to traditional work and family practices. The cusp of the modern and premodern and the consequences of economic systems are examined in the play most obviously and symbolically in the deaths, a short time apart, of Papaw and Soldier. The link between Papaw’s premodern world and the present is Ben, the grandson of Papaw and Soldier’s uncle. Ben is the narrator of the play and exists in two incarnations, one an actor in the play who interacts with the other actors, the other a more knowing version of the character periodically picked out in a spotlight, commentating on the action from a lectern, his purpose “to give distance to the events and place them in a completed past” (5). Papaw is more than a hundred years old, the family’s patriarch, and has lived a life of dignified labor, hewing and placing stone. Soldier, the great-grandson of Papaw, becomes a heroin addict and dies in a squalid motel. Papaw is, in Ben’s words, “shaped in the image of God . . . his purpose to make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing” (133). Soldier, also named Ben, is by contrast last seen “in his underclothes. He has his mouth open and he is dead. A syringe and a length of small rubber tubing lie on the night table” (120). Papaw’s son, Big Ben, cannot deal



Modernity and the South

with the conflict between the two worlds and commits suicide, dying in debt, impotent in the face of change and his own frailties. That Papaw’s understanding of the world is rooted in premodern systems is made explicit not only in the fact that his only reading is the Bible, but also in his understanding of the relationship of man to his labor: “The man’s labor that did the work is in the work. You caint make it go away. Even if it’s paid for it’s still there. If ownership lies in the benefit to a man then the mason owns all the work he does in this world and you caint put that claim aside nor quit it and it don’t make no difference whose name is on the paper” (30). This is exactly Adam Smith’s notion that the value of goods or services is determined by the labor used in their production. Ben, as commentator incarnation, responds this way: These views appear to be some labor theory of value. But there’s a further agenda. Because the world is made of stone the mason is prey to a great conceit and to whatever extent the look and shape of the world is the work of the mason then that work exists outside the claims of workers and landholders alike. Reading Marx in my last year of school only sent me to Hegel and there I found the paradigm of servant and master in which the master comes to suffer the inner impoverishment of the idle while the servant by 5 his labors grows daily in skill and wisdom. (31) This passage offers numerous intriguing complexities. Marx, for example, is mentioned only twice in McCarthy, both times in The Stonemason. The other occasion is when Ben asserts that “Marx never worked a day in his life” (39). Marx is dismissed as largely 6 irrelevant, merely a conduit to Hegel. Marx, for McCarthy, it seems, is a creature of his time, someone who responds to and is trapped within the very economic system he critiques because he believes religiously in the inevitability of its trajectory. Ben argues that, because he never worked a day in his life, Marx cannot understand the immediate and embodied rewards of certain kinds of labor. How could such a person understand that “the calculations necessary to the right placement of stone are not performed in the

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mind but in the blood. Or they are like those vestibular reckonings performed in the inner ear for standing upright” (66)? The act of rational contemplation can never be enough: “And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work” (64–65). To trace the origins of modernity even further back than Marx, the working of stone represents the clearest rejection in McCarthy of the Cartesian split between mind and body (see chapter 1, this volume). In making a series of connections between his grandfather’s understanding of the world and his own experience of it, Ben becomes trapped between the two. Forced to engage against his better instincts with conditions that have ruined his father and his nephew, he seeks to negotiate the boundaries between modern and premodern without success. His attempt to recreate his grandfather’s world is doomed in the face of the systems that have engulfed and destroyed his nephew. Brought to the point of crisis in this work is the conflict between the modern and the premodern, on which the Southern novels focus, ending in the triumph of the heightened and accelerated version of modernity exported from the cities to the country, which destroys any semblance of community. The family at the end of the play is separated irrevocably as the minister speaks the following over the grave of Papaw: MINISTER Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me. And horror hath overwhelmed me. And I said, Oh that I had wings like the dove, then would I fly away and be at rest. Lo then I would wander far off. I would lodge in the wilderness. I would hast me to a shelter from the stormy wind and tempest. ... MINISTER Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongue: For I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night



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they go about it upon the walls thereof. Iniquity and mischief are in the midst of it………… He breaks off and looks up MINISTER For it was not an enemy that reproached me. Then I could have borne it. The purpose of this passage is twofold. Carlotta blames Ben for the demise of Soldier and the passages from Psalm 55 (55:12), in which David reflects on his loss of Jerusalem, is couched in the language of betrayal. Equally, though, the passage speaks of the chaos and corruption of the city. Combined with the first section, which seems to show David longing for the quiet of the wilderness, it has resonance throughout McCarthy. This is particularly true in the flights from the acute crises of modernity that McCarthy represents in the Western novels, but is certainly the case for Lester Ballard, for whom property ownership, sophisticated notions of labor and reward, and consumerism are meaningless and alienating. Ballard retreats to the wilderness, increasingly marginalized by a new modernity represented in the activities of town and city. A burrower and a digger, Ballard, like Gene Harrogate, scavenges on the limits of the modern world. Unusually for McCarthy, who rarely repeats a form of words from one work in another, Ben seems to be quoting Judge Holden when he answers his wife, Maven, who wants to know why he insists on recounting every detail of Soldier’s demise: “Because even the small7 est crumb can devour us” (119). Ben and the judge do not, in spite of this shared line, seem to have much in common. The judge’s remarks concern his need to catalog even the tiniest life: “These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing” (Blood Meridian 195). But Ben and the judge alike have in them the desire to control, manage, and master life, to seek rational answers and responses to life’s exigencies. Where the judge rejects utterly the mysterious, however, Ben draws succor from the visions of the ghostly Papaw he sees at the play’s end and accepts the old man’s complete faith in the Bible.

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Commentator Ben in his interpretation and imitation of Papaw comes to resemble nothing so much as the embodiment of Weber’s Protestant work ethic: “At times I think I came to the life of the laborer as the anchorite to his cell and pallet. The work devours the man and devours his life and I thought that in the end he must be justified thereby. . . . I lost my way. I’d thought by my labors to stand 8 outside that true bend of gravity which is the world’s pain” (111). Ben has embodied the slave element of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and fulfilled Nietzsche’s description (Genealogy of Morals 134–56) of religious asceticism and the consequent disconnect from a full engagement with life. McCarthy, however, provides Ben with the intellectual foresight to recognize the trap he has entered. No such agency is awarded to Robert McEvoy, the protagonist of one of the more neglected of McCarthy’s works. The Gardener’s Son, published in 1976 and made into a PBS film directed by Richard Pearce, was nominated for two Emmys and features a notable performance from Brad Dourif in the title role. Based on events that took place in 1876 in the mill town of Graniteville, South Carolina, the work focuses on two families: the Greggs, founders of the Graniteville Manufacturing Company, and the McEvoys, an Irish Catholic family who have fallen 9 on hard times and have come to Graniteville to work for the mill. The film and screenplay reveal evidence of McCarthy’s commitment to research and adaptation, a pattern that continues in Blood Merid­ ian. The Witliff Collection contains evidence of McCarthy’s detailed research on the physical and political geography of the area, social conditions, and specific material on the Gregg family. This research includes scholarly articles, details of court proceedings, indictments, contemporary newspaper extracts, and regulations on the methods 10 by which hangings should be carried out. The film dramatizes the conflict, at a personal level, between the younger McEvoy, the younger Gregg, and the widowed Mrs. Gregg, who initially sympathizes with the plight of McEvoy but retreats to a patrician, paternalistic posture as her beliefs about family and social station come under pressure. At the heart of this personal drama is the question of why McEvoy shoots Gregg. The film is extraordinarily subtle in what it reveals of McEvoy’s



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motive. There is a suspicion, for example, that Gregg has coerced McEvoy’s sister into having sex, and Gregg is arrogant and contemptuous in the manner of a plantation owner. The younger Gregg sees only indigents and diligents. The fundamental inequality in the distribution of wealth, the consequent damage to the dignity of labor, and McEvoy’s rash and wayward temperament are relevant too. There is more, though, as McEvoy leaves town and then returns. He sees a bleak glimpse of the future in which modernity has destroyed his father’s career as a gardener and forced him into the factory. This same technology-driven, instrumental version of progress has exposed his sister to sexual corruption and increased the wealth of the rich at the expense of the poor. When confronted by the industrialized face of modernity, the people of the South are not equipped to respond in ways any more effective than the Native Americans in the Southwest are. One example is the ragged band of twenty-six (eighteen in the final script) who turn up at the Graniteville cotton mill “bearing bales of bedding and sorry household effects, nearly all barefooted, some appearing to be albinos, a couple of emaciated hound dogs, a few crates of chickens,” having been told there will be work and places to live (91/18/2/15). Gregg pays for their train tickets to “someplace else” and suggests to his foreman—the latter outraged that such people should impose in this way—that they are sent up to the church for supper before they go. This is a grim world indeed in which survival is anyway precarious and that the forces of modernity have only rendered more unstable. In many ways, The Gardener’s Son is the apotheosis and crystallization of McCarthy’s response to modernity in the Southern works. Suttree may provide the reader with a subtler and more variegated version, but The Gardener’s Son leaves little room for doubt. As always in McCarthy, tableaux are significant. The orator, for example, at the elder Gregg’s funeral, engages in a celebration of modernity in the form of what amounts to a eulogy to the factory. The bell from the factory and the bell from the church coexist uncomfortably. In the very last scene, McEvoy’s father drives the coffin of his hanged son away in a horse cart. The camera lingers on the reflection of the factory chimney in the misty, smoky lake. These images seem designed to convey the inevitable triumph of one way of life over

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another, as do the series of setbacks and disasters that befall McEvoy. The vortex of emotion and circumstance that consumes the younger McEvoy is attributable, at one level, to local conditions and accident of birth, but it is no coincidence that it is the great symbol of modernity, the train, that damages McEvoy’s leg and leads, in part, to the wildness, resentment, and anger that are barely suppressed in his engagement with the world. Leo Marx writes of an 1844 piece by Hawthorne detailing an idle afternoon at Sleepy Hollow interrupted by the whistle of a steam train: “The . . . appearance of the machine in the garden is an arresting, endlessly evocative image. It causes the instantaneous clash of opposed states of mind: a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as the counterforce to the myth” (229). In Rural Fictions: Urban Realities, Mark Storey points out that what Marx exposes here is “a conflict of ethics”: [It is] an assumption that notions of agrarian virtue occupy an antithetical position to that of industrial modernity . . . two ideological spheres, embodied in the geographical organizations of the city or the countryside, that are assumed to be mutually exclusive and that exist outside of historical time . . . the timeless world of country life is penetrated and disrupted by the presence of a new, alien body. (10) McCarthy renders the pastoral idyll as diseased and contaminated as he supercharges the power of the technological and industrial. The ethical is drained from both and no synthesis is available. In the hands of McCarthy, the entry of the herald of modernity into a land in which rural myth is already fatally blighted has profoundly embodied physical and psychological consequences. The film lingers intensely over the amputation of McEvoy’s leg, though the viewer is spared the detail of the operation itself. The camera zooms in closely on the tools involved in the amputation as they are disinfected by the doctor’s assistant. The condition of the leg is discussed in detail against the background of McEvoy’s pleas to keep his limb. As the chloroform is administered, he struggles and fights, fixing the



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human instruments of his loss with a baleful stare. Modernity in the person of the surgeon, the intensely rational Percival, will remove with force, and permanently, the leg that modernity itself rendered inoperable. The irony is terrible in Percival, a man who, at the same time that he uses technology to do good, merely patches up the appall11 ing damage caused by other technologies. From his encounter with the train onward, the younger McEvoy shows that, bad though conditions may be, worse can follow in the collision of the modern and premodern, his artificial limb a constant reminder in mind and body of the forces that have ridden him down. Meanwhile, the elder McEvoy is already a living exemplar of the doomed ideal of the rural as an alternate to the modernity of town and city. We know that McCarthy was already researching, and probably writing, Blood 12 Meridian by the mid-1970s. We know for certain that he was living 13 in Tucson by 1974. It seems reasonable to conclude that the preoccupation with modernity so important in The Gardener’s Son became fully realized and embodied in Judge Holden. It is as though the claustrophobic complexities of the South occlude McCarthy’s desire to throw into sharp relief the exigencies of Eurocentric modernity, and the open spaces of the Southwest provide an ideal theater in which to amplify the dreadful violence to which modernity has regular recourse.

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Violence Fast and Slow

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. — her m a n melville , Moby Dick

E

arly in Cities of the Plain, Troy recounts to Billy Parham a night trip with Gene Edmonds in an Oldsmobile with a scoop-like grille at the front. The road for miles ahead of them is covered with jackrabbits and they hear the impacts as the car hits the animals but think little of it until they pull into a gas station, where they discover that the grille is “full of jackrabbit heads. I mean there was a hundred of em jammed in there and the front of the car the bumper and all just covered with blood and rabbit guts and them rabbits I reckon they’d sort of turned their heads away just at impact cause they was all lookin out, eyes all crazy lookin. Teeth sideways. Grinnin” (20). The passage demonstrates that McCarthy rarely retreats from graphic representations of violence. When I give people copies of Blood Merid­ ian, for example, and I have an opportunity to talk to them after they have read it, almost invariably the first thing they want to discuss is violence. This same applies to my experiences of teaching McCarthy’s work at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. What students want to say before anything else is that the work is seamed with graphic representations of terrible acts perpetrated in ways that can seem random or arbitrary. They are right about the blood and murder, of course, but violence is never inexplicable in McCarthy’s work even when it might appear gratuitous. My supposition includes the 79

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brutality of the Southern fiction in which violence is the product of necessity or the manifestation of other more primitive urges that lurk beneath the veneer of civilization. It also includes the apotheosis of the violence of Eurocentric modernity in Blood Meridian, as well as the complex and choreographed form of violence that represents the coming together of cultures in the “contact zone” of the border trilogy, or a supercharged species of modern violence hinted at in The Stonemason, which is exposed more fully in No Country for Old Men and The Counselor. Finally, The Road reveals both the ultimate destination of the violence that accompanies modernity and the return of humanity to more rudimentary forms of violence postcatastrophe. Troy’s story in Cities of the Plain could be misrepresented as a gratuitous interlude in which the author indulges his appetite for horror and gore, but to me the image of the car at the pumps in the gas station is yet another tableau, one that merges two versions of the violence of modernity in the barely noticeable increase in the scars and pollution inflicted on the environment by roads and automobiles, and in the vertiginous immediacy of the collision of modernity and the natural world in the monstrous rictus of the rabbits. Shadowing the more overt constructions of violence in McCarthy’s work is a species of what Rob Nixon describes as slow violence: “By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across space and time, an attritional violence that is often not viewed as violence at all” (2). Nixon refers to centuries of human activity that feature rapidly developing technology, the instrumental use of this technology for profit or war, 1 and the export of its consequences to the poorer regions of the world. To translate slow violence into Dussel’s terminology, it becomes necessary to civilize and develop the fabric of the planet, just as it was necessary to civilize and develop colonized peoples (see chapter 3, this volume). Similarly, the conditions for the epoch that Paul Crutzen renamed the Anthropocene feature violence of the kind that Nixon describes: “Changing the climate for millennia to come is just one aspect. By cutting down rainforests, moving mountains to access coal deposits and acidifying coral reefs, we fundamentally change the biology and the geology of the planet. While driving uncountable numbers



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of species to extinction, we create new life forms through gene technology, and, soon, through synthetic biology” (Crutzen and Schwägerl). One reading of the logic of slow violence takes fictional form in The Road, in which the Anthropocene meets its end. The progress of this epochal blip in geological time is halted abruptly by the deployment of versions of the technology that enabled its existence in the first place. Prior to The Road, what I perceive as slow violence manifests itself in any number of more subtle ways: the freeway construction at the end of Cities of the Plain is one example, the semis on the blacktop (All the Pretty Horses 298), and the nuclear tests at Los Alamos in The Crossing (see chapter 9, this volume) are others. And the rise of industrial agriculture that is a subtext throughout the border trilogy might also be included. Indeed, part of what drives the wanderers of the border trilogy south is an unarticulated sense of “wrongness” in the way modernity is changing the Southwest. Implicit in this, and explicit in numerous tableaux in the border trilogy, is the notion that pace the pessimists of the Anthropocene, the Earth will recover from the brutality of the current dispensation if we cease our slow destruction at any point leading up to the cataclysm. Earlier still, McCarthy sketches in Judge Holden the origins of what will lead to the horrors of The Road. Holden, as I argue in chapter 3, is the Enlightenment made flesh, and his profound desire to disenchant the world through violence, technology, and instrumental reason is a fundamental pillar on which the representation of modernity in the later novels is built. Holden is the irresistible engine of his own destiny, owing nothing to the kinds of alternatives that might be available to those less committed to the rational and instrumental: religion, perhaps, in its many incarnations, or mysticism more generally. Holden is explicit in his insistence that violence and blood are all the law the world needs in the process of colonization (in both senses) and dominion. To recognize these “truths” is to be liberated: “Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance” (Blood Meridian 331). In the context of Holden’s Eurocentric, colonial credentials, to carry forward the project of Western civilization only the man willing to

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immerse himself fully in the annihilation of lesser races and nations is fit to “dance,” to be, in other words, the vector of civilization (see chapter 3, this volume). This is far from the mystification of violence that translates into the ritual consumption of “blood” and “flesh” in Christian ceremonies, or self-flagellation, or fasting, or human sacrifice in any number of other religions. Holden’s violence is wholly rational and demystified. If, as Durkheim argues, ritual is the foundation of religion, then something essential has been severed in the conduit between ritual and 2 religion in Holden’s activities and philosophy. Ritual, shorn of the spiritual and mystical properties it has the potential to engender, becomes a useful cover for the perpetration of the violence necessary to subsume 3 lesser ideas, practices, and individuals in the dialectic of modernity. Holden’s violence, although masquerading as demi-mystic, remains wholly instrumental, either pragmatic or a representation of his version of truth. Holden’s violence is not, therefore, sacred in any spiritual or quasi-religious senses of the kinds elucidated in Durkheim: the mediation of the religious or spiritual dies back to leave only ritualized practices that can be populated with anything (see chapter 1, this volume). Holden is concerned with certainty, a scientific and rational certainty that is the intellectual anchor to which Homo sapiens (now Homo modernitas) must cling in the absence of an abolished religion. The murder of the baby for which Tobin considers killing Holden (Blood Meridian 158) shows the rational pushed to its inevitable conclusion. It is the violence of pragmatism and exchange that justifies this and the presence of Holden and the Glanton Gang in these regions, for which they receive “a contract signed by the governor of the state of Sonora for the furnishing of Apache scalps” (201). Violence is what it means to be human, but it is also instrumental, just as all of human life must be under the purest versions of Enlightenment philosophy. Nowhere is Holden concerned with the spiritual quality of ritual. Such a notion would reek to him of mystery and the desire to reinstate magic in the world. Particular acts or behaviors systematically repeat in a way that permits them to develop into patterns that might become classified as ritual and function as a way to redeem lesser beings (see pages 47 and 53 of this volume).



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Holden’s acts of violence defy the religious elements of ritual in their moment-by-moment opportunism, their absence of local structure, and their obedience to the rational. Indeed, all of Holden’s behavior can be attributed to this commitment. Even dancing, or the defenestration of the Reverend Green, are opportunities for the judge to satisfy in a rational way his human desire for amusement and diversion and to symbolize his contempt for religion and his joyful embodiment of an intellectual notion. Other characters in McCarthy engage in violence in ways that seem to involve some element of ritual, but such characters are unable to intellectualize their compulsions— Lester Ballard, for example. Even this may not be a ritualistic compulsion, because it is quite possible that what lies at the heart of the lonely and bereft Ballard’s fixation on the creation of a shrine composed of rotting flesh is the desire to have friends like himself. Such friends are grotesque and controllable approximations of the female, incapable of meaningful discourse with a wider world and locked, therefore, in versions of the emotional cul-de-sac in which Ballard himself exists. Similarly, the unholy triumvirate in Outer Dark are actually interested merely in the acquisition of that which might sustain them. Once such items have outlived their usefulness they are simply discarded or passed on—be they babies, boots, or the foul and furred grey gristle that Culla Holme is forced to consume in his first encounter with them. What is without utility is to be exchanged or discarded, and there is no moral dimension. The tinker impaled in the tree is a reminder that morality is a device for the suppression of the strong by the weak, a notion represented wordlessly in Outer Dark, but fully articulated by Holden in Blood Meridian. The roots, therefore, of a species of violence that hovers at the borders between psychological disorder and ritual, and ritual and pure utility, run deep in McCarthy’s work. Of No Country for Old Men, it might be argued that this double nexus is embodied in Chigurh and the roll of a dice, the toss of a coin, the murder of a man whose car he needs, and his apparent psychopathy. Sometimes, however, violence is ordinary: accidental, or a pragmatic matter, a solution to a problem. Sylder’s murder of the aggressive tramp, for example, in The Orchard Keeper, or the attempt to shoot dead Uncle Ather by the authorities.

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To return, though, to Holden and ritual: Holden’s Eurocentric approach to violence manipulates ritual for its own purposes, and this manipulation becomes part of a myth that the representatives of Eurocentric modernity sell to themselves and to others. Richard Slotkin argues that human violence is based on myths that permit humanity to explain itself to itself. These myths become ossified into a species of historical fact or, to use Weber’s terminology, they materialize as mediators that permit the reconciliation of an explicable past with a powerfully complex and chaotic present (see chapter 1, this volume). Such myths, now made fact, lend a powerful materiality to their deployment. Slotkin’s example is the frontier on which he quotes Frederick Turner Jackson: The frontier is the line of the most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs. . . . The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. (Jackson 4) A better exposition of Hegel’s dialectic of the progress of the world historical spirit would be hard to find. What Turner does not describe in detail, of course, is the violence that informs the endless dialectical recreation of frontier after frontier as each new border between civilization and savagery pushes westward. Constituent in each instance is violence. As Slotkin notes, The whale, buffalo, and bear hunted to the verge of extinction



Violence Fast and Slow

for pleasure in killing and “scalped” for fame and the profit in hides by men like Buffalo Bill; the buffalo meat left to rot, till acres of prairie were covered with heaps of whitening bones, and the bones then ground for fertilizer; the Indian debased, impoverished, and killed in return for his gifts; the land and its people, its “dark” people especially, economically exploited and wasted; the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal; the piles of wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids of death-cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls, to signify our passage through the land. (565) It is left to Cormac McCarthy nearly a hundred years later to provide the necessary detail that is required to grasp the mechanics of Slotkin’s brutal dialectic. In a similar fashion, Moby Dick had already begun to shade in the detail of Turner’s thesis even before his work of history was conceived, as Melville carved out new frontiers in the mutually violent and destructive “unknown” regions of the world’s great oceans. As Slotkin notes, “Not until the early years of the twentieth century was the profundity of the novel’s vision recognized and accepted” (550). Here it is clear that the dialectic of progress is also, necessarily, one of brutality. Perhaps what McCarthy preempts is the need to confront the repulsive and sickening detail of violence in the modern age of almost total visual mediation. We can see graphic violence in the world of the unreal—films, television series, computer games—yet broadcasting networks across the Western world still shy away from showing us the truth of our deeds in places like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan via news footage of the dead and injured. As Michael Herr writes, “I went [to Vietnam] behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as everything you did” (20). The timidity of broadcasters and other cultural producers cannot be a consequence of a desire to protect viewers from violence, because we live in a society in the West where stylized visual representations of violence are cheap and plentiful in the mainstream, and all kinds of violent material is available

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on the Internet. It is, rather, a matter of a willingness to hide the real violence, which is a symptom of the politics that dominate Western societies, and in which we are complicit as participants in variants of democracy. Blood Meridian is, then, reflecting two historical periods: that of Turner’s frontier, and also of Herr’s Vietnam. Blood Meridian was published in 1985, but its origins can be traced with some certainty back to the 1970s—McCarthy was already living in the Southwest by 1974 and writing his “western” by 1977 (see chapter 4, this volume). This makes Blood Meridian a Vietnam-era novel. In quasi-­ historical mode, McCarthy’s writing resembles reportage, which somehow affects our consciousness in ways that movies and television do not. Herr writes, “Nam paradigm, Vietnam, not a movie, no jive cartoon either where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and dropped from heights, flattened out and frizzed black and broken like a dish, then up again and whole and back in the game, ‘Nobody dies,’ as someone said in another war movie” (44). There is nothing cartoonish about McCarthy’s violence. People do not struggle on after they are shot repeatedly. Apparently fatal injuries are fatal. Vince Brewton argues that “while Child of God and Suttree contain repressed traces of the Vietnam experience, Blood Meridian comes close to being a novel whose true subject is Vietnam, a kind of allegory of American involvement in Southeast Asia and of the reverberations of that history in the American psyche” (65). John Sepich also notes that “the literature of ‘atrocities’ in Vietnam seems consistent, in its language, with that of Glanton’s ‘atrocities’” (138). To follow the Herr comparison, resemblances are uncanny between, say, “a picture of a marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, as in the case of a guy I knew near Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears, ‘love beads’ as its owner called them” (202) and the scapulas of ears worn by the Glanton Gang and referred to by McCarthy half a dozen times. Indeed something is cognate in Blood Meridian’s “collapse of time and space,” so that “only violence is foregrounded” (Brewton 72), and Herr’s “for years now there had been no country here but the war” (3). If Vietnam is the apotheosis of the failure of the colonial project, and the ultimate frustration of those political leaders representing the



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Eurocentric modernity that underpins it, then Captain White might be speaking for all concerned in such projects across history: We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God’s earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government. A people so cowardly they’ve paid tribute a hundred years to tribes of naked savages. Given up their crops and livestock. Mines shut down. Whole villages abandoned. While a heathen horde rides over the land looting and killing with total impunity. Not a hand raised against them. What kind of people are these? The Apaches wont even shoot them. Did you know that? They kill them with rocks. The captain shook his head. He seemed made sad by what he had to tell. (Blood Merid­ ian 32–33) The immaturity of peoples unready to determine their own fates according to the lights of modernity must be their undoing, whereas modernity makes sacrifices of its own kind in the struggle for order and reason. For Herr, also, the chaos of Vietnam is the inevitable conclusion of Manifest Destiny: “We might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter” (49). Little has changed, it seems, for either Herr or McCarthy. Herr is old at twenty-eight (254), and, like the kid, he bears witness. Unlike the kid, however, he joins the dance, albeit as a saddened and reluctant participant: When we got back to camp that night I threw away the fatigues I’d been wearing. And for the next six years I saw them all, the ones I’d really seen and the ones I’d imagined, theirs and ours, friends I’d loved and strangers, motionless figures in a dance, the old dance. Years of thinking this or that about what happens to

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you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience. Until I felt I was just a dancer too. (65) As Judge Holden says, only the man steeped in blood and violence can dance (323). Violence is what provides Dispatches with its motive force and violence powers Blood Meridian. Both dance to the tune of blood and war. Violence consumes the man as he enters the jakes to be greeted by the judge in the closet: “He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (325). What happens in the jakes has been much debated. We know that the judge later emerges and the man does not, but this is all we know. It is possible that McCarthy’s intention is to suggest that something so appalling has taken place that even he is unwilling or unable to describe it. My view is that McCarthy has the judge, as the supreme avatar of modernity, engulf the man in this way to show modernity’s ability to consume what opposes it in synthesis. The man must be wholly overcome (see chapter 1, this volume). The level of violence with which this is achieved is proportionate to the level of threat the judge perceives: “Whatever . . . exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (195). The judge cannot somehow fully read the kid/man, who possesses or represents something that is unfathomable, something that is redolent, therefore, of mystery. Mystery, in modernity, features in systems often belonging to colonized or native peoples and as a foundation of such systems must be eradicated with extreme prejudice. World views and systems of thought that ran counter to the narrative of Eurocentric modernity were precisely what the frontier encountered in its westward movement. This is the narrative that provides the frontier myth with its motive force. To challenge and subvert the myth, McCarthy holds up that myth to scrutiny: we are required to bear witness to the truth of our desires, or those of our forebears, or those of the people with the power to act in our name. Without violence, there is no greater purpose in Blood Meridian. Divorced from the detailed and graphic representation of the truth of his desires, Judge



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Holden loses his power to convince, he is untruthful, and he shrinks to a footnote before our eyes rather than filling an extraordinarily large and hitherto unimagined space in the landscape of the modern American novel. I take issue with the notion that McCarthy depends on distancing and stylization “for the reader to stand [the violence]” (Harold Bloom in Hall and Wallach, Western Novels 215). It is one thing for a critic like Enrique Dussel to note that the process of civilizing “primitive” cultures, in Europe’s years of imperial expansion, involved extreme violence; it is quite another for Cormac McCarthy to show us in the judge an avatar of the intellectual rationale of modernity that drove that project engaged in the detail of its perpetration. For Peter Josyph (“Blood Music”), it diminishes McCarthy that he should describe scenes in which men’s genitals are hacked off and stuffed in their mouths, or in which a tree is adorned with the corpses of babies. For me, this unflinching approach to violence is a necessary engagement with the truth of our interactions with other human beings. It requires, therefore, exposition in a “serious” literary work. We do not, pace Josyph, “check our ethos at the door” (Adventures 72). Instead, we keep it on us at all times lest we have nothing against which to measure the horror. Modernity has brought us to this. We owe it to writers such as Herr and McCarthy to engage with it. It is, however, reasonable to wonder whether all the graphic scenes of violence that McCarthy details always serve the kind of interests I describe. There is no shortage of detailed description in the Southern novels, but the representation of violence is more diffuse and less specifically geared toward a particular argument. When Cornelius Suttree is half-killed by a blow on the head from a floor-buffer in a barroom fight, for example, it is tempting to read the scene as local color, a chance for McCarthy to develop further the Knoxville of his imagination. The theatrical quality McCarthy invests in the scene suggests something else, however: it speaks of violence impelled by its own momentum, the production of something fundamental in men. Indeed, McCarthy often sees men as actors driven by a script beyond their control and not of their own devising once its opening gambit has been delivered. In the hospital, “They wheeled Suttree on.” Shortly afterward, the sense of a masque is reinforced as we read of

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“a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb hobbled after” (Suttree 188). This notion of performance is consistent with Judge Holden’s exposition on the condition of things toward the end of Blood Meridian, in which he characterizes participation in the ongoing project of war and bloodshed as “the dance” and, of course, dances himself. Billy Ray Callaghan in Suttree, likewise, lives his life in a tight embrace with violence, the entirety of his being invested in a quickstep of blood, fists, and guns. And there is something balletic in the pimp Eduardo’s dissection of John Grady Cole before he administers the final thrust. In All the Pretty Horses, the observers of John Grady’s lethal knife fight with the cuchillero are “like theatre patrons, anxious to avoid the crush” (201). The performance of violence is fundamental to the interactions of men, no matter their level of education or cultural sophistication. It is everywhere in McCarthy. At one level, it is indivisible from what it is to be human. Those with the knowledge to do so, such as Judge Holden, weave the bloodshed into a larger narrative; in others, it remains merely an appetite; in others still, it is connected to the transacting of business. The prison scenes in All the Pretty Horses reinforce this notion of violence as fundamental to exchanges between men. Indeed, the narrator likens the “readiness to kill” among prisoners to a gold standard that underpins the struggle for scant possessions and status. There is no other determinant of worth or suitability to own. This is not the violence of dominant imperial systems, but its precursor, the raw material that lies within individuals but is magnified thousands of times in the prosecution of the colonial project and its larger wars. This violence on a global, industrial scale is what brings about the conditions of The Road and is the ultimate destination of modernity. In McCarthy’s last novel, the patina of civilization has been stripped away: “Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it” (The Road 28). Violence sheds most of the symbolic cargo with which it was freighted in the earlier novels to return to a kind of atavistic condition in which force is shorn of ideological power and persists either as way of survival or as gratification of other fundamental needs. “Sooner or later they will catch us



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and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it” (56). Violence returns to a condition, in The Road, comparable to its condition in the premodern Appalachian novels. Violence is profoundly rendered in Blood Meridian, its operations arcane, complex, and sophisticated. In the border trilogy, the unrefined kind of violence of The Road and the Southern novels can be placed alongside that generated by modernity. The Crossing contains a lengthy set piece in which this is symbolized in the plight of Billy’s wolf as she is forced to fight “the better part of all the dogs brought to the feria” (122). The domestic dog is often represented in McCarthy as part of the apparatus of modernity, a living tool in humanity’s domination of the planet, and the wolf, as its opposite, represents resistance. Dogs are easily dispensable and replaceable, therefore: this is true as far back as “A Drowning Incident,” in which a bag of puppies is pitched into the river, their destiny to feed hungry crayfish. Domestic dogs are used in unsentimental fashion to chase down and kill feral dogs in Cities of the Plain: “The slack of Billy’s catchrope hissed along the ground and stopped and the big yellow dog rose suddenly from the ground in headlong flight taut between the two ropes and the ropes resonated a single brief dull note and then the dog exploded” (165). Billy’s response is a laconic “Goddam” (165). Later, when he digs up the pups from the den, Billy speaks and behaves as though he were acquiring a new rifle or some other useful but inanimate piece of equipment. The rest of the border trilogy tends to pre­ sent the violence of its protagonists as defensive or perpetrated out of necessity even when it can appear choreographed: the prison scenes in All the Pretty Horses, for example, John Grady Cole’s knife fight with the pimp in Cities of the Plain, Boyd’s wounds in The Crossing, even Blevins’s execution. There tends to be “justice” associated with acts of violence in the trilogy: the demise of Blevins is summary, but he was guilty of the act for which he perished, and it was necessary, as the Captain later explains, for the respect of his office to ensure that Blevins did not return from the wood (181). That John Grady does not mete out punishment to the captain in pursuit of redress for the horses and Blevins indicates that violence in the trilogy has no

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overriding and determining metaphysical logic. Violence forms part of a practical code of behavior that permits society at the border to function according to a rough notion of justice. What marks out the border trilogy from the Southern novels, in terms of its instruments of violence, is guns. Guns are the one article devised and mass-­ produced by the manufacturing engines of the industrialized world that separate McCarthy’s work into before-and-after Blood Merid­ ian. Guns are used in the Southern novels, but they do not symbolize the entry of the manufactured into paradise as they do in the Western 4 novels: et in arcadia ego. The inscription on Holden’s gun represents manifest destiny, the pushing back of the frontier, Eurocentric modernity’s ultimate tool in the subjugation of the land and its peoples. The rise of the manufacture of increasingly efficient guns can be matched to the rise of the European—particularly British—colonial project. There is little of this in the earlier works. Death tends to be administered by more primitive methods. Weapons technology is, of course, one factor in the demise of modern humanity, and its machines, in The Road: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the window-glass” (52). It is hard to attribute this to a single event: McCarthy would probably have researched the sound of a nuclear explosion—a single bang by all accounts—and there is no evidence of nuclear contamination in the novel. The impact from a comet or large meteorite is another possibility, but how would there be a breathable atmosphere, and if the man and woman were close enough to the impact to see and hear something of it, it surely would have destroyed them? Again, as the archive tells us, McCarthy is a careful researcher and it would seem unlikely that the nature of the catastrophe and its subsequent effects would be inconsistent. It seems probable that a collection of factors have combined to precipitate this moment. It is consistent, also, with McCarthy’s recognition of the pervasive and multiple character of the various threats to human existence that this should be the case. A combination of climate change, environmental pollution, the collapse of food supplies, habitat loss, economic



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meltdown, and the consequent eruption of multiple highly technologized wars on various scales, all of which become greater than the sum of their parts, seems a likely explanation given what has gone before in the fiction. Slow violence and the more immediate kind join in apocalyptic catalysis. The land continues to burn because no emergency services are left to respond. The light and the concussions are simply another event in a series of many, significant because they represent the culminating moment of violence in which the couple realize that their life to date is over and the world is changed permanently. Before, however, McCarthy offers us a version of the destination of humanity in The Road in 2006, No Country for old Men appears in 2005. The dystopian version of modernity announced by Judge Holden reaches its conclusion. The novel represents a hypermodern version of violence, supercharged by ever-more-efficient weapons and embodied in Chigurh, to whom Sheriff Bell may or may not be referring when he reflects, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him” (4). The passage from which this volume takes its title identifies in the world of the 1980s Southwest a precursor of the apocalypse to come in The Road. Bell’s fear is that of a man overtaken by times he cannot and maybe does not want to understand, paralyzed by the development of technologies in weapons and communications that have shaped a society that is out of kilter with his experience and practices. The pace of economic globalization has outstripped the ability of society’s infrastructure to manage its dark side, manifest in No Country for Old Men in the effacement of the border as a way of controlling the illicit traffic in guns, weapons, and money. Chigurh, however, does not always seem to conform to an embodiment of these ideas the way Holden does in an earlier incarnation of modernity. Why, it seems reasonable to ask, does Chigurh stop and kill the man in the “late model Ford sedan” (7) after he has murdered the deputy by strangling him with the nickel-plated cuffs? This might seem random, but the answer is that he is motivated by pure utility. He must

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escape the law so he murders the deputy to escape; he is too conspicuous in the police cruiser he steals, so he takes the first civilian car available to him. Plainly, its driver cannot be allowed to live lest he immediately contact the authorities once Chigurh is gone. There is nothing mysterious in this, or supernatural. It is entirely rational, and seems to me to reflect the imperative in McCarthy’s fiction that states that reason is a double-edged sword. Reason, like technology, aids good and bad alike. What we do not know with any great clarity about Holden and Chigurh, however, is where they came from, where they are going, or precisely what motivates them. They are in this particular akin to “gods of the rational”—a pleasing paradox in McCarthy—and the momentary tableau as Chigurh lays his hand on the man’s forehead “like a faith healer”(7) demonstrates this notion with characteristic economy. Every decision Chigurh takes in these opening scenes is rational. Furthermore, technological abundance has equipped him with the means to kill silently and efficiently in the interests of utility; his final remark in this scene, “I just didnt want you to get blood on the car” (7), validates the notion that Chigurh is intent fully on his carefully considered precautions against capture. Militating against this is the coin toss, a seeming engagement with chance. Why, if Chigurh is some kind of avatar of the instrumentally rational—as I suggest—insist on deciding life and death by the toss of a coin, first with the garage proprietor, then with Carla Jean? Chigurh explains in some detail that it is merely a relatively simple form of historical determinism. Because of the movement through space and time of the three parties in the exchange—Chigurh, Carla Jean, and the coin—and the coincidence of their presence in the room at the moments that Chigurh decides to toss the coin and the coin lands contrary to her call, the history of all three has been retro-determined in these infinitesimal moments of the present. What lends credence to this argument is a “tell” from McCarthy when, in the conversation with the garage proprietor, Chigurh castigates the proprietor for his failure to be specific about time: “now is not a time” (No Country for Old Men 53). For Chigurh to function, time needs to be measured in a precise and specific way. “Now” is not a time for Chigurh but a signifier of the moment when the past and the future collide in the



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creation of histories. Each of our actions, then, reverse-engineers the trajectory of individuals and objects in the past. Thus history is formed: “All significant events and deeds are, in this way, opened to this kind of practical interpretation through present praxis” (Ricoeur 155). Plainly, it gives Chigurh satisfaction to concretize history in these ways. He makes no argument in No Country for Old Men about what might happen in the future, no attempt at prediction— such a course would be irrational, as it would require a gift for prophecy or an ability to collect enough data to make accurate predictions. He has found a way of knowing the world by determining its history in a way unavailable to Judge Holden. Chigurh can rout out the unknown because he continually solidifies it in historical fact: “To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be?” (57). Chigurh’s medium for determining history in this fashion is violence. It is not clear that he gains any satisfaction from the violence and bloodshed that make him what he is, which reinforces the notion that violence serves only the twin purposes for him of fixing history and of expediency. But one of the issues clouding interpretations of Chigurh is the sense of something posthuman in McCarthy’s creation, a figure so advanced in certain particulars that he might almost be a cyborg—even to a kind of clumsy assonance between the words themselves. Chigurh seems to have transcended the capabilities of ordinary mortals; he is transhuman, a being “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards” (Garreau 231–32). This is true of his use of the slaughterhouse bolt gun, which is, to all intents and purposes, an additional appendage, and his mysterious ability to disappear, reappear, and track the locations of others. Naturally, McCarthy’s interest in this is not to explore any of the radical capabilities for good such a condition might imply—the possibilities of hugely expanded life spans for human beings, for example, or the application of massively enhanced cognitive faculties to global problems. In the transhuman condition of Chigurh, McCarthy’s intent seems rather to generate an aura of mystery and to create terror in the characters with whom

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Chigurh interacts. Again, though, there is no mystery, Chigurh is one more stage down the path forged by Judge Holden toward the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project of rationality, perfectibility, and total human agency. Judge Holden is Chigurh’s direct antecedent, his deeds are transposed from an early technological period into a later one, and his method for cataloging, controlling, and using changed but recognizable. Chigurh is also the manifestation of everything Sheriff Bell fears about the accelerating rush of the future, the frenzied pace of late modernity. At the site in the desert where Chigurh has killed two more men, McCarthy mentions the Glock Chigurh has used. On the next page begins one of Bell’s ruminations on the modern world, in which he laments the pace of technological change, particularly in the area of weapons, far beyond necessity and providing more benefits for criminals than for law enforcement. The nature of criminal activity has changed also as small-scale smuggling, horse theft, and barroom brawls transmute into cocaine running, money laundering, and shootings. The world of the Colt 44-40 is now the world of the semiautomatic. Characters wearing raincoats and tennis shoes wielding machine guns and shotguns “don’t look like anybody you would expect to meet in this part of the country” (No Country for Old Men 120). The logic of modernity leads to this couple out in California [who] would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They’d torture em first, I dont know why. Maybe their television was broke. Now here’s what the papers had to say about that. I quote from the papers. Said: Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearin only a dogcollar. You cant make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try. (124) Bell recognizes that modernity has brought the world to this kind of pitch as it dislocates individuals from communities, feeds them simulacra of life, and creates of the acquisition of money and goods the



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whole of aspiration, yet Bell’s commonsense position has attracted criticism from some quarters, in which the character is damned as a conservative and McCarthy is caricatured as his analogue (Oates 3). Both are evidently more complex than this, and Bell is critical to No Country for Old Men if for no other reason than as an exemplar of how conservative nostalgia is no more effective in the face of a pervasive modernity than is liberal hand-wringing, or Marxist longing for an infinitely postponed revolution. At one level, then, it would be relatively easy to make the argument that No Country for Old Men and The Road signify McCarthy’s most despairing response to modernity. And, along with The Counselor, which operates in a similar realm to No Country for Old Men, they are, of course, his most recent works. The extreme violence inflicted on Chigurh at the end of the novel as well as the torture and mutilation commonplace in all three works are of a piece with that inflicted on the larger planet in The Road, where both the slow and immediate violence of modernity reach their final destination in the dissolution of the Anthropocene. In McCarthy, violence is deeply woven into what it is to be human, operating at multiple levels and signifying a range of ideas and phenomena. As readers, we are forced to confront the truth of this violence and engage in honest ways with how we feel when faced with one of the less palatable truths about what it means to be human. The truth of the violence in McCarthy’s fiction produces strong responses in his readers. In the next chapter, I consider in more detail how this and other truths manifest in affect and feeling, and how such manifestations might result in embodied consequences in the real world.

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Learning from Cormac McCarthy

[Mr. Duffy] lived a little distance from his body. — ja mes joyce , “A Painful Case,” in Dubliners

I

first imagined this chapter as an analysis and discussion of ways in which Cormac McCarthy could be taught in higher education. It would chronicle activities on McCarthy’s work that I had designed for my students, record student testimony, and seek to draw conclusions from the results. I engaged an interested helper, set up a daylong workshop, talked with colleagues who also teach McCarthy, and created a program of interviews at an international Cormac McCarthy 1 conference. After a while, however, it began to feel as though this were not enough, or even the right thing to do. It became increasingly important for me to write about how reading Cormac McCarthy changed my life. How could I expect to analyze successfully the experience of others without initial scrutiny of my own responses? I returned, therefore, to my unexamined notion that, like other authors I read before him— Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and J. G. Ballard, for example, and David Foster Wallace and Leslie Marmon Silko after—McCarthy made and continues to make a difference to the ways in which I think and behave. My “being in the world” is forever altered in the encounter with the fiction. What I have decided to do, therefore, is to write about some of my personal experiences with McCarthy’s work and reflect on those in ways I hope will create links to my writing, my teaching, and my research. This chapter, then, is a mixture of the anecdotal, the philosophically speculative, and the pedagogic, but is governed by the autoethnographic method (see introduction, this volume). 99

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I begin with teaching, which permits me to be a practitioner of sorts, and is important in the sense that it enables me to “do” my subject—the ontological being as important as the epistemological in this and the chapters that follow. I have observed hundreds of hours of teaching in universities over the years in a variety of roles—student, peer reviewer, mentor, trainer—and I have judged what I have experienced according to various criteria provided for me by the institutions I have worked for, against theories that have interested me, and in loose relation to a collection of less formal, self-created notions of what represents good and bad teaching. Sometimes I have used all these methods simultaneously in an unconscious way; other times I have been more consciously rigid. Truthfully, I have not seen much bad teaching. Occasionally students have emerged from a room plainly baffled, outraged at overt or covert sexism or racism, or desperately bored in the face of undiluted lecturing. These instances are rare. Students are mostly focused, enthusiastic, and intellectually engaged—as are their tutors—and approach their material with a critical cast of mind. In these last two sentences, I am keenly aware that I have revealed, without thinking about it, both what I have been trained to believe is important in the way those new to my discipline engage with it, and my rejection of the idea that our foundational pedagogy in universities should consist of the download of content from master to novitiate consciousness. I learned early on, however, that if you begin by asking students what they think about a book, or whether they like it, the level of debate is not likely to attain the depth and complexity required to do justice to the primary material. Here, again, I unconsciously reveal what I consider to be important in literary studies, that is, depth and complexity a la Harold Bloom (Western Canon 16–35). We give our students things to do in lectures and seminars. We require that they participate in group and pair work. We demand that they close-read. We insist that they engage with theory. They are assessed on whether their work is analytical or, heaven forfend, descriptive. We grade them on the skill with which they achieve a mix of these activities in writing of one form or another. We credit them with original ideas, and we admire the facility and speed with which they carve out new or occupy existing niches in the edifice of



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

our subject. Yet something bothers me about this. I have never forgotten my pre-university experience of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: the narrator, describing one of the Ivy League hypocrites in the squadron, states that the character “knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.” This is hardly a startling insight now, of course, but when I was at graduate school this frustration was frequently expressed, albeit in much more sophisticated ways, but I felt then and I feel now that the practice of the discipline of literary studies need not result in diminished pleasure in reading. If my colleagues tend to be jaded, cynical, and more joyless than one might imagine they should be, it is more likely to be the result of excessive demands on their time and efforts, the ever-lurking threat to the humanities in Western universities, and the triumph of a managerialist culture in their institutions. It did seem to me, though, that my colleagues rarely spoke about the pleasure they derived from a text, and I only occasionally heard from them that reading a novel had made a difference to them personally, in their lives beyond the academy. I think part of the explanation lies in the attempt by very clever people to bond literature to theory seamlessly, and in the creation of a climate in higher education where research is paramount—and where that research becomes increasingly subject to spurious ideas of measurement. An environment is created that determines rather rigidly the way all of us in the academy engage with our primary objects of study. Such a climate tends to militate against discussion of what the novels and poetry we read do to us as we read them. How they make us feel. How they change us. There is a gap between the superficiality that can arise when people are asked what they think of a book or how it makes them feel, and the level of engagement I am searching for that requires people to use both their personal epistemological and ontological apparatus and to reflect on an embodied experience with literature. This gap exists among academics as well as students, as I have suggested, but for obviously different reasons. I want, therefore, to work this out in a way I hope is coherent but I realize represents a bricolage of overlapping and sometimes contradictory assertions. Because of this, this section of the book feels as though I am abandoning the solid ground

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of the theory and practice of literary studies I learned in university English departments in a somewhat reckless or irresponsible fashion. It feels necessary, however, because I worry that a significant part of my literary sensibility has become trapped or diminished by the methodologies I have learned and applied over time. The ideas I set out here are connected to some of the collateral damage I think has occurred in the last forty or fifty years, in my discipline, as a result of the overzealous mission of faculty to apply new ways to analyze literature. One example of such damage has been the obsessive tendency to marginalize the author and to deemphasize the social power of 2 fiction. Early on the “well-wrought urn” of the New Critics made the literary work an object of ascetic aestheticism, close-read and self-­ contained, whereas belletrists emoted in exclusive ways about imagery and ignored its context. Later we stopped talking and writing about the individual life-changing properties of literature and began to examine it through lenses Marxist, feminist, LGBT, or postcolonial as we awaited an infinitely postponed revolution. At the same time, cultural materialism persuaded us that no form of literary production is superior to another; and postmodernism showed us that the novel does not communicate a single meaning, but that meaning is forged only in the interaction of individual subjectivity with the material. Nothing can be truly shared. At either end of this system of responses, many academics became convinced that the discipline of literary studies was another compromised ideological excrescence of the neoliberal capitalist project. One escape is to revert to what interested me in fiction in the first place: how it made me feel about the world and how it changed my perceptions. This returns me to the ways in which reading Cormac McCarthy makes me feel and how the experience has changed my opinions, my beliefs, indeed, the way I live my life. In other words, the autoethnographic approach. Arthur Bochner writes the following: Autoethnography is an expression of the desire to turn social science inquiry into a non-alienating practice, one in which I (as a researcher) do not need to suppress my own subjectivity, where I



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

can become more attuned to the subjectivities of others, where I am free to reflect on the consequences of my work, not only for others but also for myself, and where all parts of myself—emotional, spiritual, intellectual, embodied and moral—can be voiced and integrated into my work. . . . It’s a response to an existential crisis—a desire to do meaningful work and lead a meaningful life. (53) Bochner reintroduces, in terms that resonate strongly with me, significant elements that have been absent from academic approaches to both teaching and research for too long. Not only are the “emotional, spiritual, intellectual, embodied, and moral” essential in the production and reception of literature, they also feature in significant ways in the writing of Cormac McCarthy, either as elements in the narrative or underlying abstractions. To mix autoethnography and literary criticism seems entirely justifiable as a small performative manifestation of my belief that what we teach students should be increasingly problem-­based, that we should mix disciplines in the service of this notion, and that as a consequence we may create a generation better equipped to understand and operate in a world globalization has already rendered interdisciplinary. Reading Cormac McCarthy helped solidify my views about this, and reading what other people write about McCarthy helped me learn it. My friend and colleague Peter Josyph, who has recently met and talked with McCarthy, told me, when I pressed him, that McCarthy was like a very intelligent, extraordinarily well-read uncle with whom you can enjoy a debate on a variety of subjects. Peter also told me that McCarthy owns around ten thousand books—many of them annotated—and is currently building a library to house them. This was very important to me, and buttresses what I have always supposed somewhat casually about fiction: it does your interdisciplinarity for you. If McCarthy is properly versed in the range of material his library implies he is, then it is no exaggeration to claim that to read Blood Meridian, say, is to engage with chemistry, astronomy, biology, physics, metaphysics, anatomy, history, and geography, and to locate confluences in these often artificially separated

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fields of thought and endeavor. McCarthy makes me feel vicariously erudite as I struggle toward an understanding of his work. Such a sense makes me wish I could claim that I was a Cormackian (to quote Rick Wallach) before I was: devotees tend to be divided into pre– and post–The Road, pre– and post–All the Pretty Horses, more rarefied divisions before and after Blood Meridian. All that can be asserted with any confidence in this connection is that everyone who attended the inaugural conference of the Cormac McCarthy Society in October 1993 at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, had presumably read all the fiction written to that point. My own first McCarthy Society conference was the 2000 event in Austin, Texas, beginning the day after the election. Arriving too early, I witnessed a motorcade descending the street toward the river from the capitol, complete with outriders and flashing lights. The future President Bush in all probability, but this was pretty much unverifiable by any commonsense method, and conclusive evidence would have been difficult to come by—a problem about conclusive evidence that was to manifest on a national scale in 2000 in the Florida recounts. Anyway, I knew it was Bush but I could not prove it. This seemed to me to reflect the strangeness of the United States in those febrile postelection days. I imagined this was what it would be like if aliens had landed and we had not yet quite discerned their motives. So I was in Austin, capital of the Southwest, about to attend my first academic conference. Presiding was Rick Wallach. Rick is an indefatigable promoter of the works of Cormac McCarthy. I have emulated Rick in giving away copies of Blood Meridian and related 3 books to all kinds of people. At this conference, I also met Dianne Luce and Edwin T. “Chip” Arnold, both of whom had been publishing on McCarthy for at least ten years. Also there were Stacey Peebles, now editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, and Marty Priola, responsible for originating Cormacmccarthy.com, around which the Cormac McCarthy Society is organized. I drop these names simply to demonstrate that the world of Cormac McCarthy scholarship was small and informal in those days, yet most of the individuals I mention remain active in writing about McCarthy, despite the entry of hundreds of other scholars into the field.



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

Particular authors inspire a kind of loyalty. Some of it is to do with the fact that if academics have devoted large parts of their time and careers to a particular subject, it really had better be worthwhile. Thus we defend vigorously to ourselves and others our decision to work on the output of these individuals. When I hand Blood Merid­ ian to a colleague, or leave a copy on the train, this is mostly what I think too. But I also think, you can know me through this book. Part of us becomes our work, and vice versa. This is not, though, the whole story. McCarthy is one of those authors whose work is particularly productive for literary critics. This is not merely because he will not talk to academics about his work, so no absolute confirmation of authorial intent is possible, but also because the work has multiple layers of erudition, a spectacular linguistic inventiveness, and an extraordinary and elusive power of evocation. It is not much of an argument to state that I have long felt that these things are linked, or to assert that this power to evoke comes about as a result of the inventiveness—either single new words, or combinations of words in sentences—that create new worlds in a Wittgensteinian way (see chapters 1 and 11, this volume). Perhaps, though, what emerges is a different kind of grammar in which to write of the South and the Southwest, a grammar that creates a new place that both is and is not the Southwest of my initial experience of it. The 2000 trip was not my first to the Southwest, or even my second. I had driven through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah in both 1998 and 1999. On my first trip, I read Blood Meridian again as we drove through west Texas. As we approached the town of Presidio, I read the following: “They traveled northeast as far as the town of Presidio on the Texas border and they crossed the horses and rode dripping through the streets” (167). Coincidentally, McCarthy had put me in the Presidio of his world at the precise moment I entered it in mine. I felt elated. I noted this to my traveling companions. After the subsequent short silence, we stopped and ate lunch. As we walked back to the car, I could discern “the barren peppercorn hills and the mountains and the flat brush country and running plain” (167), and it felt to me that if I blocked out the telephone lines, the trucks, and the cars, I could conjure Glanton, the

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kid, and the judge slumped loose in their saddles, ready in a moment to slaughter anything that drew breath on the infernal plain. Later we stopped to look out over the Rio Grande from the roadside in a shimmering heat that seemed to hiss or whisper slightly in the quiet, and I felt that McCarthy’s writing had given me a Southwest that was unique to me, yet available in multiple forms to others. There was my consciousness, his consciousness, and there was history. I felt I understood what McCarthy wanted all his readers to know: that nothing, not even the very stuff of the earth itself, is imperishable. I felt the insignificance of humanity and human systems. Because of McCarthy, what happened in that moment created a platform for me to another level of thought and being. It was McCarthy’s fiction, too, that impelled me to swim across the Rio Grande during a stay at Big Bend on the same trip, intoxicated as I was by the romance of his version of the freedom it represented. It occurs to me, now, that what I did has both an ontological and an epistemological dimension. I think that there was something in the act that was driven by a desire to undermine an arbitrary border, to embody in the fact that national borders are fundamentally permeable because they seek to defy geography, and geography in the Southwest can only be defied by the incredibly slow passage of geological time. My actions were thus mounting a kind of defiant and performative defense of freedom. It felt heroic. The breath-catching grandeur of what I saw around me seemed to provide a legitimizing context for the recklessness of the plunge. As it turned out, the river was kind, possessed of nothing more than gentle downstream currents, and free of worrying pollution. Dripping like the Glanton Gang after their Presidio crossing, I returned to the United States and looked back at Mexico with a curious sense that I had, physically and emotionally, entered the landscape. Edward Abbey had demanded we crawl on our hands and knees through these regions (Desert Solitaire), and it felt as if I had acted in that spirit. I wonder now what I could have said to any authority on either bank who had questioned me on the matter other than “Cormac McCarthy made me do it.” Much later, I fed the lasting impressions of these experiences into



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

teaching workshops on McCarthy and others. Here I must be detailed because without the detail it will be impossible to show how I have tried to translate these feelings and sensations into structured activity that, I hope, helps participants move from epistemological readiness to ontological engagement: from knowing to doing and being. The pedagogy underlying my method was informed by the notion that novels offer us complex, nuanced readings of a range of human and societal behavior and activity unavailable in such 4 condensed and accessible form elsewhere. To tease out some of 5 these readings, I designed an activity I call theory building. Theory building requires that the tutor or facilitator prepares in advance a series of laminated images or fragments of text, or both. Twelve to fifteen is enough. Each laminate should address some aspect of the session’s subject matter, either directly or tangentially. The information should not lead participants in too specific a direction, but should be appropriate to their levels of knowledge and ability. The exercise is for groups of eight to thirty. The facilitator divides the larger group into several smaller groups. The groups are each provided with a set of identical laminates. Each group is required to create a theory or narrative from the materials and represent this as a pattern on the floor of the space. The facilitator should be ready to step in at various moments to clarify, for example, what the images represent and where the quotations originate. Each group, when they are ready, invites the other groups, in turn, to enter their space and read the theories. This part of the exercise is complete when every group has read every other group’s work, a process that lasts anywhere from forty minutes to an hour and can be concluded with a plenary, for the entire group, of whatever length the facilitator determines is appropriate. It is possible to add two stages to the process. Participants can form a tableau or still image of their theory. They can also add movement through an improvised performance. It is also possible to conclude a theory-building exercise with a writing session in which participants articulate their theory in five hundred words. The images for a typical session, which in this case focuses on McCarthy and the Southwest, include John Gast’s American

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Progress, a photograph of what appears to be a Mexican scaling the wall dividing his country from the United States, a photograph of Monument Valley, a highly stylized “cowgirl,” images of firearms, a photograph of uranium ore, another of the falling water levels in Lake Mead, a reproduction of a cartoon depicting Donald Duck’s nephews discovering Cibola, the artist Palmer Murphy’s sketch of McCarthy on Oprah, and images of a rattlesnake, a dinosaur, a Jesuit on horseback, a ruined church, and the Anasazi structures at Canyon de Chelly. Selected quotations from Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, McCar­ thy of course, and Thomas Keneally are also included: He was naked on a rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams. Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers or desires, rock-turtles on their rock. Something Reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like crustaceans in their armour. (Cather 102) When I write “paradise” I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also Scorpions, tarantulas and flies, ratttlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo, mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes—disease and death and the rotting of flesh. (Abbey, Desert Solitaire 147) [They] never paint for the callow purpose of declaring “I am.” They paint as a means of maintaining the physics of the earth. (Keneally 57) [They] were intransigent nomads and hence evoked two contradictory impulses in sedentary people like us—to condemn or to sentimentalize. (Keneally 23)



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

I have seen patterns on the floor derived from these fragments that students use to represent ideas and narratives as varied as nihilism, spiritual belief, the decline of the West, a progression from “lower” to “higher,” postcolonial theory, language, and various species of ecology. Groups of students will also produce theories and narratives similar to my own concerning modernity and geological time. It is true that I choose the images, and that I must be in some way leading the students. The process, though, can be made more impartial by asking that students supply an image or phrase themselves before the session. It is also true that what might appear to be a simple exercise can create profound experiences for students if the facilitator creates materials that allow participants to own the narratives they create. Furthermore, the final element of the exercise brings the two artificially divided notions of embodiment and intellectual activity back into closer 6 proximity. What is most powerful in these exercises is the move students make from individual reflection to collaborative reflection, to changes in those reflections, to the shared embodiment of an idea. I use this method not just for McCarthy and the Southwest, but also for a range of subjects including literary theory, capital punishment, and the eighteenth-century novel. The phase in which I ask students to make a tableau, or still image, of the idea they have represented in images and text on the floor is always the most challenging. The requirement, I tell them, is that they should all be in physical contact with one another, and that they should be silent in the final moment of presentation. All 7 other possibilities are open to them. An example of how these tableaux have worked for me personally is a session run by a colleague in which he wished us to understand the concept of hegemony. Two of the group of three I was in blindfolded the third before leading them around the room then stopping at the moment the facilitator counted us down to stillness to form a natural pose on the floor. The third reached out toward the dominant two, meeting fingertip-to-fingertip, with an extraordinary expression on her face, which is almost impossible to describe—something like a combination of gratitude and puzzlement, but more subtle and varied. What I looked like, I don’t know, but the readers from the other group were obviously struck by some kind of authenticity that clung to the image we had produced, as we were with

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theirs, and it felt to me on that day that I knew this concept, through feeling it, better and in a radically more meaningful way than I had done before. If I were asked for a learning outcome, I might say this: “Participants are forced by the nature of the activity to engage. It both promotes collective action and encourages a sense of individual responsibility. It deepens understanding of the subject matter and provides a platform for later, more detailed discussion.” Such a dry articulation, however, fails to do justice to the experience. I cannot, of course, create the circumstances in which my students feel compelled to and, more to the point, are able to dive into the Rio Grande. I might, however, if I were teaching Shakespeare in England, take them to the Globe, where they could gain a sense of the experience of a groundling. I might, in a seminar on nineteenth-century poetry, travel to the remains of Emmonsails Heath and explore the fragments of true heath at Castor Hanglands, or the grassland at Barnack Hills and Holes. In this environment, it might be possible to conjure a sense of what John Clare might have felt when he wrote his poetry, and compare this with what we experience when we read it now. This kind of embodied engagement is simply not available to most teachers on a regular basis, but theory building can approximate it. To reunite students’ intellect with their feelings about literature, and to allow them to reconnect mind to body as a fundamental in the process is a powerful learning experience for many. Students have said about these sessions that “[this] has been a fantastic advertisement for working through performative text”; and, in the broader context of the module in which the activity was situated, “I felt— unlike other seminars—that I had to be there every week.” Students also noted that theory-building sessions were “original, stimulating, exciting.” More importantly, a former student remarked that “the long-lasting . . . impact of my experience . . . has recently drawn me back to the University, a number of years after leaving. . . . [My experience] was hugely beneficial to my professional development as a teacher.” Students feel significantly better about learning when they are permitted to create knowledge and understanding for themselves in environments where the embodied and the intellectual are recognized as part of the same function.



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

If academic colleagues can note that “almost two years after our Embodied Learning Workshop, my faculty colleagues and graduate students continue to reflect on the inspiration they gained from [the session],” there has to be a case for pushing this kind of teaching and learning further. This is true not just for historical context, and for the grasp of abstract concepts, but also for the lived reality of the students. Theory building is a shortcut to the kind of experience I had when I lived in unpromising circumstances in London. I existed on the margins of society, earning money as a builder’s laborer and living on the floors and couches of friends or in squats. This was in the 1980s and long before I returned to education. I made sure, though, that I always took to work, or left lying around in whatever squat I was using, a copy of the particular William Burroughs novel I was reading, or Ballard’s Crash. I did this because it made me feel different, it distanced the abyss I felt was always about to open beneath me, and I felt that intimacy with these books afforded me a special status, so I walked in the streets more confidently than I might otherwise have done. How I presented myself to those I worked with felt altered: there is no doubt, for example, that I was considerably more articulate than the average wielder of a hammer drill. I felt I had something that your average laborer did not, and it showed in my posture and behavior, much to my embarassment as I reflect on it now. The fiction did, though, become part of me in a meaningfully embodied sense. Literature and the ideas it contains entered both my mind and my body. I am aware I am perpetuating what many have come to regard as an artificial distinction by framing this notion in this way, so perhaps it is better to write that certain novels, poems, and plays have occupied me viscerally, changing me in ways that were and are manifest. I felt and was different. If we imagine for a moment that we do not constantly reinscribe, as I have just done, the language of Cartesian dualism, then I am tempted to return to something like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and look for a neologism akin to his verb to grok, which seems to mean something beyond a mere intellectual grasp of another’s attempt at communication. The Oxford English Dictionary defines to grok as to “understand (something) intuitively or by empathy.” The root of the metaphor is to drink. This moves in the right

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direction, but the definition I am looking for would be something more specific and focused: “to experience a work of art both ontologically and epistemologically,” maybe. Does such a combination bypass the mind-body division? I doubt it because the difficulty here is to try to forget Cartesian dualism ever existed, which would be to imagine the impossible: to un-understand a concept I have previously understood. So much discourse is founded on this separation, and so many assumptions made as a consequence, that it is unsurprising that those of us who want to introduce embodiment into higher education teaching and learning methods are sometimes greeted with reactions as 8 extreme as terror, anger, or contempt. The body might have disappeared in higher education for the time being, but I know nonetheless that I have felt and continue to feel things in response to Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Sometimes, for example, McCarthy makes me laugh aloud. Instances abound in Suttree, which is rich in comic material. And funny moments are a feature of many of the other works despite their often serious or tragic themes: the manufacture of gunpowder in Blood Meridian, the discourse and behavior of Blevins in All the Pretty Horses, Lester Ballard’s first appearance in drag, and the crazy pigmen in Outer Dark who drive Culla to distraction, to name but a few. Equally, writing from the breadth of McCarthy’s work has brought me to tears, or affected my emotions in other ways. All this is to reinforce the point that literature has effects in the real world, which is evident in my own engagement with Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Alan Goldman notes that the form of the novel renders it amenable to the gleaning of insights concerning beliefs and principles that are created by the author via the interiority of the particular novel’s characters, and that are harder to reach in “real” life (Philosophy and the Novel). Further, Goldman notes that “we can learn from novels not only consequences of acting on various principles, and conceptual truths such as what is involved in fully developed moral agency, but philosophically important empirical facts such as how such agency develops or decays” (17). I would go further than Goldman to say that the novel enables us to feel things at the same time that we know them. My endeavor has been to see whether that is actually true if I recount, honestly, what I recall to be



Learning from Cormac McCarthy

my experience, or series of experiences of events in Texas, and in teaching and learning sessions. I am still not sure that anything conclusive might be generalized beyond my experience in what has emerged. I know for certain, however, that I can see many connections between this chapter and the others. The forty-one instances of feel, felt, or feeling, for example, allow me to be more confident in my assertions in chapters 11 and 12, where I search for ways to explain affect in McCarthy. In the same vein, the twenty mentions of body, embodiment, or ontology license the more abstract material in the same chapters. Finally, the sixteen instances of change, changed, or different seem to offer an opportunity to bolster one of the principal notions that underpins the ideas represented in this book, that literature, and the literature of Cormac McCarthy in particular, can change your life. For those who might argue that the work is passive doom-mongering devoid of any politics but a resigned and supine species of conservatism, I would ask how much more political can literature be if it is an agent of change in the being of individuals of whose thoughts, feelings, and actions the real world is composed?

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A Resonance like Music

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. — willia m faulk ner , The Sound and the Fury

I

end the last chapter with the suggestion that McCarthy’s work engages with affect and embodiment in a way that produces the potential for social change. Such change must come about individual by individual in the face of the rapidity with which large-scale collective organized action has dissolved, or devolved into single-issue politics. The decline of collective action is a complex phenomenon. Part of the explanation is that its inherent power to resist has been weakened by a globalizing economic system that shapes individuals in Western democracies and “developing” economies into consuming bodies. Many in other parts of the world, meanwhile, are left in poverty, susceptible to disease, starvation, and death. Under such circumstances, coalitions that escape local characterization are harder and harder to mobilize as capital becomes ever more fluid, but labor does not. McCarthy’s work, however, offers a detectable challenge to this hegemony that, because it has no party affiliations, no clearly elucidated Marxist foundations, and no obvious postcolonial themes, might be overlooked. The challenge is consistent with the generation of affect in individual readers that produces the kinds of responses I describe in chapter 6, and which I examine in greater detail in chapters 10 and 11. “The personal is the political” has never been more apposite. This kindling of affect provides the foundation for readers 115

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to engage with a variety of elements in the fiction that are laden with more or less subtle notions of resistance to modernity. These elements include a resurgence of the mystical, performance of a particular aesthetic, creation in language of new worlds, a sophisticated understanding of borders and the kinds of challenge produced in their liminal or third spaces, and an acutely developed reverence and respect 1 for the land and its nonhuman species. I start with the last of these, and the creation in McCarthy’s fiction of communities beyond the ken of modernity. Animals in McCarthy’s fiction fulfill a number of purposes and exist, even within a single species, in a wide variety of incarnations. They can be pets, tools, demi-familiars, food, companions, agents of war, scenery, and symbols. Most significantly, though, they provide a profound contrast between ways of being in the world that have a connected, somatic, mystical character, and those that feature isolation, intellectual abstraction, the use of technology for war, and instrumental reason. Residual in the pre-linguistic, pre-Columbian being of horses and wolves, in McCarthy’s fiction, is an ancient mysticism that might be perceived as the antithesis of the all-consuming rational determinism embodied in Judge Holden and embedded in the Eurocentric modernity from which McCarthy’s heroes are frequently in flight. The human appetite for irrational joy can seem spent in the novels, yet animals are capable of a complementary and harmonic relationship with the natural world. Mankind, by contrast, is too often distanced from the world by readings of it that posit a better place after death and that dilute an immediate response of the kind that remains available to animals. This relationship is sometimes given a mystic sheen by McCarthy and sometimes merely noted as behavior. Beset by a nameless discomfort, McCarthy’s border wanderers long to enter the world of these animals and in so doing pursue living mysteries that contradict the drive to utility and productivity. The desire is never articulated by the Parhams, or by John Grady Cole, but exists as unspoken defiance. Such a kinship forms a loose coalition of those not yet rendered spiritually barren in a world about to be drained of mystery. McCarthy’s post–Blood Meridian nomads create of the wild and semi-wild creatures, in the novels, the quintessence of a disappeared



A Resonance like Music

consciousness: a consciousness detectable as a barely audible hum against the numbing roar of modernity. This version of the relationship between human and animal, however, does not mature until late in McCarthy’s work, and, as in most other areas, the division between Southern and Southwestern fiction represents a departure in the ways 2 animals are treated. There are hints, though, in the earlier writing of what is to come. This is perhaps most distinct in the representation of animals in their fossil forms, living or petrified, which signify the very ancient and imply a notion of time as undetectably slow-moving, as slow as geological change. Animals manifest, in their ancient materiality, as warnings of extinction and representations of ages in which species, genera even, have passed into the fossil record. These warnings are present in McCarthy from The Orchard Keeper onward. McCarthy writes of a path: “Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great stone tusk jutted” (The Orchard Keeper 88). Animals are also part of a world in which the human is often absent, or present only by association: “In the early quiet all sounds were clear and equidistant—a dog barking out in the valley, high thin whistle of a soaring hawk, a lizard scuttling dead leaves at the roadside. A sumac would turn and dip in sudden wind with a faint whish, in the woods a thrush, water-voiced” (54–55). Only the dog, here, represents the world of the human and its voice is closer to the wild than to the alien voices of man. Such strategies evoke the premodern in their sense of a world before the machine entered the garden. These undomesticated creatures carry with them in their cries and movements the echo and inherited memory of Edenic worlds passed forever out of existence. McCarthy also summons a premodern vision of human relations with the animals and the land. The tide of hogs that Culla Holme meets in Outer Dark is a fine example. The description of the encounter is full of Old Testament imagery and direct references to the Bible: when Culla first becomes aware of the hogs, it is via “a faint murmurous droning portending multitudes, locusts, the advent of primitive armies” (211). The herders “seemed together with the hogs to be in flight from some act of God, fire or flood, schisms in the earth’s crust” (214). McCarthy creates another memorable tableau

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in this invocation of an Appalachia more adjacent to the Bronze Age than the world of modernity. One of the herders is described as a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid frieze so that Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer, borne on like some old gospel recreant seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders of a mob stricken in their iniquity to the very shape of evil until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight. (216) It is an extraordinary and rich vision of a premodern environment, frozen forever in a moment that might have existed the world over any time after the domestication of horses and wild boar and the translation of religious feeling into text. It is impossible to be precise concerning the date of the events in Outer Dark, for clues are hard to find. The use of the term squire suggests that the novel is set at some point in the mid- to late nineteenth century, before the term fell out of usage for a local lawyer-cum-judge in the South, and the harrykin (116) suggests that the snakehunter who said it might be referring to 3 the storm systems of 1883 that swept the East Coast. Other technologies, such as guns and paint, are not described in enough detail to permit any meaningful estimation of date beyond the 1830s onward. This may have been part of McCarthy’s intention. Outer Dark is the novel I argue is least interested in the clash of the modern and premodern. Dogs and horses, the animals that McCarthy tends to use as symbols of this clash, are not often present. Dogs, which are often agents of modernity in McCarthy, receive only incidental mentions, and horses exist principally as beasts of utility. Outer Dark is the preindustrial South, and it features characters such as Harmon and his companions, and the tinker, whose like have long since passed. The old woman who invites Rinthy in for buttermilk and so despises snakes is a relict population of one: the pig in her living room and the rat whose presence she denies speak of a time when both wild and



A Resonance like Music

domesticated creatures lived in ways far more closely connected to humanity than they do in the present in the United States. It may or may not be an indication of her relationship to this incipient modernity that she despises dogs and will not keep one (108). That dogs are instruments of man’s subjugation of the natural world is implicit everywhere in the fiction. This is the case from “A Drowning Incident” onward. The short story shows that dogs are for work. Once they become too expensive to maintain, or troublesome, or are otherwise superfluous to practical requirements, the adult world treats them with indifference. A boy’s father drowns a litter of puppies in a river and McCarthy spares no detail of the condition of death, setting a precedent for his later work: Then with the gentle current drifted from beneath the bridge a small puppy, rolling and bumping along the bottom of the creek, turning weightlessly in the slow water. He watched uncomprehendingly. It spun slowly to stare at him with sightless eyes, turning its white belly to the softly diffused sunlight, its legs stiff and straight in an attitude of perpetual resistance. It drifted on, hid momentarily in a band of shadow, emerged, then slid beneath the hammered silver of the water surface and was gone. (32) Later, the boy spies a sack in the river and hauls it out: “He worked it to the bank and lifted it gingerly to shore. It was rotten and foul. When he opened it, there was only one puppy inside, the black one, curled between two bricks with a large crawfish tunneled half through the soft wet belly” (33). Again we are spared nothing, and in the activities of the crayfish, a creature originating millions of years before dogs and man, the reader encounters, for the first time in McCarthy’s work, an instance of the action of the ancient on the modern as the former slowly consumes and erodes the latter. In Child of God, we see “a windfelled tulip poplar on the mountainside that held aloft in the grip of its roots two stones the size of fieldwagons, great tablets on which was writ only a tale of vanished seas with ancient shells in cameo and fishes etched in lime” (127–28). In the same paragraph, McCarthy refers to “the fairy tracks of birds and deermice” in the

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“old” and “deep” woods that resemble those that existed before the concept of ownership had come to dominate relations with the land. Elsewhere in the novel, animals tend to be quarry and dogs are almost always referred to in the context of hunting. The bird that Ballard gives the grotesque child as a “playpretty” (77) exemplifies an attitude prevalent among McCarthy’s less sophisticated Southern characters: a perception of other species as mechanicals, devoid of feeling and without entitlement. Outer Dark and Child of God give us animals in the country, but Suttree shows that once in contact with the metropolis and technologies that have rendered their use as tools obsolete, dogs in particular are reduced to “soiled” (100) and “scarred” (69) scavengers barely tolerated, even on the margins of urban society. “Roving bands” of the “unclaimed” are “herded off to the gas chamber” (207). These animals—when they survive—are the subject of amusement, falling into whiskey barrels and howling drunkenly, for example. The other common companion animal to man, the domestic cat, is barely mentioned in Suttree and is prominent nowhere across the works except in The Orchard Keeper, where its role as the repository of mysticism, or as a familiar, is suggested. In this connection, the novel hints at a theme that McCarthy will develop more fully in the Southwestern works, that of the mystical role of the animal. The “wampus cat” or “the painter” in The Orchard Keeper is one such example of an animal represented in mystical or mythical forms already ascribed to it by a variety of traditions. As Wallis Sanborn writes, “in Anglo and Indian lore, the wampus cat, a legendary and supernatural feline, the product of feline and woman must exist above the smaller wild cats on the feline hierarchy because of its cunning and savage exploits” (28). It is not just Anglo and Indian folklore. The former slave Ather recalls from his childhood that “the night mountains were walked by wampus cats with great burning eyes and which left no track even in snow, although you could hear them screaming plain enough of summer evenings” (59–60). The painter in the novel exists in two incarnations, natural and supernatural. As Ather says, “they’s painters and they’s painters. Some of em is jest that, and then others is right uncommon. That old shepainter, she never left a track one. She wadn’t



A Resonance like Music

no common kind of painter” (157). Ather represents the last living vestige of non-Christian supernatural belief in the world of The Orchard Keeper, his faith in the mystical powers of cats undiminished by the burgeoning modernity that will ultimately capture him: “Knowed a man oncet had a cat could talk. Him and this cat’d talk back and forth of one another like ary two people. That’s one cat I kept shy of. I knowed what it was. Lots of times that happens, a body dies and their soul takes up in a cat for a spell” (227). Such beliefs are represented naturalistically in a world that has no reason to tolerate Ather’s way of life, and that render his presence untenable in the face of the forces that drive those agents of the modern world who “lobbed teargas bombs through the windows and stormed the ruined house from three sides” (188). Ather’s destiny is the asylum: “They ain’t never said what I was charged with nor nothin but I suspicion they think me light in the head is what it is” (227). For Ather, the painter that haunts the mountain contains for seven years the spirit of the man interred in the spray-pit and exists beyond the reach or ken of the modernity with which the old man has collided. It is not until the border trilogy that animals enter into relationships with humans, or become the subject of man’s particular interest as a more direct way of resistance. I have already noted that dogs are local color in the Appalachian novels: be they floating, dead, down the Tennessee River in Suttree, running in a pack through Lester Ballard’s stolen and makeshift quarters in Child of God (23–24), or rudimentary instruments of a nascent modernity. Horses, too, do not yet bear the significance they have in the novels of the Southwest, scarcely appearing in the Appalachian work. The key exception is in Outer Dark, where the ferry carrying Culla Holme is destroyed in the dark by a crazed horse, leading to Culla’s first meeting with the hideous trio that murders his child. There is enough evidence to suggest, as Sanborn does, that the horse signals in this passage its later role in the Southwestern novels as demi-combatant, adjunct to the mechanization of conflict. Horses have long been used in war by man, and it is only technology of a very advanced kind that has marginalized them completely. Blood Meridian shows most clearly the horse as auxiliary to conflict as the kid sees “the horses of war trample down

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the fallen” as “a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone” (50). Blood Meridian continues the dominant assumptions of the Appalachian novels that horses and dogs are tools, but this time in a brutal regime in which force is all. Glanton’s “large and vicious” dog, which he tames with food, becomes a participant in war and bloodshed alongside the horses and ponies. There is no hesitation, either, in using horses and mules for sustenance when circumstances demand, be they rotting or “snakebit”(110). Horses appear too in the fossil record. “Horse and cougar and turtle” (Blood Meridian 133) are represented in pictographs, and McCarthy’s legion of smaller desert animals attracted by firelight almost all represent some kind of menace to modern man: All about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. (211) This kind of smaller life acts in concert with the uniform hostility of the living geography of the desert to repel the imposition of civilization. Animals show, also, the artificiality of modern borders. In Cities of the Plain, the mountain lion escapes from the dogs, moving Travis to say, “She’s done us thisaway before. . . . She’ll run plumb out of the country” (86). Later in the same passage, Travis talks about hunting jaguar in Nyarit—by which it seems reasonable to assume he means the Pacific coastal province of Nayarit, in Mexico, the borders of which are at least a thousand miles from the nearest part of the United States—and how this is no longer possible for Americans. To reinforce the point, McCarthy has the older men talk about the revolutionary war in which Francisco Madero led the rebels to victory over Porfirio Díaz, and emphasizes the very modern nature of a conflict



A Resonance like Music

fought using cannon, rifles, and trains. Only creatures in a premodern condition, it seems, have access to areas beyond the demarcation created by these border conflicts. Dogs, however, generate ambivalence in McCarthy’s border characters. The dog that survives the killing of the Parham’s parents, for example, is treated with a kind of amused contempt. McCarthy does not hesitate to supply graphic detail concerning the last moments of a domestic dog that has reverted to a semi-wild condition: “The sun was not an hour up and in the flat traverse of the light on the mesa the blood that burst in the air before them was as bright and unexpected as an apparition. Something evoked out of nothing and wholly unaccountable. The dog’s head went cartwheeling, the ropes recoiled in the air, the dog’s body slammed to the ground with a dull thud” (165). McCarthy’s characters are ambivalent about dogs, as this passage shows, as Billy Parham and John Grady mistakenly rope one end of a dog each. But there is no feeling for the creature, as there is in a previous episode in which an injured hunting dog returns and John Grady puts his arm around him as it nuzzles him and they both gaze out into the desert (90). Horses, however, have a multiple role in McCarthy’s Southwestern fiction. In addition to their role as an element in the machinery of war, they also have economic, symbolic, and spiritual value, and they signify the romance of the premodern. Often these functions are imbricated or intertwined, and sometimes they are contradictory. The first hint of the mystical power of horses occurs in Blood Meridian when the kid sees the sea for the first time and gazes at it in company with an adult horse and a colt: “The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea” (296). There seems a loose kinship at this moment between the spirit of horse and whale that is the first suggestion of the mystical power of the animal so pervasive in All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. This is in line with McCarthy’s rapidly developing focus on modernity that begins with Blood Meridian but is yet to develop into the version in the border trilogy that begins to see animals as remnants of the premodern that therefore communicate in

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some way with a world that has become almost wholly inaccessible to most of mankind. It is in All the Pretty Horses, of course, that McCarthy invests fully in the idea of the horse as symbolic of a disappearing order and as a route to a kind of mystical or spiritual resistance to modernity. Horses continue to fulfill the functions they did in the Appalachian novels, but they also become currency or material wealth, and they are woven into John Grady Cole’s romance with Alejandra as well as the larger romance of the novel’s engagement with an ostensibly premodern Mexico. This broad notion of romance, combined with the financial and material value of the animals, explains the inclusion of the story of the hacendado’s brother. The hacendado sends Antonio on a two-month journey to Kentucky to obtain horses for La Purísima (125). The journey, in which the brother is jailed on two occasions, is both romantic and utilitarian. True, the bloodstock from Kentucky will improve the economic prospects of the ranch, but the journey resembles a medieval quest and appears rooted in the desire to create something of beauty as well as of material value. These journeys within journeys that cross and recross the Mexican-US border characterize the Southwest as a rare contested space in the United States in terms of its political, cultural, and physical geography (see chapters 1 and 3, this volume). The journeys are mostly conducted on horseback, or are at least connected with horses in one way or another. Two passages in All the Pretty Horses are particularly revealing in this context. The first appears early in the novel and shows that at one level John Grady’s relationship to horses is not at all mysterious: “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” (6). Simply to be passionate about and engaged in the business of life is what attracts John Grady. At a slightly more sophisticated level, however, he reads in the being of the horses an unabstracted engagement with the world in its material reality, unmediated by the veils the modern world has placed over such interactions for humanity. Reason is not the issue, here, but feeling—ontology over epistemology (see chapter 6, this volume). McCarthy offers us a character



A Resonance like Music

who simply commits himself to one side of this division. Indeed, why would he do otherwise as a young man to whom McCarthy cannot in a convincing way ascribe the language to render these kinds of abstraction? What John Grady Cole feels is mystery and, in its mystery, the kind of ardent love he feels for the horses and for Alejandra becomes sacred. Such a resurrection of the mysterious and sacred in animals is resistant at a fundamental level: Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and well-being of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason. Similarly, once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects. (Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries 5) Here is the root of the change in McCarthy’s fiction, a growing sense that to reenchant the world via its animals is to resist modernity at an ontological level. To resist it in more rational ways is to play a game in which reason must always triumph in any argument because the 4 arena of the debate is reason itself. The second passage is part of John Grady’s dream in the prison at Saltillo: “And there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised” (161–62). In relationships that cannot be cemented or created in language, McCarthy substitutes the notion of resonance. The passage informs us that this phenomenon resembles music and that this resonance is actually the world. There is, therefore, some kind of union in John Grady’s dream that makes of the world a whole that includes both its animate and its inanimate parts, all of which behave in ways that form harmonies and counterpoints. What John Grady longs for

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is the freedom such a representation of the world offers: an escape from the physical bounds of the prison and the metaphorical bounds of modernity. It would be absurd for McCarthy to have John Grady Cole render his view of the world in this kind of language, so his dreams represent the alternatives for him in his subconscious. Horses are the avatars of flight and resistance, of desires that lie beyond the articulations and constructions of language in a world made human by these processes, and in that making creates a version of humanity that begins to exclude or exploit all else. What horses are to All the Pretty Horses, wolves are to The Cross­ ing. The earliest encounter with the wolf is on page 4, and the novel quickly establishes both the wolf and its prey as representative of a world apart. These passages are similar to those in which John Grady imagines the horses and, like John Grady, Billy Parham does not have the language to elucidate these ideas. Rather, it is left to the narrator: They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire. (The Crossing 4) The premodern world is evoked in this passage in which man-thehunter has not yet appeared. These passages and those in All the Pretty Horses differ, however. In the latter, the assertions are framed “as if.” In All the Pretty Horses, they just are. The Crossing offers another example: “Her and others of her kind, wolves and ghosts of wolves running in the whiteness of that high world as perfect to their use as if their counsel had been sought in the devising of it” (31). The wolf here is not a mystical creature but a living relic of what existed before, persisting in direct conflict with modernity: Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was



A Resonance like Music

slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols. (The Crossing 24–25) If, however, The Crossing is McCarthy’s attempt to engage with the mystery of the nonhuman more directly, in what way does the wolf function? Is it symbol? Why is she written out so quickly? To this point, animals have functioned as bridges, links, or even hierophants, mediating between the material and the mystical. The departure of the wolf is abrupt and must surely be significant. Perhaps in the version of Billy we see in Cities of the Plain lies the answer. Unlike John Grady, Billy is more quickly divested of his longing for the mysterious and the mystical, the impulse crushed from him early by the exigencies of a modern world that shows no quarter and set up in a dialectic that forces conformity, or offers only death to those who resist. The function of animals in the border trilogy—in which they have either become conduits to a world of enchantment that lies beyond the grasp of modernity, or have access to this world but are themselves now out of reach of the human—seems to diminish as the trilogy progresses. It disappears altogether in the later fiction. In No Country for Old Men, animals feature either as tools—the dogs of the drug dealers, for example—or are victims, like the hawk dead in the road on the way to Dryden (44). In The Road, wolves and horses are gone, along with almost everything else. There is no evidence of living creatures other than man. A dog exists only in its distant barking, birds are dream-memories, cows remain solely in odor and bones, and fish live in the memory as brook trout summoning a fragrant, multifarious past, redolent of the swift flow of clean water. Animals have perished

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in the apocalypse. The human is all that survives among organisms with motive power or a teleological ontology, but is itself soon to disappear. Before the catastrophe, however, the border trilogy offers, in the relationships of its protagonists to wolves and horses, a glimmer of hope. These relationships are not interesting because they render ways in which animals are like us, or can perform certain cognitive functions almost as well as we can: they are central to the novels because they render difference, and in that difference they offer 5 the possibility of access to lost, forgotten, or unimagined worlds. Most of all they reinstate pre-Enlightenment mystery: He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them. (The Crossing 45–46) It is possible to argue that this often-quoted passage is unnecessarily portentous, empty even. It remains, however, one of the few places in the fiction in which the link between animals and the spiritual is examined in an explicitly intellectual way. Other more lyrical passages, of course, mystify animals, but it is unusual for the connection to be made in the context of organized religion and its rituals. It imputes, also, an epistemological system to the wolf that allows it to surpass humanity in the accuracy of its insight. What remains of the spiritual in human life, argues the Mexican, is merely its rituals and ceremonies, and these are disconnected from a more potent spirituality that continues in the world and to which creatures like the wolf



A Resonance like Music

have access. The drinking of blood, even in the extant demi-reality of communion, is a serious matter, but the experience is empty. Its significance is paradoxically lost to peoples rendered nonspiritual by the activities of the organizations and hierophants that administer them—mediators who travel beyond their original role as facilitators of a direct contact between man and God, and now magnify the very gulf they were created to bridge. The acts of mankind are detached from those rituals and ceremonies designed to connect with the actions of God in the world, actions seemingly perceptible to the wolf who spills blood merely to survive (until it encounters the “created” animals of man, the cow and the dog), and faces death as the sole incontrovertible truth of existence. Acts and ceremonies are divorced one from the other. What remain are multiple versions of Weber’s hollowed-out rituals, rituals that, in this case, can no longer perform their function of creating the bonds that link man to the environment that sustains him (see chapter 1, this volume). What remain are the visible and audible creations, in people, of an advanced consciousness separated from the realities of the earth by the built environment, and divided, each consciousness from the other, by a deluge of words bombinating in its canyons. In “The Second Coming,” W. B. Yeats framed this as humanity’s radical disconnect from the natural world: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer” (124). By offering the wolf as a way of reading what man has lost, McCarthy invites us to read his fiction similarly, attempting to catch, in turn, a snatch of what is no longer readily audible. Perhaps McCarthy wishes to suggest that the limits of language, and the concomitant access of species without language to a different kind of understanding of the world, would render many concepts impossible: “The limits of language, for Wittgenstein, are the limits of philosophy. Much of philosophy involves attempts to say the unsayable: ‘what we can say at all can be said clearly,’ he argues. Anything beyond that—religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical—cannot be discussed. They are not in themselves nonsensical, but any statement about them must be” (Grayling 16). As Wittgenstein writes in his preface to the Tractatus, “The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to

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the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)” (Kenny 1). Could it be that McCarthy is exploring this paradox in the discourse of the Mexican, here? It is almost as though the old wolf-trapper understands what Wittgenstein was trying to elucidate. His instincts tell him that to conjure knowledge of the mystical in the world it is necessary to invoke the experience of another species. Such experience connects to the world in ways that either transcend language— even though no such thing is possible if the old man is using language to communicate—or that have no option but to engage in other ways because language is unavailable. The possibility remains, therefore, that what McCarthy appeals to in the border trilogy is a way of thinking about, and interacting with, the world of other species that is not conducted on a wholly anthropocentric footing—that is, not in language. What are explored are ways to be in the world that are embodied more closely in the ecosystems that sustain us. If such notions exist beyond the power of language to summon, they begin to appear mystic or spiritual at some level. Although he describes the behavior of these animals, McCarthy rarely seeks to imagine what their experiences might be like for them. In this, he seems close to Thomas Nagel’s failed attempt to imagine what it is like to be a bat: I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications. (439) The realm of what popular science calls super senses, which belong exclusively to animals, are not within the compass of our consciousness as individual humans, as Nagel’s argument suggests. Nagel’s formulation presents a continuing challenge to the ideas and claims of



A Resonance like Music

authors like Monty Roberts the horse whisperer or Dawn PrinceHughes, whose experience with gorillas, as channeled through her Asperger’s syndrome, permitted her to claim an especially acute understanding of the animals’ social interactions. This seems especially true of Temple Grandin, whose tendency to think in pictures owing to her autism allows her to make a connection to cattle. Grandin’s assertion that “animals are controlled by what they see” and the connection she makes between this and her own condition of “thinking in pictures” (Wolfe 130) do not, though, resolve Nagel’s dilemma. Ultimately, if Nagel is to be believed, Grandin cannot have access to the consciousness of cattle. The improved circumstances and obviously less anxious condition of cows in facilities she has designed seem more to do with her acute empirical observations about the positioning of visual apparatus in prey species that cause them, for example, to “respond sharply to small visual stimuli that humans don’t even register—a length of chain dangling from a feedlot fence, a reflection in a puddle . . . a crumpled white plastic bottle rocking in the wind” (Wolfe 130). McCarthy’s fiction, though, suggests that animals have access to a particular form of experience that we might seek to characterize as spiritual, and this can be deduced through their behavior. But if this is the case, some kind of extra-cognitive metacommunication between human and animal would be needed for the human element in the relationship to be able to gain access to the particularities of the animal’s experience. This is hinted at in John Grady’s relationship with horses. This relationship, though, seems much more like an empirical and detailed study of behavior on John Grady’s part than any special access to horse consciousness he may have developed, or been born with. The passage from Cities of the Plain, when he detects lameness in a horse through the slight movements of its ear as it walks, is indicative of this (42–45). Equally, Billy Parham’s relationship with the wolf—though it is probably the most meaningful and intense period of his life—represents a failure to gain access to the spiritual or supernatural of the kind the Mexican asserts is possible. We observe these animals responding and reacting in mysterious ways to the world. We see them living in ecosystems in which they do not disturb the

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balance, and they move us in particular ways—ways that, because they are not easily amenable to logical explanation and rational analy­ sis, might be regarded as in some way spiritual. Only the faintest, most easily overlooked traces of previous and more mysterious worlds are detectable. We learn this about the domain of the wolves in The Crossing: A world construed out of blood and blood’s alkahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had the power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one. (73–74) The atavistic and bloody hunting instincts of the wolf are uncontaminated by modernity and therefore in opposition to it, yet the wolf is on the verge of extinction. Animals cannot reconnect McCarthy’s characters with the premodern, nor modify modernity enough to postpone the apocalypse, and we have no access to the mysterious origins to which they will return. McCarthy has his protagonists’ relationships with animals come, ultimately, to nothing in this regard. The gap is so huge that the relationship might be construed as reducible to psychological projection and the vanity of human wishes. As Guy says in “Whales and Men,” “we occupy a small band of visible light, a small band of audible sound, a small band of shared existence. We are imprisoned by what we know” (96). This does not mean, however, that the potential to understand and act on what is suggested are not available to us as readers. If there is a mystery, here, it is the consciousness of other apparently sentient creatures, a consciousness to which we do not have access, but which if we did might make available to us worlds that have the potential to disturb and trouble the destructive and instrumental relationships with the natural world that are a function of the culture and economics of modernity.

8

Journeys of Spiritual Formation

God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. — fyodor dostoyevsk y, The Brothers Karamazov

M

cCarthy’s border nomads wander into quasi-spiritual associations with animals, plunge into romance, and end stateless, their unconscious and unarticulated resistance to modernity unable to escape a dialectic, the nature of which seems inescapable. The vehicle for these journeys in McCarthy is a modified bildungsroman. Elements of the genre have been present in McCarthy’s fiction since Outer Dark, but Suttree is the clearest example in the Appalachian novels. Suttree, following an irreparable quarrel with his family, plunges into the seamy underworld of Knoxville as the novel traces the vagaries of his psychological and emotional condition. He cannot, though, reach an accommodation with the town or the wider world. Within the language of the genre, he fails to mature. All the Pretty Horses, too, meets the genre’s essential criteria: John Grady Cole’s journey resembles Suttree’s in many particulars in that John Grady seems mired in a particular collection of behaviors. A similar sequence of events is Billy Parham’s lot in The Crossing and beyond into Cities of the Plain. These journeys end badly. John Grady’s catalytic muse is removed and his opportunity to develop is abbreviated brutally, as is the case for Boyd. Only Billy survives to full adulthood in the border 133

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trilogy, but even he, despite those of his encounters that suggest worlds beyond quotidian reality, is able to articulate only “I aint nothin” (289) at the end of Cities of the Plain. Nonetheless, of all McCarthy’s fiction, The Crossing, in its focus on the journeys of Billy with the wolf, then of the Parham brothers in search of stolen horses, is the most faithful to the bildungsroman’s premise of a formative journey through life in which the participants are tested and changed. This is fertile territory for an analysis of what might lie beyond the confines of secular modernity in McCarthy’s fiction. In The Cross­ ing, he gives voice to a mystical or spiritual experience that is without recourse to religions that appear either hostile or indifferent either to those souls yet to be converted or to the fabric of the planet. The particular category of bildungsroman that the border trilogy develops might, therefore, be described as a narrative of spiritual forma1 tion, or seeleroman. Across the novels of the border trilogy, the move is from romance to the spiritual and back again, with The Crossing as the central text, a work that of all McCarthy’s fiction comes closest to offering versions of spiritual redemption from the emptiness of the secular world. The first manifestation of this sub­ genre is the journey into Mexico of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses. It is followed by Billy Parham’s journey with the wolf in The Crossing, then Boyd and Billy’s search for the horses, and follows the trajectories of both John Grady and Billy in Cities of the Plain. The development from either romantic love, or the romance of the quest, to something more spiritual is most evident in the near-canonization of Boyd Parham (298). The focus on Boyd is initially his romantic liaison with the girl he and Billy rescue from her abductors. But after Boyd’s and Billy’s separation, Boyd transcends his earthly status to emerge in local folklore as a messianic figure, a redeemer, celebrated in songs, myths, and legends that pit good against evil. Boyd becomes the subject of “the corrido, the poor man’s history” (The Crossing 386). Like John Grady Cole, Boyd makes the ultimate romantic sacrifice in death. Unlike John Grady, he begins to symbolize something more wide-ranging and profound. In its engagement with an understanding of the world that is not the dominant Anglo-Saxon version of the European Enlightenment, The Crossing interrogates notions



Journeys of Spiritual Formation

such as materialism, the enslavement of reason to technological development, and the isolation of self from community. The novel suggests ways these ideas might be challenged through a kind of reenchantment that exists at first as both romantic love, and as romance in the broad generic sense of a courtly pursuit. This pursuit is punctuated by adventure and conducted by a hero in a world removed from the commonplace in which the fantastic, the mythic, and the marvelous thrive in the absence of the real. This realm of the irrational allows the supernatural space in which to develop and generates experience that might then be classified as spiritual. Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious includes the suggestion that romance might be a step along the path toward something greater and more profound. Jameson argues that “late capitalism” (my definition of modernity is similar) privileges realism over romance in its cultural manifestations. He identifies a revival of the romantic impulse in fiction, which offers a challenge to modernity, albeit at a mostly unconscious level: It is in the context of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism that romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage. Romance now once again seems to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or utopian transformations of a real now unshakably set in place; and [Northrop] Frye is surely not wrong to assimilate the salvational perspective of romance to a re-expression of Utopian longings, a renewed meditation on the Utopian community. (104) The word spiritual is not used here, but plainly demonic and salva­ tional carry supernatural connotations, and the word salvational, in 2 particular, is crucial in its implications for resistance. Romance as Jameson characterizes it is a waypoint on a journey. John Grady Cole’s yearnings for a world uncontaminated by the “leprous” modernity (Cities of the Plain 247), with which Eduardo taunts him in their knife fight, are represented in his drive to abandon himself to love

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affairs with women that seem to be symbolic of an older order, before the dialectic of modernity consumed and commodified the nature of romance. Across the border trilogy, these episodes tend to manifest an ethereal quality that strengthens the notion that romance exists in a mystical space, detached from the real world: “The last time [John Grady] saw [Alejandra] before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect . . . the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware . . . until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky yet a dream withal” (131–32). Although little in All the Pretty Horses transcends romance as a way of resistance to modernity, by the time The Crossing emerges, romance and the spiritual have become interwoven. This is clearest in Boyd Parham. A passage from Northrop Frye, quoted by Jameson, is relevant in this connection: The hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah, or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world. The conflict, however, takes place in, or at any rate, primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movements of nature. Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor and youth. (Political Uncon­ scious 111) Is it too tenuous, I wonder, to compare this passage with the descent from an apparently new world of the youthful Boyd on a mission to restore justice into a chaotic, climatically unpredictable, aged world of barbarism, uncertainty, and disorder? Boyd is given few words by McCarthy, but there is a purity in what he does, a lack of sophistication that could be regarded as goodness. To the Mexico that reveres him, Boyd, in the springtime of his life, might well appear to be an



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antidote, descended from “above,” to the “darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, and old age” that are the legacy in the country of the seemingly endless wars that have scarred it. Given McCarthy’s tendency to welcome ambiguity in any such metajourney, it certainly seems possible. Boyd becomes a symbol. Like John Grady Cole, Boyd dies for the love of a young woman, but unlike John Grady, he is immortalized in language, his deeds messianic. By contrast, confusion, sterility, and old age are what remain for the survivor, Billy. Either way, by virtue of his early death, Boyd transcends romance and enters the world of belief, faith, and the mystical. Such a reenchantment is a sign in McCarthy’s fiction of a willingness to permit the idea to develop that the world can be remystified via a link between romance and the spiritual. The Crossing is compelling, also, in this context, for the quantities of monologues, set pieces, and tableaux with which McCarthy addresses the mystical. These speak of a world that has lost its ability to connect its spiritual needs to its religious rituals and, thence, to an 3 experience that it is not merely the empty creation of modernity. Critics are left, under these circumstances, to search for schema that might reveal a spiritual structure. One such schema, as Edwin Arnold has argued, is that of Jacob Boehme: “Boehme saw humankind existing in three states simultaneously: the external world composed of the natural elements; the world of darkness ‘wherein is born the fire as the eternal torment’; and the world of light, wherein resides happiness and the Spirit of God” (“McCarthy and the Sacred” 223). Arnold’s case is that “the three major interpolated narratives in The Cross­ ing—those of the priest, the blind man, and the gypsy—told to Billy on his three journeys into Mexico, reflect Boehme’s philosophy and 4 serve as warnings to the boy against his own spiritual peril” (224). In Boehme’s “fire as eternal torment” is plainly a version of the Christian hell in its simplest translation, and at another level it might symbolize the industrialization of the world in which the planet’s natural and spiritual resources are consumed simultaneously. A spiritual wasteland akin to this is what awaits Billy at the end of Cities of the Plain as he remains unable to synthesize the “natural elements” of the earth, and the “world of light” to resist the “world of darkness”

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created by modernity and represented by the freeway construction and the hints of the nuclear tests at Los Alamos (see chapter 9, this volume). The lesson of the seeleroman is that the abolition of the spiritual, which is a key part of the action of modernity, leaves Billy and the rest of us in peril. The seeleromane of McCarthy’s wanderers in the border trilogy tell us also that an important element of this spiritual peril is that people perceive themselves under modernity as wholly separate from one another. The production of the consuming I in modernity is vital to its economic and cultural survival. Even in the small groups in which McCarthy’s wanderers travel, crises are often manifest when separation occurs: Boyd from Billy in The Crossing, John Grady from Billy in Cities of the Plain, and John Grady again from Rawlins and Blevins in All the Pretty Horses. Elsewhere in the fiction, it is tempting to read the spiritual hell of Lester Ballard as partly a product of his alienation from a wider community, and Suttree’s visions in the woods are full of terrifying and strange phantoms generated in a mind divorced from community. To the individual separated from communities of the like-minded, modernity poses the gravest danger. Even minor characters tend to reinforce this notion. Early in The Crossing when Billy still has the wolf, the Mexican woman and her pregnant daughter Billy meets along the road fear the separation of individuals into smaller and smaller units: “She said that the young nowadays cared nothing for religion or priest or family or country or God. She said that she thought the land was under a curse and asked him for his opinion but he said he knew little of the country” (87). The bonds of community are disappearing, yet to live meaningfully in the world individuals must become part of that world: to defy community is to embrace a potentially catastrophic separation. The words of the “wild Indians” contain the essential message of community: [the leader of the Indians] said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to



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know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. (134) McCarthy’s fiction also imputes this notion of community to those without capacity for reason and technology: “Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for [the wolf’s] delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one and not separate from” (127). This version of the spiritual addresses not only the human community, but the community of the 5 sentient that makes up the larger world. To join this community is to move toward a condition in which humanity begins to perceive itself as part of a closely interdependent system rather than to view all that is nonhuman as an economic resource. It is a journey that at its ultimate destination refuses the separation and dualities of Western thought that sees even God as fundamentally removed from his creation. As Achiel Peelman notes in Christ Is a Native American, “the radical separation between God and the cosmos in Western thinking is also the origin of a series of other dualisms or separations which have profoundly influenced Roman Catholic and Protestant theology: cosmos-history, naturegrace, body-spirit, profane-sacred, world-church, individual-society, man-woman” (54). What springs from these separations is a dualism that leads to the anchorite’s doubts concerning God, and his obses6 sion that without witness God could not continue to exist. The anchorite identifies such a process in his analysis of the doubts concerning God of the priest in his story: The existence of the deity lay imperiled for want of this simple thing. That for God there could be no witness. Nothing against which He terminated. Nothing by way of which his being could be announced to him. Nothing to stand apart from and to say I am this and that is the other. Where that is I am not. He could create everything save that which would say him no. (The Crossing 154) The priest has internalized a view characteristic of Western thinking, a view that is unable to perceive any entity, even God, as undivided,

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seeking always to sunder what might remain whole. Ultimately, though, the priest recants. He sees that, in the absence of other entities and the participation of God, life is meaningless: “What the priest saw was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has the power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against” (156). The warnings of spiritual peril, here, concern the failure to recognize that the spiritual is central to human existence. Yet, at a more secular and nebulous level, that may be a precursor to the spiritual, they refer to the dangers of solitude and disconnection from community. The priest’s narrative and his relationship with the anchorite offer Billy unqualified warnings against the dangers that reside in attempts to form an identity constituted solely in an I sealed hermetically against God and community. Both the anchorite and the priest are disfigured spiritually in the founding of this I until both, in the end, embrace the knowledge that it cannot stand: “Ultimately every man’s path is every other’s. There are no separate journeys for there are no separate men to make them. All men are one and there is no other tale to 7 tell” (157). It is not necessary to be wholly persuaded by Arnold’s projection of the philosophy of Boehme onto The Crossing to accept that the priest, the gypsy, and the blind revolutionary function as spiritual advisors to Billy Parham and, by extension, to the reader who seeks to unpick the intertwined threads of the spiritual in The Crossing: Such a feature is entirely consistent with the notion of a Seelero­ man, and an essential part of this genre (as it is in the Bildungs­ roman) is that the protagonist should encounter “guides” who influence him as he journeys towards maturity. As I have suggested, however, it is not clear that Billy is swayed in significant ways by what he hears. At the conclusion of the priest’s tale, for example, he returns to the United States, but it is not obvious from his subsequent actions whether or not he has accepted that man cannot function as a single entity, separate from the world, if he is to challenge modernity. Similarly, after his encounter with



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the blind revolutionary, Billy “asks God about his brother” (295), but there is no reply; Billy falls asleep, and the experience is not mentioned again. Finally, after his meeting with the gypsies, who are returning the aeroplane to its original owner, Billy listens with great care to their leader and is willing to seek clarification of certain points (as he always is), but finally all he has to say to the gypsy’s suggestion that they are both men of the road is that he is not, in fact, any such thing (413). These encounters seem never to penetrate fully Billy’s consciousness, just as the dialogue with the stranger appears to have little effect at the conclusion of Cities of the Plain. (Monk, “Versions of the Seeleroman” 174–75) McCarthy’s characters are offered the wisdom of men who would reunite them with the world of the spiritual from which modernity has detached them, but McCarthy does not permit his characters to use the potential of the spiritual to resist modernity. McCarthy’s wanderers remain half-blind and unredeemed. The buds of transformative religious experience rarely flower for the nomads of the seeleromane. This does not prevent McCarthy from creating a host of characters in The Crossing—other than the priest, the blind man, and the gypsy— who engage Billy in one way or another at levels that suggest a move away from quotidian reality. I mentioned the old Mexican wolf-­trapper, but we also meet the diva from the traveling opera, the Yaqui gerente of the Babicora who returned Billy and Boyd’s horses from the remuda, the girl hulling pecans whom Billy overhears singing. Even one of the kidnappers of Boyd’s girl proves to have things to say to which Billy listens. What all these characters have that Billy does not is an ability to reflect on themselves and the world, a readiness to engage with the world in a questioning, philosophical fashion. Few certainties remain, though, and no conclusions. As the old wolf-trapper says at the start of The Crossing, “They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them” (47). The implication is that the connection to a richer, more spiritual world has been lost or damaged to the point that humanity has become estranged from itself. I am reminded of Charles Taylor’s remarks concerning the journey toward God:

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[Augustine’s] concern was to show that God is to be found not just in the world but also and more importantly at the very foundations of the person. . . . And so at the end of its search for itself, if it goes to the very end, the soul finds God. The experience of being illumined from another source, of receiving the standards of our reason from beyond ourselves . . . is seen to be very much an experience of inwardness. . . . But the way within leads above. When we get to God, the image of place becomes multiple and many-sided. In an important sense, the truth is not in me. I see the truth “in” God. Where the meeting takes place, there is a reversal. Going within . . . takes me beyond. (Sources of the Self 136–37) The notion that “the way within leads above” is vital to what the reader may choose to take from The Crossing. The various narratives, though, that represent this and similar ideas seem to be no more than a litany of failed attempts to achieve the levels of self-examination Taylor advocates. Success in these attempts might unite McCarthy’s characters with land (“multiple and many-sided”), community, and ultimately a broader spiritual understanding of the world that transcends their conditioning and status. But the seeleroman is never concluded in the border trilogy. The journey toward its God peters out in the sand of the desert, just as Suttree’s mystical experiences in the woods circle back merely to a subsistence-level existence, violence, drinking, and unsuitable relationships. Once the wolf is gone, Billy Parham never examines what lies within in any serious way. Indeed there is almost a paraphrase from Taylor from the leader of the “wild Indians” who tells Billy that “the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them” (134). That a focused scrutiny of the self might lead to a reengagement with something greater is close to a paradox given the founding in modernity of the all-consuming I. But Billy is told in unadorned terms that the momentum must first be generated from within, and until this is possible there can be no meaningful connections, much less unions, forged with worlds beyond modernity.



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Billy remains throughout The Crossing and Cities of the Plain a passive listener to the spiritual narratives of others—some seemingly complete such as that of the priest: “In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God, For nothing is real save his grace” (158). Or that of the blind man who fought at Durango: Somos dolientes en la oscuridad, Todos nosotros. Me entiendes? Los que pueden ver, los que no pueden . . . Lo que debenos entender . . . es que ultimamente todos es polvo. Todo lo que podemos tocar. Todo lo que podemos ver. En éste tenemos la evidencia más profundia de la justicia, de la misericordia. En éste vemos la benedición más grande de Dios. (293) [We are mourners in the darkness. All of us. Do you understand me? Those who can see, those who cannot . . . What we should understand is that finally everything is dust. All we can touch. All we can see. In this we have evidence more profound than justice, than mercy. In 8 this we see the greatest blessing of God.] (J. Campbell 8–9) And, finally, the gypsy: Pensamos . . . que somos las víctimas del tiempo. En realidad la vía del mundo no es fijada en ningún lugar. Cómo sería posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo también. Somos lo mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapíadado. (413–14) [We think we are the victims of time. In reality the way of the world is not fixed in any place. How could this be possible? We ourselves are our own journey. And for this we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Unpitied.] (J. Campbell 15) Billy seems not to recognize that the blind man’s narrative is another attempt to persuade him (and the reader) that modernity has disfigured human existence to the extent that people no longer recognize the transience of the material (and, by extension, the permanence of the spiritual). It is interesting that McCarthy has a blind man speak these words—even the sightless can see this particular truth. Billy in

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his encounter with the gypsies receives a similar message. The gypsy speaks to him of the faded daguerreotypes that swing from lines attached to the sides of his caravan: “What he came to see was that as the kinfolk in their fading stills could have no value save in another’s heart so it was with that heart also in another’s in a terrible and endless attrition and of any other value there was none. Every representation was an idol. Every likeness a heresy. In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased” (413). The artifacts of the material world descend, without fail, into nothingness. There is no point, therefore, in ownership. As the narrator of The Crossing says of the gypsies, “They stood in no proprietary relationship to anything” (410). No objective truth is to be found, therefore, in this material world of dust and illusion, which leaves only subjective truth, and such truth is myriad, unique to the individual, and can only emerge from within (“we ourselves are our own journey”). Here, I feel, we are back to Augustine and Taylor and, framed more negatively, a kind of solipsistic existentialism. The gypsy offers Billy a narrative of spiritual formation that is complete. Ultimately, however, Billy’s spirituality in The Crossing, after the death of the wolf, amounts to little more than an acknowledgment that we may as well pray—it might be futile but it might stay worse evils than those we already face (390). Yet McCarthy’s constructions of these seeleromane, even when they fail, offer meaningful speculation on how interactions with the world might be constructed in ways that do not simply accept a passive conformity to the shapes that modernity requires of our lives. The terms in which William James classified the Christian narrative of spiritual formation more than a hundred years ago are apt here: To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many of the phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. (157)



Journeys of Spiritual Formation

Clearly Billy Parham’s narrative of spiritual formation in The Cross­ ing is problematized by McCarthy and cannot be said to map onto James’s formulation in any precise way. But each of the clauses of James’s definition can be correlated with the novel. Billy’s encounters permit him to experience something akin to the religious. This, in turn, begins to hint at a resolution of some of his internal conflicts, in which the religious manifests as real in subtle ways. His experiences with the stranger beneath the freeway overpass at the end of Cities of the Plain are the most telling, when Billy is exhorted to “love that man who stands for us” (280). John McClure argues that a work of fiction is a narrative of spiritual formation “because the stories it tells trace the turn of secular-minded characters back towards the religious; because its ontological signature is a religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real; and because its ideological signature is the re-articulation of a dramatically ‘weakened’ religiosity” (3). What McCarthy does with Billy follows this formula closely, but never permits closure. The reader can never be certain of the precise changes wrought in Billy but can be sure that his experiences of the unreal challenge the dominant real of modernity, as McCarthy has him face a “turn . . . back towards the religious.” There is evidence of a reconnection with the mystical—a reenchantment of the world. McCarthy’s novels, however, remain deeply dubious concerning the ability or willingness of men to make this connection. Billy himself wanders the Southwest exposed to a beguiling collection of experiences that exist just out of reach. The result is that the Western fiction, alongside a sense of creeping dereliction, and a feeling of loss already embedded in all the novels and plays, displays a profound melancholy predicated on the reader’s inkling that something is missing. This can be read at least two ways. One is that, as the dialectic of modernity careers toward the end of history, humanity has passed the point at which spiritual experience can redeem it. The other is that Billy, John Grady, and the others are salient and timely reminders of what might happen if we fail to engage with strategies that might check the advance of untrammeled technological and industrial progress, instrumental reason, and the banishment of magic from the

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world. It is also true that McCarthy, as an American white man of his generation, with a Roman Catholic background, writes from a socially constructed position of a particular kind. Despite an obvious interest in spiritual matters, perhaps McCarthy is not well equipped to delineate the kinds of lived resistance that might be available to, say, Native American writers, because he has been fashioned in an artistic tradition in which religious and spiritual feeling have been 9 siphoned away. Salman Rushdie suggests that if one is to attempt honestly to describe reality as it is experienced by religious people, for whom God is no symbol but an everyday fact, then the conventions of realism are quite inadequate. The rationalism of that form comes to seem like a judgement upon, an invalidation of, the religious faith of the characters being described. A form must be created which allows the miraculous and mundane to co-exist at the same level—as the same order of event. (376) But in the way that romance shades into the spiritual or mystical in the border trilogy, and from the wampus cat in The Orchard Keeper, to the monstrous trio in Outer Dark, to Suttree’s visions, to the mysterious ability of the judge and Chigurh to appear and disappear there is a “co-existence of the miraculous and mundane” in the work—an “unreal realism.” As an extension of this, the border trilogy exploits the seeleromane in ways that permit McCarthy to explore the boundaries between the real and the spiritual, offering in form and content an alternate to the conventions of realism so that the reader might actually imagine salvation in one form or another. In this way, McCarthy might be said to transcend his social situatedness. Edwin Arnold argues in defense of “the possibility of grace and redemption even in the darkest of [McCarthy’s] tales, although that redemption may require more of his characters than they are ultimately willing to give” (“Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” 46). I agree with Arnold on this, but his analysis is incomplete: McCarthy’s characters are not unwilling, they are unable to give what is required for redemption and so, by extension, is modern humanity. In The Road, the world has consumed itself in a fiery apocalypse, leaving a



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new and appalling truth: “He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe” (110). McCarthy has transcended the implication of nothingness that lies beyond an unrestrained modernity to an outright description of nullity itself: “Hope skulks out of the world . . . and back to where it came from, death,” as Adorno once observed of the work of that other prophetic and profound nihilist of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett (“Trying to Understand Endgame” 81). In McCarthy’s border trilogy, hope for the modern world lingers in a prolonged, evanescent moment in the magnificence of yet another bloodred desert sunset. In The Road, hope collapses into mono10 chrome. What remain of humanity are a few scavengers destined to perish once the leftovers have been consumed and cannibalism has run its course: The remains of an old fire by the side of the road. Beyond that a long concrete causeway. A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hagmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. (231) God seems also to have departed: “God never was, perhaps, or there is no God without belief and faith is impossible after such a calamity, or all those going to Paradise have departed and God has abandoned the remainder, or utter ruination is what the secular has brought us to” (Monk, “Versions of the Seeleroman” 179). And yet, given that care of the boy is handed to the evidently spiritual “good guys” at the end of the novel, it seems McCarthy offers the reader yet another version of the spiritual in which the existence of God depends on faith. Such an interpretation suggests that any attempt to trace a consistent and specific message across the many and various characterizations of

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the spiritual in McCarthy’s work is futile beyond the assertion, to which I return once again, that all these forms resist the imperatives of modernity in one way or another. Cities of the Plain ends, significantly, with Billy’s assertion “I aint nothin” (289), which follows immediately from the narrator’s description of Billy’s gnarled old hand: “There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape” 11 (289). Billy embodies a spiritual journey, but he fails to recognize its worth. He is the profoundly ironic twentieth-century everyman upon whose body is inscribed God’s message to his creation, but who remains spiritually illiterate. And if Billy cannot articulate the message, it is hard for us to read it. It is, though, there. What Vereen Bell saw in McCarthy all those years ago was nihilism, but nihilism is only part of the story, as Billy’s narrative demonstrates. McCarthy explores these ideas in dramatic form in The Sunset Limited, which opened in Chicago in May 2006. The play is a dialogue between two characters, Black, who is religious and optimistic, and White, who is pessimistic and atheistic and has an almost Adornian view of the world: “When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed the import of which is impossible to ignore” (112). Along the way, Black offers a counter to instrumental reason that is the antithesis of the view of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: The unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everything he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the morning you get to put your feet on a real floor and you don’t have to worry about where it come from. But if he didn’t then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. (66) After a prolonged and wide-ranging discussion, however, it is White’s nihilism that prevails. Black fails in his proselytizing and cannot stop White from departing, presumably to complete the suicide that Black prevented at the beginning of the play. Toward the end, White speaks one of the most telling lines in the implicit



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critique of the disenchantment of the world that McCarthy’s work represents. Black asks him why he thinks people take their own lives: “I cant speak for others. My own reasons center around a gradual loss of make-believe. That’s all. A gradual enlightenment as to the nature of reality. Of the world” (120). To consume the Frankfurt School view of the world without reaching out for a way to reenchant is to invite despair and nullity—this is the clear message of this passage for me. At the end of the play, what remains is the silence of God in response to Black’s “Is that okay? Is that okay?” (143). The audience is in no better a position to believe or disbelieve than it was before the play began, but the notion from the end of the border trilogy that mystery and the possibility of reenchantment are out there if we are willing to grasp them is repeated here. This and the other spiritual representations I elucidate are evidence of what Richard Falk calls “the resurgence of religion as a political force” (83). Falk argues that the appeal of the secular has waned dramatically: Modernism [Falk’s definition of modernism is similar to mine of modernity] is losing its hold over the cultural imagination. In reaction a dynamic of cross-penetration is underway between politics and religion, producing a series of developments that can be either constructive (liberationist) or destructive (fundamentalist). Politics is being reinfused with religious symbols and claims, [and] religion is being summoned to the trenches of popular struggle. (98) The other side of the coin of the religious fundamentalism that is disfiguring politics in a host of places from the United States, to Africa, to the Middle East might be the polyphonic, polychromatic, polyspiritual voices of liberation to be heard within McCarthy’s narratives. The question might then become, how might this be translated into political resistance? Falk suggests several tentative answers: The path from a religious renewal to a political renewal is complicated, controverted and still quite difficult to discern . . .

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several assured features are present: (1) an ecological feeling for the wholeness of experience as primary; (2) a decentering of anthropocentric presuppositions about the divine plan and the locus of the sacred; (3) a grounding of religious and political life in suffering, not only of humans, but of other animals and even the rest of nature as well; (4) a conviction that the creative and imaginative locus of energies is passing from those who currently preside over established hierarchies of church and state; (5) a trust in the cooperative potential implicit in human nature, as well as a distrust in a variety of “realisms” and “rationalisms” that claim human nature to be inherently aggressive [and] closely related, a disenchantment with violence as the means to security, justice, revolution, and transformation. (97) To argue that McCarthy’s fiction matches precisely all these criteria might be a step too far, but an overlap is clear, because implicit in the fiction is the possibility of a move from spiritual to political activity if only we are willing to recognize the possibilities. Warnings are everywhere that, in the absence of a move from the hermetically insulated I, modernity will continue unhindered and unmitigated. Investing our sole trust in its transformative power, its capacity to deliver justice, revolution, or security, leads directly to the version of the world espoused and created by Judge Holden in all its necessary violence. Most of all in McCarthy’s fiction is the idea that it is the outsider who has the insight to change the course of the world. What remain, though, are the first three items in Falk’s inventory. In the next chapter, these form part of my analysis of cultural geography as I consider the ways in which McCarthy integrates the physical world of the Southwest into these broadly spiritual concerns, and I examine the ways further resistance might spring from a changed relationship with the natural environment.

9

The Earth Shall Weep

Every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space. — her m a n melville , Moby Dick

R

ichard Falk’s recommendations for a peaceful resurgence of religion include “an ecological feeling for the wholeness of experience as primary, a decentering of anthropocentric presuppositions about the divine plan and the locus of the sacred, [and] a grounding of religious and political life in suffering, not only of humans, but of other animals and even the rest of nature as well” (97). I have already considered elements of these suggestions in my analysis of animals and the spiritual in McCarthy’s work, particularly in the sense that the fiction implies that a reconnection of the human to these aspects of existence is essential if we are to avoid catastrophe. Beyond this is a physical environment specific to McCarthy’s fiction that is neither urban nor suburban, that is nonindustrialized, that remains free of large-scale agribusiness, and that represents a potentially sur1 prising element of the political. This environment is McCarthy’s “locus of the sacred” yet it moves beyond mere landscape into other regions both internal and external. There is a sense in the fiction of a world animated by something spiritual that is neither exclusionary nor amenable to anthropomorphizing as “god.” Falk, and McCarthy, implicitly, question the notion that religion need necessarily require a

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“personal” relationship with a deity or deities of the self-­contained, salvational kind propounded by Christianity. Indeed, the self-­ contained I, so beloved of modernity, is actively promoted by the Christian insistence on this highly specific sacred intersection located at the point at which God encounters the interiority of the individual. This wholly internalized experience of religion must necessarily exclude everything but the personal experience of salvation, causing a divide between the self in its hermetic Western incarnation, and the self defined as a member of a community of the like-minded in a particular relationship to the natural world. Native Americans of the Southwest understand clearly the mechanics of this process: “Christianity separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush the single clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone, because Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul” (Silko 68). The self is separated from the self. To remedy this, Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko suggest that the locus of the sacred must be repositioned in the broader community and in the land where it originated. McCarthy’s fiction, in suggesting that the spiritual might be regenerated from engagement with the natural world, implies something similar. As Falk argues, the sacred might be expanded from a handful of key geographical locations, such as churches, shrines, and other places of pilgrimage, so that a more pantheistic version might develop. To attempt this expansion would be to attempt to reconnect the religious with the politics of commonplace activities and everyday environments. Related to this, Falk’s third point addresses the divide between earthly misery and heavenly paradise that the Abrahamic religions tend to promote. Suffering in these creeds is an investment in a future world sundered from an extant earth shortly to be consumed in apocalypse. Falk suggests an alternative cast of mind in which suffering is recognized as universal in the communities and creatures that inhabit the world, and in the world’s very fabric (see chapter 5, this volume). Suffering in the present in these categories then becomes shared. As a result, decisions to inflict suffering—be it upon other humans, animals, or the stuff of the earth itself—require more careful consideration than they do in a modern world in which we are given spiritual



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sanction by an obsession with the self, and in Hegelian terminal creeds that tend to view the natural environment as doomed or irrelevant and therefore of marginal interest. In the Western view of the world, the individual is paramount, community increasingly marginalized, and the natural environment disenchanted to the point at which it can be regarded as a mere resource to be used for the manufacture of ever-increasing quantities of product. Heidegger characterized this understanding of the natural world as one that saw only 2 Bestand—“stock,” “holdings,” or “product” (Garrard 69). Max Oelschlaeger traces this development historically in Western societies: The separation of humankind from nature’s embrace began long ago with the Neolithic turn and the advent of civilization in Sumeria and Egypt. The Pre-Socratics intensified the separation by making nature an object of intellectual study; the paragons of Athens reanimated the natural world, conceiving of nature as organic and self-moving, yet they divorced the essence of our humanity (psyche) from nature. Judeo-Christianity both desacralized nature—since only God was divine—and raised humans above it, thinking the world God’s gift to his most favoured creation: man. The scientific and industrial revolutions were the ultimate realization of the alchemist’s dream: through science the biological and physical world was conceptualized as a machine that could be understood simply as so many atoms of matter-­in-motion. . . . Capitalism and democracy coalesced with machine technology to effect the conversion of nature into a standing reserve possessing market value only. Modernism thus completes the intellectual divorce of humankind from nature. (95–96) Oelschlaeger’s modernism is my modernity. Falk’s proposals and Oelschlaeger’s context are important for my purposes because they represent an intersection at which environmental and spiritual concerns meet in ways that might offer a response to the intensively destructive and resource-hungry arrangements currently dominating the globe in the newly christened Anthropocene dispensation (see chapter 5, this volume). McCarthy’s willingness to

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invest land and landscapes with a kind of unspecified mystery challenges the absolutism of human agency at a conceptual level—though the fiction is characteristically ambivalent about the precise nature of any resistance that might result. The natural world does, though, have the capacity to reenchant, in McCarthy, by striking a kind of reverence into the being of those characters who interact with it, and those readers who respond to the writing in a similar way (see chapter 6, this volume). At some level, it might be possible to classify this as spiritual or mystical in that it is not wholly within the scope of humanity to encompass using reason. The fiction endows the natural world with an uncorrupted nature that is largely absent from the conception of the human. McCarthy describes John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins, for example, suffering a bout of nausea in the wilderness south of the US-Mexican border: their presence, “A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool” (All the Pretty Horses 71). The natural world has grace, but man does not. If grace, in the Christian sense of love and mercy, is what is intended here, then the writing suggests some kind of spiritual influence, operating through the fabric of the world, from which humanity has been disconnected to the extent that man himself seems grotesque. McCarthy’s protagonists are as often at odds with the land and its creatures as they are in harmony with them, forcing it and them into the forms determined by the habits of modernity they internalize. McCarthy’s living landscapes are, though, beyond the compass of these habits, existing in both memory and the empirical present as a primordial presence, yet stretching into an unimaginably distant future. In this sense, modernity is, for all the destruction it appears to wreak, the most momentary of blights, nugatory in the barely conceivable reaches of geological time. Whatever destruction we visit upon the earth, a vast expanse of time will facilitate the regeneration of the planet in one form or another. Native American cultures—“Indians” in McCarthy’s work— tend to operate in ways that align with this notion, and seem to see a world that does not recognize the separations that exist in the Anglo characters in the border trilogy. Even when native peoples are represented as hostile or detached in the fiction, they often enjoy a relationship to the land that is



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complementary, or at least seem better acquainted with and adapted to its rhythms. The “indian” at the beginning of The Crossing, for example, who is waiting patiently for something to hunt at the river and calls Boyd a “little son of a bitch” for scaring the game from the vicinity (7), or members of the unnamed tribe who simply stop their work in the mines for whatever time is necessary to return a member of their tribe to his village (92). Suspicion of Western environmentalists who seek to portray the Native American as the perfect and uncontaminated ecologist should be noted here, however: How can America be simultaneously paradise seemingly untouched by human hands and—as archaeologists and other scholars have often proposed—inhabited by people who, prior to the arrival of the Europeans, exploited lands and animals in order to live, cut down forests for fuel and arable land, and perhaps oversalinated fields and helped animals to an early demise? (Krech, Ecological Indian 77) Shepard Krech argues that “images of noble and ignoble indigenousness, including the ecological Indian, are ultimately dehumanizing. They deny both variation within human groups and commonalities between them” (26). He feels that “[white environmentalists] victimize Indians when they strip them of all agency in their lives except when their actions fit the image of the Ecological Indian” (216). For Krech, Native Americans vary as much in their attitudes to the environment as members of any other society do: Some wish to preserve the environment at all costs and to take actions premised on a religious relationship with an animated natural world, and on landscape as a repository of sacredness and history. In contrast, others want to develop land and resources, which represent jobs, household income, and economic security; they have a more narrowly utilitarian relationship with resources as commodities. (227) Clearly Krech is right to the extent that to attempt to recreate the

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facile “noble savage” of times past would be offensive, retrograde, and unworkable. Also, the portrayal of the “indian” in the section of The Crossing I mention is at some significant distance from the “ecological indian.” McCarthy’s representation of an opportunistic nomad who offers nothing to Billy and Boyd—certainly not wisdom—and may have been responsible for the murder of his parents, suggests McCarthy’s position is akin to that of Krech. This is reinforced by the treatment of the “indian” with the stinking bait in Suttree who, apart from certain inherited practices, is no more in a special category of ecological being than any other vagrant in the novel. Resistance to modernity in the border trilogy is, though, predicated on attitudes actually quite similar to those belonging to Native Americans engaged in certain kinds of cultural production and politics in the Southwest who wish to challenge environmental destruction and the brutal exploitation of resources by returning to, or maintaining, more traditional relationships with the land. This is important for a number of reasons, not least because it shows McCarthy’s responses suggest ways in which modernity might be demonstrated to be merely one among a variety of ways to conceive of, or run, the world. McCarthy’s use of landscape—cultural geography—constructs alternate worlds in language that invoke the geography of the Southwest to evoke the endurance and longevity of the fabric of the natural world and the many cultures that have passed fleetingly across its surface. The ancient pictographs referred to on several occasions in Cities of the Plains are evidence of this (47, 163). Cultural geography is defined as “the study of how particular social relations intersect with more general processes, a study grounded in the production and reproduction of actual places, spaces, and scales and the social structures that give those places, spaces, and scales meaning” (Mitchell 294). Don Mitchell is concerned with the ways in which geography and culture provide each other with meaning and this, broadly, corresponds to my use of the term in this chapter. He is, however, primarily interested in places and spaces that bear the marks of innumerable human interventions—primarily cities and towns— and less interested in natural environments. My focus, by contrast, is the way in which the natural geography of the Southwest affords



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cultural and spiritual meaning in the work of McCarthy. I do not, though, argue for crude environmental determinism, but suggest a rather more nuanced view of the relationship between culture and geography. Richard Peet, for example, recognizes direct responses from cultures to geographical factors. He also notes, however, that in some circumstances the nature of cultures may be partly dictated by the powers those cultures confer on local geography. “Because landscapes are partly natural,” he writes, “their signs are frequently long lasting, and because landscapes are the homes of women and men, they are particularly suited to the ideological task of framing the social imaginary” (23). Peet uses the language of the secular sociologist, but his remarks carry equal weight if spiritual substitutes for ideological. The imagined world of Native American cultures, for example, is transmuted into reality by the investment over centuries of spiritual 3 power in the landscape, a relationship that becomes reciprocal. These landscapes, often apparently unchanging in the Southwest and always massively imposing, contribute a clearly defined cultural framework that offers a degree of permanence even in the face of the vagaries of events such as the arrival of Europeans. McCarthy’s fiction suggests that the relationship between the geography of the Southwest and the cultures that have been influenced by it offers an alternate way to understand the world based on the spiritual. McCarthy’s fiction has in common with many Native American cultures the notion that the parts of the world farthest from modernity are those to which humanity turns for spiritual sustenance. Suttree’s spiritual experiences take place in the deep woods, the encounters of Billy Parham and John Grady occur beyond the physical and quotidian in the countryside of an essentially pre-industrial border, and it is only at the conclusion of the border trilogy that McCarthy chooses to locate one of these set-pieces in an environment that belongs wholly to modernity: under the freeway intersection. Tableaux of landscapes appear everywhere in McCarthy, and these tableaux seem to have the power to generate a sense of awe, and something perhaps best described as secular reverence. An element of John McClure’s “weakened religiosity” is present in these experiences, as it is, I argue, in the engagements of characters in the

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border trilogy with romance (see chapter 8, this volume). These engagements bring the reader closer to Falk’s idea that the existence of humanity should be essential rather than complementary to a closer relationship between all living things. This is represented by Falk in the need to tap the genuine feel for the environment and ecology that has emerged so strongly in Western societies recently, yet has a long tradition in American literature from Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville onward. It might even be possible to argue that the depth of feeling regarding conservation in the Western middle class is such that ecological concerns can be considered spiritual engagement by many who would never consider themselves religious, or for whom organized religion and its proscriptions are abhorrent. An expansion and development of the green and ecological movements that have been persistent in Western cultures since the 1960s might provide points of entry—or “ruptures,” as Hardt and Negri describe them in Empire—allowing an opportunity for elements of indigenous belief systems to suggest possibilities that begin to defy modernity (see chapter 2, this volume). These belief systems, particularly those deriving from Native American philosophy, seem always to have a holistic view of the earth and its inhabitants. Donald Fixico describes, for example, a world that is “alive” in a way that is alien to much of Western thought (Rethinking American Indian History 175). In these world views, humanity is decentered, suffering is no longer wholly anthropocentric, the sacred becomes universal, and the notion that all things are connected in a web of being remains current in spite of the best efforts of the forces of modernity, capitalism, and orthodox Christianity. The natural world (or the environment), in Eurocentric philosophy, has been desacralized in a characteristic process of detached observation, it has been artificially separated from religion and both have been allocated their own specialists and experts, corralled in their appropriate locations. McCarthy’s nomadic Indians and gypsies in The Crossing offer a nuanced series of rebuttals to the philosophical foundations of these prevailing conditions. Just one example is from an early encounter in The Crossing, when Billy is given shelter and food in the mountains by wild Indians of an unnamed tribe. Their



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representative tells Billy that Billy has within him “a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one” (134). Native American views of religion and the environment tend to reflect a wider understanding of both, imputing the sacred to all living things (the fabric of the earth itself included), thus blurring the divide between animal and human, and human and the earth: Native North Americans were close to the environment in ways that seem foreign today to urban dwellers and non-indigenous Westerners. Their origin stories and histories tell about long-ago eras when significant boundaries between humans and animals were absent. Animal-human beings like raven, coyote, and rabbit created them and other things, and then tricked them. People modeled relationships with sentient other-than-human beings on human relationships, and toward many acted with respect (culturally defined) and in expectation of reciprocity; or expressed kinship and alliance with them in narratives, songs, poems, parables, performances, rituals, and material objects. (Krech, Ecolog­ ical Indian 211) The human-only view of religious experience is alien to belief systems such as this, resulting necessarily in a greater respect for the lives of animals of all sorts, whether prey species or otherwise. Similarly, the living land is sacred to many Native American groups. It is possible for it to be wounded and to suffer in ways akin to those of animals, Krech explains: “The Blackfeet argued that the Forest Service’s plans to allow Chevron and Petrofina to drill exploratory wells in a 100,000-acre roadless area of Montana south of Glacier National Park amounted to a violation of First Amendment religious rights. Traditionalists argued that it would ‘cut out the heart’ of their religion and that ‘the land is our church’” (The Ecological Indian 219). To “cut out the heart” of the land is both literal and metaphorical in this context. That McCarthy chooses the Southwest as his canvas is significant. The region is well-known as a location for environmentally

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destructive projects on a huge scale, from open-cast mines for uranium, to new proposals for tar sands strip mines, to the atomic bomb tests at White Sands. All of these were and are resisted vigorously by certain local First Nations groups, horrified not only by the physical manifestations on landscape and body of the damage caused by modernity in its industrial incarnation, but also by the simultaneous 4 and indivisible spiritual effects. When Billy crosses the Animas Valley with Boyd’s bones in the travois (The Crossing 421) it is Ash Wednesday 1945, in February. The Trinity detonation took place on July 16, 1945, and the novel places Billy in the vicinity of I-25 somewhere between the town of Hatch, New Mexico, and the Caballo Reservoir in July—if Organ Mountain is eighty miles away and Billy is traveling in roughly a straight line when he strikes the blacktop (422). It is possible, though, that the blacktop could be NM-26. These are rough calculations, of course, but either way Billy may be as few as sixty miles from White Sands, and throughout the novel are oblique references to the advent of the nuclear age. The hideously deformed dog that crawls into his shelter in this section presages fallout mutation to come, as does Boyd’s visionary dream of the “burnin lake” consuming people, yet with no natural material to fuel its flames (35). And the novel’s fiery imagery includes the word afterflash on one occasion (383). Billy wakes in the adobe hut by the road in a desert noon transformed into a strange dusk: “Yet more dark and darkening still where it ran on to the east and where there was no sun and there was no dawn and when he looked again toward the north the light was drawing away faster and that noon in which he’d woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark” (425). Billy weeps in the “inexplicable darkness” of a new power, incomprehensible in the potential of its destructive capacity, which has desecrated in its apocalyptic fury the heart of the country that has sustained the unformed sense of the spiritual in Billy’s relationship with the landscapes of the border. Maybe it is not too tenuous to suggest that Billy’s dream just before meeting the blacktop imagines the Manhattan Project and the apotheosis of a particular version of modernity: “He saw God’s pilgrims laboring upon a darkened verge in the last of the twilight of that day and they seemed to



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be returning from some deep enterprise that was not of war nor were they yet in flight but rather seemed coming from some labor to which perhaps these and all other things stood subjugate” (420). What greater separation could there be of humanity from its environment? McCarthy offers us, here, the first hints of the apocalypse to come in The Road. In Ceremony, Leslie Silko takes the notion of desecration a stage further to an inventory of the sacrilege committed in her “church” by the presence of modernity’s terrifying apotheosis in the corner of the Southwest occupied by the Pueblo dwellers: Trinity site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of [Tayo] now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine of the twin mountain lions had always been. (246) Even the sacred sites have been usurped by the dark side of the instrumental technology of the West: the most terrible of ironies resides in the way modernity has used these sacred and life-preserving landscapes to terrorize and destroy human beings in locations all over the world. What could be more grotesque to traditional Native Americans than the excavation of their sacred lands for such monstrous purposes? As Silko claims in Ceremony, the yellow rocks of the Southwest have been transformed into weapons-grade uranium to provide the warheads for the bombs that would be unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter” (246). The comparison between Silko and McCarthy is instructive. The extraction of uranium for the manufacture of atomic bombs from the rocks of the Southwest in the 1940s and 1950s, in Silko’s novel, correlates with Holden’s manufacture of gunpowder from rocks and

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minerals in the same region in a work set in the 1850s. The difference in what modernity achieves is merely a question of scale. In both novels, the application of sophisticated technology is applied to raw materials to destroy and terrorize stunned opponents possessing only primitive weaponry by comparison. The argument is strengthened if the reader accepts constructions of Blood Meridian as a Vietnam novel. For gunpowder, read napalm and Agent Orange. Geography is no longer spiritual under these conditions: in the purview of modernity, it is reduced to the rational, the instrumental. We would be mistaken, though, to imagine anything soft and ethereal in McCarthy’s ambiguities concerning landscape. Alongside its potentially spiritual function, it must do double duty as the very stuff that will defeat modernity. It is implacable, therefore. What remains of the Glanton Gang traverses “a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood” (251). On such geography it is not possible for man to make a mark that is not swiftly eradicated: “The desert upon which they were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of any feature altogether and there was nothing to mark their progress upon it” (295). Out of this deathly emptiness, the kid and Tobin are saved by the Diegueños, who eke their living from the land but are perpetually aware of their fleeting presence upon it, looking always “for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world . . . whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable” (301). Any species of humanity has only the most tenuous foothold in these lands. Yet alongside the impermanence and fragility of humanity in the face of ancient and hostile environments is the fiction’s ambivalence concerning the potential of even these harshest of landscapes to resist and survive human agency. Holden, for example, insists on man’s ability to change forever the fabric of the universe. His belief in his power to tame the wild is this conflict in McCarthy’s work writ large: “Whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with barely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe” (Blood Meridian 146). Indeed, Holden



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remains defiant in the midst of the torturing desert, his parasol, his idiot, and his belief in Western civilization sustaining him in landscapes that would destroy all others. Here, it seems, is another example of the underlying ambivalence in McCarthy’s fiction concerning the notion that it is too late to resist. Perhaps not even these extraordinarily harsh and inhospitable landscapes can bury Western civilization—as figured by Holden—beneath their rock and sands before this civilization destroys their very fabric, as it finally does in The Road. Holden is the archetypal Western observer, detached from what he views: objective, scientific, and dissociated from the natural world. Western philosophy, in the years since Descartes, has been unable to overcome the notion of disconnection inherent in the mindbody problem. Larger moves to reconnect mind to body and a unified mind and body to the environment—Arne Naess’s deep ecology (1972), for example, and the emergence in Western philosophy of the notion of Gaia—have arrived very late and have done little in the mainstream to counter the claim of a radical divide between interior 5 and exterior, and between mind and the rest. Again, a glance at Native American culture might have been revealing. Notions of multiplicity, for example, are far from unknown to Native American cultures, yet they do not imply a separation from the worlds they describe. Gladys Reichard notes the following about Navajo beliefs: Since for eons man has been advancing toward oneness with the universe, he identifies himself with all its parts. This world may be considered a functioning central world; others, left behind but remembered in myth are underneath; there are others above. The number of worlds is hypothetical, there being little agreement about it; myth furnishes details of four underworlds, of the sky immediately above, and the one still higher, Land-beyond-the-sky. (14) These notions of multiplicity, simultaneity, and yet a seemingly paradoxical move toward oneness tend to foster an automatic respect for, and easiness with, the environment. Even if we find such unscientific beliefs difficult to accept, they present a practical challenge to the ruthless exploitation of resources and instrumentalism characteristic

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of the modern industrial world, in which often little moves beyond the desire to create wealth. Also, beyond the trepidation created by the unknown, white settlers—having none of the belief systems that sustained the Native Americans in a seemingly hostile landscape— seemed to fear the emptiness of the environments they encountered on their journey west. Frederick Turner writes of the dichotomy between the view of the whites of a hostile, dangerous environment, and the traditional indigenous attachment to a sacred earth: [The Native American approach] amounted to a different kind of possession than the whites were prepared to understand as they looked about these spaces and found them empty of visible marks of tenancy. . . . To them the lands were satanic rather than sacred, and the traders and their employees could tolerate the wilderness only in the hope that eventually they could make enough money to leave it behind and return to civilization to live like humans. So they would grimly push out into the woods beyond the furthest reaches of civilization. . . . Here they would establish a post and make it known that they stood ready to supply the needs of the resident tribes in return for pelts taken in trapping and hunting. . . . Here again we encounter the clash between history and myth, with the whites, driven to enormous technological ingenuity, producing a vast array of seductive items for the peoples of the globe whose spiritual contentments had kept their own technologies at comparatively simple levels. . . . We know now that there has been no people on earth capable of resisting this seduction, for none has been able to see the hidden and devious byways that lead inevitably from the consumption of new luxuries to the destruction of the myths that give life its meaning. (24) Turner illuminates the manner in which whites, avowing Christianity rather than the sustaining myths of the indigenous peoples, countered their fear and filled the “emptiness” of what, to them, was a one-­ dimensional environment. Indeed, the potential of these attitudes to poison the continent were clear to Native American leaders and



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elucidated by Luther Standing Bear in “Land of the Spotted Eagle” in 1933: “True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?” (quoted in Deloria, God Is Red 303). This awareness of the condition of the continent under the dominion of the white man contrasts vividly with the meretricious perceptions of the colonist. Deloria quotes Walter Camp, for example, in a report to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1920: “The savage is concerned only with the immediate necessities of life, while the civilized man looks beyond subsistence. In other words, the Indian is not a capitalist. . . . One might say he is lacking in industry, and that the dearth of capital is an effect and not the cause of his poverty” (God Is Red 331). The chilling dismissal of subsistence reveals a concomitant absence of any willingness to engage with the environment beyond the will to exploitation. This is recognized throughout the border trilogy in passages that identify the encroachment of modernity. The juxtaposition of a vulture and a locomotive in The Crossing, for example, or more explicitly when the wolf’s proximity to human habitation is explained: “Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines” (25). McCarthy’s work manifests a response to this in pockets of resistance that feature animals, landscape, and the spiritual. All remain at one level or another either figuratively in flight from subsumption into modernity, or defiant of it. What links animals, landscape, and the spiritual under these conditions is their irrationality, the characteristic that places them at some level beyond the ability of a quotidian modernity to render them fully intelligible and, thereby, amenable to control. But as humans expelled from paradise, the primal catastrophe has left us profoundly dislocated. The author of the book from which this chapter takes its title writes, “we are exiles in an alien wilderness which we must struggle to subdue. With every generation we move further and further from the gates of Eden, sustained only by dreams of somehow regaining our lost innocence or of creating a new heaven on earth” (Wilson 5). Such a view is reminiscent

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of McCarthy’s characters, exiled in strange lands, and seeking always for something just out of reach: [Billy] sat in the sun and looked out over the country to the east, the broad barranca of the Bavispe and the ensuing Carretas Plain that was once a seafloor and the small pieced fields and the new corn greening in the old lands of the Chichimeca where the priests had passed and soldiers passed and the missions fallen into mud and the ranges of mountains beyond the plain range on range in pales of blue where the terrain lay clawed open north and south, canyon and range, sierra and barranca, all of it waiting for the world to come to be, the world to pass. (The Crossing 135) This passage is shot through with a sense of the permanence of the geography of the Southwest that is utterly untroubled by the multiple navigations of it by various orders of men and their cultures. Here is a land in which concerns are spatial rather than temporal. It is the infinitesimal moment of the conditions of the immediate environment that lends meaning to the world and by which actions may be interpreted. As Billy and his party depart from the diva’s caravan in The Crossing, she sees them as “inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more” (231). Such a construction challenges Christian tendencies that have become entwined in modernity, in which the present is drained of significance and the arena in which it unfolds is spiritually empty and irrelevant to what is sacred to the religion. The emphasis in Christianity and modernity alike therefore tends to be on time rather than place or space. As Deloria argues, “If time becomes our primary consideration, we never seem to arrive at the reality of our existence in places but instead are always directed to experiential and abstract interpretations rather than to experiences themselves” (God Is Red 72). To confront Western conceptions of time and to foreground the spatial is to challenge modernity (see chapters 2, 3, and 12, this volume):



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The shift in thinking from temporal considerations to spatial considerations may be seen in a number of minimovements by which we are struggling to define American society. Ecology, the new left politics, self-determination of goals by local communities, and citizenship participation all seem to be efforts to recapture a sense of place and a rejection of the traditional American dependence on progress—a temporal concept—as the measure of American identity. (God Is Red 73) To question the notion of time as linear, progressive, and empty is to begin to resist the notion that we are carried along in an unstoppable flow moving from a point of origin to a point of destiny. As Wilson writes of Native American perceptions of time, “there is no simple, straightforward chain of cause and effect: events have to be seen not in chronological relation to each other but in terms of a complex, coherent understanding of the world, rooted in the origin story, in which time, space, spiritual entities and living beings all interact” (8). Such an environment is akin to the one created in the lengthy philosophical sequence at the end of Cities of the Plain in which the stranger relates his dream within a dream to Billy: “He saw that a man’s life was little more than an instant and that as time was eternal therefore every man was always and eternally in the middle of his journey, whatever be his years or whatever distance he had come” (280). The move from point a to point b becomes irrelevant, which lays the foundation for the interactions Wilson describes: “The world of our fathers resides within us” (278). Place trumps time both for Native Americans and Mexicans in McCarthy: the circularity of a Mexican society whose time dimensions have not yet been completely reshaped by modernity are inherent both in the way revolutions repeat themselves and in the way young American men peregrinate in powerfully repetitive and seemingly timeless journeys into an antique land. What they seek is the space of the premodern. The feelings generated in them by the environments in which they travel may be echoes of an ancient understanding belonging to humanity of the dominance of the spatial over the temporal: “All I had forsaken I would come upon again” (286).

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There is though, in both the border trilogy and the Appalachian novels, something of the despair of the Brangwens in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, who move from a pastoral idyll in which the farmer feels “the pulse and body of the soil” (42) to a world made linear, instrumental, and industrialized that Will Brangwen wishes eventually to see annihilated, “leaving only the bare earth with plants growing and waters running” (235). In The Road, in the child’s acceptance by the “good” people, is the possibility of a Lawrentian redemption for humanity more broadly: She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. (The Rainbow 548) Might it be that the conclusion that confronts us at the end of The Road is that from a world cleansed of modernity individuals will emerge infused with the spirit to regrow that world in harmony with nature? To read McCarthy in this way is to read into the work not nihilism but a millenarian suggestion of rebirth. This is not the “inhumanism” Oelschlaeger identified as love turned outward “from humankind to the transhuman beauty of things, the cosmic whole that enframes the human odyssey and, indeed, is itself divine” (252), but hope at last for humanity in a wasteland of its own creation. Again, the moment in The Road in which the boy is handed over to the care of the good guys (282) is crucial. Is this a false note that corrupts the political power and integrity of the fiction, or a welcome hint of what is to come? How the reader chooses to interpret this moment may well determine how she/he understands the larger corpus of McCarthy’s fiction.

10

The Beautiful Image

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. — fyodor dostoyevsk y, The Brothers Karamazov

T

he following quotation from The Crossing is one I find beautiful and evocative:

The cranes were moving south and he watched their thin echelons trail along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years. He watched them until they were gone and the last thin fluted cry like a child’s horn floated away on the night’s onset and then she rose and took her serape and walked off down the gravel bar and vanished among the cottonwoods. (328)

This passage engenders in me a feeling of imminent loss and a wistful sense of transience, marked in the sounds and movement of the cranes and mirrored in the behavior of Boyd’s girl. For me, there is an engagement at the level of effects and affect: I feel something (affect), and I have a very clear sense that the passage describes the sight of migrating cranes with clarity and truth (the effects of the writing). In this chapter, I argue that, operating in constellation, affect and effect produce the aesthetic of works of fiction. For Hegel, the aesthetic meant the “sensuous appearance of the idea” that is “a manifestation 1 of truth through an experienceable medium” (Honderich 10). Hegel’s criterion could be applied to the cited passage, as could Heidegger’s 169

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“sensuous apprehension” (133). Similarly, for Schopenhauer and the Romantics, art represented a higher level of consciousness. For Hegel, though, art and the aesthetic must disappear in the dialectic of history, folded into religion and philosophy in the flow of the world-­ historical spirit toward perfection. What is fascinating about the rise of ideas broadly construed as aesthetic during this period is that Enlightenment thinkers felt the need to separate music, painting, poetry, and sculpture from, to them, distinct intellectual activities of science and rational thought (Honderich 10). Once again it is instructive to see that entwined with the rise of modernity is a relentless will to separate, to categorize, and to seek oppositions. Literature, it might be argued, with its undeniable facility for intellectual engagement combined with its ability to move, fascinate, and entertain, forms a bridge between these two artificially separated realms of thought. In response to this, this chapter considers the relationship between some of the techniques of literary production McCarthy deploys and explains why I think they are particularly effective in generating a response in the reader. I then examine the ways in which the theories I adduce concerning the relationship of artistic production to politics might be relevant to my broader argument that, in its form as well as 2 its content, McCarthy’s work resists and challenges modernity. First, I consider the subject of affect: the way in which McCarthy’s fiction produces emotional responses in his reader. I want to preempt the next chapter’s move into the world of the somatic and argue that McCarthy’s aesthetic actually generates, in concert with the embodied imagination of the reader, a practical way to resist one of modernity’s most hegemonic diktats—that mind and body should be separate (see chapters 1, 6, and 9, this volume). In “Once More with Feeling,” Derek Attridge illustrates ways in which feeling is generated in the reader in response to McCarthy’s fiction: We’ve identified several ways in which feelings of pleasure are implicated in the experience of the artwork as event: delight in the revelation of the power of the medium produced by the skilful handling of form; admiration for the creator; enjoyment of the opening up of hitherto occluded ways of thinking and feeling.



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The emotions aroused by the images depicted are not directly experienced as the reality they represent would be, but are staged and controlled by the subtle arrangements of language. (339) This seems to me to be an accurate summary of some of the ways we can be affected by art. What it does not include, though—and I address this later—is the active participation of the reader. Attridge’s analysis identifies the reader as a subject without agency, wafted to and fro on the winds of authorial intent. The passage Attridge chooses to examine is this: Jackson sat with his legs crossed. One hand lay in his lap and the other was outstretched on his knee holding a slender black cigarillo. The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled. He was sat as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone. (101) Attridge takes the trouble to rewrite elements of this passage a number of times to convey to the reader that a less-skilled artist, or indeed a practitioner from a different discipline, would be unable to generate the responses in the reader that McCarthy achieves. Attridge identifies a particular sensation on engaging with this passage: “It’s not easy to fix on an appropriate name for this feeling—repulsion? disgust? repugnance? horror? Something like this, no doubt, but also

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perhaps fascination? awe? astonishment? Perhaps even an urge to laugh, albeit uncomfortably. The fact that we can’t name the feeling—or perhaps ‘complex of feelings’ would be a better expression” (330). That Attridge notes the close relationship between the mind and body in the reactions of readers to this passage, and to many others in McCarthy’s fiction, is significant for my arguments in these chapters. Feelings evoked in passages like this are real for Attridge, manifest3 ing in actual sensations in various parts of the body. Attridge argues this way: “Language—is significant: it reflects not only the paucity of our vocabulary in dealing with affective experience, itself a reflection of the poverty of our understanding of this domain of our lives, but also the capacity of literature to engage powerfully and subtly with the extraordinary complexity of emotional responses, in which the 4 psychic and the somatic are so inextricably entwined” (330). Attridge concludes his essay with a reflection on the ability of art to generate sensation in the form of bodily responses that are no less real than any other emotion or sensation, though of a lesser order, being at one remove: The emotions experienced by the reader of a work of literature are real; of this there can surely be no doubt. That they are not identical with the emotions that would be felt as a result of direct exposure to the people and events portrayed is also unquestionable. In arguing that the difference can be explained by regarding the reader’s affective responses as performances of the emotions in question, I am not suggesting that there is a conscious distancing at work: rather, it is a matter of the feelings being coloured by an awareness that they are being prompted by art—and this is a matter not primarily of fiction but of form. It is not enough to say that we respond as we do to McCarthy’s depiction of a horrifying event because we know it is fiction; it is McCarthy’s superb control of his medium that makes the important difference. We read the novel, that is, as an authored work, and part of the enjoyment that it offers, even in its most macabre passages, lies in the relishing of that authorial achievement. And this is an enjoyment we



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can experience over and over again, precisely because it’s not a response to an object but to an event, or rather the response is the event, an event that changes with us as we change. We can always read it once more, with feeling. (340) Attridge reaches beyond a two-dimensional technical analysis of style and technique to explain the facility with which McCarthy’s work moves the reader to heightened and embodied sensations and feelings. Significant emphasis remains, though, on the reader’s admiration for the author’s achievement, and less is placed on the participation of the reader, and this is where I further develop Attridge’s argument. I have mentioned tableaux in McCarthy’s work and suggested that they are evidence of McCarthy’s power to summon images that come to stand for complex ideas, or to make vivid and intense relatively straightforward ones. One example of the latter is the tableau of the jackrabbit heads in the radiator grille from Cities of the Plain, and an example of the former comes in the following passage from Blood Meridian, which generates a sense of place, evokes a world moving solely in accordance with geological time, its creatures responding to age-old rhythms, and describes a world free of man-made edifices or machinery as the relative pace of modernity is thrown into sharp relief: In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north. The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. (99–100) The mare imbrium (sea of rains) is a vast crater on the moon, the

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second largest, and summons the sense of the otherworldly that landscapes in this region can often promote, particularly in those encountering them for the first time. Also, by invoking planetary geology, McCarthy alludes to the vast stretches of time in which the insignificance of humanity is manifest. Certain images, however, acknowledge the entry of the machine into the garden. McCarthy chooses “butcherpaper” to describe the mountains, hinting at sophisticated civilizations to come perhaps, and “distant armies” prefigure conflicts yet to be fought, but refer also to the overseas wars taking place as the 5 novel was being written. The same might be said of “holocaust,” although the context in this passage seems to suggest the older sense of a sacrificial animal burned at the altar to appease the Old Testament God. Such thoroughgoing destruction gives life to the deity just as the burning sun apparently regenerates to reappear unfailingly again the next day. Represented too is the age-old interaction of predator and prey, and McCarthy renders the wolves the same color as the desert. Everything in the tableau is in its rightful premodern place before the arrival of the clashing destructive incongruity of modern man and technology. I am immediately affected by the clarity of this scene, its panoramic nature, and its fearful beauty. I can feel echoes of the heat of the region, the wonder at the vastness of the Southwestern skies that produces a kind of acute stillness in the body, and the excitement as a wild animal moves into view and the sensation of quietude that descends as it engages in its natural behavior unaware of, or unconcerned by, the proximity of the human. It is in these moments that McCarthy invites his reader to feel the world and sense its animals as he imagines they might have been a thousand years ago, to experience a fleeting sensation of man’s relationship to the natural before the ruptures and estrangements of modernity. Here is a move toward bridging the gap between idealist and empirical understandings of the world. If McCarthy’s fiction can help me feel the world as it might have been before modernity, then he and I are projecting an idea of the world out there from the inside out. It is, however, the representation of the empirical reality of the mountains, the sun, the sky, and the animals I have experienced as matters external to me that produce the ability to feel the sensation.



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What might at first appear to be a paradox seems to me to be simply the world as a creation of the mind reunited with that world in a sensory impression. This separation may not have occurred had thinking about the way we exist in the world not been influenced in a lasting way by the insistence of Descartes and others that mind and body are separate, that either the world must be understood as a creation of the mind or can be understood only as sensory impressions of the outside (see chapter 9, this volume). This dichotomy has produced an array of undesirable ideas, not least that the human mind should have dominion over the body and, by extension, all else. In this is a convergence with religions, principally Christianity, that create of mankind a superior and separate category having sovereignty over living creatures and the land. That McCarthy’s writing should challenge these assumptions by producing affect in the reader is startling. The process is performative. By writing and creating this way, McCarthy “does” the ideas he simultaneously represents through narrative and mimesis. Not only that, a species of reader willing to suspend disbelief may also begin to feel they are partici6 pating in a process that is both epistemological and ontological. The tableaux I mention are everywhere in McCarthy. Dianne Luce, in “The Painterly Eye,” suggests a more specific comparative milieu for what I have described: “Many instances of landscape representation in McCarthy’s works are of scenes framed within a static and clearly defined vantage point approximating a painted landscape. One thinks of Suttree’s view of Knoxville (238), or some of the striking vistas in Blood Meridian” (Borders and Crossings 69). This is particularly interesting in the light of my claim that literature combines the sensuous pleasure of visual art or music (an ontological arena) with the business of knowing (an epistemological one). It is borne out, also, in the films. McCarthy has always tended to imagine his output in cinematic form, and his works include numerous occurrences of 7 painterly tableaux. One of the reasons the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men feels so affecting, I think, is their willingness to linger over the sound of the wind in a largely empty view of west Texas at the beginning of the film. Or the survey of vehicles in the aftermath of the drug deal gone bad. Or Chigurh’s approach to

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the garage where he tosses a coin for the life of the proprietor. Some of the more affecting moments in The Counselor are in this register: the cheetah pursuing its prey against the background of the Southwestern desert (11), or the road in the wake of the retaking of the effluent truck (127). McCarthy’s first venture into film, The Garden­ er’s Son, has a very clear version of the painterly tableau in the final scene, when McEvoy’s distraught father drives away in a cart the coffin of his hanged son as the camera shifts to a lingering shot of the factory chimney mirrored in the lake, the surface of which is partially obscured by mist or smoke. What I find common to all these scenes is their ability to produce affect in me. To return to “The Painterly Eye,” Luce refers to the “tanker half careened . . . out on the tidal flats” that the boy sees as he and his father reach at last the “alien sea” (215). She notes that the image of the sinking ship was a regular one in nineteenth-century American painting and used to represent “the foundering ship of state” (70). My argument would be that the tanker in McCarthy represents the rotted hulk of a technology-obsessed world brought to ruin in the inescapable arc of modernity. This response is not merely intellectual: at some level, as well as knowing what I think the tanker represents, I feel that understanding too. The Road is replete with such tableaux. As Luce attempts to demonstrate, they show McCarthy at his most Romantic in the sense Schopenhauer and his contemporaries intended. She argues that McCarthy’s aesthetic is frequently that of the “apocalyptic sublime” (72), and quotes Malcolm Andrews to this effect: “Among the circumstances contributing to the terrifying Sublime, according to Edmund Burke . . . are obscurity, vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence, all of which bewilder the senses of sight and sound, and more generally stress the absence of any determined forms” (72). Mile after mile of destroyed forest, ash, lifeless seedpods, a dead swamp, and a variety of sounds that in their occasional character only serve to emphasize the quiet of the destroyed world, make this a strong argument. Yet it is with one of the most emotionally affecting passages in all his writing that McCarthy closes The Road after the boy comes into the care of the good guys after the death of the father. It is instructive that this final passage is a tableau—or, rather, two: the fish standing in the current,



The Beautiful Image

and the creature lying in the fisherman’s hand. It is significant that this is McCarthy’s most recent fiction, and that it reiterates an aesthetic designed to summon the “beautiful image.” The beautiful image is an aesthetic trope Herbert Marcuse identifies as a challenge to existing conditions and as a means to challenge the hegemony of modernity: [The] radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image . . . of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence. Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible: the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality. (Aesthetic Dimension 6) McCarthy’s invocation of the beautiful image at the end of The Road denies the ugliness of the reality created by the modern world that has reached its apotheosis in the preceding pages. An alternative reality is summoned in which McCarthy conjures the imperishable magnificence of the natural world, in prose both elegant and magisterial, as a way to 8 liberation. In McCarthy’s tableaux, myths of the near past compete with that of modernity for status as reality: “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality” (Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension 9). Marcuse argues that, by existing as an alternate reality, art can claim equality or even dominance over the given reality: “The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions” (7). Within the terms of this book, the creation of irrational realities in McCarthy’s fiction has the potential to disrupt modernity by disputing the truth claims of the system (see chapters 2, 4, 5, 8, and 12, this volume). The result is that the objectivity to which

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modernity lays claim through scientific practice and rationality, and which applies through all strata of human existence, is displaced and new paths of resistance are opened. “The transcendence of immediate reality shatters the reified objectivity of established social relations and opens a new dimension of experience: rebirth of the rebellious subjectivity” (7). Art, in this scenario, becomes the way the world is understood and resistance mobilized. Such a position runs counter to suggestions that McCarthy’s critiques of the modern world tend to deliquesce into a species of inert romanticism characterized by wistful evocations of a world now lost to us, and that there is little in his fiction, therefore, that might form the basis of a political agenda. The argument for nihilism might be taken a stage further to suggest that McCarthy’s position is reactionary and characteristic of conservative political attitudes. I argue, however, that the approaches I detail in these chapters represent a level of resistance in the work beyond the consciousness-raising effects of McCarthy’s meticulous exposure of the depredations of the modern world. In addition to the resistance of the work of art in itself to the “realities” dictated by economic conditions, McCarthy’s work represents a powerful reaction against what Nietzsche identified as the ascetic—a phenomenon that could not be overcome by science, but must be rendered ineffectual by “the will to deception,” that is, by art or cultural practice (see chapter 1, this volume). The ascetic in the forms Nietzsche and Weber outlined is one of the engines of the modernity that so dominates Western economics and culture today. In Nietzsche’s words, “this instinct for freedom forcibly made latent . . . this instinct pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself” (Genealogy of Morals 87). Such instincts belong to the “slave” for Nietzsche and are those that many of McCarthy’s characters resist. From Uncle Ather to Suttree to John Grady Cole to Llewellyn Moss, they flee from or reject lives trapped in systems of consumption and production in which the self-flagellation of the work ethic for the sake of the work ethic operates its hegemony. Crucially, however, a rejection of this same ascetic function is characteristic of McCarthy’s prime avatars of modernity, such as Holden and more recently Malkina in The Counselor.



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McCarthy’s fiction subtly recognizes that a disavowal of asceticism does not equate to the industrial-scale overindulgence and materialism promoted by the version of capitalism with which we interact on a daily basis. Indeed, this kind of consumption, driven by the economics of modernity, is what forces the modern world to the brink and over it. McCarthy allows his reader a glimpse of both sides of the same coin, a coin on which are represented both the unarticulated desire of certain characters for an aesthetic rather than ascetic experience of the world, and the clearly articulated desire of others to consume and possess that world. Plainly, however, a critic asserting the aesthetic-political value of any work of art post-postmodernism faces the problem articulated in Frederic Jameson’s suggestion that aesthetic production is now “integrated into commodity production generally” (Postmodernism 4). Subsumed into the unbreakable logic of economic production, aesthetic resistance is a parody of itself, available fully and by definition for consumption and unable to escape the system it critiques. David Holloway’s book on McCarthy, for example, seems to imply that the existence of this new iron cage is a given, as much for the artist as for the critic: “In a move characteristic of the late capitalist moment in which it is produced, the epilogue [to Cities of the Plain] might be read as a self-reflexive inquiry into the act of writing itself, and as an assessment of the failing potential for a critical effectivity (or agency) in the realm of culture: a realm that earlier modernisms accorded a certain privileged status, in terms of its notional autonomy from the 9 world at large” (19). The passage Holloway quotes is this: You think men have power to call forth what they will? Evoke a world, awake or sleeping? Make it breathe and then set out upon it figures which a glass gives back or which the sun acknowledges? Quicken those figures with one’s own joy and one’s despair? Can a man be so hid from himself? And if so who is hid? And from whom? You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what

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might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. (Cities of the Plain 283) The representation of the real indicates the failure of culture to affect the dialectic of modernity—or, as Holloway would have it, the “late capitalist moment.” Every reality is determined by the hegemony of that moment. At the same time, for Holloway, the idea that culture was autonomous in Modernism (the artistic movement) was the ground on which it was accorded privileged status to comment on that of which it was a part from a position outside that very thing—a logical impossibility and an unresolvable cultural paradox. But McCarthy creates an “unreal real” that permits his reader to feel and thereby to participate. In this environment, alternate realities are created in which the conditions of modernity might at least be recognized and subjected to proper scrutiny (see chapters 2, 4, 5, 8, and 12, this volume). I recognize, of course, the bind here. It is not possible to escape in the creation of works of art from the actual conditions of modernity because every attempt to do so ends in a re-creation of the same conditions. My view, however, is that literature of all the art forms is best able to communicate realities that transcend the hegemony of capitalist modernity. A condition is that art and literature meet the aesthetic criteria identified by Marcuse (guilty, of course, of committing the Modernist cultural paradox mentioned earlier), and also create affect in the reader. They cannot do the former without the latter. McCarthy’s aesthetic seems designed to summon awe in the reader for the grandeur and terrible beauty of the world in which we live and to offer us, simultaneously, a vision of a creeping apocalypse that threatens the very life of this world and all that dwell in it. These both are and are not realities. Once it is accepted that reality can exist in such a double condition, it becomes straightforward to reiterate Marcuse: “The transcendence of immediate reality shatters the reified objectivity of established social relations and opens a new dimension of experience: rebirth of the rebellious subjectivity.” To paraphrase, abstraction into



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an aesthetically affecting literary facsimile of a threatened world, mediated through the consciousness of a writer as skilled as McCarthy, creates possible pathways to change. In this moment of recognition, hegemony begins to dissolve. It may well be that the “probability of the actual is absolute,” but the actual of the affect created in those who read McCarthy’s fiction is no less a reality than any other reality one might care to name. Such a position escapes, thereby, counsels of despair that suggest that the dialectic of modernity renders a work of art wholly and without exception just another plank in the edifice of neoliberal hegemony. Forms of resistance may, in this way, become 10 internalized in readers of the fiction. Such an approach also helps in overcoming the idea of commodification. The packaging and sale of a work of art—in this case a book—to turn a profit is clearly an act of commodification. I cannot accept, however, that the ideas that exist within this commodity must be, by definition or even association, commodities themselves—or even necessarily contaminated by the process of commodification. Commodification is a hegemonic process, and if it is accepted that hegemony dissipates at the point of recognition, then any commodity that contains the communicable expression of an idea that exposes the process, destroys its own existence as a commodity. It might have been a commodity at the moment of its purchase, but it no longer is once it is read and affect has been generated in the reader. As Adorno argues, Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced without being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art’s immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared. Nothing social in art is immediately social, not even when this is its aim. Not long ago even the socially committed Brecht found that to give his political position artistic expression it was necessary to distance himself

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precisely from that social reality at which his works took aim. 11 (Aesthetic Theory 308) McCarthy’s distancing is of precisely this character. His work is and is not reality at the same time. The fiction deals with a mediated reality that escapes commodification through its inherent power to resist the prevailing conditions. Clearly art cannot reflect a single true reality. Rather, a perception of the world as radically consistent within the logic of its own fictional systems, applied in such a determined fashion and mediated through the beautiful image, connects us with ways of seeing and knowing that might have been unavailable previously or that resonate as shared experience with the artist and other readers, viewers, listeners, “experiencers.” Dennis Sansom discusses McCarthy in the Jour­ nal of Aesthetic Education: The artistic imagination is not just a fanciful thought experiment or a mirror of experience. In the Critique of Judgement Kant argued that artistic imagination has a creative effect, not just a reproductive one. It enables us to imagine what the pure reason of science and the practical reason of moral universalizeability cannot enable us to know. As fruitful for knowledge as science and morality may be, they are limited to what is experienced in the senses, synthesized by a priori categories, or universalized to a dutiful necessity. Because science and morality are restricted in what they can know by their own modes of reasoning (that is, pure and practical), they lack a creative ability to envision a different world. But art can envision a world in which the free individual can harmonize in will and action with nature’s purpose. Art’s judgment, according to Kant, gives us a new critique of the human experience: Do our ideas really mix with our experience of purpose in nature? Art can imagine a purpose to life, which science and morality cannot explain by their modes of reasoning. (3–4) Sansom’s argument condenses the argument I have sought to make concerning the mechanisms of affect, aesthetics, and the will to create



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alternate realities that are functions of art. It brings me to the final section of this chapter, in which I consider Adorno’s arguments in a little more detail in relation to McCarthy. I also reiterate that if one of the functions of modernity is to disenchant the world, then McCarthy’s response in the fiction is to reenchant it (see chapters 1, 7, 8, and 12, this volume). This shows clear links to Marcuse’s “irrational realities” and Adorno’s notion of art at one remove from social realities. Morality and science reinvent the world along the paths dictated by the system of which they are a part, but art in its imaginative reinvention of the world opens new ways to see the present and future that escape the rules of the governing system. In McCarthy’s case, the production of a world more closely bound to the “will” of nature, combined with the power of affect in his writing, produce an experience that has the potential to allow the reader to create new worlds. And by create, I mean make real. I have tried to avoid the somewhat glib argument that in a disenchanted world, made so by modernity and capitalism and the rise of science and reason, the dreamlike quality of McCarthy’s fiction has the power to reenchant in a direct and purposeful way. It might also be reductive to suggest that the spiritual elements in the fiction are a simply a move to reintroduce magic into a world whose day-to-day functions are dominated by the rational impulses of modernity and technology. The process is more vexed than this, and any reenchantment McCarthy allows is weakened by humanity’s unwillingness or inability to shake off the imperatives created by modernity’s paradigm of reality. Indeed, were the magical and the mystical not placed by McCarthy into a realm where their reality might be questioned, or their efficacy doubted, his work would be vulnerable to the suggestion Adorno made in Aesthetic Theory that art is actually a stage toward the disenchantment of the world in that it concretizes the magical, rendering it amenable to the scrutiny of the rational gaze. As I argue in the chapter on the spiritual, however, McCarthy makes a serious attempt—beginning in Suttree, skipping Blood Meridian (in which all is in thrall to the secularizing power of modernity), and resuming in the border trilogy—to introduce seeleromane as a counter to modernity. In Suttree in particular there is an aesthetic,

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during Suttree’s October quest in the mountains, that begins with arcane and recondite descriptions of landscape, wildlife, machinery, and peoples. It continues with the conditions of their occupation of the area, and drifts almost imperceptibly, via the death of the rider impaled on a protruding length of rebar (another scene that depicts the violent entry of modernity into the natural), into descriptions of half-wakeful and dreamlike states that herald the appearance of an elf, cobwebbed monks, and a “doublegoer” or “othersuttree” (286). Conversations with trees are included, culminating in a bizarre parade featuring “alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons.” Finally, the hunter with the crossbow appears at the point at which Suttree can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal (287). McCarthy’s writing is at its most inventive in these sections, creating neologisms, using back-­formations, and dredging up disused vocabulary to place in the service of otherworldly creation. The magical of the subject matter is matched by the language. The world of Suttree’s vision in the mountains is posited as a meaningful alternative to the quotidian and rational real of what precedes and follows it, yet we can never be certain as readers if we are intended to read this as a dream (unreal) or waking truth (reality). Magic reenters the world in this passage in this way, and does so again in the form of horses, wolves, and nomads in the later works. It is present, but it exists in a way that owes everything to McCarthy’s ability to avoid the bind of Adorno’s concretization of the magical in art, which is a step on the way to disenchantment. Magic and the mystical might be said in their marginal and liminal conditions to be provisional in McCarthy and thereby to have avoided co-option into modernity’s dialectic. Adorno argues that Hegel’s thesis of art is founded in “consciousness of plight” (Aesthetic Theory 27), and something of this is evident in McCarthy’s work. What happens in the work of artists who cleave to this position is that “the darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art” (27). It could be argued that McCarthy’s “radically darkened art” shuts out the possibility of reenchantment, and passages like the one at the end of The Road in which the boy is delivered to the good guys, and we are left with the tableaux of the brook trout, are mere gestures. Adorno goes on to say



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that “in its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie” (27). The implications of these ideas for the aesthetic of The Road are profound. As in Blood Meridian, the dark objectivity of the fiction feels true as McCarthy enunciates the frequently repressed fears of apocalypse that are constants in the periphery of our modern sensibilities, and this is only partially undermined by the false note struck by the “sweetness” we encounter in the redemption of the boy at the end of The Road. Adorno would surely approve of McCarthy, as he approved of Beckett, whose resistance never admitted so much as a note of false happiness. McCarthy’s writing is a remarkable constellation of stylistic and linguistic phenomena, and it is difficult to untangle the elements of such an overlapping array of the conscious and the unconscious. What a variety of critics have identified as grandeur, stateliness, affect, complexity, vividness, depth, ambition, vision, cognitive power, mystery, pomposity, otiose elaboration, bloodthirstiness, sentimentality, reactionary politics, inventiveness, linguistic hybridity, the gothic, among many other literary phenomena, all feature in the creation of an aesthetic that becomes larger than the sum of these parts. I argue in the next chapter that two key elements crystallize from this mélange once the mechanics of affect are examined in greater detail. These are phenomenology, both as a bridge between idealist and empiricist philosophical positions and as a branch of literary criticism, and performativity, in the philosophical sense of words creating the world.

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These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. — ja mes joyce , Ulysses

I

n the last chapter, I mention the phenomenon of affect and note the political effects of the aesthetic in McCarthy’s fiction as resistance to modernity is invoked and performed in the “beautiful image.” This chapter extends both these ideas into an analysis of the way language works in relation to aesthetics and affect, and seeks to isolate phenomena that might have been overlooked in McCarthy’s fiction. I focus on what the prose actually does and how it might be possible to isolate the mechanisms of language whereby the writing achieves its effects. Several linked elements relate to this, but two in particular dominate. The first is centered on the notion of performa­ tivity in language. The second focuses on a version of what Western philosophy has categorized as phenomenology—specifically, the version of phenomenology Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed in the twentieth century, rather than Hegel’s earlier version. The point at which these notions intersect is that at which McCarthy becomes part of a process that engages an entire listening 1 and reading community. By engaged, I do not mean merely that the author-storyteller commands the attention of the reader-listener, but rather that the reader-listener becomes a participant in a practice that has the potential to redefine and reshape the world in significant 2 ways. I am aware that this might seem a rather grand claim, but evidence for it is clear both in McCarthy’s commitment to a mode of writing that creates a new register through its need to develop a 187

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language adequate to the themes with which it deals, and in a particular method of adaptive literary invention. In part, these phenomena account for the effect I have already considered at some length that permeates my responses to reading McCarthy, and that involves impressions of awe, fascination, and the sense that one enters a world 3 at the same time familiar and alien. For a linguistic act to be performative, the utterance must bring about what it describes. The phrase “I sentence you to five years” spoken by a judge, for example, or “I open this supermarket” by a dignitary or celebrity, are performative. Such an act of speech or writing does what it says it does. Once writing becomes performative it enters a different register. J. L. Austin remarks, for example, that “it is worthy of note that . . . in the American law of evidence, a report of what someone else said is admitted as evidence if what 4 he said is an utterance of our performative kind” (13). In this register, language has meaningful effects in the world. A performative utterance of this kind is “not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (6). Performativity in fiction, though at one remove from strictly linguistic definitions, shows close similarities. Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, in the novel Ceremony, which remains descriptive and narrative in the Western novelistic tradition from its opening word, “Ts’its’tsi’nako,” to its closing word, “Sunrise,” per­ forms the Native American ceremony of the title. Silko does not say, “I perform now a Native American ritual,” but the effect is equivalent—it “does” Austin’s “it.” Similarly, McCarthy’s use of Spanish in the border trilogy makes the statement implicitly. The moment in which McCarthy produces a border Spanish for his characters is the moment at which that version of the language becomes performative. What might easily be viewed as the appropriation of the language of the colonized by the colonizer can be read, therefore, in a different way if the reader recognizes its use as performative in Austin’s sense. By “doing” this “impure” version of Spanish McCarthy creates a register that performs in language the hybridity that dominates theoretical responses to the Mexican-American border in literary studies. As Isabel Soto notes, “in McCarthy’s The Crossing



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Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other. The result is a wholly other discourse defined by, or constitutive of, the United States-Mexican border, or ‘contact zone’” (58). McCarthy, particularly in The Crossing, includes much untranslated Spanish, and in doing so he asks the Anglophone reader to connect with a culture of difference at a level that would not otherwise be required. McCarthy leaves Billy, Boyd, and the reader no choice but to engage with a language that is nonnative and of an, arguably, subjugated nation. A performative move of this nature has the potential to transport literature from a condition that might be construed as intrinsically inert to one of activism. The poetic categories of mimesis (description) and diegesis (narrative) that Aristotle identified in Poetics, and in which the dominant reality is merely reproduced, are capable only of restating and reinforcing the normative condition of the presiding cultural paradigm—in the case of post-Enlightenment fiction that paradigm would be an unfolding modernity. I suggest that McCarthy’s and Silko’s fiction add the category of performativity to Aristotle’s ancient yet persistent formulation. A new mode of novelistic storytelling emerges that might instigate meaningful change as it challenges existing conditions. It is significant that Soto, a native speaker of Spanish, implies that McCarthy’s highly idiosyncratic use of the language, far from restating and reperforming the colonial project by appropriating the language of the colonized, suggests a new paradigm that threatens the status quo and frames alternatives to the dominant discourse. “Thus,” she writes, “the unfamiliar or defamiliarized Spanish articulated in The Crossing is generated by crossing or transgressing various thresholds, linguistic and/or rhetorical” (61). Soto’s argument comes as welcome relief from responses that read Anglo or white writers using languages other than English as appropriators or neocolonizers— though these kinds of critiques imply, rightly in my view, that language is actually doing something tangible in the real world that has noticeable effects. Soto’s analysis, therefore, is a powerful counterweight to constructions of McCarthy as an unthinking, ravenous appropriator of the culture of others. McCarthy’s Spanish in its fundamental hybridity (both within various forms of Spanish and in

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combination with English) is heterogenous and ungovernable. These two adjectives belong to the border in its lived reality. McCarthy’s Spanish is not merely a facsimile of these conditions but also part of the reality, a reality constituted as a third space in which resistance of various sorts to a dominant Anglo hegemony, driven by capitalism 5 and whose cultural ontology is modernity, might find fertile ground. The moment McCarthy introduces a new language of resistance is the moment that the potential for a new challenge to the dominant becomes performative. McCarthy’s novels “do” by creating and writing a new hybrid language, then, just as Austin’s judge “does” by forming the words of the prisoner’s sentence. In asserting this, I differ somewhat from others who have written on this strain in McCarthy’s work. Derek Attridge, for example, stops short of allowing the notion of a fully performative function for fiction: A literary work shows off the power of the language to do . . . things, but—and this is the important, distinctive point—without actually doing them. Or, to be more precise, to the extent that the language of the work does actually hurt or teach or obscure it is not behaving as a work of literature. As literature, it performs hurting, teaching, obscure and so on, relying on the effectiveness of the as if to provide an experience that replicates modes of thinking and feeling in the non-literary domain. (333) The focus of Attridge’s article is feeling and literature and the ways in which the latter creates the former. Relevant to my argument is Attridge’s implication that once writing “does,” it is no longer behaving as fiction—although interestingly, whether behaving like fiction and being fiction are two different things is not clear from this passage. For me, McCarthy’s performative model transcends the “as if” and in doing so moves from simulation to reality. In doing a version of Spanish it is no longer “as if,” it “is.” This distinction is important because it alludes both to the relationship between knowing (epistemology) and being (ontology) that I refer to in this chapter’s section on phenomenology, and the artificial separation of mind and body that has been central to the rise of modernity (see chapters 1, 6, and 9, this volume).



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It is possible to argue, therefore, that the act of retelling on his own terms the story of the American West, and the roles taken by marginalized groups that feature so heavily in his version, McCarthy creates a performative challenge that is different from, but parallel to, revisionism. As Paul Beekman Taylor notes in connection with Native American literature, the fact of reinscribing the marginalized culture in opposition to that of the cultural dominant presents precisely such a challenge. Taylor argues that the practice of art might even be the most effective method available to Native Americans to shift engrained Western perceptions: “The arts, and particularly the literatures of the American Indian, are effective tools for shaking the European’s perspective loose from tight ideological shackles to engage him in alter6 native realities” (23). Such a notion might apply equally well to any alternate history. McCarthy’s technique of researching historical fact through a variety of sources is a factor in the creation of alternate realities, of course, in that he takes established fact and re-visions it. Put another way, his fiction locates the sources of existing material and reframes or re-views them for the reader. Simultaneously, by inventing and re-producing the languages of the marginalized, either in the way Soto suggests or via the speech of the Appalachian poor, McCarthy offers an alternate reality to the dominant. McCarthy’s fiction implies in these ways that modernity’s world of truth is a construct of language and, as it can be erected in language, it can be demolished in language or, better, reinvented. It is hard to say whether these phenomena are conscious or unconscious, but what they suggest is that, for McCarthy, modernity is not the only idiom in which the world speaks. Language continues to form its realities. There is a sense in which fiction of the type McCarthy produces creates the 7 world. Linked to these ideas is a phenomenological approach to literary criticism, the roots of which lie in attempts to address the subject-­object problem in which Western philosophy becomes so frequently entangled. The form of phenomenology on which I focus was developed by Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. It was then taken up by Roman Ingarden in the 1930s as literary exegesis, and further developed in the work of the reader-response theorists of the 1980s—Hans

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Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, for example. The work of Heidegger and Husserl on phenomenology arose from a desire to resolve the dichotomy between those who believe that no material world exists independently from thought, and those who believe that knowledge is produced only by what is external, that nothing is innate. There is, however, common ground—if only in a negative sense. As Robert Magliola suggests, “Though opting for opposite horns of the subject– object dilemma, both idealist and empiricist agree there is no bridge between thought and world” (4). Phenomenology has made a number of serious attempts to build this bridge. The work of Husserl is one example, as Magliola explains: Consciousness for Husserl . . . is not a Cartesian knowing of knowledge but a real intercourse with the outside. Consciousness is an act wherein the subject intends (or directs himself towards the object), and the object is intended (or functions as a target for the intending act, though the object transcends this act). The subject intending and the object intended are reciprocally implicated (and, it should be added, the subject is real and the object is real, that is, truly emanating from the outside). (4) More succinctly, “For the phenomenologist, knowledge is the grasp of an object that is simultaneously gripping us” (Magliola 17). The relevance to literature is clear. When we read fiction, we are gripped by ideas, images, and arguments that we simultaneously “grasp” in an intellectual and emotional way. As Paul Ricoeur suggests concerning the novel, “Whereas language is only the condition for communication for which it provides the codes, it is in discourse that all messages are exchanged. In this sense, discourse alone has not only a world but an other, another person, an interlocutor to whom it is 8 addressed” (146). In McCarthy, the process is acknowledged: “Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all” (The Crossing 154). There can be no affect without the reader, and without affect there is no challenge to the status quo. Phenomenology stresses the perceiver’s vital role in the creation



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of meaning while acknowledging a tangible world “out there.” My experience of a “new” Southwest that became real in my consciousness because of my simultaneous interaction with McCarthy’s fiction and the landscape is an example (see chapter 6, this volume). Such a position requires the writer and the reader to take up particular roles that allow for an integrated knowledge that depends on neither the absolute authority of the author nor that of the audience. With either missing, no “experiential unity,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, is possible. Indeed, any other approach would suggest an irredeemable incompleteness. Part of the power of McCarthy’s fiction derives from the onus it places on its reader to generate meaning, particularly in the context of place. In this, McCarthy has much in common with Native American writers of the Southwest. Leslie Silko, for example, asserts that “the ancient Pueblo vision of the world was inclusive. The impulse was to leave nothing out. Pueblo oral tradition necessarily embraced all levels of human experience” (Yellow Woman 31). At this level, there is no subject-object divide. To the traditional Native American mind, such a rupture is artificial even at the quotidian level. To begin from a position, therefore, where divisions make it tortuously difficult to bridge storyteller and world, storyteller and audience, world and audience, and so on, is unthinkable. McCarthy’s works include moves toward overcoming or bridging these divides. Suttree, for example, is remarkable for its evident impulse toward inclusion. The exchanges between McCarthy and his editor Albert Erskine are especially instructive in this context in that Erskine mounted a campaign for McCarthy to leave out large swathes of Knoxville detail involving both place and charac9 ter. Throughout McCarthy’s work is a sense that he is reaching out for a world complete. His work demands of its reader that they become part of the project in that they work to create meaning. One of the explanations, perhaps, for the seemingly limitless scope of speculation is reflected in the ever-increasing numbers of related journal articles and books that deal with McCarthy’s work. This desire to “leave nothing out” stretches to the conceptual, also, as McCarthy seeks to encompass a vast and multifarious panoply of knowledge in which he plainly declines to recognize disciplinary

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boundaries: “His list of those whom he calls the ‘good writers’— Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner—precludes anyone who doesn’t ‘deal with issues of life and death’” (Woodward). McCarthy’s unflinching approach to violence and the darker side of human nature should come, therefore, as no surprise. The jolt the reader receives on entering Lester Ballard’s world, for example, or on encountering the polymathic horrors of Judge Holden are of this character. Equally, to conjure “a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable as the burnedout floor of hell” (248), where many readers are accustomed to cathedral-like red sandstone mesas, sweeping vistas of distant mountain ranges, accompanied by the swish of the fetlocks of horses brushing through lush grass is to profoundly reimagine the West. To include the darker side of landscape and human nature in these ways is to build connections of the kind Silko describes. In concert with its performative qualities and its potential to create affect, McCarthy’s fiction operates as a species of creative mediation that, in seeking to bridge a series of artificial ruptures, cannot but help create the world anew. McCarthy tends to reflect on historical occurrence tangentially using a distancing technique that places his reflections in a different period than the one on which he is reflecting—somewhat akin to many works of science fiction or fantasy that use temporal, spatial, and cultural distance to examine difficult social issues or subjects about which dispassionate discussion is difficult for contextual reasons. This might confidently be argued about Blood Meridian and the Vietnam War, and certainly a case can be made that America’s highly technological overseas wars are one of the metasubjects of the border trilogy and No Country for Old Men. Once more, phenomenology might offer an insight as to how this re-visioning of history might occur. Paul Ricoeur argues that the meaning of human action is . . . addressed to an indefinite range of possible “readers.” The judges are not the contemporaries but, as Hegel said, history itself. Weltgeschichte ist Welt­ gericht. That means that, like a text, human action is an open work, the meaning of which is “in suspense.” It is because it



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“opens up” new references and receives fresh relevance from them, that human deeds are also waiting for fresh interpretations that decide their meaning. All significant events and deeds are, in this way, opened to this kind of practical interpretation through present praxis. (155) History transcends its traditional role in the Western tradition as a map of fixed points on a linear graph of events. The phenomenological view, in its insistence on hermeneutics as a two-way street, challenges this entrenched notion of history as ossified, immobile, or even dead. It offers, instead, history as something alive, fluid, and available as a tool to those willing to use it. That readers and critics engage with the 1840s and 1850s via Blood Meridian to understand the politics of a war in the 1960s and 1970s is the process Ricoeur describes in action. The chronological disjunct between Blood Meridian and the Vietnam War, both in fictional terms and in terms of the novel’s publication in the 1980s, maintains a sense of openness in our reading of all three periods. History in McCarthy’s fiction refuses fixity according to sets of principles or narratives that derive from a collection of tenets that belong to the habits of mind created by modernity—progress, linear reasoning, teleology. Reading McCarthy in this phenomenological way enables us, as reader-participants, the opportunity to share ways of thinking that challenge the hegemony of 10 modernity. This nexus of the performative function of language and phenomenology has manifested itself in particular strains of Western linguistic philosophy, the initial objective of which was to challenge the notion that meaning is something innate, timeless, and transcendental. The idea, for example, that we live in a world that may be perceived as a construct of the language in which it is described has become widespread in the West. Richard Rorty, for example, argues that the world does not “speak a particular language,” it has no intrinsic, predetermined nature awaiting the correct words to reveal the “reality” of its condition. Instead, its reality to a large extent 11 depends on the vocabulary with which we choose to render it. To redescribe the world is to change it:

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What Hegel describes as the process of the spirit gradually becoming self-conscious of its intrinsic nature is better described as the process of European linguistic practice changing at a faster and faster rate. The phenomenon Hegel describes is that of more people offering more radical redescriptions of more things than ever before, of young people going through half a dozen spiritual gestalt-switches before reaching adulthood. What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. . . . What was glimpsed at the end of the eighteenth century was that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed. (7) To use Umberto Eco’s terminology, certain kinds of storytelling practice—novels, poetry, plays, for example—are more open than others, in the sense that their meaning is predetermined to a lesser extent, and require the collaboration of readers and listeners to achieve their effects. (By way of contrast, an article on tooth decay in The Lancet, for example, is less open in that very little is required from the reader beyond acceptance.) Such an approach is clearly phenomenological in that it argues that works of art are mediators of and between the consciousnesses of the author and the reader. McCarthy’s thoroughgoing re-vision of the nineteenth-century history of the West in Blood Meridian, followed by that for the immediate post–World War II period in the border trilogy, and culminating in roughly the present in No Country for Old Men, exist at this level and offer a rereading of both past and present that permits the reader in the grip of the fiction to grasp fully the depredations of modernity, the terrifying avatars it produces, and its ultimate destination. The work performs in this moment the reconstruction of the history it rewrites (mimesis) and narrates (diegesis). Such fiction opens a new front in literature’s engagement with the world and McCarthy is a prime exponent of it. Louis Owens, the Native American literary theorist, argues that much of the most effective of American Indian literature is



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“authorless.” This is particularly important for my analysis of McCarthy. Academics are frustrated by McCarthy’s refusal to engage in public discussion of his works. He has always said that he wants his work to speak for itself. Nothing seems to have changed since McCarthy was interviewed by Richard Woodward for the New York Times in 1992. Woodward quotes Anne DeLisle, McCarthy’s second wife, on their life in the 1970s: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.” In the Oprah Winfrey interview from 2007, McCarthy remains enigmatic, content to politely sidestep difficult questions concerning religion and politics. I had a sensation of being guided gently back to the work. McCarthy was declining to add to what he had said in his fiction. This is corroborated by those I have talked with who have met McCarthy for long enough for conversation to develop. He is evidently knowledgeable on a host of subjects, but to raise the subject of his work would probably mean a swift end to the encounter. What these conditions force is an engagement with the literature unmediated by the awareness of an extratextual presence determining the understanding of the material. To this extent, the author “Cormac McCarthy” is, if not dead, at least absent. This does not mean I am willing to accept Michel Foucault’s argument that “the author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations” (“What Is an Author?” 209). This seems a step too far. Nor do I agree that the author becomes “a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (209). What the absence of McCarthy as an observer of his own work does do, however, is to permit the reader an engagement with a continuous process of rereading that allows new hypotheses to appear and disappear without the stifling presence of authorial fiat. Foucault is quite clear concerning the suffocating influence of the

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author function, but he has little to say about what might replace it. Unfortunately, his admirable determination to disrupt authority and enable multiple voices has a dark side, where, together in polyphonic array with the clear, the discerning, the unequivocal, and the illuminating, exist—ripe for appropriation—the nebulous, the undifferentiated, and the perniciously misleading. In this atmosphere of absolute relativity, concepts drained of meaning can come to stand for any13 thing. Owens does Foucault a great service by offering Native American storytelling practice as something that might fill or structure the polyvocal, empty, or manipulated (depending on one’s preference) space that Foucault imagines. Owens takes Leslie Silko as his example: “[Silko is] the vehicle for a story that is older than she, as old as the consciousness of the people. The unmistakable message is that though Silko, like a traditional storyteller, is remaking the story . . . she is not inventing it” (Other Destinies 170). This act of remaking requires, also, the participation of the reader and thus diminishes the power of the author while retaining the necessary structuring and preserving functions. McCarthy is a writer whose work exists unglossed by himself, and who is a vigorous manipulator of existing material. He is no less a re-maker than Silko. Cormac McCarthy, the author, is a vehicle for stories that emerge from cultures that have been overlooked and marginalized in the United States. The profound environmental concerns in the work, the sympathy with the nomadic and displaced, the fondness for the outsider, the willingness to recognize an active spiritual dimension to the world, and the geological view of time, ally him closely with the kind of writing Owens describes. Owens says this of Silko: “She rejects the egocentric posture of the modern author in favor of what could be defined as an ecocentric orientation and attempts a culturally determined heteroglossia in which her text serves as transmitter rather than originator of voices and meanings” (Other Destinies 169). McCarthy’s excavation of the sources and his concomitant power to give voice to the marginalized, together with a clear ecological orientation, have something in common with this ecocentric heteroglossia. Thus we hear from communities who would otherwise have remained silent: Knoxville’s outsiders, for example, particularly those belonging to the



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despised and ultramarginal transsexual-transgender caste, or the poor Mexicans at the border in a Southwest about to change for ever. A final example that brings together the phenomenological and the performative involves the practice of naming. Joshua Masters addresses this in an article from 1998: The judge goes on to say, “Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning” (85). Again, the judge posits himself at the center of meaning, as the being who controls words, and thus the things those words possess. Lewis describes this relation between words and things as elemental to the Adamic figure: “This new Adam is both maker and namer . . . [t]he things that are named seem to spring into being at the sound of the word” (51). The judge’s ability to transform chaos into order stems from his textualization of the universe. He alone controls historical intentionality; he alone controls the meaning behind words, and he alone controls their application. Holden erases the past in favor of what he records in the present. Indeed, this is where McCarthy comes closest to Wittgenstein (see chapters 1, 2, 5, 7, and 9, this volume). Peter Hacker frames Wittgenstein’s argument that “language is misrepresented as a vehicle for language-independent thoughts” as follows: “The limits of truth are determined by the limits of the expression of thoughts. The possession of a language not only expands the intellect, but also expands the will. A dog can want a bone, but only a language-user can now want something next week. It is not thought that breathes life into the signs of a language, but the use of signs in the stream of human life” (cited in Honderich 962). It is via the unrestrained exertion of will through language that Holden and McCarthy wrestle their versions of the world into being. The naming of something—or, in this case, its textual analogue, the process of recording a claim in print, brings that thing into the world of reality. Those who are the name-givers dictate to a significant degree, therefore, the nature of the existence of a thing in the world. Naming, or the act of definition, is, if not an act of pure

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creation, one of radical modification that redefines the parameters of its subject in the consciousness of those upon whom it impresses itself. A famous passage from Blood Meridian illustrates this perfectly: “The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees. Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (195). By naming the anonymous creatures he fears will “devour us,” Holden consents to their existence on his own terms. This is the equivalent of a material change in the subject to the extent that, if it is accepted that—as the phenomenologists would have it—interactions with the world consist of a response to and a response from, then the “response to” element shows significant difference. Also, of course, treated in this way, naming becomes performative. This is, in effect, to examine in a little more detail the mechanics of Rorty’s suggestion that the world is fundamentally altered by its redescription. At the end of his 1992 interview with McCarthy, Richard Woodward says this: “As he commemorates what is passing from memory—the lore, people and language of a pre-modern age—[McCarthy] seems immensely proud to be the kind of writer who has almost ceased to exist.” The remark about loss and the premodern is astute, as is the characterization of McCarthy as a writer who might see himself as an anachronism. What is missing from the observation, however, is I think a realization of the extent to which McCarthy’s powers of invention and adaption have acted in concert with the thoughts of his readers to mold a material understanding of the South and Southwest of the United States that could not have come to be in any other way. As I argue elsewhere, McCarthy is an author whose works sell well, and as such he is able to reach parts of the population of the United States and the rest of the world that many others do not. I recall a colleague, for example, from one of the southern states saying to me that he knew his father-in-law read McCarthy but would stake his mortgage that he did not read Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon. That McCarthy engages audiences on the Left and the Right of the political spectrum means that his achievement in the



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creation of a version of the United States that may well differ from preconceptions on either side ought, perhaps, to be reevaluated as something greater than it might at first appear. What remains in the final chapter of this volume is for me to reinforce this reevaluation through an analysis of McCarthy’s representation of the border between Mexico and the United States as a space of possibility, a site of resistance to the hegemony of twenty-­fi rst-century culture, open to the presence of subjugated peoples and knowledge.

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Marginal Worlds, Marginal Languages

It is not down on any map; true places never are. — her m a n melville , Moby Dick

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perating at many levels, Cormac McCarthy’s engagement with the aesthetic, performative, and phenomenological dimensions of language is profound, meaningful, and politically charged. By the time The Road is published, however, McCarthy is beginning to reflect on the subsumption of language itself into modernity’s catastrophic end times: The world shrinking down about a core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. (75) Ironically, the passing into nothing is expressed in language freighted with meaning. Here at last is a world in which modernity has finally overreached itself, a world hinted at in the oblique intimations of nuclear power at the end of The Crossing (see chapter 9, this volume). Westray’s version of these end times in The Counselor echoes the fears represented in No Country for Old Men and The Road: “But time is not going to stop, Counselor. It’s forever. And everything that exists will one day vanish. Forever. And it will take with it every 203

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explanation of it that was ever contrived. From Newton and Einstein to Homer and Shakespeare and Michelangelo. Every timeless creation. Your art and your poetry and your science are not even composed of smoke” (62). As the end of all things draws closer, the inability of humanity to mitigate the worst depredations of modernity is about to produce nothingness. Not even the hope that geological time might allow the planet to outlive such conditions remains in the grey, godless wastes of The Road in which all is dead or in the final stages of dying. The eulogies to a natural world that represented hope in the previous fiction are consigned to the past, along with the modernity that destroyed it. There is, though, a promise of regeneration at the end of The Road. This suggestion exists partly in the notion that if the smallest crumb can devour us, so might the smallest crumb recreate the world in a new version of the primordial evolution that begot us, and partly in the hopeful future for the boy imagined by his new guardians at the end of the book. But, like any form of optimism in McCarthy’s fiction, these hints are not well developed. The fish at the end of the novel are “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again” (287). If there is to be a future in which the living world regenerates, it will not be as it was before. The brook trout represent a severely attenuated hope. Stronger is the woman’s conviction. Her claim that “the breath of God was [the boy’s father’s] breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time” (The Road 286), speaks of the enduring quality of human life, guaranteed and ceded motive power by the deity. It is unusual for McCarthy’s fiction to so clearly assert what amounts to spiritual permanence. More typical, and contrary to this position, is the idea of “the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence” (231). So, in spite of the hope crystallized in the woman’s remark, “ceasing to be” seems more convincing. This is how I imagine the boy would perceive the religious abstraction voiced by the woman compared with the overwhelming evidence of his experience. Also, however, the notion of a benign deity and a continuing spiritual existence are inconsistent with much that has gone before in the fiction. As I argue in chapter 8, “Journeys of Spiritual Formation,”



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salvation is a veiled concept, hinted at but never identified clearly. It is plain that the spiritual is generally absent from the world of The Road, because individuals have reverted to a base condition, their understanding of the world determined by their viciousness or that of others, or simple bodily needs. The spiritual becomes an increasingly peripheral phenomenon in spite of the woman’s remarks. But that McCarthy should choose a woman to voice the message that the good guys carry redoubles the emphasis on the marginal. If the reader accepts that this is more than mere tokenism on McCarthy’s part, it becomes possible to add to a list of marginalized voices, including those belonging to Native Americans, Mexicans, Gypsies, uneducated cowboys, and the rural Appalachian poor, those of a variety of women. It is easily overlooked that McCarthy consistently gives voices to the otherwise unheard. An example occurs in Kenneth Lincoln’s American Canticles, which includes a chapter on each of McCarthy’s works except The Counselor. Lincoln asks, “Where’s the women?” He then adds, “The matriarchy is always troubling for McCarthy’s men” (118). Lincoln does not answer his own question, though, nor does he elaborate. The implications are threefold: that women do not feature, that McCarthy’s work is doubtful about powerful women, and third, by extension, that if the matriarchy is troubling to McCarthy’s characters perhaps it is troubling to McCarthy too. I think the first two of these extrapolated assertions are wrong. As to the third, I say that we can have no idea whether matriarchy is troubling to Cormac McCarthy, the man. Indeed one of my metaquestions is how much this matters. The answer is little, if I am to take myself at all seriously in the chapter on language, where I argue that it is in fact important to the effects of the fiction that we know as little about McCarthy’s private views as we do. But women appear in nearly every work in a range of roles, and engaged in diverse activities. The reader has access to the detailed interiority of many of them. Nell Sullivan may be right when she writes of “the objectification of women as dead bodies in Child of God” (230), but what of the search of the agonized Rinthy Holme for her child in Outer Dark? There may be “one-­ dimensional stereotypes [of] witch, virgin, or whore in Suttree” (230), and Sullivan is on stronger ground here, but there are also Alejandra’s

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aunt, or Jones’s wife, or Suttree’s lover, all characters of greater complexity. There are indeed whores, but once the reader reaches the border trilogy, the stark grimness of their lives and their suffering at the hands of men of all sorts is unmistakable. In Cities of the Plain, Magdalena’s history as a child prostitute leaves no space for a romantic or sentimental view of any aspect of the business (136–37). The casual, joking way in which Billy and his buddies from the ranch view the whores is drawn meticulously by McCarthy, who leaves the reader to address the contradictions (2–5). “An unmistakable ambivalence about women, even an outright misogyny” (Sullivan 230) is plain across a range of McCarthy’s characters, and often within them as individuals, but this is in the service of an attempt to represent in a convincing way what it was to be a man or a boy in this period in the variety of cultures McCarthy writes about. To suggest that this misogyny becomes “absence itself in much of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing” (Sullivan 230) is less convincing. Female characters of all sorts feature in the border trilogy. In The Crossing, thousands of words are spoken by a range of women: the diva of the traveling opera, Boyd’s girl, as well as vagrant and nomad Mexican women who are forthright in their differing views concerning the separation of individuals from their spiritual life, priests, and the business of war (84–86). Indeed, more is written in the border trilogy about what it is to be a woman than what it is to be a man. The old woman, for example, praying in the church after Billy finds Boyd’s grave, mourns sons who are long dead in that blood and violence which her prayers and her prostrations seemed powerless to appease. Her frail form was a constant in that land, her silent anguishings. Beyond the church walls the night harbored a millennial dread panoplied in feathers and the scales of royal fish and if it yet fed upon the children still who could say what worse wastes of war and torment and despair the old woman’s constancy might not have stayed, what direr histories yet against which could be counted at last nothing more than her small figure bent and mumbling. (390)



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Little of the woman’s interiority is revealed but, equally, little of, say, Boyd’s is either. The important point is that McCarthy does not overlook the old woman nor others of her ilk. As far as matriarchy is concerned, it is true that there are few examples, but as Appalachia and the Southwest are strongly patriarchal in the periods about which McCarthy writes, it seems appropriate that he should confine himself to the occasional vignette of women who engage with or seek to assert matriarchal power in relatively small ways. Sarah Borginnis in Blood Meridian is one example, and Dueña Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses and Marina Gregg in The Gardener’s Son are others. That Borginnis fails in an act of kindness and decency that seeks to elevate the weak to the level of the strong is unsurprising in the context of Blood Meridian, and that the Alfonsa thwarts romance in favor of pragmatism and the rational supports the idea that modernity tends to flatten gender difference. This is true, also, of the widowed Mrs. Gregg’s struggles with the industrialization of the South. None of these examples betokens a troubled response in the male characters to matriarchal tendencies, nor do any of these characterizations amount to misogyny. Rather, they allow typically unheard female voices to rise to the surface. McCarthy’s leading characters are indeed mostly men and boys, but Rinthy Holme, Alfonsa, and Malkina, in The Counselor, are exceptions. Malkina, though, is a far from convincing representation of femininity, seemingly little more than a female version of Judge Holden, if her relish for violence is anything to go by. “We would like to draw a veil over all that blood and terror that have brought us to this place. It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in doing so it makes of it our destiny. Perhaps you would not agree. I don’t know. But nothing is crueler than a coward and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining” (184). If Malkina does not ring true as a version of border femininity, it should not, perhaps, be surprising. It is hard to imagine McCarthy writing a version of Woman Hollering Creek or So Far from God. We would not expect from him the subtleties Sandra Cisneros or Ana Castillo create of mestiza life, or the 1 insights they produce in their readers. McCarthy’s Southwestern

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fiction exists in a parallel but no less meaningful realm that does not challenge or dispute with other writers of the border but is complementary. This applies, in particular, to Gloria Anzaldúa, whose version of the border becomes recognizable on numerous occasions in the border trilogy, Blood Meridian, and The Counselor. Criticism of McCarthy for his apparent failure to represent women as anything other stereotypes, or even to include them at all, is I think unwarranted. I have heard no such criticism of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel of the American Southwest published two years before Suttree, which includes women principally as whores, witches, mothers, and profound mysteries—the latter in the protagonist Tayo’s dual quasi-supernatural 2 love interests. Another criticism is that women function as ciphers and symbols in McCarthy’s fiction. Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses can be adduced as the best example. For many, she is merely a sign marked romance. She is, however, much more complex than this characterization allows, and the novel recognizes the trap that she, and young women like her, faced in the period in which the novel is set. Alejandra is caught in the conflicting triple emotional, political, and psychological pull of her father, her aunt, and John Grady, to the extent that what she actually represents is the stunted choices and unfreedom of women in these circumstances at this time. She is no more a cipher than John Grady, and the fiction permits her a kind of strength that it denies him. Alejandra’s last days with John Grady illustrate very clearly what I argue (248–54). Alejandra, a victim of her feelings, is created a hopeless romantic by McCarthy, but, significantly, John Grady is made a hopeful one and is the more unrealistic of the two in his aspirations. This is demonstrated in the irrational longing with which he challenges the status quo, and that causes him to reinvent Alejandra in Magdalena, leading to his death. John Grady attempts to recruit Alejandra to the outsider status he occupies. His profoundest hope is that they can exist together in a space between their two worlds, a border zone of sorts. Indeed, he nearly succeeds. Their discourse is already that of this zone, the exchanges conducted in border Spanish, the linguistic home of the excluded in McCarthy’s border trilogy. McCarthy is constantly in dialogue with marginalized understandings of the worlds, and their



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languages and dialects. As a champion of pre-Columbian humanity on the American continent, the pimp Eduardo, whom John Grady engages in a knife fight that will end in both of their deaths, is a problematic spokesman, steeped in cruelty and violence. Yet what he says to John Grady is a coherent critique of modernity north of the border. Eduardo is both trenchant and ominous in a way typical of McCarthy’s villains, and draws an important distinction between a Mexico that, underneath a surface of “adornment,” is “very plain indeed,” and an America that “totters upon a labyrinth of questions,” a society that continually tears down to rebuild, erasing and rewriting its history at every turn. Eduardo, however, reverses modernity’s consuming impulse: “We will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire” (250–51). John Grady has little to offer in response to the double thrusts of language and blade, his forbearance, quietude, and bravery being constituted in a collection of values conducive to the success of a version of modernity that masks a deeply conflicted imperial US history, and that disguises a nation less self-confident than it might at first appear. This set piece is more profound and significant than a simple juxtaposition of values, therefore, in which John Grady the all-American cowboy hero is paired with the amoral villainy of Eduardo for Mexico. Both characters arrive where they are following the seemingly endless struggle of McCarthy’s border nomads not only to engage with other cultures but also to reckon with what lies beyond the scope of their articulation. All the Pretty Horses draws many different Mexicans and many different Mexicos, beginning with the Mexican John Grady and Rawlins meet early in the novel who has never been to Mexico (34). Between this encounter and the Hombres del país—men of the road—who remove the Mexican captain but leave John Grady unharmed are a large variety of characters who, no matter how small their part, create layers in McCarthy’s construction of Mexico that resist interpretation as facile archetypes. I think in particular of the culture around La Purísima, in which older cowboys remember Victoriano Huerta and Porfirio Díaz, and young men and perfumed young girls drink tequila and dance until dawn. Hospitality is everywhere in the border trilogy, but it is variable, and a host of trades are in evidence: some groups make

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wax; some herd sheep or collect chino grass; and others trade in fur, candelilla, and goat hide. There are, of course, brutal guards and vicious killers, and beyond All the Pretty Horses also pimps, thieves, potential rapists, and givers and takers of bribes. But the farmworkers who save Boyd linger in the memory, as does the doctor who tends to him. And the thoughtful children to whom John Grady recounts his tale before his final encounter with Alejandra at Torréon are touching in the seriousness with which they take his plight. John Grady is exposed, in Mexico, to a culture that is in many ways still premodern, not yet subsumed in the dialectic of modernity that dominates north of the border. Don Héctor, hacendado of La Purísima, is an exemplar of yet another version of Mexico: sophisticated, cosmopolitan, its face turned toward modernity and the global, yet firmly rooted in tradition. Dueña Alfonsa who sabotages John Grady’s relationship with Alejandra justifies her actions by asserting, “This is another country” (136). Her words are partly the response of a wealthy, educated family to the idea of the American cowboy, with no prospects, taking away their expensively educated offspring. But Alfonsa’s story is one of disillusionment founded in Mexican history and culture, but it is also created by a European education the principal concepts of which are determined by that continent’s Enlightenment. Amid these contradictions, McCarthy’s border becomes a place that is neither the United States nor Mexico, but instead a space composed of both which in the indeterminacy of its cultural currents becomes amenable to shaping outside the particular determinants of either. McCarthy’s fictional America is no more than Mexico a place of shallow assumptions and glib stereotypes. Although the journeys to Mexico and back in the border trilogy tend to be predicated on escape from domestic strife, the novels insist that John Grady and the Parhams are also in flight from an ecologically destructive and technology-­obsessed United States. The numberless destroyed fences and fence posts that Billy Parham in particular finds convenient for cooking and camp fires are symbolic of a real world, north of the border, in thrall to an economic imperative that demands ever larger ranches at the expense of smaller operations and more varied methods of farming. The romantic unreality of Mexico, by contrast, in



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which smaller-scale ranches maintain a foothold represents a fantasy—particularly for John Grady Cole—but McCarthy ensures that from the dream a brutal reality of a different sort emerges. It includes no place for a reductive separation of the United States and Mexico across a clear line—imaginary or otherwise. McCarthy blends conscious responses to profoundly personal and intimate events in his characters with less conscious reactions to seemingly irresistible forces that transcend individual choice. John Grady and the Parhams labor under the hegemony of modernity at the same time they carry with them their personal tragedies. The conflicts McCarthy generates in his characters and their subsequent journeys must be read in the context of a border composed of a clash of ethnicities, histories moving at variable speeds, differing constructions of nationality, and a permeable geographic boundary: What McCarthy creates in this way is a zone between the US and Mexico that is not clearly delimited. The result, in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian, is a “third space” that is both and neither country simultaneously: “McCarthy represents the US/ Mexico border as a ‘contact zone’ in the sense that Mary Louise Pratt has defined the term, a place ‘where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination (4)’” (Eaton 174). The border in ATPH lacks the vigorously policed and demarcated barriers of the late twenty-first century that allow the legitimate movement of capital and goods, and proscribe the movement of labor south to north, but both iterations of the border—in their differing ways—leave many individuals stranded and stateless in a no-man’s land that is both physical and of the mind. The unpoliced, provisional, and wild borderland of the Trilogy becomes an area in which any one jurisdiction is undermined by illicit entry, and cannot be absolute, creating both immediacy and a form of contact that is to a large extent unregulated. The “third space” of McCarthy’s borders is truly a “contact zone,” therefore, in the sense intended by Pratt, and it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that many of the most significant encounters in the novels occur

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in this space. (Monk, “All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter” 122–23) From the gypsies Billy Parham meets toward the end of The Crossing, to the blind man, to the hermit in the ruins of the church, to the animals that move through it heedlessly, the border becomes a space in which both sides become distorted and are amenable to reinvention as the modernity of the North collides with a different way of understanding the world in the South. The hegemonic reality of modernity in the United States, however, is never described as such by McCarthy, yet it occurs frequently in symbolic tableaux. The brutally efficient and concentrated power of technology is represented in the five hundred horses harnessed in a diesel engine that sweep to one side John Grady’s small string of animals: “He drifted north again, trailing the horses in the bar ditches along the edge of the blacktop roads, the big semi’s blowing them up against the fences” (All the Pretty Horses 298). McCarthy encapsulates in a single vivid picture the conflict between modernity and those who would seek a life beyond its parameters. McCarthy’s protagonists, though, do not have the language to articulate this. It can be addressed only in partial truths or untheorized observations. “They” have created, with modern fencing, a country unfit for horses, for example (31), or, “there aint shit down there” (34), which is perhaps the moment at which one of McCarthy’s characters come closest to recognizing the nature of the contrast between the United States and a country as yet not fully mapped and persisting in a condition not wholly transformed by modernity. Rawlins’s remark is preceded, in similar vein, by John Grady’s father’s observation about the United States that “the country would never be the same” (25). Economic realities and continuing mechanization result in an increase in larger-­ scale agriculture as smaller-scale ranching in the southwestern United States begins to enter its final dispensation, soon to be erased forever as a way of life. The young men of the border trilogy move south in response, unsure and conflicted in their purposes, but stumbling purblind toward an older culture in which modernity has not yet subsumed the alternatives. This flight does not go unnoticed, nor is it



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confined to McCarthy’s protagonists. It is abundantly clear, for example, that Eduardo in Cities of the Plain recognizes this southward movement, and he is scathing in the way he frames its motivating force. “[The farmboys] drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name. Being farmboys of course the first place they look is the whorehouse” (249). Eduardo does not understand fully, either, the motors of these movements, and he is right to some degree concerning John Grady’s desire, but the “thing” to which he alludes is beyond mere lust, and is closer to a broader definition of romance I identify, into which the unvoiceable feelings of the border trilogy’s protagonists are projected (see chapter 8, this volume). John Grady’s indistinct hankerings for a world free of a “leprous” modernity are made flesh in Magdalena and Alejandra, as are Boyd Parham’s in his own girl. They seek to regain what has been lost both in ways they can articulate and ways they cannot. These romantic episodes are frequently characterized by a visionary almost spiritual feel that removes romance from the arena of the real: The last time [John Grady] saw [Alejandra] before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect . . . the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware . . . until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky yet a dream withal. (131–32) Alejandra is John Grady’s desires both sexual and otherwise, made flesh, and she is in this moment an avatar of the alternate to the crushing realities he wishes to jettison each time he crosses the border. This is a different register altogether to the one used in his parting from Mary Catherine Barnett, where the modernity represented by the reality of the commerce of San Angelo is reflected in the quotidian idiom of a language that contrasts vividly with the “unreality” of the elevated language of the borderlands. John Grady is not, however, permitted any kind of lasting consummation. His desires move

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beyond the sexual to the kinds of unarticulated regions I have described, and it is this nexus of feelings and motivations that render him dangerous to both Don Héctor and the Dueña Alfonsa, both of whom ensure that Mexico will not accommodate him. Don Héctor’s decision to have him arrested is characteristically fatherly, but is also a reversion to the ancient codes that define Mexico, or a version of Mexico that exists in opposition to the tenets of post-Enlightenment Europe. This Mexico may display a surface varnish of modernity, but underneath lies a feudal culture, the complex history of which cannot be encompassed by the European Enlightenment and its consequences. La Purísima and the wider identity of Mexico is determined by the land in a way lost to John Grady and the other Americans. “The weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise” (226), says a Mexican vaquero of his country. John Grady cannot change the fact, though, that he is a product of his country and therefore of the hegemony of modernity. He has neither the patience nor the maturity to postpone his gratification in response to Alejandra’s desire, despite the warnings of the Dueña Alfonsa. It is both fortunate and unfortunate for John Grady that he and Don Héctor are actually quite similar in their feel for the way the world might be beyond the closed and consuming system of capitalist modernity: “But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man” (127). John Grady, though, transgresses an ancient boundary and there can be no going back. His punishment is expulsion from the premodern paradise of La Purísima: “John Grady carried with him, as a US citizen subject to the hegemony of that country, the seeds of his own downfall. Ultimately, he is rejected by the Aunt, by Don Héctor, by Alejandra, and, worst of all, by the Mexico of his imagination that has momentarily moved, in sharp focus, from dream to reality” (Monk, “All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter” 126). McCarthy’s border nomads have no choice, under these circumstances, but to occupy physical, cultural, and emotional zones that



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are of neither country but exist as a contact zone between the two. By the time Billy arrives in Lordsburg in The Crossing, for example, he is capable of stirring highly conflicted feelings in those US citizens who encounter him: When he walked out into the sun and untied the horse from the parking meter people passing in the street turned to look at him. Something in off the wild mesas, something out of the past. Ragged, dirty, hungry in eye and belly. Totally unspoken for. In that outlandish figure they beheld what they envied most and what they most reviled. If their hearts went out to him it was yet true that for very small cause they might also have killed him. (170) Billy has become a creature of the border. He is not Mexican. Mexico rejects him in spite of his Mexican grandmother, but he is no longer of the United States. He belongs in the zone between the two. In this connection, it is significant that John Grady’s final encounter with Mexico or a Mexican in All the Pretty Horses is with his dead Abuela (grandmother) who served the family for fifty years and for whom he sheds his last tears at the graveside. The significance is not merely that John Grady joins Billy Parham as a de facto “mixedblood,” but in another of McCarthy’s tableaux, in the neutrality of a graveyard, John Grady grieves for a Mexican on US land. Another “third space.” He becomes in these moments a true creature of the contact zone between the United States and Mexico. Equally significant, perhaps, is the following exchange between John Grady and Rawlins: “Where is your country? [Rawlins] said. I don’t know, said John Grady. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what happens to country. Rawlins didn’t answer” (299). John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses was once a part of the country that is the United States, was once also part of Mexico, and now belongs in neither. Although a US citizen, he is psychologically and emotionally stateless. Boyd, in his martyrdom, becomes a similarly stateless rumor, Billy a transnational vagrant of mountain and freeway, and John Grady, as we rediscover him in Cities of the Plain, an habitué of border towns that offer him a neutral space in which he can ease the pain of his loss and

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feel with his fellow misfits a sense of belonging. Such an argument resists the ways in which critics have tended to read John Grady, Rawlins, Blevins, and the Parhams as avatars or agents of colonialism. John Grady’s exchange with Rawlins concerning country is telling for some in this connection: “In [John Grady’s] comment is the novel’s most interesting irony. It is suggestive of the familiar story of the American male who leaves ‘civilization’ behind to seek a different way of life in the ‘wilderness’ but unwittingly becomes an agent of colonization, transforming his wilderness refuge into the very thing he sought to escape” (Cooper Alarcón 149). On the contrary, I do not think McCarthy’s characters transform much of what they encounter: Boyd is absorbed into older narratives, Billy and John Grady become stateless, Blevins never comes back, and Rawlins is a candidate for assimilation by Mexico. The relationship of the hacendado’s family with a globalizing economy and its historic associations with the wider culture of Europe are the true risks in these circumstances. The American boys do not change Mexico: rather, they are changed. Permanently. They can never be Mexican, but neither can they be reabsorbed into the United States—even enlisting for war is unavailable to Billy in a gesture by McCarthy that seems to be as much symbolic as plot-driven. The liminal space of the border may now be the only place where it is possible for McCarthy’s Southwestern nomads to live, Gloria Anzaldúa explains: Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” (3) Anzaldúa is clearly referring to Mexicans heading north, and they



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greatly outnumber any Anglos who might become part of this indeterminate place. But it is true that the wounded, hunted, and persecuted young men of the border trilogy have many of the characteristics Anzaldúa attributes to the Mexicans. Indeed Billy Parham is, in Anzal­dúa’s phrase, mongrel, and John Grady’s children would certainly have been half-breed had he reproduced with either of the women to whom he proposed. McCarthy’s border nomads speak from a space not fully assimilated by modernity in a language that also refuses assimilation: Isabel Soto writes of The Crossing: “Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other. The result is a wholly other discourse defined by, or constitutive of, the United States-Mexican border, or ‘contact zone.’ Furthermore, that this frontier discourse spreads beyond either side of the border is suggestive perhaps of a growing mestizo hegemony. Geography, as ever, shapes human experience” (58). Soto’s argument, and she writes from the perspective of a native speaker of Spanish, is that McCarthy’s use of the language is like nothing that exists previously, that it is deliberately constructed to represent “the border”: “Thus the unfamiliar or defamiliarized Spanish articulated in The Crossing is generated by crossing or transgressing various thresholds, linguistic and/or rhe3 torical” (61). The Spanish McCarthy uses, in its very hybridity, its mongrel phrasing, and its non-conformity, asserts a third linguistic space between English and Spanish. Such a space is “paratactic”: “While the border imposes a hierarchical, subordinate relationship between the two sides, McCarthy substitutes a paratactic relationship. That is, he recognizes both sides of the resulting juxtaposition—Mexico and the US, American and Mexican—as a mutually constitutive pair” (Eaton 167). This parataxis determines the nature of the contact zone that ATPH and the other novels of The Border Trilogy feature as their principal setting, and in doing so suggests that McCarthy’s fiction does more than merely recreate and re-instantiate accepted boundaries and differences. (Monk, “All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter” 128)

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The subtleties of this position have tended to pass unrecognized by those commenting on the border in McCarthy’s work, which is unfortunate because these nuances allow his Southwestern fiction to be interpreted as something more than a rather grand rehashing of Western frontier mythology. The linguistic condition of the border trilogy mirrors important hybrid aspects of the lives and activities of the characters in that McCarthy represents a set of alternate circumstances and conditions that continue to operate in opposition to modernity. These resistant strains are often Mexican or hybrid Mexican but they can also be Native American. McCarthy begins All the Pretty Horses with the Comanches, and ends it with “indians.” Even though it is true to say that the description of the Comanches at the beginning is set in the past—they are not “real” in the sense that anyone in the novel encounters them. That McCarthy starts and finishes the novel with those who have an ancient lineage in the Southwest is, however, significant. These are nations that could not have imagined an arbitrary separation of the region, and that would have operated according to other more transient forms of demarcation. All that remains is 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 . . . the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives. (5) Transition is marked in a similar way at the end of the novel as a group of “indians” watch John Grady Cole exit their camp on horseback: “The indians stood watching him. . . . They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all they needed to know. They stood and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish” (301). The way the description is framed suggests that the landscape is responsible for John Grady’s disappearance, not the less tangible concept of time.



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Such a supposition fits well with the idea that many Native American cultures regard the white man and the Eurocentric modernity that accompanies him as temporary. Beyond the geological capacity of the earth to outlast Western humanity is a notion in traditional Native American approaches of the evanescence of Western culture. McCarthy’s fiction asserts in this way another view of the world that could scarcely be further removed in its philosophical construction and practical application from the kinds of end-of-history dialectics beloved of modernity. This focus of traditional Native American cultures on the spatial at the expense of the temporal, and of the cyclical over the linear, allows them to avoid the trap in which the Bible-literal Christian religions are caught, in which Christians move through a world ruined by their sin away from a past paradise 4 toward a future one. The Native American approach suggests an attitude to the world more likely to preserve it for future generations than what dominates at present. Indeed implicit everywhere in McCarthy’s treatment of the Southwest is that Native Americans have simply endured in the region in a way that they have not in other areas of the United States. As Colin Taylor and William Sturtevant note, “unlike other regions of North America, over twenty-five Native American groups have survived the onslaught of European expansion and been able to remain on their traditional homelands with some complement of their distinctive customs as enclaved cultures” (65). That McCarthy recognizes the durability of these peoples is reflected by the frequency with which the indigenous nations of the Southwest, from the Acoma to the Zuni, feature in the fiction. It is remarkable indeed that such societies have continued to exist in the face of the onslaught of the kind of Eurocentric modernity Gary Snyder identifies: The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostering craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire that cannot be satiated and hatred which has no other outlet except against oneself, [or] the

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persons one is supposed to love. . . . The soil and all animal life are being destroyed by these cancerous collectivities. (177–78) Native American groups and individuals who have survived this assault have done so by preserving traditional practices through the strength of their religious beliefs, their relationship with a landscape they perceive as eternal, their belief in the impermanence of the white man, and their consequent resistance to either colonization of the mind or co-option. Those who have become absorbed into the system are now among the poorest and most deprived of in US society. Alternately, they have become rich on government largesse in the form of exceptions to legislation on gambling, or on the back of heedless mineral exploitation of traditional lands, and themselves become part of the problem posed by modernity. McCarthy uses Native Americans to voice a wide range of philosophical points—the “wild indians” in The Crossing, for example, have a significant role as Billy’s spiritual interlocutors. The work recognizes, at the same time, that Native Americans (in groups and as individuals) were not merely passive in the westward expansion of modernity, and themselves participated in appalling acts of violence and bloodshed. It is clear that this was partly in defense of their lands and culture, and partly as part of modernity’s larger project—the presence of the Delawares in Blood Meridian implies this kind of participation. Ashis Nandy’s demand for a fundamentally different approach to cultural interaction is instructive, here, and as I write in chapters 8 and 9, the proximity of some of McCarthy’s attitudes to Native American writers of the region, such as Silko, Momaday, and Fixico, is striking: the . . . search for authenticity of a civilization is always a search for the other face of the civilization, either as a hope or as a warning. The search for a civilization’s utopia, too, is part of the larger quest. It needs not merely the ability to interpret and reinterpret one’s own traditions, but also the ability to involve the often-recessive aspects of other civilizations as allies in one’s struggle for cultural self-discovery, the willingness to become



Marginal Worlds, Marginal Languages

allies to other civilizations trying to discover their other faces, and the skills to give more centrality to these new readings of civilizations and civilizational concerns. This is the only form of a dialogue of cultures which can transcend the flourishing intellectual barters of our times. (1771–72) McCarthy does not hesitate to engage with ideas that belong to older cultures on the continent. A process that begins in The Orchard Keeper develops with Suttree’s hallucinogenic experience in the mountains and continues in various ways through the Southwestern works. The channeling of such ideas into his fiction as examples of challenges to modernity permits McCarthy to transcend categorization as merely another producer of postapocalyptic fiction in a procession of what Greg Garrard calls “environmental ‘doom merchants’ . . . selling bad news” (115). As Garrard goes on to write, it is vital that we imagine the planet actually has a future, otherwise we are unlikely to take action to save it. For John Grady Cole, though, the tableau that becomes the focus of attention at the end of All the Pretty Horses is the single bull rolling in the red dust of a bloodred sunset, “like an animal in sacrificial torment” (302). It symbolizes the annihilation of small-scale ranching, wilderness, and any kind of existence not rooted in permanent dwellings, at the behest of an all-consuming modernity to which everything is sacrificed in a dialectic of consumption and destruction. McCarthy offers us young men like John Grady and the Parhams who cannot read what the contact zone inscribes on both them and the landscape. McCarthy’s wanderers cannot escape from their particular and only partly understood longings and desires and are not yet ready, perhaps, to accept the lessons to be learned from the older cultures of the border. The narrative of these older cultures in concert with the languages and behaviors with which McCarthy endows the men and women of the contact zone in the border trilogy represents what Foucault has described as “subjugated knowledges.” Such knowledges exist, however, not only in the Southwest in McCarthy’s work but also in the language of the poor whites in the Appalachian fiction. This latter discourse has an archaic quality that is the sound of repressed and

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disappearing dialects: “I finished my dope and set it down and made like I was fixin to leave then and Kirby, he says, stit grinnin kind of, You mean, Uncle Ather, that you can tell one painter from anothern by its squall?” (The Orchard Keeper 149). Or, “You ain’t no different from the rest. From any man borned and raised and have his own and die. They ain’t one man in three got even a black suit to die in” (Outer Dark 233). Or Harrogate, unsure of how to deal with the world he inhabits, “I dont have no friends somewhere else. You dont have any here. Harrogate shook his head. Shit, he said. Bus? I aint never even been on a goddamned bus. All you do is get a ticket and get on. Yeah yeah, sure sure. I’d get on the wrong damned bus or something” (Suttree 436). As Foucault says, I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand . . . a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the reemergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges . . . that criticism performs its work. (“Two Lectures” 83) In the iteration of these subjugated languages, McCarthy’s vagrants and outsiders produce an unconscious critique of modernity from a range of marginalized perspectives. The rehabilitation and emancipation of these languages and knowledge render the possibility of opposition and struggle increasingly real (“Two Lectures” 85). What is generated, also, in this process of rehabilitation is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might characterize as “smooth” space. Smooth space is differentiated from “striated” space—the province of the structures of society that provide this texture—by its character as “a field without conduits or channels” (Deleuze 409). Linguistically, the contact zone of the border approaches this condition in its rejection of many of the conventions that exist in established versions of its language. Within the terms of the theory, for an aesthetic space to be smooth, the artist must be “too close” to the “thing,” he must lose



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himself “without landmarks” (544). “Striation” comes only when the artist pulls back from the work to recognize structure. In the intervening period, smooth space represents a space of infinite possibility. Immersion in the Spanish of the border trilogy, it might be argued, creates such possibilities. Furthermore, as Brian Evenson has noted, the realm of smooth space is the realm of the nomad, whose movement is “not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (Deleuze 353). As Billy Parham says to the sheriff in Lordsburg, who asks him what he was doing in Mexico, “I just went down there” (The Crossing 166). It is important to recognize how threatening to modernity and capitalism both the idea and the reality of the nomad is (see chapters 1, 3, and 9, this volume). The nation-state cannot function without clearly demarcated borders that operate osmotically (in the sense that they are semipermeable) to allow ingress and egress to certain categories of material and particular kinds of individual only. Capital is free to move but bodies are not. To disrupt the way in which these borders operate and to interfere with the regulatory mechanisms—as nomadic peoples do—is to send a shudder through national governments. Millions of people continue to cross the Mexican-US border: We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la migración de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlán. This time the traffic is from south to north. El retorno to the promised land first began with the Indians from the interior of Mexico and the mestizos that came with the conquistadores in the 1500s. Immigration continued in the next three centuries, and, in this century, it continued with the braceros who helped build our railroads and who picked our fruit. Today thousands of Mexicans are crossing the border legally and illegally; ten million people without documents have returned to the Southwest. (Anzaldúa 11) Not all these people are consumed by the capitalist system; a few become “liberated” rather than “emancipated,” in Hardt and Negri’s

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terminology. Hardt and Negri distinguish between these phenomena in the following way: “Emancipation is the entry of new nations and peoples into the imperial society of control, with its new hierarchies and segmentations; liberation, in contrast, means the destruction of boundaries and patterns of forced migration, the reappropriation of space, and the power of the multitude to determine the global circulation and mixture of individuals and populations” (Empire 363). The United States frantically attempts to “emancipate” its illegal immigrants—in other words, attempts to assimilate them—yet they continue to arrive in such numbers that “liberation” becomes a real possibility. In this context, McCarthy’s border nomads become exemplars of a species of liberation. The expanded and extended border becomes in McCarthy’s fiction a crucial arena of resistance in both language and in representing the threat of the nomad to modernity. Marginalized languages and understandings of the world are resurrected, including the discourse of the differently educated cowboy, that of the dirt poor of the Appalachians, the typically silenced voices of prostitutes, even the autochthonous but overlooked consciousness of animals. But most of all, in the hybridized language of the border, McCarthy’s fiction draws the reader’s attention to newly excavated possibilities: Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. [There is] a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case. (Foucault, History of Sexuality 95–96) Such is the ground on which McCarthy’s work stands. We are invited as readers to understand the futures that McCarthy, in his role of “true and living prophet of destruction,” suggests may be the



Marginal Worlds, Marginal Languages

outcome of unrestrained modernity. As part of a political agenda worthy of the name, McCarthy’s fiction offers the reader an opportunity to be affected in meaningful and embodied ways. We are asked to “feel” in other words, and to reenchant our worlds in the process. The fiction demands that we ponder our role in environmental degradation. It entices us to engage with the suprahuman and subjugated consciousness of animals. It suggests that we oppose easy materialism with a broad spirituality and that we reject the dark side of technology. We are invited to mend our relationship to violence. We are asked to embrace the unrooted. We are offered an opportunity to recognize knowledge belonging to cultures, both within and other to our own, that has become marginalized or forgotten. We are dared to summon a different kind of world from the neglected corners of our collective imagination. We are called, ultimately, to consider our responses to all aspects of the particular species of a modernity that determines the greater part of most of our lives in the West.

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introduction

1. See Monk, Literature Compass. 2. See chapter 10 for an elucidation of the “beautiful image”—a phrase that originates with Herbert Marcuse (The Aesthetic Dimension 6). 3. Spanish occurs first in McCarthy in The Orchard Keeper when Sylder beats Gifford to death: “Es muy malo que no tengas un perro” (It’s too bad you do not have a dog) (167). 4. See Monk, Cambridge Companion. 5. An example of what Vereen Bell called McCarthy’s “photorealistic style” (Lincoln 20). 6. See Monk, Literature Compass. 7. See chapter 11, “Doing Things with Words,” for the relationship between performativity and writing. 8. The chapter is autoethnographic in the sense that I use my experiences as data for analysis and reflection: “autoethnographic data can be collected in a variety of ways: recalling, collecting artifacts and documents, interviewing others, analysing self, observing self, and reflection on issues pertaining to the research topic. Recalling is a free-spirited way of bringing out memories about critical events, people, places, behaviors, talks, thoughts, perspectives, opinions, and emotions pertaining to the research topic” (Chang 114). What I write here falls within the categories of analyzing and observing self and reflection. A recent article by Emma Rees in the Times Higher Education Supplement titled “My Work Is My Life” highlights the rise of what is becoming known as “mesearch” in some circles, and considers the role of autoethnography in the arts and humanities, the area from which this book emerges. 9. Phyllis Rose is a possible originator of approaches that engage in this 227

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way: “Rose’s The Year of Reading Proust was a progenitor of this reading-­ memoir genre and helped establish the outlines of the form: a reader begins in some trepidation or inquiry, and sets herself a novel-reading ‘quest’; carrying it out she mingles her own story and thought with commentary on what she reads.” In the same Times Literary Supplement review, Tessa Hadley discusses Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch: “her overall effort is not to make Eliot’s world seem strange; Mead works to make it seem to exist just round the corner from our own experience. She is under the influence of the strong magic of Middlemarch” (21). 10. I am very grateful to Katy Salzmann and her staff at Texas State University San Marcos’s Southwestern Writers Collection at the Witliff Collection for their patience and support during my visits over the past few years. chapter 1

1. All references to the Cormac McCarthy Papers, or the Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy—both in the Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos—use the following notation: 91 for the former or 92 for the latter, the box number, the folder number, and a page reference where necessary. 2. Both David Cremean and Stacey Peebles have noted this lack, as has Steven Frye. 3. Much is yet to be unearthed on the relationship between more ancient literature—including the Christian Bible—and McCarthy’s work. 4. Clear evidence of Hegel’s assumption of a mind-body separation. 5. The essence of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. 6. As, indeed, they are of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, in which one of the benefits of globalization and technology is that newly created grids offer the possibility of restoring these dislocations and recoupling the broken connections. chapter 2

1. This definition of nihilism should be distinguished from definitions applied to McCarthy’s fiction by a number of critics over the years. The latter is to do with nothingness, or emptiness, and the consequent pointlessness of existence.



notes

2. Habermas is used in this section because of his widely acknowledged eminence in the defense of modernity and the Enlightenment from the critiques of those who see these phenomena as pernicious, destructive, imprisoning, or tending to promote imperialism and colonialism. Habermas wants to separate the good from the bad in the Enlightenment and to dispose of the latter but retain the former. Habermas believes we can solve our problems with more enlightenment. I am not persuaded that McCarthy does. 3. The ambivalence of Habermas toward the Frankfurt School is clear in the following passage: With their concept of “instrumental reason”: Horkheimer and Adorno want to add up the cost incurred in the usurpation of reason’s place by a calculating intellect. This concept is simultaneously supposed to recall that when purposive rationality, overblown into a totality, abolishes the distinction between what claims validity and what is useful for self-preservation, and so tears down the barrier between validity and power, it cancels out those basic conceptual differentiations to which the modern understanding of the world believed it owed the definitive overcoming of myth. (119) Although sympathetic to Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of the dangers of the “calculating intellect,” he perceives their position as dangerous in that it allows back into the world the kind of theological-mythical structuring of society that the Enlightenment was supposed to have swept away. 4. Indeed, it may be that Habermasian pragmatism—modernity is inevitable in its constant dialectical self-renewal so we should recognize the beneficial elements that may be mobilized for the good of all—is right. For many, however, it is hard to forget Marcuse’s dictum concerning complicity in a “peaceful evolution from capitalism to socialism,” in which under the label of socialism some tinkering is done at the margins but capitalism remains unaltered in most important respects. 5. I think of Leslie Marmon Silko in particular here, but N. Scott Momaday is another example, as are Simon Ortiz and Louis Owens. 6. These end-of-history debates came to prominence, of course, with Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s central idea is that we will shortly reach the end point of history’s dialectic in a liberal-democratic demi-paradise. 7. There are many academic descriptions of globalization. Timothy

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Brennan’s “From Development to Globalization” includes five, as well as the contention that globalization does not really exist (Lazarus 120–22). My own view is that globalization is very real in an economic and environmental sense, but highly partial in areas such as politics, culture, and the more utopian features advanced by some of its advocates and celebrants (Lazarus 225–27). 8. Tomlinson concludes that disruption is not the answer and offers Helmuth Berking’s adaptive, enlightened self-interest as the best hope: a solidary individualism in which the building of self-identity depends on an increasing reflexive awareness of relations with others. . . . This means to act in one’s self-interest is not necessarily to do so in a narrowly utilitarian way, but indeed involves the self-justification that comes from acts of mutuality. . . . Thus the modern reflexive subject in the intention of realizing itself, acts towards changing the social world. (206) Berking continues: “If I know what tropical forests or automobile traffic mean for my health; if I know what love and friendship, empathy and compassion can give rise to . . . what then counts . . . are extended solidarities that are no longer restricted to my own community of shared values” (quoted in Tomlinson 207). This softens, humanizes, and extends Hardt and Negri’s rather mechanical conception of the ever more complex and dense networks that are a function of increased globalization. 9. To be precise, “Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule— in short, a new form of sovereignty” (Empire xi). chapter 3

1. For a description of the dialectical process, which is always the Hegelian version in this book, see chapter 1, this volume. 2. For the Frankfurt School view of the Enlightenment and modernity, see chapter 1, this volume. 3. I have maintained the novel’s format for the purposes of clarity in conversations between characters. McCarthy’s sparse use of punctuation would render the passage more difficult to read if the lines were run together.



notes

4. For more detail on Dussel’s views, see chapter 2, this volume. 5. Benjamin’s understanding of modernity is explained in more detail in chapter 1, this volume. 6. “Their heads and Breasts were covered with a thick Hair. . . . They had Beards like Goats, and a Long Ridge of hair down their Backs, and the fore Parts of their Legs and Feet; but the rest of their bodies were bare, so that I might see their Skins, which were of a brown Buff colour. . . . They had strong extended Claws before and behind, terminating in sharp Points, and hooked” (Swift 207). 7. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe, “In advance, the Enlightenment recognizes as being and occurrence only what can be apprehended in unity: its ideal is the system from which all and everything follows” (Dia­ lectic of Enlightenment 7). 8. My position is that the instrumental use of reason, both abstract and practical, is the problem. Otherwise my views are similar to Dussel’s: “Unlike the postmoderns, I will not criticize reason as such; but I do accept their critique of reason as dominating, victimizing, and violent. I will not deny universalist rationalism its rational nucleus, but I do oppose the irrational element of its sacrificial myth. I do not then deny reason, only the irrationality of the violence of the modern myth. I do not deny reason, but rather postmodern irrationality. I affirm the reason of the Other as a step toward a transmodern worldhood” (Invention of the Americas 26). 9. Goya’s etching, from about 1797 to 1799, “The Sleep of Reason,” depicts Goya asleep at his desk. Various winged monsters are about to descend upon the artist. The picture implies that reason must be vigilant at all times to ward off the horrors of unreason. This is the view Holden espouses in his discourse to his fellow scalp hunters and the one McCarthy challenges through the characters in his fiction who are spiritually aware, or concerned with the environment, or both. Alejandra’s father is, I think, less interested in dismissing rationality as pernicious and deadly in the modern world than making a point concerning the Mexican-Spanish national character. He says a little later, “I think we dont believe people can be improved by reason. That seems a very French idea” (146). It is true, however, that Don Hector engineers the separation of his daughter from John Grady Cole in the most rational way available. 10. It is difficult to resist a comparison between Holden and the Satanist Aleister Crowley. Not only was Crowley huge and bald, he was also well

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known for an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane material, mystifying tricks, and sleight of hand. Most significant, however, is the epigraph to Magick in Theory and Practice: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” 11. For the development of the I in Hegel, see chapter 1, this volume. 12. Nomads and wanderers of a different stripe do appear in the fiction: Chigurh, for example, the Glanton gang, and the murdering bands of Indians in Blood Meridian. I do not think these instances undermine the broader point, however. 13. For the Hegelian underpinnings of this process, see chapter 1, this volume. 14. Grasp in the sense of both understanding and to seize. 15. John Gast’s painting offers an instructive contrast with Klee’s view of modernity as Benjamin interprets it (see chapter 3, this volume). chapter 4

1. For my understanding of the term dialectic, see chapter 1, this volume. 2. McCarthy’s first published work, which appeared in the University of Tennessee’s literary arts magazine, Phoenix. 3. Wes Morgan’s remarkably detailed and thorough analysis of the journey of man and boy in The Road, in “Roots of The Road,” proves beyond reasonable doubt that the novel is set in the southeast, specifically around the area of the Great Smoky Mountains. 4. “It is Adorno’s view that dialectics ossifies in both Hegel and Marx because the drive for identity inherent in both systems—a drive that is manifested in a tendency to hypostatize concepts and to posit final ends (i.e., Absolute Spirit and communism)—which reproduces the very kind of mythological thinking that he and Horkheimer had previously diagnosed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. As a result, in response to the drive for identity that exists in both the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, in which objects are subsumed by their concepts without leaving any remainder, ‘the hinge of [Adorno’s] negative dialectics’ is to ‘change the direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity’ (Negative Dialectics 12). At the outset it must be made clear that this turn toward non-identity sharply differs from nominally similar turns later made by certain poststructuralists. Adorno does not want to discard the moment of identity



notes

altogether—‘the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself,’ or, put more simply, ‘to think is to identify’ (Negative Dialectics 5). Rather, he asserts, philosophy ‘must strive by way of the concept to transcend the concept’ (Negative Dialectics 15). Whereas Hegel famously advocates the ‘identity of identity and non-identity’ and various poststructuralists advocate ‘non-identity’ in itself, Adorno argues for the ‘non-identity of identity and non-identity’—that is, the need for conceptual fluidity to adequately (and therefore never completely) describe the actual objects of a fluid reality” (Sherman 239–40). 5. For Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, see chapter 1, this volume. 6. One of the principal reasons a study of McCarthy through the single lens of Marx cannot work for me is that much of a higher priority would need to be omitted to accommodate such a reading. Also, in instances such as this, it is implied that Marx is tangential, irrelevant almost, at best a conduit to other thinkers, Hegel in this case. I read this as authorization to further explore Hegel’s philosophy as constitutive of the modernity against which McCarthy writes. 7. More unusual still, in The Counselor, Westray has the following line: “What’s the Miller quote that Reiner likes? The smallest crumb can devour us? You learn to let nothing pass. You cant afford to.” The third time McCarthy uses this fragment—presumably, on this evidence, adapted from Henry Miller’s the Colossus of Maroussi, 69. 8. See The Protestant Ethic 14–19. 9. A more detailed description is available at the Cormac McCarthy website: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/works/the-gardeners-son/. 10. The collection includes, for example, Thomas P. Martin, ed., “The Advent of William Gregg and the Graniteville Co.,” Journal of Southern History 11:3 (1945), photocopy; “Honorable William Gregg The Founder of Graniteville,” transcription from the Edgefield Advertiser, June 5, 1879, photocopy; Pat Conroy, “Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies,” Faces of South Carolina, 47–56, photocopy; J. H. Taylor, “Manufacturers in South Carolina,” De Bow’s Review 8:1 (1850): 24–29, photocopy; “Honorable William J. Whipper,” photocopy; Trial, State of South Carolina vs. Benjamin Booth, Marion Booth, Sampson Booth, Davis Kissick and John Carpenter; Indictment for Murder, Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Texas State University-San Marcos (91/18/2). 11. This is not a plea for a return to whichever century organizations

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like the Islamic State would have us return, but a note that when all we can do is attempt failing technological remedies for conditions technology itself has brought us to, then perhaps we should think in more fundamental ways about how we use this technology. I think in particular of the way the oil economy and climate change are driven by technology. What beckons, otherwise, is the world represented in The Road. 12. In a letter dated January 26, 1977, McCarthy informs J. Howard Woolmer that he is in Tucson “working on my western” (Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University-San Marcos, 97/1/2), presumably Blood Meridian. On February 2, 1979, McCarthy tells Woolmer that Blood Meridian is “basically finished” (97/1/3). 13. On March 12, 1974, McCarthy sends his new address in Tucson to Woolmer (97/1/2). chapter 5

1. Nixon’s epigram to his book on slow violence is from a confidential memo written by Lawrence Summers, who was chief economist at the World Bank at the time: “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?” (1). 2. “On feast days . . . their thoughts are centered upon their common beliefs, their common traditions, the memory of their great ancestors, the collective ideal of which they are the incarnation; in a word, upon social things. . . . So it is society that is in the foreground of every consciousness; it dominates and directs all conduct; this is equivalent to saying that it is more living and active, and consequently more real, than in profane times. . . . The individual soul is regenerated too, by being dipped again in the source from which its life comes; consequently it feels itself stronger, more fully master of itself, less dependent upon physical necessities” (Durkheim 390–91). 3. “All religious rituals spring from the surrogate victim, and all the great institutions of mankind, both secular and religious, spring from ritual” (Girard 306).



notes

4. Part of modernity is an ever-burgeoning impulse to improve existing technology. These technologies, in the case of weapons, rendered resistance useless in the premodern societies that become the subject of the colonial project. The financial gains from conquests fueled the technological imperatives of a nascent capitalist system and ever better weapons were produced. Although such weapons became part of colonized cultures, such cultures could never keep pace, lacking other necessary structures of modernity such as organized governments and standing armies. Jared Diamond demonstrates the importance of weapons technology: “The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both horses and guns. To the average white American, the word ‘Indian’ conjures up an image of a mounted Plains Indian brandishing a rifle, like the Sioux warriors who annihilated General George Custer’s U.S. Army battalion at the famous battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. We easily forget that horses and rifles were originally unknown to Native Americans. They were brought by Europeans and proceeded to transform the societies of Indian tribes that acquired them. Thanks to their mastery of horses and rifles, the Plains Indians of North America, the Araucanian Indians of southern Chile, and the Pampas Indians of Argentina fought off invading whites longer than did any other Native Americans, succumbing only to massive army operations by white governments in the 1870s and 1880s” (75). chapter 6

1. Thanks to Katja Rebmann, my PhD student, who worked hard and with great enthusiasm on these parts of the project. 2. I realize the irony in later chapters as I argue that McCarthy in some ways fades from his own work. It is not, though, the creation and use of new theoretical models of literary criticism I object to, but instead the somewhat slavish acceptance of such theories and, in many cases, their dogmatic and decontextualized application. 3. For more on Rick and McCarthy, please see Peter Josyph’s chapter in Cormac McCarthy’s House, in which Rick discourses on Blood Meridian while bathing. 4. A precondition of autoethnography is that it should be a form of inquiry that is “vulnerable, forthright in exploring the character

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weaknesses, struggles, and ambiguities of the researcher” (Anderson and Glass-Coffin 75). Teaching in this way renders one vulnerable to the skepticism of students and colleagues who are used to, and comfortable with, the more passive lecture and seminar model of higher education. It also requires the facilitator to be openly self-reflective as an example to students. Again, one is vulnerable. In the same way, this chapter is performative of this vulnerability. 5. I first encountered methods of this kind through the work of Professor Jonothan Neelands, now of “WBS Create,” which is part of the Business School at the University of Warwick. Without the twin influences of Professor Neelands and my colleague Dr. Jonathan Heron (also at Warwick), the embodied pedagogies I have developed could not have existed. 6. Writers on autoethnography have clearly engaged with ideas of embodiment. For example, When non-linear and improvisatory modes of inquiry are used, the body is often the epistemological and ontological nexus from which . . . new insights emerge (Spry 2001). As anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup reminds us, “The body is the nodal point in our attention to the world. The body is the zero-point of perception, the center from which the senses project themselves out into the world, and defines the horizon of the self” (p. 95; see also Merleau-Ponty, 2001). Just as the work of a musician is corporeal, an autoethnographer also draws on and works from embodied knowledge and experiences. This focus frees the voice and body from the conventional and restrictive mindbody split that continues to pervade traditional academic research and, indeed, writing. Spry concurs, suggesting that in the auto­ ethnographic process, “text and body are redefined, their boundaries blurring dialectically” (p. 711). (Bartleet 452–53). 7. It is only after careful preparation during and before the session that participants will feel confident and engaged enough to work in these ways. This includes the selection of the right kind of space for these activities. For more detail, see Monk et al., Open-space Learning: A Study in Trans­ disciplinary Pedagogy. 8. I recall a session in which my colleagues and I sought to teach chemistry via performance and I overheard an extremely anxious young woman say to the person next to her, “if I’d wanted to be ‘creative’ I wouldn’t have done chemistry.” Fascinating at a number of levels as it seems, first, that



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the idea of creativity has been severely abused in whatever high school this student attended. Second, she has learned from somewhere that science isn’t creative. Finally, nothing is better guaranteed to create apprehension and anxiety among most students who have not opted for theater studies or the performing arts than the notion of embodying an idea in the presence of others.

chapter 7

1. The workings of affect are considered in detail in chapter 10 of this volume. 2. The Sunset Limited has no animals, nor any mention of them. The Gardener’s Son mentions domestic animals in passing—a horse named Captain is one instance—and Wallis Sanborn has a section on mules and death in the film. Sanborn writes also of the dog Bossy in The Stone­ mason, but it features very briefly and only then as an object of amusement. In The Road, animals are summoned in tableaux of pre-apocalypse worlds but none, of course, exist in the present. Of these works, two are plays and one is a screenplay, reflecting the difficulty, perhaps, of representing animals on stage and the costs of shooting them on film. Another possible explanation, among others, why “Whales and Men” never made it to the screen. 3. “North Atlantic Storms During March, 1883.” 4. Clearly I am using reason myself to make the arguments in this book, so I can hardly reject it. The argument I perceive in McCarthy’s fiction is not with reason per se, but with its instrumental version, which subjects everything, including the unknown and potentially unknowable, to a set of criteria that render it available for use or consumption. In the border trilogy, wolves and horses are situated in a category (ontology) that is beyond the reach of knowing (epistemology). What cannot be known cannot be subject to reason. This kind of argument should not be interpreted as a claim that Cormac McCarty the author is in any way advocating the abandonment of reason—this would be nonsense. Rather, I suggest that the fiction offers us a world that is preserved, as long as there are animals with which we can have connections, from co-option into a system of modernity that requires all to be subject to instrumental reason so that it may be subsumed or incorporated. 5. Something of the allomorphism of Greg Garrard’s typology of

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representations of animals is detectable in this idea. What he identifies as a “kind of superiority” (154) of animals to humans. chapter 8

1. “Narrative of spiritual formation” denotes a particular species of the bildungsroman in which the journey toward maturity is conceived in narrower terms: a novel in which the interest lies in the protagonist’s philosophical or, more particularly, spiritual development. I am grateful to Professor John McClure for this formulation that I first heard in a graduate seminar at Rutgers University in 2001. For McClure, much contemporary fiction is postsecular. Seeleroman means “novel of the soul.” This is my own coinage. I first identified the seeleroman as a genre in “Versions of the Seeleroman: Cormac McCarthy and Leslie Silko.” 2. Jameson elsewhere claims that “spirituality virtually by definition no longer exists: the definition in question is in fact that of postmodernism itself” (Postmodernism 55). My view is that the difference between spiritual and postmodern, in this case, is semantic rather than philosophical. 3. Garry Wallace’s interview with McCarthy is instructive concerning this disconnect: [McCarthy] said that the religious experience is always described through the symbols of a particular culture and thus is somewhat misrepresented by them. He indicated that even the religious person is often uncomfortable with such experiences and accounts of them, and that those who have not had a religious experience cannot comprehend it through second-hand accounts, even good ones like James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. He went on to say that he thinks the mystical experience is a direct apprehension of reality, unmediated by symbol, and he ended with the thought that our inability to see spiritual truth is the greater mystery. (138) Deloria’s God Is Red offers a contrasting view: “The question the so-called world religions have not satisfactorily resolved is whether or not religious experience can be distilled from its original cultural context and become an abstract principle that is applicable to all peoples in all places and at different times” (65). McCarthy’s fiction implies that the jury remains out on the question.



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4. This is convincing in part, and McCarthy has certainly read Boehme, as both the quotation at the end of Blood Meridian and the full title of the novel demonstrate. 5. Indigenous societies in North America considered such a community of the sentient, unremarkable. Calvin Martin writes that “the single most important deterrent to excessive hunting . . . was the fear of spiritual reprisal for indiscreet slaughter. . . . Nature, as conceived by traditional Ojibwa was a congeries of societies: every animal, fish, and plant species functioned in a society that was parallel in all respects to human families. There were ‘keepers’ of the game, or leaders of animal families” (71). 6. The anchorite, here, is the old man, of whom the priest speaks, who lives in the teetering shadow of the church at Caborca. 7. In this passage, the notion of a pantheistic God that inhabits even the inanimate parts of the earth is rejected: “Nor does God whisper through the trees. . . . Trees and stones are no part of it” (152). 8. All the translations from Spanish in this book are from “A Translation of Spanish Passages in The Crossing” by Lieutenant Jim Campbell. This, and translations of the rest of the Spanish passages in the border trilogy and Blood Meridian, are available at http://www.cormacmccarthy.com. 9. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, the supernatural experiences of the protagonist, Tayo, are in fact “religious realities” of the kind James described in 1902 and Robert Bellah elucidates: “American Indians lack a word to denote what we call religion,” writes Ake Hultkrantz in The Religions of the American Indians. . . . Of course, nothing else is to be expected in environments where religious attitudes and values permeate cultural life in its entirety and are not isolated from other cultural manifestations. (139) 10. Except, of course, for the moment of hope McCarthy introduces right at the end. 11. The double negative might suggest ambivalence: perhaps Billy thinks he is something after all, but the context suggests otherwise. chapter 9

1. The border trilogy is the principal focus of this chapter because the move to the Southwest in McCarthy’s fiction heralds a more developed

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response to issues that are incipient in the Appalachian novels. Native American culture is much more significant here given that Navajo and Pueblo cultures, for example, have endured in the face of the overwhelming potential of modernity to consume opposition in its dialectic. The Southwest is fertile ground, therefore, for a kind of cultural geography that wishes to reassert the spiritual in the face of modernity. 2. Heidegger’s influence on environmental philosophy has been significant (Garrard 34–36). 3. As Donald Fixico observes of the Navajos, quoting Alvord and Van Pelt: “Navajos believe in . . . a world view in which everything in life is connected and influences everything else. A stone thrown into a pond can influence the life of a deer in the forest, a human voice and a spoken word can influence events around the world, and all things possess spirit and power.” (American Indian Mind 175) 4. I want to be sure that I do not construct some version of my own of the “ecological indian” in this chapter. I am not too naïve to accept that some Native Americans, individuals and groups, have wholly embraced modernity and clamor for casinos, airstrips, and any profit that may accrue from selling off land and minerals. In the Southwest, however, indigenous communities are often marginalized and harmed by these activities, regardless of whether they follow a traditional way of life. The following appeared in the online publication, Third World Network, in 1999, and indicates the ongoing concerns of Native Americans concerning uranium mining: Laguna, New Mexico, Jun 14—Native Americans in the United States and Canada have inherited a grim legacy of increased rates of cancer and a ruined environment because of uranium mining on tribal homelands. Indigenous communities met on the Laguna Indian Reservation here last week for the 10th annual conference of the Indigenous Environment Network against the backdrop of increased mining activities for uranium used for nuclear reactors—and weapons. While one of the poorest areas in the county, the region surrounding the reservation in the western part of the state of New Mexico is one of the richest in uranium ore deposits. One of the largest open-pit uranium mines in the world, known as Jackpile, operated near a small Laguna town between 1953 and 1982. Originally owned by a small



notes

company known as Anaconda, Jackpile is now owned by Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). “They said the mine would make us rich but I’m still poor and almost everyone around me is dying of cancer and strange diseases,” said Dorothy Purley, a woman dying of lymphoma cancer, who worked for Anaconda Jackpile for 10 years. In the small town of Paguate, where Purley lives, an estimated 50 people who were miners died from cancer-­related illnesses. An additional 20 people who lived downwind from the mine also died, she said. Kathleen Tsosie, secretary of the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining, an advocacy group based in the northeastern part of the state, told a similar story. “There are a lot of Navajo widows who live alone,” she said. An estimated 350–400 members of the Navajo nation who were underground miners have died from diseases related to exposure to the radioactive uranium, according to Chris Shuey, an environmental health researcher with the Southwest Research and Information Center. But not all Native Americans at the conference condemned the uranium mining. “I would like to keep the uranium issue on the positive side,” said Harry Early, governor of the Laguna Pueblo. “The Jackpile mine provided employment for 800 people during its 30 years of existence and we don’t know if the cancer has really been caused by uranium.” John Redhouse of the Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum disagreed. “The social costs and health impacts outweigh any jobs and money that goes to Laguna,” he said. “Whatever apparent benefits accrue do not necessarily go to the communities but to the multinational energy companies.” Jackpile is now undergoing a $48 million reclamation program—paid for by ARCO and conducted by the Laguna tribe—aimed at restoring the landscape to resemble the way it appeared before the exploitation began. Many at the conference said the current reclamation effort was only partially completed and a lot of the uranium from the mine waste already had leached into the soil and water. “Two tributaries near the mine and the Rio San Jose have already tested positive for radiation contamination,” according to Manuel Pino with the Laguna-Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment. “It’s one of the best kept secrets of the United States.” Purley, who lived less than 1,000 meters from Jackpile, said she was not happy with progress of the reclamation project. “Every time the rain falls there is still this strange smell by the mine.” Inter Press Service, South-North Development Monitor, issue 4456, June 16, 1999.

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5. I recognize the danger of reductionism in this and I am not a philosopher. Suffice it to say that the position I most closely identify with in recent debates concerning the mind-body problem is functionalism: Arguably the most influential position on the mind-body relation during the past four decades. Functionalism conceives of mental kinds as “functional kinds,” not physical kinds. Pain, for example, is to be understood in terms of its function as a causal intermediary between sensory input (e.g. tissue damage), behaviour output (e.g. wincing, groaning, and escape behaviour), and other mental states (e.g. desire to be rid of it). An internal state of an organism that serves this function, which can vary from species to species (and perhaps from individual to individual), is said to be a “realizer” of pain. Most functionalists are physicalists in that they hold that only appropriate physical states could serve as realizers of mental states functionally conceived. But they differ from type—physicalists in holding that, on account of their variable realizability, mental states cannot be identified with physical—biological states. Functionalism construes psychology as an autonomous science of these functional properties and kinds, specified in terms of their causal roles and abstracted from their specific physical-biological realizations. This view of psychology has been influential; it can be considered the received view of the nature of cognitive science. The question whether or not functionalism is a non-reductive form of physicalism depends crucially on exactly what physical reduction requires, and it must be considered an open question. (J. Kim in Honderich 614)

chapter 10

1. Aesthetics in the form we understand it today, although it had its origins in Plato and Aristotle, is an Enlightenment idea. Indeed, the term itself was not coined until 1735 by Alexander Baumgarten, who took it from the Greek word aisthēsis, meaning sensation or perception. 2. It is a challenge to contain the available material to a manageable selection, so I confine the detailed theoretical material that informs this chapter to conceptions of the aesthetic espoused by the Frankfurt School and their precursors and allies, most prominently Marcuse and Adorno— Marcuse on the basis of the activist sensibilities he claims as foundational in the aesthetic, and Adorno for his notions of darkness and remystification in



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the face of the overwhelming pressures of capitalist modernity (for more on Marcuse and Adorno and Horkheimer, see chapter 1, this volume). 3. For my experiences of this, see chapter 6, this volume. 4. See chapter 6, this volume, “Learning from Cormac McCarthy,” for a description of the ways in which, once the emotions, feelings, or affect are generated these become manifest in the body itself. Real effects in the real world are generated in real bodies by fiction. 5. As Bill Brown argues, “literature has the capacity to preserve (however marginally) residues of phenomena that remain in some sense unrecognizable . . . in our existing historiographic registers. Within literature the detritus of history lingers, lying in wait” (4). Brown’s remarks are relevant here and also in the next chapter’s consideration of certain relevant aspects of history and temporality. 6. I am not breaking new ground, either, in asserting that thinking and being or “doing may be reunited by engagement with the arts and humanities. “When we perceive the arts as ‘humanities’ it is crucial that we interpret them as a demand that we pause, and in their light, re-examine our own realities, values, and dedications, for the arts not only present life concretely, stimulate the imagination, and integrate the different cultural elements of a society or of an epoch, they also present models for our imitation or rejection, visions and aspirations which mutely solicit our critical response” (Levi and Smith 180). 7. That Cities of the Plain, for example, was a screenplay before it was a book is evidence of this. 8. This alternate “unreal” world is akin to what Kenneth Lincoln characterizes as the “hyperreal” in McCarthy’s fiction (19). 9. See also Berman 22–23. 10. There is now no shortage of studies that claim to show how the reading of fiction improves “connectivity” in the brain (Berns et al.), how it stimulates empathy (Bal and Veltkamp), or develops theory of mind—the means by which we understand the mental states of others (Kidd and Castanoe). 11. I believe Adorno’s modernity to be my artistic Modernism on this occasion.

chapter 11

1. McCarthy is similar in this to certain Native American authors writing out of the Southwest—Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, or N. Scott Momaday.

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2. I use author-storyteller and reader-listener here as I am one of many who read McCarthy aloud to themselves or friends and partners. In my experience, this is common with McCarthy—people find the style euphonious and dramatic. 3. I ally myself entirely with Derek Attridge on the matter of affect: “I should make it clear at the outset that I am not relying on any principled distinction among the terms ‘emotion,’ ‘feeling,’ and ‘affect.’ Many attempts have been made to distinguish them, but no agreement on how this should be done, and since each term functions differently in different grammatical contexts it’s probably wise not to be too dogmatic about their meanings” (330). 4. The work of the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin is central to these ideas, in particular his series of lectures given at Oxford University in the 1950s: How to Do Things with Words. 5. “The artist’s ambition would never be more than a project if it did not form part of the lived reality of the people” (Glissant, Caribbean Dis­ course 235). 6. The link, here, to Nietzsche’s, then Marcuse’s, views of the proper place of art as resistant is instructive (see chapter 10, this volume). 7. If this seems unconvincing in any way, I would refer the reader to the way in which elements of the media in the United States has pushed the political agenda to the right through the creation of new “realities.” 8. “Whereas the signs in language refer only to other signs within the same system, and whereas language, therefore, lacks a world just as it lacks temporality and subjectivity, discourse is always about something. It is in discourse that the symbolic function of language is actualized” (Ricoeur 145). 9. In a letter from Erskine to McCarthy, archived in the Alkek Library and dated May 27, 1977, Erskine quotes Coleridge on the reproduction of dull and garrulous discourse resulting in the “affects of dullness and garrulity.” For Erskine “J.B., Hoghead, Primrose, Blind Richard, etc, etc . . . are still indistinguishable from one another and are equally boring.” The book “seems to be marred by so much that is repetitive and extraneous . . . the repetitive descriptions of blight and decay in the city that Suttree broods over” (91/19/1–3). 10. This is vertiginous in that it suggests radical and uncomfortable potential of the kind Benjamin identifies in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].



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Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. (Illuminations 271) Benjamin’s Jetztzeit seems to be the nunc stans, the eternal now. Developed by Augustine, this idea can be explained as follows: “Philosophers and theologians have spoken of the ‘nunc stans,’ the abiding now, the instant that knows no temporal articulation, where distinctions between now, earlier and later have fallen away or have not arisen. All of us know, I believe, poignant moments that have this timeless quality: unique and matchless, complete in themselves and somehow containing all there is in experience” (Loewald 65). 11. “Attention to the vocabularies in which sentences are formulated, rather than to individual sentences, makes us realize, for example, that the fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian” (Rorty 6). 12. There is a similarity here with Heideggerian criticism, in which the author function is lowered from the pedestal upon which it had been placed by critics and academics responding to Western literature: “Heidegger implies that the author’s personality is present in the work, but is a mere conduit whereby Being can reveal itself. . . . Heideggerian theory maintains the personal life-world of the author is relatively unimportant” (Magliola 8). 13. I should acknowledge at this point Foucault’s notion of the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (“Two Lectures” 82), in which “naïve knowledges . . . located low down on the hierarchy” are reemerging to challenge the established order. Plainly this is an area in which Foucault does fill and structure the “void.” chapter 12

1. When asked about the novel he was working on, in 2007, McCarthy said, “It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a

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brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl.” He added, “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try” (Jurgensen). 2. Things change radically in Silko’s later fiction, where women as protagonists dominate. 3. Soto adds that “[Louise] Pratt’s observation that languages of the ‘contact zone’ are ‘commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure’ (6) is instructive here” (61). 4. That Native American cultures understood space and time in concert, and in ways different to Europeans, is uncontroversial. It is important, though, that it would be naïve to suppose that even traditional, or traditionally inclined, Native Americans cling to a pre-Columbian understanding of the phenomena: Some scholars dismiss outright the compatibility of Native Americans and clock time. Calvin Martin, for example, argues that clock time was not Indian time (Martin, 1987: 16) while Donald L. Fixico argues that the cyclical nature of American Indian time inoculates against inculcations of linear and clock based time (Fixico, 2003). Historian Shep Krech quite rightly questions such assumptions and urges scholars to “restore balance and fullness to temporality in native North America. It is time,” he urges, “to bring linear time back in” (Krech, 2006: 585). Native American temporality is not linear or cyclical, natural or mechanical. Native Americans, like Euro Americans and African Americans, functioned with in multiple, conflicting, cyclical, linear, natural and clock times amongst others. What they did not share was the processes through which clock time was instilled. . . . Other Indian nations such as the Lenape and the Blackfoot for example, measured time through the passage of winters comprised of 13 lunar cycles. The naming of the lunations, however, was contingent on geography. When the Lenape lived in Pennsylvania, they referred to the Euro-American month of March as “the shad moon” for this was the time at which the shad fish “began to ascend the fresh-water rivers from the sea” (Thatcher, 1833, 193). Upon their removal to Ohio, the same month was referred to as the Moon of “the sap-­ running” (Thatcher, 1833, 193). Native Americans relied on nature to organize their civilizations and direct action and inaction. (Wells 3–4)

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259

index

Abbey, Edward, 106, 108 Adorno, Theodor: on art as resistance, 181–82, 183; on art’s contamination, 16–17, 242n2; on consciousness of plight, 184– 85; on disenchantment, 13, 50, 54, 183, 184; on Enlightenment, 13, 15, 38, 50, 54; on identity and non-identity, 67, 232n4; on instrumental reason, 229n3; on synthesis, 66; on technology, 10 aesthetics, xviii, 242n1; consumption of, 179; feelings and, 169– 70; language and, 187; Marcuse on, xv, xvi, 180, 227n2, 242n2; for resistance to modernity, 116, 177; sublime in, 176 affect. See feelings Africa, 27, 31–32 Alejandra (fictional character), 124–25, 208, 213–14 All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berman), 19–22 All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy): as bildungsroman, 133; border zone in, 208–14; Cervantes quote in, 45; dance of violence

261

in, 90; horses as mystical in, 123–26; Marx, K., and, 9; Native Americans in, 218–19; as seeleroman, 134; slow violence in, 81; women in, xiv, 206, 207, 208 alternate realities, 29, 180, 182–83, 191 American Canticles (Lincoln), 205 American Indians. See Native Americans American Progress (Gast), 47, 107–8, 232n15 amputation, 76–77 anchorite, 52, 55, 74, 139–40, 239n6 ancient. See premodern Andrews, Malcolm, 176 “Angelus Novus” (Klee), 59–60 animals, xviii, 237n2; bats, 68, 130; as borderless, 122–23; cats, 120–21; cattle, 127, 129, 131; in Child of God, 119–20; crayfish, 91, 119; desire in, compared to human, 6; in fossil form, 117; hogs, 117–18; Native Americans and, 159; in No Country for

262

inde x

animals (continued) Old Men, 127; in Outer Dark, 117–19; as premodern, 117–18, 119, 123–24, 127; reenchantment by, 16; as resistance to modernity, 52, 116, 125; in The Road, 127–28, 237n2; in Southern compared to Southwestern fiction, 117; spiritual linked to, 13, 16, 128–29, 130–31; utilitarian uses of, 116, 188; wampus cat, 120, 146. See also dogs; horses; wolves animism, 54 Anthropocene, 81, 97 anthropocentrism, 150, 151–54, 158 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 208, 216–17 Appalachian novels: dogs in, 121; modernity and premodernity in, 64–65; modernity in, 1; subjugated knowledges in, 221–22. See also Child of God (McCarthy); The Orchard Keeper (McCarthy); Outer Dark (McCarthy); Suttree (McCarthy) Aristotle, 189, 242n1, 245n11 Arnold, Edwin, 104, 137, 140, 146 art: capitalism and, 179–80, 181, 242n2; consciousness of plight in, 184–85; disenchantment in, 183, 184; Enlightenment separating science and, 170; Horkheimer and Adorno on contamination of, 16–17, 242n2; as humanities, 243n6; mechanization and, 17; politics related to, 170; reality and, 177–78, 180–83; as resistance

to modernity, 5, 11–12, 16, 170, 178, 181–82, 183 asceticism: capitalism and, 12–13; of fundamentalist religions, 12; Nietzsche on, 10–11, 14, 74, 178; in Protestant work ethic, 11–12; technology linked to, 10–11 Ather (fictional character), 64–65, 120–21 atomic power, 24, 160–61, 203 Attridge, Derek, 170–73, 190, 244n3 Augustine, 142, 144 Austin, J. L., 188, 244n4 author function, 196–98, 245n12 autoethnography, xvii, 99–103, 227n8, 235n4, 236n6 bad conscience, 11 Ballard, J. G., 99, 111 baptism, 65–66 barbed wire, 61 The Bathers (Seurat), 65 bats, 68, 130 Baumgarten, Alexander, 242n1 Beckett, Samuel, 147, 185 Bell, Daniel, 19–20 Bell, Vereen, 148 Bellah, Robert, 239n9 Ben (fictional character), 70–74 Benjamin, Walter, 17–18, 58–60, 244n10 Berman, Marshall, 5, 19–22 Beston, Thomas, 4 bildungsroman, xvi, 133–34, 238n1 Billy Parham (fictional character): bildungsroman of, 133–34;

mixed blood of, 215; mysticism crushed in, 127; oneness of, 51, 159; premodern projections of, 56–57; resistance to modernity failed by, 56–59; seeleroman incomplete for, 140–41, 142–45, 148; spiritual guides for, 140– 41; spirituality in nature for, 157; wolves and, 131 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), xii; dance of violence in, 90; epilogue of, 47–48, 50, 51, 61–62; geological time in, 173–74; gifting copies of, 104–5; horses as resistance to modernity in, 121– 22; as interdisciplinary, 103–4; kid in, 44, 46–47, 51, 52, 53, 88; modernity in, 2, 48; mysticism in, 123; phenomenology and, 194–96; photograph of McCarthy on, 3–4; role of violence in, 79–80; Sheriff Bell in, xiii, 93, 96–97; tableaux in, 173–74; time and space in, 27; as Vietnam-era novel, 36, 86, 162, 194, 195; violence as necessary truth in, 88–90; women in, 207, 208. See also Judge Holden (fictional character) Bloom, Harold, 100 Bochner, Arthur, 102–3 Boehme, Jacob, 137, 140, 239n4 border trilogy: animals as premodern in, 123–24, 127; dogs in, 123; economic rationalism in, 13; hope in, 146–47; mechanization resisted by, 17; modernity’s transformations in, 7; mysticism in, 53–54; Native Americans in,

inde x

239n1; nomads in, 55; powerlessness in, 37, 60; resistance to modernity in, 48, 53–54; role of violence in, 80; as seeleroman, 142–43, 183–84; separation in, 138; violence as justice in, 91–92; wolves and horses as beyond reason in, 128, 237n4. See also All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy); Cities of the Plain (McCarthy); The Crossing (McCarthy) border zone, xviii; in All the Pretty Horses, 208–14; animals as borderless in, 122–23; as contact zone, xv, 80, 189, 208–9, 211, 215–17, 221–22, 246n3; economic modernity and, 20; globalization impacting, 32; hybrid language of, 217–18, 224; as marginalized, 205, 225; migration and, 55, 223–24; nomads in, 214–16; ranches in, 210–11; reenchantment and, 34; as resistance to modernity, 34, 116, 224–25; subjugated knowledges in, 221–22; swimming across, 106, 110; as third space, 211, 215; women as marginalized in, 205 bourgeoisie, 8–9, 19–20, 22, 23 Boyd Parham (fictional character), 134, 135–37, 215 Brewton, Vince, 86 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky), 37, 133, 169 Brown, Bill, 243n5 Burroughs, William, 69, 99, 111 Bush, George W., 104

263

264

inde x

calculability, 5, 15 Camp, Walter, 165 capitalism: art and, 179–80, 181, 242n2; asceticism and, 12–13; end-of-history for, 29–30; as global, 14–15; hermetic I in, 48; Holden’s gunpowder linked to, 45; hybridized language for, 29; kid’s disruption of, 44; Marcuse on, 15, 229n4; modernity and, 8–10, 15; nihilism of, 20; subsistence compared to, 165; time and space in, 26–27; transformation as continuous in, 8 Caribbean Discourse (Glissant), 28–29 Carr, Peter, xiv Catch-22 (Heller), 101 Cather, Willa, 108 cats, 120–21 cattle, 127, 129, 131 Ceremony (Silko), 161, 188, 208, 239n9 Cervantes, Miguel de, 4, 45 Chamberlain, Samuel, 37, 41 change: feelings, politics, and, 113, 115; individuality of, 115; literature engendering, 99, 101, 102– 3, 106, 111 Chigurh (fictional character), 83, 93–96, 97, 146, 175–76 Child of God (McCarthy), 61; animals in, 119–20; premodern consuming modern in, 119–20; women in, xiv, 205 Chollier, Christine, xiv, 9 Christianity, 6, 10–11, 144, 152, 154, 166, 219 Christ Is a Native American (Peelman), 139

church, nature as, 159, 161 Cities of the Plain (McCarthy): animals as borderless in, 122; animals linked to spirituality in, 131–32; atomic power in, 24; epilogue of, 56–58, 179; role of violence in, 79–80; as seeleroman, 134; slow violence in, 81; space in, 167; tableaux in, 173; time in, 57–58, 167; women in, 206. See also Billy Parham (fictional character) civilizing mission: of Enlightenment, 50; of Holden, 7, 41–42; of modernity, 7, 41–42, 50; against Native Americans, 41–42; violence in, 40–41, 42 coin toss, 83, 94, 175–76 colonialism, xiv; in The Crossing, 49; Dussel on violence of, 40, 50, 80, 89; guns in, 92; Holden on, 81–82; mysticism’s eradication by, 88; nature’s relationship with, 164–65; slow violence of, 80–81, 234n1; Vietnam as failure of, 87–88 Colum, Padraic, 4 comedy, 112 community: individuality conflicting with, 69–70; modernity exploding, 69–70; sentient beings sharing, 139, 239n5; separation from, 138–40; in The Stonemason, 70, 72 complexity, 21, 30 Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey), 26 consciousness of plight, 184–85 conservative politics, xiii–xv, xvi, 96–97, 178

consumption, 33–34, 44, 48, 57, 164, 179 contact zone, xv, 80, 189, 208–9, 211, 215–17, 221–22, 246n3 Cormackian, 104 Cormac McCarthy Journal, 104 Cormac McCarthy Society, 104 Cornelius Suttree (fictional character), 17, 43, 52, 65–66, 69–70, 157 The Counselor (McCarthy), 97, 178, 233n7; end of time in, 203–4; role of violence in, 80; tableaux in, 176; women in, 205, 207–8 Crash (Ballard), 111 crayfish, 91, 119 Crofutt, George A., 47 The Crossing (McCarthy), 37, 91, 165; animals and spirituality linked in, 128–29; colonialism in, 49; gypsies in, 59, 137, 140, 141, 143–44, 158, 212; horses in, 123; Marx, K., and, 9; mysticism addressed in, 137–38; Native Americans in, 155, 156, 220; nuclear age and, 160–62, 203; order questioned in, 49; permanent structures in, 55–56; as seeleroman, 134; slow violence in, 81; Spanish language in, xv, 188–90, 217–18; tableaux in, xvi; wolves in, 49, 126–27; women in, xiv, 206. See also Billy Parham (fictional character) Crowley, Aleister, 231n10 crumb, devouring, 39, 73, 204, 233n7 Crutzen, Paul, 80–81

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Culla Holme (fictional character), 62, 69, 83, 112, 117, 121 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Bell, D.), 19–20 cultural geography, xviii, 19, 34, 150, 156–57, 239n1 dance, of violence, 46, 81–82, 87–88, 90 Deleuze, Gilles, 55, 56, 222–23 DeLisle, Anne, 197 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 165, 166, 238n3 Descartes, René, 5–6, 163, 175 desire, 6 deterritorialization, 34 devouring crumb, 39, 73, 204, 233n7 Diamond, Jared, 235n4 Diawara, Manthia, 31–32 Díaz, Porfirio, 122–23 diegesis, 189, 196 disenchantment: in art, 183, 184; Enlightenment and, 13, 50, 54; in modernity, 13, 183 Dispatches (Herr), 85–88 dogs: in border trilogy, 123; in “A Drowning Incident,” 67, 91, 119; as modernity symbol, 118– 19, 120, 121; as utilitarian tool, 91, 120, 122, 127 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 37, 133, 169, 194 Dourif, Brad, 74 “Drift Away” (Gray), 4 driving trip, through Southwest, 105–6 “A Drowning Incident” (McCarthy), 62, 67, 91, 119 drug smuggling, 36, 96 dualism, 139

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Dubliners (Joyce), 99 Dueña Alfonsa (fictional character), 23, 50, 207, 210, 214 Durkheim, Emile, 82, 234n2 Dussel, Enrique, 5, 31–32, 46; on colonial violence, 40, 50, 80, 89; on instrumental reason, 30, 231n8; on modernity’s limits, 29–30 Eco, Umberto, 196 Ecological Indian, 155–56, 240n4 economics, 12–13, 20. See also capitalism education: of Dueña Alfonsa, 210; of Holden, 40–41 Eliot, T. S., 66 emancipation, liberation compared to, 223–24 embodiment, 76–77, 106–12, 236n6 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 34–35, 158, 223–24, 228n6, 230n9 empiricist and idealist, 174, 185, 192 end, of time, 203–4 end-of-history, 8, 29–30, 34, 219, 229n6 Enlightenment: art and science separate in, 170; calculability in, 5, 15; civilizing mission of, 50; disenchantment and, 13, 50, 54; Habermas on, 24–26, 229n2; Holden representing, 37–38, 42–43, 81; Horkheimer and Adorno on, 13, 15, 38, 50, 54; Kant on, 41; time and, 26; utility in, 15

environmentalism, 155, 158, 159– 60, 163, 198, 221, 240nn2–4 epilogue: of Blood Meridian, 47–48, 50, 51, 61–62; of Cities of the Plain, 56–58, 179 epistemological experience of literature, 106, 112 Erskine, Albert, 193, 244n9 Eurocentrism: Hegel on modernity and, 40; of Holden, 37–38, 40–41, 84; modernity’s, 1, 5, 14, 40; nature and, 158; violence and, 50, 84 Evenson, Brian, 223 existentialism, 69–70, 144 exploitation, of nature, 5 Falk, Richard, 149–52, 153, 158 Faulkner, William, 61, 115, 194 feelings: aesthetics and, 169–70; Attridge on, 170–73, 244n3; autoethnography and, xvii, 102–3; John Grady Cole representing, 124–25; language and, 187; literature engendering, 101, 102–3; McCarthy’s novels engendering, 112–13; mind and body bridged by, 175; political change through, 113, 115; as reality, 181, 183; for reenchantment, 225; for resistance to modernity, 170–71 feminist critiques, xiv fish, in The Road, 176–77, 204 Fisher-Wirth, Helen, xiv Fixico, Donald L., 158, 220–21, 240n3, 246n4 fossils, 117, 122

Foucault, Michel, 25, 197–98, 221–22, 224, 245n13 Frankfurt School, 5, 10, 15, 17, 21, 23, 229n3, 242n2 freeway overpass, 7, 56–57, 81, 138, 157 frontier mythology, 84–85, 88, 217–18 Frye, Northrop, 135, 136 functionalism, 242n5 fundamentalist religions, 12, 14 futility of resistance, 21–22, 33–34, 51–53 gamblers, 42–43 Gandhi, Mahatma, 22 The Gardener’s Son (McCarthy), 62, 74–77, 176, 207, 237n2 Garrard, Greg, 221, 237n5 Gast, John, 47, 107–8, 232n15 Gene Harrogate (fictional character), 17, 68–69, 73, 222 geological time, xii, 67, 81, 109, 154, 173–74, 204 Giddens, Anthony, 31 Glanton gang, 10–11, 13, 48, 86, 122 Glissant, Edouard, 5, 28–29, 55, 56 globalization, 26–36, 229n7; of capitalism, 14–15; of violence, 90–91 God, 139–40, 142, 147–48, 239n7 God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Deloria), 165, 166, 238n3 Goldman, Alan, 112 good guys, 147, 168, 176, 184, 205

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Goya, Francisco, 231n9 grace, 143, 144, 146, 154 Grandin, Temple, 131 Gray, Dobie, 4 Great Gambler, 42–43 grok, 111–12 Grundrisse (Marx, K.), 9 Guattari, Félix, 55, 56, 222–23 Guillemin, George, 47 gunpowder, 45, 161–62 guns: Holden’s inscription on, 41, 92. See also weapons technology Guy (fictional character), 45, 132 gypsies, 59, 137, 140, 141, 143–44, 158, 212 Habermas, Jurgen, 22–26, 229nn2–4 Hacker, Peter, 199 Hardt, Michael, 5, 34–35, 158, 223–24, 228n6, 230nn8–9 Harmon (fictional character), 118 Harvey, David, 26–27 Hastrup, Kirsten, 236n6 Hegel, G. W. F., 84, 233n6; on aesthetics, 169–70; on desire, 6; on end-of-history, 30; on Eurocentric modernity, 40; on identity and non-identity, 232n4; on master-slave dialectic, 6–8, 10, 74; on modernity, 5, 22–23; in The Stonemason, 71–72; on time, 58–59 Heidegger, Martin, 153, 169–70, 187, 191–92, 240n2, 245n12 Heinlein, Robert, 111 Heller, Joseph, 101

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hermetic I, 1, 5, 48, 140, 150, 152 Herr, Michael, 85–88, 89 historical determinism, of Chigurh, 94–95 history: for disrupting modernity, 58–59; end-of-, 8, 29–30, 34, 219, 229n6; Hegel on, 6–7; local resistance to, 28–29; phenomenology and, 194–95 hogs, 117–18 Holden. See Judge Holden (fictional character) holemaker, 47–48 Holloway, David, 9, 179–80 hope, 146–47, 168, 204, 239n10 Horkheimer, Max, 38; on art’s contamination, 16–17, 242n2; on disenchantment, 13, 50, 54; on Enlightenment, 13, 15, 38, 50, 54; on instrumental reason, 229n3; on synthesis, 66; on technology, 10 horses, 29; in fossil form, 122; John Grady Cole and, 54–55, 124–26, 131; multiple roles of, 123; mysticism of, 54, 116–17, 123–26; in Outer Dark, 121; as premodern, 123; as beyond reason, 128, 237n4; in resistance to modernity, 52, 53, 121–22, 124, 125–26 humanities, 243n6 humanity: desire in, compared to animal, 6; modernity as demise of, xi–xiii; redemption as incapable for, 146–47; as temporary, 162; violence as necessary truth of, 88–90, 97 Husserl, Edmund, 187, 191–92

hybrid language, 29, 185, 188–90, 217–18, 224 hypermodern violence, 93 I, 7, 18, 138; hermetic, 1, 5, 48, 140, 150, 152 idealist and empiricist, 174, 185, 192 identity, 67, 140, 232n4 imperialism, 1, 8, 229n2 inclusion, 193–94 Increase Tipton (fictional character), xii, 62 Indians. See Native Americans individuality: change and, 115; in Christianity, 152; community conflicting with, 69–70; hermetic I as, 1, 5, 48, 140, 150, 152; modernity and, 50–51, 69–70 industrial agriculture, as slow violence, 81 influences, 3–5; painterly, 65–66 Ingarden, Roman, 191 instrumental reason, 116, 145, 231n8; Dussel on, 30, 231n8; Habermas on, 24; of Holden, 45, 81, 148; Horkheimer and Adorno on, 229n3; modernity’s, 5, 10, 25, 125, 237n4 interdisciplinary, McCarthy as, xvi, 103–4 inventive language, 105, 184, 185 irrationality, 135, 231n8 irrational realities, 177–78, 183 Iser, Wolfgang, 191–92 jackrabbit heads, 79, 173 Jackson, Frederick Turner, 84–85

James, William, 144–45 Jameson, Frederic, 5, 11–12, 33, 135–36, 179, 238n2 Jauss, Hans Robert, 191–92 John Grady Cole (fictional character): Alejandra and, 124–25, 208, 213–14; in contact zone, 208–9, 215–16; feelings of, 124–25; horses and, 54–55, 124–26, 131; mixed blood of, 215; modernity fled by, 212–13; romance of, 50–51, 53, 135–36; spirituality in nature for, 157 Josyph, Peter, 3, 89, 103 Joyce, James, 1, 99, 187 Judge Holden (fictional character) (Holden), xii; Ben compared to, 73; Chamberlain as source for, 41; civilizing mission of, 7, 41–42; on colonialism, 81–82; education of, 40–41; Enlightenment represented by, 37–38, 42–43, 81; as Eurocentric, 37–38, 40–41, 84; as Great Gambler, 42–43; gun inscription of, 41, 92; gunpowder of, 45, 161–62; hermetic I of, 48; instrumental reason of, 45, 81, 148; modernity of, 18, 37–38, 77, 88, 89, 162–63, 178; naming by, 200; as Nietzschean, 10–11; rationalism of, 13, 25, 38–39, 82–84, 116; rituals and, 13, 46, 82–84; scalping by, 45, 82; suze­ rainty of, 38, 39; violence and, 38–39, 41–42, 46, 81–82, 84 “Judging Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West by Its Cover” (Josyph), 3

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justice, violence as, 91–92 Kant, Immanuel, 41 Keneally, Thomas, 108 kid (fictional character), 44, 46–47, 51, 52, 53, 88 Klee, Paul, 59–60 knife fight, as contact zone, 208–9 Krech, Shepard, 155–56, 159, 246n4 Kushner, David, 3 “Land of the Spotted Eagle” (Standing Bear), 165 landscape. See cultural geography language, xv, xviii; aesthetics and, 187; in contact zone, 246n3; feelings and, 187; hybrid, 29, 185, 188–90, 217–18, 224; inventiveness of, 105, 184, 185; limits of, 129–30; marginalized, 191, 208, 222, 224; modernity’s subsuming of, 203; neologisms in, 111, 184; performativity in, xv, 187–91, 195; reality and, 191, 195–96; as resistance to modernity, 29, 116, 190; as third space, 190. See also Spanish language Lauter, Paul, 43 Lawrence, D. H., 168 “Learning from Art: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine Determinism” (Sansom), 182–83 “Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit” (Hegel), 23 Lester Ballard (fictional character), 52, 73, 83, 121, 138

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liberation, emancipation compared to, 223–24 library, of McCarthy, xvi, 3–4, 103 Lincoln, Kenneth, 205, 243n8 literary criticism, 102 literature: autoethnography approach to, 102–3; change created by, 99, 101, 102–3, 106, 111; as embodiment experience, 111; feelings engendered by, 101, 102–3; ontological and epistemological experience of, 106, 112; pleasure in, 101 local resistance, 19, 28–36 Los Alamos nuclear tests, 138, 160–61 Luce, Dianne, 65, 175–76 Lyell, Charles, 41 Madero, Francisco, 122–23 magic, 13, 14, 15–16, 18, 183–84 Magliola, Robert, 192 Manifest Destiny, 47, 87, 92 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx, K.), 8 manufactured, xi, 61, 62, 66–67 Marcuse, Herbert, 11, 17; on aesthetics, xv, xvi, 180, 227n2, 242n2; on capitalism, 15, 229n4; irrational realities of, 177–78, 183; on technology, 15 marginalization, 191, 205, 208, 222, 224–25 Martin, Calvin, 239n5 Marx, Karl, 233n6; on bourgeoisie, 8–9; on capitalism’s nihilism, 20; on end-of-history, 8, 30; on modernity, 5; on slavery, 7; in The Stonemason, 71–72

Marx, Leo, 76 Masters, Joshua, 199 master-slave dialectic, 6–8, 10, 71, 74 matriarchy, 205, 207 McCarthy, Cormac. See specific topics McClure, John, 145, 157, 238n1 mechanization, art and, 17 media portrayals, of violence, 85–86 Melville, Herman, 4, 19, 79, 85, 151, 194, 203 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 193 messianic figure, 134, 135–37 Mexicans, xiv, 209–10 Mexico, 28, 124, 167. See also border zone migration, in border zone, 55, 223–24 mimesis, 29, 175, 189, 196 mind and body: environmentalism and, 163; feelings for bridging, 175; functionalism in, 242n5; in reading McCarthy, 170–71, 172; separation of, 5–6, 170, 175, 190; in The Stonemason, 72 misogyny, xiv, 206, 207 Mitchell, Donald, 156 mixed blood, 215 Moby Dick (Melville), 19, 79, 85, 151, 203 modernity: in Appalachian novels, 1–2, 18; asceticism in, 10–11; Benjamin on, 17–18; in Blood Meridian, 2, 48; capitalism and, 8–10, 15; cattle representing, 127, 129; challenges and



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responses to, xvi–xvii; characteristics of, 1, 14; civilizing mission of, 7, 41–42, 50; community exploded by, 69–70; disenchantment in, 13, 183; dogs symbolizing, 118–19, 120, 121; of Dueña Alfonsa, 50; as empire, 34–35; end-of-history for, 29–30; Eurocentrism and, 1, 5, 14, 40; in The Gardener’s Son, 62, 74–77; Habermas on, 22–23, 229n2, 229n4; Hegel on, 5, 22–23; hermetic I in, 48; history for disrupting, 58–59; Holden as, 18, 37–38, 77, 88, 89, 162–63, 178; as humanity’s demise, xi–xiii; individuality and, 50–51, 69–70; instrumental reason of, 5, 10, 25, 125, 237n4; John Grady Cole’s flight from, 212–13; kid’s disruption of, 44; language subsumed by, 203; Lester Ballard’s fleeing of, 73; Marxist understanding of, 5; Nietzsche and Weber challenging, 14; nomads as threat to, 55–56, 223–24, 225; Oelschlaeger on, 153; permanent structures as, 55–56; philosophical currents of, 4–5; rationalism of, 1; realism privileged over romance in, 135; reality shaped by, 29; romance sidelined by, 50; rural ideal doomed by, 74–77; Sheriff Bell on, 96–97; simplicity linked to, 30; slow violence of, 80–81, 93, 234n1; spirituality unrecognized in, 143–44; in Suttree, 2,

18, 33, 61; synthesis and, 44, 58–59, 88; tableaux of hegemony of, 212–13; as technological, 1; as temporary, 154, 156; time and space in, 19, 26–28; trains as, 76–77; transformation and, 7, 15. See also premodern; resistance to modernity Momaday, N. Scott, 220 Murphy, Palmer, 108 My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue (Chamberlain), 41 mysticism: Ather representing, 120–21; Billy Parham’s crushed, 127; cats as, 120–21; colonialism’s eradication of, 88; The Crossing’s addressing of, 137– 38; of horses, 54, 116–17, 123– 26; John Grady Cole and, 124– 25; magic and, 13, 14, 15–16, 18, 183–84; resistance to modernity through, 46–47, 53–54, 116; of wolves, 116–17, 126–27, 132 myth: consumption destroying, 164; frontier, 84–85, 88, 217– 18; Slotkin on, 2, 84–85 Naess, Arne, 163 Nagel, Thomas, 130–31 naming, 199–201, 203 Nandy, Ashis, 220 Native Americans: in All the Pretty Horses, 218–19; animals and, 159; in border trilogy, 239n1; Christianity’s attraction for, 10; in The Crossing, 155, 156, 220; cultural geography of, 157; as Ecological Indian, 155–56,

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Native Americans (continued) 240n4; Great Gambler of, 42–43; inclusion and, 193; language as resistance in, 29; McCarthy’s knowledge of, 42–43; modernity’s civilizing mission against, 41–42; nature’s relationship with, 154–56, 157, 159, 164–65; nomadism and, 55; oneness and, 163, 240n3; phenomenology and, 193; religious realities of, 239n9; resistance to modernity of, 156; revisionism, performativity and, 191; role of, 2; sacredness and, 159; in Southwest, 219–20; space and, 27, 28, 219, 246n4; spiritual impact of desecrating nature for, 154–61; Swift’s Yahoos as, 42, 231n6; time and, 27, 28, 167, 219, 246n4; uranium mining and, 159–60, 240n4; weapons technology and, 235n4 nature: as church, 159, 161; Eurocentrism and, 158; exploitation of, 5; grace in, 154; manufactured and, 61, 66–67; Native Americans and, 154–56, 157, 159, 164–65; as passive, xi, 62; reclamation by, 62–63; reenchantment in, 154; resistance to modernity in, 116; sacred in, 151, 152; spiritual impact of desecrating, 154–61; spirituality in, 157; suffering of, 159 Negri, Antonio, 5, 34–35, 158, 223–24, 228n6, 230nn8–9 neologisms, 111, 184

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 10–11, 14, 74, 178 nihilism, 20, 148, 168, 178, 204, 228n1 Nixon, Rob, 80, 234n1 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy): animals in, 127; Chigurh in, 83, 93–96, 97, 146, 175–76; global and local in, 36; hypermodern violence in, 93; phenomenology and, 196; political conservatism in, xiii; resistance as futile in, 33–34; role of violence in, 80; tableaux in, 175–76 nomads: in border zone, 214–16; gypsies as, 59, 137, 140, 141, 143–44, 158, 212; as liberated, 224; modernity threatened by, 55–56, 223–24, 225; resistance to modernity of, 50–52, 133 non-identity, 67, 232n4 “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” (Jameson), 33 nuclear power, 24, 160–62, 203 nuclear tests, 138, 160–61 Oates, Joyce Carol, xiii Oelschlaeger, Max, 153, 168 oneness, 51, 159, 163, 240n3 ontological experience of literature, 106, 112 optimism, 16, 148, 204 The Orchard Keeper (McCarthy), xi–xii, 61; Ather in, 64–65, 120–21; fossils in, 117; mysticism in, 120–21; painterly influences in, 65; Spanish language in, 227n3; violence in, 83

order, questioning of, 49 ordinary violence, 83 Outer Dark (McCarthy), 61; animals in, 117–19; as bildungsroman, 133; hogs as premodern in, 117–18; horses in, 121; nomads in, 52; painterly influences in, 65; violence in, 83; women in, 205 Outermost House (Beston), 4 outsiders, 2, 69–70, 198, 208, 222 Owens, Louis, 196–97, 198 “The Painterly Eye” (Luce), 65, 175–76 painterly influences, 65–66 Papaw (fictional character), 70–74 passive, nature as, xi, 62 Pearce, Richard, 74 Peebles, Stacey, 104 Peelman, Achiel, 139 Peet, Richard, 157 performativity, xviii, 5, 29, 30–31, 185, 194, 203; language as, xv, 187–91, 195; naming as, 199– 200; revisionism and, 191; swimming Rio Grande as, 106 permanence, 55–56, 162–63, 166 pessimism, xviii, 15, 17, 23, 36, 148 phenomenology, 185, 203; author function and, 196–98; history and, 194–95; Husserl and Heidegger on, 187, 191–92; naming and, 199–201; Native Americans and, 193 Phillips, Dana, xv Philosophical Discourse of Moder­ nity (Habermas), 25

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philosophical influences, 4–5 photograph, of McCarthy, 3–4 pictographs, 122, 156 pleasure, in literature, 101 Poetics (Aristotle), 189 The Political Unconscious (Jameson), 135, 136 politics, xviii; art related to, 170; conservative, xiii–xv, xvi, 96–97, 178; feelings, change and, 113, 115; religion and, 149–50; spirituality for renewing, 150 Pound, Ezra, 4 powerlessness, 37, 60 Pratt, Mary Louise, 211–12, 246n3 premodern: animals as, 117–18, 119, 123–24, 127; Ather as, 64–65; Billy Parham’s projections of, 56–57; fossils as, 117; Gene Harrogate as, 68–69; Mexico as romance of, 124; modernity consumed by, 119– 20; modernity melded with, in Appalachian novels, 64–65; modernity’s relationship to, in “Wake for Susan,” 63–64; Southwest’s war between modern and, 2; in The Stonemason, 70–71; in Suttree, 63 Prince-Hughes, Dawn, 131 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 41 Priola, Marty, 104 prophet of destruction, xi, xiii, 93, 224–25 The Protestant Ethic (Weber), 11–12 Protestantism, 11–12, 13, 14, 74

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Psalms, 72–73 The Rainbow (Lawrence), 168 ranches, in border zone, 210–11 realism, 135, 146, 150, 239n9 reality: alternate, 29, 180, 182–83, 191; art and, 177–78, 180–83; feelings as, 181, 183; horses, wolves and, 29; irrational realities and, 177–78, 183; language and, 191, 195–96; modernity shaping, 29; naming and, 199– 200; religious realities as, 239n9 reason and rationalism: Chigurh symbolizing, 94; in economics, 13; gamblers and, 42–43; Habermas on, 24–26; of Holden, 13, 25, 38–39, 82–84, 116; modernity’s, 1; reason used against, 25; rituals and, 13, 82–84; sleep of, 44–45, 231n9; wolves and horses as beyond, 128, 237n4. See also instrumental reason rebirth, 168, 204 reciprocity, in nature, 157, 159 reclamation, by nature, 62–63 redemption, 40, 46, 60, 134, 146– 47, 185 reenchantment: animals for, 16; border zone and, 34; feelings for, 225; in nature, 154; spirituality for, 183–84; The Sunset Limit­ ed’s possibility for, 148–49 Reichard, Gladys, 163 religion: anthropocentric, 151–54; asceticism in, 12; dualism in, 139; Falk on, 149–52, 153, 158; fundamentalism in, 12, 14;

grace in, 154; hermetic I in, 152; magic lacking in, 13, 15–16; as political force, 149– 50; realism and, 146, 239n9; religious experience in, 238n3; religious realities in, 239n9; rituals in, 234n2; spirituality drained from, 12; suffering in, 150, 151, 152; violence of rituals in, 82, 243n3 research, McCarthy’s detailed, 74, 92, 191 resistance to modernity, xviii; aesthetics for, 116, 177; animals as, 52, 116, 125; art as, 5, 11–12, 16, 170, 178, 181–82, 183; Billy Parham’s failed, 56–59; in border trilogy, 48; border zone as, 34, 116, 224–25; complexity as, 30; environmentalism as, 158; feelings for, 170–71; as futile, 21–22, 33–34, 51–53; of Gandhi, 22; Hardt and Negri on, 35; horses in, 52, 53, 121– 22, 124, 125–26; language as, 29, 116, 190; local, 19, 28–36; mysticism for, 46–47, 53–54, 116; of Native Americans, 156; of nomads, 50–52, 133; powerlessness in, 37, 60; romance as, 52, 53, 135; spirituality as, 147– 48; time and space in, 166–67; wolves as, 49, 52, 53, 91 revisionism, 191 Ricoeur, Paul, 192, 194–95, 244n8 Rinthy (fictional character), 69, 118, 205, 207 Rio Grande, swimming of, 106, 110

ritualistic violence, 46, 82–84, 234n3 rituals: Holden and, 13, 46, 82–84; Lester Ballard’s violence as, 83; religious, 234n2; spirituality disconnected from, 128–29, 137, 238n3; violence of religious, 82, 234n3 “The River Merchant’s Wife” (Pound), 4 The Road (McCarthy), xi, xii; animals in, 127–28, 237n2; consciousness of plight in, 184–85; fish in, 176–77, 204; globalization in, 36; globalized violence in, 90–91; God in, 147; good guys in, 147, 168, 176, 184, 205; hope in, 146–47, 168, 204, 239n10; instrumental reason in, 25; naming in, 203; nihilism or rebirth in, 168, 204; resistance as futile in, 33–34; role of violence in, 80; setting of, 62, 232n3; slow violence of, 81, 93, 97; spirituality in, 204–5; tableaux in, 176–77 Roberts, Monty, 131 romance, 50–53, 124, 134–37, 157–58 Rorty, Richard, 195–96, 200 Rural Fictions, Urban Realities (Storey), 76 rural ideal, 74–77 Rushdie, Salman, 146 sacred, 151, 152, 159, 164–65 Sanborn, Wallis, 120, 121, 237n2 Sansom, Dennis, 182–83 scalping, 45, 82, 84

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Schopenhauer, Arthur, 170, 176 science, art separated from, 170 “The Second Coming” (Yeats), 129 seeleroman, 13–14, 134, 138, 140– 46, 148, 183–84, 238n1 sentient beings, community of, 139, 239n5 separation: of art and science, 170; in border trilogy, 138; community and, 138–40; dualism linked to, 139; of mind and body, 5–6, 170, 175, 190 Sepich, John, 41, 86 Seurat, Georges, 65 “The Seventh Direction, or Suttree’s Vision Quest” (Spencer), 43 Shaviro, Steven, 38 Sheriff Bell (fictional character), xiii, 93, 96–97 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 99, 152, 193, 194, 198, 220–21, 246n2; Ceremony, 161, 188, 189, 208, 239n9 simplicity, modernity’s insistence on, 30 Sklair, Leslie, 32 slaves: master-slave dialectic for, 6–8, 10, 71, 74; Nietzsche on morality of, 10–11, 178 sleep of reason, 44–45, 231n9 Slotkin, Richard, 2, 84–85 slow violence, 80–81, 93, 97, 234n1 Smith, Adam, 71 smooth space, 222–23 Snyder, Gary, 219–20 “Social Movements and Global Capitalism” (Sklair), 32

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Soto, Isabel, xv, 188–89, 191, 217, 246n3 The Sound and Fury (Faulkner), 61, 115 Southern fiction: animals in, compared to Southwestern fiction, 117; nature’s reclamation in, 62–63; role of violence in, 80, 89–90. See also Appalachian novels; Child of God (McCarthy); The Gardener’s Son (McCarthy); The Orchard Keeper (McCarthy); Outer Dark (McCarthy); The Stone­ mason (McCarthy); Suttree (McCarthy) Southwest: cultural geography of, 156–57, 239n1; driving trip through, 105–6; modern and premodern at war in, 2; Native American enduring in, 219–20; permanence in, 166; spiritual impact of desecrating nature in, 159–61; subjugated knowledges in, 221–22; time and space in, 26–27; uranium mining and, 159–60, 240n4 Southwestern fiction: animals in, compared to Southern fiction, 117. See also All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy); Blood Meridian (McCarthy); border trilogy; Cities of the Plain (McCarthy); The Crossing (McCarthy); No Country for Old Men (McCarthy) space: capitalism and, 26–27; in Christianity, 166, 219; in Cities

of the Plain, 167; Mexico and, 167; in modernity, 19, 26–28; Native Americans and, 27, 28, 219, 246n4; in resistance to modernity, 166–67; smooth and striated, 222–23; third space as, 190, 211, 215 Spanish language: in The Crossing, xv, 188–90, 217–18; hybrid, 29, 185, 188–90, 217–18, 224; in The Orchard Keeper, 227n3; Soto on, xv, 188–89, 191, 217, 246n3 Spencer, William, 43 spiritual formation. See seeleroman spiritual guides, 140–41, 220 spirituality, xviii; animals linked to, 13, 16, 128–29, 130–32; cultural geography and, 157; Jameson on, 238n2; modernity not recognizing, 143–44; in nature, 157; nature’s desecration and, 154–61; political activity through, 150; reenchantment by, 183–84; religion’s draining of, 12; resistance to modernity by, 147–48; rituals disconnected from, 128–29, 137, 238n3; in The Road, 204–5; romance developed into, 134–37, 157–58; Silko on, 152 Standing Bear, Luther, 165 The Stonemason (McCarthy), 70, 71–72, 74, 80 Storey, Mark, 76 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 111 striated space, 222–23

Sturtevant, William, 219 subjugated knowledges, 221–22, 245n13 sublime, 176 subsistence living, 165 suffering, 150, 151, 152, 158–59 suicide, 148–49 Sullivan, Nell, xiv, 205–6 Summers, Lawrence, 234n1 The Sunset Limited (McCarthy), 148–49 Suttree (McCarthy): as bildungsroman, 133; Cornelius Suttree in, 17, 43, 52, 65–66, 69–70, 157; dance of violence in, 90; dogs as modernity symbol in, 120; economic rationalism in, 13; Gene Harrogate in, 17, 68–69, 73, 222; inclusion in, 193–94; local resistance in, 32–33; modernity in, 2, 18, 33, 61; nature and manufactured lacking synthesis in, 66–67; painterly influences in, 65–66; premodern in, 63; as seeleroman, 183–84; separation from community in, 138; tableaux in, 175; “The Waste Land” compared to, 66; women in, xiv, 205–6 suzerainty, 38, 39 Swift, Jonathan, 42, 231n6 swimming, across border, 106, 110 synthesis, 7, 44, 58–59, 66–68, 76, 88 tableaux: cultural geography and, 157; examples of, xvi, 173–77;

inde x

Luce on, 175–76; of modernity’s hegemony, 212–13; in theory-­ building activity, 109–10 Taylor, Charles, 125, 141–42, 144 Taylor, Colin, 219 Taylor, Paul Beekman, 191 teaching: autoethnography approach to, 99–101, 103; embodiment and, 110–12; theory-­building activity for, 107–11, 236nn7–8 technology: amputated leg and, 76–77; asceticism linked to, 10–11; barbed wire as, 61; Benjamin on, 17–18; Horkheimer and Adorno on, 10; Marcuse on, 15; modernity’s, 1; Sheriff Bell’s fears of, 93, 96–97; technological remedies for, 233n11; in violence, 81–82; of weapons, 33, 92–93, 96, 162, 235n4 theory-building activity, 107–11, 236nn7–8 theory of mind, 243n10 third space, 190, 211, 215 Thomas, Dylan, 4 time: capitalism and, 26–27; Chigurh’s understanding of, 94–95; in Christianity, 166, 219; in Cit­ ies of the Plain, 57–58, 167; end of, 203–4; Enlightenment and, 26; geological, xii, 67, 81, 109, 154, 173–74, 204; Hegel on, 58–59; in Mexico, 28, 167; in modernity, 19, 26–28; Native Americans and, 27, 28, 167, 219, 246n4; in resistance to modernity, 166–67

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Tomlinson, John, 5, 31, 230n8 Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 129–30 trains, 76–77 transformation, 7, 8, 15 trickster figure, 43 Trinity site, 160–61 truth, violence as necessary, 88–90, 97 Turner, Frederick, 84–85, 86, 164 Ulysses (Joyce), 1, 187 uranium mining, 159–60, 240n4 utility: of animals, 116, 188; dogs as tools of, 91, 120, 122, 127; Enlightenment’s standard of, 15; violence of, 5, 83, 93–94 “The Vanishing Mediator” (Jameson), 11–12 Vietnam war, 36, 85–88, 89, 162, 194, 195 violence: of Chigurh, 93–96; in civilizing mission, 40–41, 42; as dance, 46, 81–82, 87–88, 90; Dussel on colonial, 40, 50, 80, 89; Eurocentric, 50, 84; frontier’s myths supporting, 84–85, 88; global scale of, 90–91; Holden and, 38–39, 41–42, 46, 81–82, 84; hypermodern, 93; as justice, 91–92; media portrayals of, 85–86; as necessary truth, 88–90, 97; ordinary, 83; of religious ritual, 82, 234n3; ritualistic, 46, 82–84, 234n3; role of, 79–80, 89–90; slow, 80–81, 93, 97, 234n1; technology in,

81–82; of utility, 5, 83, 93–94; of Vietnam war, 85–88, 89 Vizenor, Gerald, 42 vulnerability, 235n4 “Wake for Susan” (McCarthy), 62, 63–64 Wallace, Garry, 238n3 Wallach, Rick, xii, 104 wampus cat, 120, 146 “The Waste Land” (Eliot), 66 weapons technology, 33, 92–93, 96, 162, 235n4 Weber, Max, 5, 10–15, 17, 21, 74, 129, 178 “Whales and Men” (McCarthy), 4, 24, 45, 132 Wilson, James, 167 Winfrey, Oprah, 108, 197 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 105, 129– 30, 199 wolves, 29, 165; Billy Parham’s relationship to, 131; mysticism of, 116–17, 126–27, 132; as beyond reason, 128, 237n4; as resisting modernity, 49, 52, 53, 91 women, xiii–xiv, 205–8, 245nn1–2 Woodward, Richard, 197, 200 work ethic, 11–12, 74, 178 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), 17 Yahoos, 42, 231n6 Yeats, W. B., 129

literary criticism

monk

C

“Nicholas Monk’s work on McCarthy and modernity constitutes a major undertaking that will inspire, provoke, and illuminate generations of readers to come.” —peter josyph ,

True and Living

author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy

Prophet of Destruction

“With his usual elegance of expression and detailed analysis of multiple works, Nicholas Monk reveals the urgency with which McCarthy responds to the contingencies of the postsecular world. The book is original, distinctive, and one of the most politically and spiritually relevant studies of McCarthy’s work to date.” —steven frye ,

True and Living Prophet of Destruction Cormac McCarthy and Modernity

author of Cormac McCarthy’s House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls and Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy is an associate professor in the Department of English and the director of the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick. He is the editor of Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. nicholas monk

nicholas monk isbn

978-0-8263-5679-6 90000

university of new mexico press

unmpress.com | 800-249-7737

9 780826 356796

>

ormac McCarthy’s work sounds warnings of impending apocalypse, but according to Nicholas Monk, it also implies that redemption remains available. Monk argues that McCarthy’s response to modernity is more subtle and less laden with despair than many realize. McCarthy’s understanding of the world, Monk shows, transcends the political divisions of right and left, escapes the reductiveness of identity politics, and looks to futures beyond the immediately adjacent. Such a reading positions McCarthy as an acute and farsighted chronicler of the condition of America at the beginning of a new century. Tracing the development of modernity in philosophical terms, Monk begins by hypothesizing some of the ways in which various political and philosophical undercurrents function in McCarthy’s fiction, how they are generated, and what they oppose. Other chapters focus on language, aesthetics, violence, the spiritual, and the natural environment and the animals that inhabit it. Finally, Monk examines in detail the experience of reading McCarthy’s work and analyzes the reasons so many readers report that “reading Cormac McCarthy changed my life.”