Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy 0817321535, 9780817321536

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy
2. All Limbo’s Clamor: History, Nature, and Parable in McCarthy’s South
3. Stamped against the Night: Suttree, Naturalism, and the American City
4. In Light and Shadow: Contingency and Kinship in Blood Meridian
5. The World Lies Waiting: Transitions and Contact Zones in the Border Trilogy
6. Maps and Mazes: Choice, Vision, and Synthesis in the Later Works
7. Prospects
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

UNGUESSED KINSHIPS

ST U DI ES I N A M ER IC A N L I T ER A RY R E A L ISM A N D NAT U R A L ISM SERIES EDITOR Gary Scharnhorst EDITORIAL BOARD Donna M. Campbell John Crowley Robert E. Fleming Alan Gribben Eric Haralson Denise D. Knight Joseph McElrath George Monteiro Brenda Murphy James Nagel Alice Hall Petry Donald Pizer Tom Quirk Jeanne Campbell Reesman Ken Roemer

U NGU ESSED K I NSHIPS Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy

STEVEN FRYE

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-­0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press. Typeface: Plantin MT Pro Cover image: Sunrise at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. © Twildlife | Dreamstime.com Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn Cataloging-­in-­Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2153-6 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-8173-6109-9 (paper) E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9446-2

For Kristin, Melissa, and Thomas

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Matthew 10:16

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsix 1  Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy

1

2 All Limbo’s Clamor: History, Nature, and Parable in McCarthy’s South

19

3 Stamped against the Night: Suttree, Naturalism, and the American City

50

4 In Light and Shadow: Contingency and Kinship in Blood Meridian64 5 The World Lies Waiting: Transitions and Contact Zones in the Border Trilogy

80

6 Maps and Mazes: Choice, Vision, and Synthesis in the Later Works

113

7 Prospects

142

Notes149 Bibliography161 Index171

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book emerges from thirty years spent reading Cormac McCarthy’s novels, plays, and screenplays. In many ways the volume blends a few dec­ades of study spanning the breadth of American literature and culture. In that time, I’ve accumulated a range of obligations to friends, family, and colleagues who are too many to enumerate. You know who you are. But some names deserve mention because of their unique association with the thoughts that inform these pages. I must first thank my many associates in the Cormac McCarthy Society. We have gathered in many places—in Reims, Knoxville, Austin, Sydney, and Dublin. From these friends I have received the gifts of conviviality, insight, and a dark but redemptive wisdom gleaned from McCarthy himself. Special thanks to Edwin T. “Chip” Arnold, Rick Wallach, Peter Josyph, Lydia R. Cooper, Nick Monk, Allen Josephs, Bill Hardwig, Jay Ellis, David Holloway, Nell Sullivan, Scott Yarbrough, Bryan Vescio, David Cremean, and Dustin Anderson. Particular mention must go to Dianne  C. Luce and Stacey Peebles—compatriots, fellows, friends. To my colleagues at the American Literature Association, my genuine gratitude. They include Alfred Bendixen, Olivia Carr Edenfield, and Leslie Petty. Appreciation as well to Katharine A. Salzmann, lead archivist and curator of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos. My heartfelt thanks to the naturalist community that has enriched me these many years. In London, Reykjavík, Santa Rosa, Berkeley, and Sonoma, we have shared drinks, thoughts, and laughs, and built from the experience an archive of textured memory. In this context I must single

x / Acknowledgments

out two names: Eric Carl Link, who has been my friend since graduate school, and whose critical acumen and incisive genius are threaded incalculably throughout the pages of this book; and Keith Newlin, whose professionalism, friendship, and insight imbue my understanding of American literary naturalism as a genre and movement. Other naturalist scholars deserve special mention as well: Donald Pizer, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, John Dudley, Donna Campbell, Anita Duneer, Adam Wood, Jude Davies, and Ken Brandt. Finally, to the editorial team at the University of Alabama Press, especially the editor of the Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism series, Professor Gary Scharnhorst. His support and his faith in this project were essential. And to Daniel Waterman, editor in chief, and Pete Beatty, acquisitions editor. The book is that much better for their consummate professionalism. Unguessed Kinships remains only one attempt to grasp a writer who strikes through the pasteboard mask. But behind that mask the world lies waiting. It is a material space made whole for me by my wife, Kristin, and by my grown children, Melissa and Thomas. To my family—quadrant, constellation, compass—thank you.

UNGUESSED KINSHIPS

1 Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

C

ormac McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the 1930s this city in the Southern Appalachian Mountains was emblematic of America’s transition to modernity. Many in the region lived without hydroelectric power, and even people in more populated areas waited for the iceman and the dairyman, relying on an economy of limited and local exchange. The land was never far from their lives. It was a source of sustenance and beauty and formed an intricate tapestry of collective memory. Changes to what had once been an implacable wilderness had a tangible effect on communities and individuals, not just in terms of the practicalities involved in daily living but in the realm of worldview and perception. What did it mean to relate to the land in more indirect ways? How does one cope with the mediation of machines in what were once small towns, communities now being transformed into new urban spaces constituted on “no known paradigm”? Knoxville in the 1930s and 1940s works as a metaphor for the larger socioeconomic realities of American history. The forces of industrial progress have always confronted a wilderness peopled not only with Indigenous populations but with a vanguard of settlers who shaped and were shaped by a dense, violent, and seemingly impenetrable frontier. The existence of the wilderness is only one defining influence on the development of American culture. But the human consequences of these historical pressures became the substance of a significant strand of a new and evolving literary tradition.

2 / Chapter 1

Cormac McCarthy is a modern culmination of that tradition.1 His work reveals the changing textures of the American landscape, and by his own admission he embraces an aesthetic of influence. But through the mysterious alchemy of his own imagination, he transforms the canon and makes it new. T. S. Eliot would call McCarthy a writer with “historical sense,” since he reenacts such works as the King James Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the tragedies of Shakespeare, and the novels of Melville, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Hemingway.2 McCarthy’s reading life is active and his consumption of the Western canon prodigious, though in his later years he has focused primarily on philosophy and science.3 But his connection to all these works is more than passive, and he does not read them at a critical remove. Like many of our greatest innovators, he approaches literature with a creative mind and perceptive capacity, not as an admirer, but with the active motivation of one who intends to break apart and rebuild, to absorb and reenvision.4 He has said that “books are made out of books,” and the act of making has a particular resonance when we consider McCarthy’s artistic practice.5 As far as we know, even in the age of Microsoft Word and Apple Pages, he still uses an Olivetti typewriter. This is not a reactionary gesture or the posture of someone lamenting a bygone time. Even the most casual look at McCarthy’s archived drafts reveals a complex creative process involving reading, research, and contemplation, as well as philosophical, scientific, and artistic engagement. All this is enhanced by a layered and tenacious commitment to the rigors of revision.6 It is a process developed over sixty years of writing, one that early on became dependent on the only technology available to him.7 No transformation in machinery could alter an approach that allowed McCarthy to absorb the tradition and make it his own. Like Ben Telfair in The Stonemason (1994), McCarthy builds his works using old stones, taking on faith that those materials will hold together and stand against the vicissitudes of history. Western literature resonates through time, and it is worthwhile to look closely at the stones themselves and trace the architecture that binds them in McCarthy’s collective canon.8 Works emerging from classical Greece and Rome, the ancient Near East, and the European Renaissance, as well as later texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are all a part of the pattern. But to consider McCarthy’s use of the literature alone is to establish barriers that limit an understanding of influence in his work. McCarthy’s residence at the Santa Fe Institute is a testimony to his fascination with science and its expansive reach into the realm of philosophy.9 He was asked to revise the operating principles of the institute, and he wrote the following:

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  3

Scientific work at SFI is always pushing creativity to its practical limits. We always court a high risk of failure. Above all we have more fun than should be legal. We are absolutely relentless at hammering down boundaries created by academic disciplines and institutional structures. If you know more than anybody else about a subject we want to talk to you. We don’t care what the subject is. We are beyond relentless in seeking out the best people in every discipline. We will get you here. No matter what. And we will give you the space and the resources that you need. We don’t care how young you are. We have in general avoided becoming involved in matters of policy. But if you are working on a program that involves sustainability or the environment or human welfare and you think we might have something you can use pick up the phone. The educational opportunities that we offer—especially for young people—are simply not available elsewhere. Period. Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we’re on the right track.

McCarthy challenges the partitioning that occurs as methodologies evolve in an academic setting. He writes about eradicating boundaries, echoing his own fascination with malleable borders more than physical but intellectual and imaginative. McCarthy rejects the popular dichotomy between heart and mind, a tension heightened by the dual legacies of the Enlightenment and romanticism. McCarthy’s operating principles suggest that rationality, intuition, empirical inquiry, and imagination merge in a strange chemistry, one that takes the human community to new territories and into realms beyond the practical and utilitarian.10 The Santa Fe Institute was founded on the notion of cross-­disciplinary inquiry centering on the exploration of complex adaptive systems. It was established in 1984 by scientists George Cowan and Murray Gell-­Mann (among others) and has become the most renowned institute dedicated to contemporary issues related to complexity theory. In the summer of 2019, David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, delivered the keynote address to the semiannual conference of the Cormac McCarthy Society. His talk dealt in detail with the current state of understanding in

4 / Chapter 1

complexity science, the specific role of the Santa Fe Institute in these inquiries, and McCarthy himself as a trustee and regular interlocutor in the institute’s discussions. Krakauer emphasized both the freedom offered to fellows in his community and the scientific rigor demanded of them. His keynote led to vigorous discussion involving Krakauer himself, filmmaker Karol Jałochowski, and the literary scholars attending the conference. During the Q and A, Krakauer emphasized something that speaks powerfully to McCarthy’s work and his role at a scientific institute—aesthetics. Any understanding the human community comes to achieve in complexity science will ultimately emerge from a creative capacity similar to what has led to the greatest works of art. One might infer from Krakauer’s comments that the intuition of the scientist is not precisely the same as that of the artist. Coming from different patterns of thought, they share a disparate range of experiences, and the totality of those experiences lead to conclusions emerging from distinct vantage points. But still, each employs the raw material of “deep, earnest thinking” as they seek insight into realms hitherto unknown, as they venture into Melville’s ocean perishing—his vast, open, and unremembering sea. There is more shared by the scientist and the artist than is conventionally assumed since both seek truth and beauty in tandem and in essential relation. Near the end of the discussion Krakauer seemed to echo the poet John Keats, who in the last lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) wrote: When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Academic and intellectual taxonomies have practical value in any pursuit of knowledge. But taken on face value they often lead to divisions that breed erroneous popular conceptions and a peculiar kind of false consciousness. The distinct philosophical categories of epistemology and aesthetics treated independently cloud and even obscure their essential relation. This is not to say that the artist will discover and codify the principles that govern the nature of physical reality. That of course is the role of the scientist. But the artist may in some way intuit those principles in works that can only be appreciated though the whole of the human mind. Truth will be understood not only in empirical terms but through the complementary capacities of artist, philosopher, and scientist. In 2019, Krakauer compiled a collection of essays that represent the Santa Fe Institute’s inquiries into complexity science since 1984. The volume

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  5

is entitled Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019. As an epigram to the introduction, Krakauer quotes Edgar Allan Poe from “The Purloined Letter”: They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it.11

In this founding work of detective fiction, Poe strives to map the human intellect at its finest and most transformative. The detective blends the capacities of poet and mathematician, the intuitive and the supremely rational. This integration allows the detective to apprehend things hidden and obscured by intellectual practices that limit and constrain. The essential relationship between the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic has been at the heart of McCarthy’s writing life, and his striking out, together with the embrace of failure, perhaps most directly reflects McCarthy’s productive debt to the late nineteenth century and to literary naturalism as a movement and genre. This literary naturalism involves the kind of writer preoccupied with philosophy, science, and literature together, the writer with an impulse to engage the world in all its intricacies and ambiguities, who renders things hidden in a way that broadens human perspective and touches the human soul. Philosophically considered, naturalism assumes a kind of pessimism with respect to human nature. A natural world governed by the Darwinian principle of natural selection is brutish and indifferent to human suffering. Human beings are determined by chemical forces and are often atavistic, monstrous, and cruel. But the artist renders these ideas with a degree of thoughtful indecision. The picture is darker and more exotic, emerging from both dream and nightmare. In this sense literary naturalism takes the wilderness, the frontier, and scientific inquiry into the realm of the collective world imaginary. McCarthy is perhaps the most important contributor to a contemporary naturalist tradition.

I Cormac McCarthy’s work has elicited responses from critics that run the gamut in terms of worldview—from Gnosticism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism, to the ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Periods in literary history, such as romanticism and modernism, have all been explored in the polyvalent context of his canon.12 Like many of these movements, literary naturalism is a contested category. First employed to denote a broad grouping of European authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term applied to Americans describes a more focused group

6 / Chapter 1

of fiction writers, specifically Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. Developing out of a transformation in culture that swept through the Western world in the latter half of the nineteenth century, naturalism involves a layered response to both aesthetic and intellectual concerns. In literary art, naturalism was initially seen as an extension of realism, which under the influence of Europeans such as Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, and Americans such as Mark Twain and Henry James, asserted that literature should portray setting and character in rigidly mimetic terms. Stories in this vein bring to life all the grit, detail, and sordid reality that characterize human experience as it exists in the known world. The ideas and formal conventions of romanticism persisted with vigor, but realists tried to distance themselves from romantic portrayals of ideal and mythic figures, who were often noble in birth and behavior, in favor of character types who came from various social classes and strata. Naturalism enthusiastically employed this blended romantic and realist aesthetic in the context of what was called the “new science,” the revolutionary ideas of intellectuals such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reviewers and literary critics tended to oversimplify how these scientific precepts appeared in the fiction of naturalist writers, treating works such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), as well as Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (1904) and The Call of the Wild (1903), as unambiguous “representations” of Darwinian precepts. Such accounts failed to consider how ideas are refracted and reimagined in the process of artistic creation. This perspective is expressed most notably in the third volume of Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1930). Parrington concludes that American literary naturalism is a kind of “pessimistic realism” that places human beings in a “mechanical world” and understands them to be victims of an indifferent material universe.13 In 1963, George Becker codified this perspective, defining naturalism in American literature as “no more than an emphatic and explicit position taken by some realists, showing man caught in a net from which there can be no escape and degenerating under those circumstances; that is, it is pessimistic materialist determinism.”14 But running parallel with Parrington and Becker, other critics recognized in the naturalism of the literary artist a more ambiguous rendering of the new science. In 1947, Malcolm Cowley acknowledged the pessimistic tendencies of the literary naturalists, insofar as they limit the role of human agency in a deterministic universe. But Cowley argues that a rigid philosophical naturalism does not define naturalist fiction

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  7

entirely.15 There is an undercurrent of optimism in the work of American literary naturalists that finds its source in the romance tradition. This optimism is observable not only in the patterns of genre but in the themes of naturalist works. Especially later in the 1950s, a new generation of critics took this more nuanced perspective. Scholars such as Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, and Lee Clark Mitchell carefully consider how artists encounter ideas and transform them through a complex process of creation and regeneration. Walcutt challenges the notion of naturalism’s debt to realism, suggesting that naturalism involves a “divided stream,” one branch reflecting romanticism and specifically New England transcendentalism.16 Lee Clark Mitchell pursues a new avenue by considering how naturalist determinism appears in linguistic structure and narrative itself.17 Donald Pizer explores the relationship between a purely naturalist vision and more traditional conceptions of our relationship to nature, writing that “the naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions . . . the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience.” He continues by arguing that despite naturalism’s leveling of animals and humans, there is “a compensating humanistic value” that “affirms the significance of the individual.”18 A useful generalization can be drawn from these later inquiries. Writers are evolving human beings and artists rather than philosophers or scientists bound by strict epistemological procedures. In terms of narrative, their works will reenvision in remarkable ways the concepts that interest them. The creative process and the fundamental exigencies of narrative make ideas new, distinctive, and rife with tensions and ambiguities. These critics recognized in naturalist fiction a more complex and polyvalent treatment of scientific precepts, and as this understanding of literary naturalism emerged, an enriched sense of its intellectual and aesthetic significance came to prominence. Literary naturalism was understood not just as the straightforward and monolithic (even dogmatic) presentation of a materialism based in the biological sciences. Instead, the movement put these new ideas in play, in narratives that live initially in the consciousness of the artist and emerge with all the strangeness and uncertainty that literary art by its nature permits. Literary naturalism encourages the reader to acknowledge the reality of the Darwinian concept of natural selection: the world is blind to human suffering, and human behavior is often bestial, atavistic, and monstrous. But despite this, literary naturalism explores things distinctly human, such as brotherhood, altruistic commitment to the other, and even spiritual awareness. Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) tells the story of four men at sea in a small skiff

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as they struggle to find their way to shore in a storm. The narrator acknowledges their environment as brutal, harsh, destructive, and, finally, “flatly indifferent.” But the story emphasizes the “subtle brotherhood” among the men, a selflessness that cannot find easy explanation in purely materialist terms. A rigid philosophical naturalism, then, finds itself in tension with a form of humanism that sets the species apart, makes it distinctive and rare. In considering the works of late nineteenth-­century writers such as Crane, Walcutt and Pizer never deny the human capacity for avarice, greed, and violence; these realities too can be understood in human terms, but in their treatment of naturalism’s leveling of the human and the animal, the human in all its moral complexity retains a palpable resonance. Continuing in this critical tradition, Eric Carl Link works to define the contours of literary naturalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (2004), Link considers the movement from its inception forward.19 Reinforced by a reading of representative texts, Link posits a tripartite model for understanding how the new science came to fruition in various corners of our intellectual culture. He identifies three forms of naturalism: scientific naturalism, philosophical naturalism, and literary naturalism. Scientific naturalism refers to methodology. The scientific naturalist is the scientist, the individual who implements scientific methodology and depends on its epistemology to constitute objective truth in the physical world. In the same vein, the philosophical naturalist transforms that method into a worldview. For the philosophical naturalist, nothing exists beyond the tactile and material world, and no truth can be designated as such without reliance on the scientific method. In contrast to both, the literary naturalist is the writer who is attracted to Darwinian thinking but is by no means confined by a purely empirical conception of the world. As an artist rather than as a philosopher or scientist, the literary naturalist allows scientific and philosophical concepts to play freely in a narrative context centered on the human struggle. For this writer, ideas are compelling and provocative, even true, but questions of human and even the spiritual portent still deserve consideration in stories varied and polyvalent in their thematic implications. Given this modern and contemporary perspective, a host of twentieth-­ century writers might be considered through a naturalist lens: Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner, as well as later authors such as Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  9

McCarthy. Given his emphasis on the implacability of historical forces, William Faulkner might especially be considered in this vein, and his influence on McCarthy is undisputed. More broadly, the modernism that many of these authors help define bears the indelible mark of the earlier naturalism, given that both movements engage ideas unique to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They both rigorously explore philosophical determinism in all its social, biological, and historical manifestations. Beginning with The Orchard Keeper (1965) and continuing through The Road (2006), a firmly naturalistic vision works in dialectical interaction with a more humanistic and even romantic view of the human condition and the material universe. Outer Dark (1968) concerns itself with the transformative role of transgression and guilt but does so in the context of two characters’ journey through a world both natural and man made. It is a place haunted by the mysterious triune, who seem the mysterious outer projection of nature itself, as well as an emanation of a realm beyond human comprehension. Through the necrophiliac Lester Ballard, Child of God (1974) echoes the novels of such naturalist writers as Frank Norris and Jack London in its presentation of the bestial and atavistic, while pointing with tortured sympathy to the character’s humanity and fruitless struggle. Suttree (1979), the last novel of McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, reflects the concerns of such naturalists as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton in exploring these themes in an urban setting, where in a modern context the struggle for survival is particularly acute. In the early 1980s McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas, to research the novel he initially termed his “Western.” That work was Blood Meridian; or,The Evening Redness in the West (1985). McCarthy remained in that region, which also became the setting for his Border Trilogy. This series includes the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). The West proved to be a region entirely appropriate for a novelist exploring naturalist themes, and Blood Meridian certainly embodies the concerns of literary naturalism. At one point late in the novel, after readers have witnessed seemingly endless episodes of bloodletting, McCarthy describes a barren desert landscape in decidedly naturalist terms: In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates

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the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.20

The leveling of the human and inhuman becomes a dominant focus of the novel, as does the distinct though problematic humanity of the protagonist, the unnamed kid. This same preoccupation appears in All the Pretty Horses, in which the main character, John Grady Cole, struggles to find a place in a natural world that is harsh and indifferent, yet mystically endowed. A blend of naturalist and transcendentalist conception, reminiscent of the “divided stream” explored by Walcutt, appears in The Crossing, where, among other things, the image of the she-­wolf connotes brutish, wild, and simultaneously spiritual realms. In Cities of the Plain, the pimp Eduardo speaks of the excessive adornment of Mexico as masking the “plain” reality of a brutal world. These literary naturalist concerns are prominent in later McCarthy works, such as The Road (2006), The Sunset Limited (2006), and The Counselor (2013). In this sense, McCarthy’s work involves themes and formal conventions similar to the naturalist ideas of nineteenth-­century writers, as well as to definitions of this tremendously influential aesthetic as explored by more modern critics. Of course, one of the most well-­known early naturalists was Frank Norris, author of McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), and Vandover and the Brute (1894–95, published 1914). Norris was one of the few writers of this period who attempted to explore in critical terms what it meant to be a literary naturalist. Acknowledging Zola as a founding figure in the movement, Norris wrote the 1896 essay “Zola as Romantic Writer.” In this brief treatise, Norris affirms the generic distinction later articulated at length by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957).21 Chase and a generation of critics up to and including the present have observed that the genre can be divided into two formal strands. They are the narrative of social realism and the “romance” novel. The latter is divided into two categories, the mythic as initially defined by James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms, and the philosophical and psychological, as exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. For Norris, as Zola engages the new science and posits a world largely defined by atavism, violence, and brutal indifference to human suffering, he employs the conventions of the romance as well. His novels deal with scientific issues that in the nineteenth century could be placed within the context of what was termed “natural philosophy” and was therefore a part of a philosophical

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  11

tradition broadly construed. In “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901) Norris further affirms this formal distinction and argues that realism and naturalism are not departures from the romance.22 Instead, they are a logical and illuminating use of the genre, especially insofar as the romance allows for a deviation from a plot-­level verisimilitude that permits the writer to directly engage philosophical questions. Throughout his work, McCarthy blends both the tangibly real and the otherworldly. We see this in The Crossing as Billy Parham sets a trap for the she-­wolf he will later commit to saving: Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such as place. (22)

As Billy works at a workman’s task, McCarthy presents him as the sailor at his instrument, navigating the world with ancient tools, objects designed to make the celestial vaguely tangible to human sensibilities. The “world” is a thing at once immutable and ever changing. Whether aesthetic or scientific, the intellectual methods human beings have created make the mysterious at once comprehensible and sublime. Such is the nature of the romance and the implied purpose of the literary naturalist.

II In August 1854, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine published Herman Melville’s “The Lightning-­Rod Man.” Often read as a critique of religious orthodoxy, the story is a direct and purposeful attack on orthodoxy of any kind. The tale is told from the point of view of a first-­person narrator who is visited by a traveler in a storm. The traveling man is selling lightning rods, and, counting on his ability to articulate necessity and inspire fear, he tries to manipulate the narrator deceitfully. As the lightning-­rod man marshals expertise to create dread, he underestimates the narrator’s savvy. The narrator is a firm skeptic and in many ways a foil for Melville himself. At a figurative level, the lightning-­rod salesman is not only the door-­to-­door purveyor of religious tracts but the scientific aficionado in the tradition of utopian eighteenth-­century positivism. He is a modern man who has transformed science into application and seeks to peddle its supremacy. But the narrator responds with incredulity and anger as he sends the salesman on his way:

12 / Chapter 1

What has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away! See, the scroll of the storm is rolled back; the house is unharmed; and in the blue heavens I read in the rainbow, that the Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man’s earth.23

The thinly veiled allusion is to the religious charlatan who resells the Christian message at the front door of the susceptible believer. But the lightning rod is a tool that emerged from scientific understanding. The double allusion then is to the seller of science and technology as well. In this story Melville explores the same tensions that motivate the work of the later naturalists, reflecting the Victorian dilemma, which involves religious doubt and the rise of highly productive scientific epistemologies. Melville runs crossways with the dominant and sometimes monolithic intellectual currents of his time. Religion does not offer a complete and adequate account of reality—not any longer. But the same is true of the new science, especially when it posits empirical process as the solution to all problems social, moral, and intellectual. In 1889, Thomas Huxley coined the term agnosticism, linking the word to a model of thinking bound to empirical procedure.24 Melville anticipates Huxley but extends that perspective into a radical skepticism, rejecting the efficacy of any totalizing system, religious, scientific, or philosophical. McCarthy’s affiliation with the Santa Fe Institute acts as testimony to his respect for science, but the Santa Fe Institute has committed itself to breaking down epistemological boundaries. This iconoclastic approach to the acquisition of truth lies at the heart of McCarthy’s engagement with the various scientific accounts he has encountered over the years. Early in Blood Meridian, he ponders the imponderable, as the kid leaves home and travels west amid a violent and unforgiving world: Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. (4–5)

Amid a landscape both figurative and real, the kid stands in for the whole of humanity, his beginning beyond memory and his future impossible to chart on any map available to the intellect. The human spirit may transcend the world in mystery and the absolute, but it may with equal veracity be a sadly palliative illusion.

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  13

This and other tensions are the central concern of American literary naturalists as they engage the intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century. In his long poem “War Is Kind” (1899), Stephen Crane takes on the issue of war with seething irony, and in the context of this critique articulates perhaps the most direct expression of philosophical naturalism: A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”25

This verse is commonly anthologized separately from the larger poem and as such presents an unvarnished and harshly naturalist perspective. There is nothing ambiguous about Crane’s view of the human condition and the limited agency people possess in the context of an indifferent universe. Taking these five lines separately has a certain effect on the reader, and not an unreasonable one. The stanza serves as an expression of Crane’s most important naturalist theme: human beings are victims of forces beyond their control, and their significance appears meaningful only to themselves. But excising this section from the larger context of the poem limits the richness and polyvalence of Crane’s concerns. When it is read as one stanza in a larger narrative, the naturalist themes are even more vivid and troubling. In “War Is Kind,” human beings are not merely victims but the purveyors of “mindless violence” and war. This is the condition Judge Holden in Blood Meridian holds out to be the ordering principle of the universe. Here the natural state is not one of indifference alone; destruction is the most basic and operative reality in the world. But in writing a satirical and ironic critique of conventional heroism Crane encourages reform and offers the possibility of altering the initial conditions of animal experience. Perhaps humans can create a community in which indifference and violence may be kept at bay, and more humane circumstances might prevail in which the sense of obligation is borne by all. Near the end of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy ponders the kind of epiphany experienced by John Grady Cole. The young man has fought and killed to survive the brutal microcosm of a Mexican prison. In that “other country” he has experienced both beauty and violence, but as he travels back to Texas, he sees a group of farmworkers and perceives in them a humanity that transcends. They have a “good will” that has “power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve . . . power to heal men and to bring them to safety” (219). Brotherhood and community are palpable and defining even in a world of bloodletting and

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greed. It is this same sense of possibility in darkness that motivates the reformist ethos of Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a novel that portrays the degraded and naturalistic conditions of the city but implicitly argues for social change. In this sense Crane’s naturalism is polyvalent and complex, and in accepting the core reality of the natural world Crane offers the human intellect and conscience as a partial remedy. Frank Norris explores these same issues in a set of novels that deal with the corruption and monopolistic practices of the Progressive Era. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) portrays the sad experience of an unlicensed dentist and his wife, Trina. The story examines the degenerative influence of the city on an ill-­fated man of lesser intelligence, one who finds himself economically bereft after learning he can no longer practice without formal training. Trina wins the lottery but is excessively parsimonious, causing the oafish McTeague to descend into brutish and monstrous acts of abuse and murder. Naturalist themes of atavism and animality are nakedly rendered, but the novel locates the events in the vivid context of America’s emerging urban space, a territory that seems to cultivate rather than mitigate the worst human impulses. McCarthy portrays this same reality in Suttree, an urban novel that explores the degradation of the modern city and its influence on a set of characters who struggle to cope in a place that seems blind to their needs and hopes. Both novels assert and challenge the boundaries of a rigid philosophical naturalism, since the violence latent both in the world and in the human heart seems to transcend the imperative to survive. McTeague’s ultimate brutality seems motivated by an impulse beyond reason and suggests something monstrous in nature that resists explanation. The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), the first volume in Norris’s unfinished Epic of the Wheat Trilogy, provides a fictionalized account of the Mussel Slough Tragedy in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the culmination of a conflict between wheat farmers and San Francisco’s Central Pacific Railroad. The novel foregrounds nature’s most operative principle in action: the struggle that circumscribes not just the individual but the collective. Through the main character, the aspiring writer Presley, the narrative displays sympathy for the farmers, and it counterpoints the naturalist plot of decline with the sad but perhaps just fate of the antagonist. In the end, the novel suggests Walcutt’s “divided stream” as it blends nature’s indifference with the pantheistic vision of the American transcendentalists and the ameliorative evolutionary theory of Joseph LeConte. Vandover and the Brute (1894–95, published 1914) and The Pit (1903) involve these same tensions. With a naturalistic worldview as background these

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  15

novels encourage activism and help initiate the reformist tradition most notable in the later novels of Sinclair Lewis. Perhaps the most popular and well-­known writer associated with late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century naturalism is Jack London, and novels such as The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) have entered the public consciousness not only as rousing stories but as inquiries into the brute nature of the world outside the confines of human civilization. Certainly, London from his own experience brings to light the indifference of nature in the Yukon, and the tenacious instinct for survival manifest in the two animals seems strangely personified in the narratives. But the brutish nature of men both exemplifies and challenges the boundaries of a rigid philosophical naturalism. Unlike the dense and ill-­adapted protagonist in London’s “To Build a Fire” (1902), men in The Call of the Wild and White Fang are often positively malevolent. They do not act out of necessity merely but seem to reflect a brutishness beyond instinct or reason. London’s “nature” in these novels is not simply a realm blind to suffering. It is positively hellish and malign, at least when we consider the brutal treatment of dogs in the hands of men. It is true that human benevolence exists in London’s world, but it is pitted against a brutality that seems to challenge the boundaries of natural law. The survival imperative cannot explain the actions of the men; nor do an atavism and brutishness that conform by implication to Darwinian natural selection. In McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), this senseless violence can be seen in the mysterious psychopathology of the villain Anton Chigurh. Confronting him in all his mystery, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell struggles as he witnesses something incomprehensible and latent in human nature that thrives on violence. This same impulse to malevolence can be seen in London’s The Sea Wolf (1904). In this novel, London employs a polyvalent and overtly polyphonic narrative structure reflecting the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche. To Wolf Larsen, human beings are “yeast,” living and dying according to natural law with no more significance than viruses or simple bacteria. It is worthwhile to note that London gives expression to a pervasive nineteenth-­century concern, which can be found before Nietzsche in the proto-­existentialism of Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Notes from the Underground (1864). Dostoevsky was quite devout and orthodox in religion, but in exploring the intellectual challenges presented by the nineteenth century he employs a polyphonic narrative design to articulate a perspective that is not his own. In Notes from the Underground, he writes of the profound insight offered in something as simple as a toothache:

16 / Chapter 1

In these moans there is expressed, first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not. There is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain.26

The nameless dweller in Dostoevsky’s underground shares similar naturalistic sentiments with London’s Wolf Larsen. But Larsen also challenges the boundaries of rigid philosophical naturalism with an impulse to violence that transcends the material world. Still, how a society or culture responds to these dark insights becomes the essential question. In The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Iron Heel (1908) London’s socialist politics find full expression, and the city is the gridiron on which naturalist principles find themselves in brutal and dynamic play. The People of the Abyss and The Iron Heel invite a collective response on the part of society at large, and in the end The Iron Heel predicts a better and more egalitarian future. London’s reformist leanings are built into the thematic architecture of many other literary naturalists’ works, and it is precisely the tension between human conscience and the laws that bind that transforms “philosophical” naturalism and makes it “literary.” Nature’s indifference and the principle of natural selection are unavoidable and present realities, but collective effort and moral rectitude also have their say. In the end, though, London’s polyvalent naturalism allows for a darker and deeper sense of mystery unresolved, one that expresses itself in unmitigated violence. The nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in cities unprecedented in human history. In the early 1800s urban areas in America were effectively medieval, having not changed substantially for hundreds of years. But during the Industrial Revolution these cities became centers of the new economy, as people in great numbers moved from small towns and farms to work in factories and offices, and even to manage large corporations and conglomerates. A new class system evolved around these industries and the service sectors that supported them. Large urban spaces emerged and grew in tremendous proportion, and cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco became financial and industrial centers. Ironically, these urban spaces were where the most basic laws of nature found expression. For this reason, literary naturalists such as Crane, Norris, and London set many of their novels in the city, and this tradition continued in the twentieth century with later naturalist writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton. In novels such as Sister Carrie (1900), The Financier (1912), and the aptly named An American

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy  /  17

Tragedy (1925), Dreiser explores the destructive effects of high capitalism that motivated the reformist politics of the Progressive Era. Naturalist principles form the thematic heart of Dreiser’s work, and in his novels the city is a vivid manifestation of the natural world in microcosm. Urban America is an environment indifferent to the concerns of workers, whether they are in factories or offices. The strong often exploit the weak without consideration or guilt, and deterministic forces subjugate and destroy human beings as Dreiser’s narratives embody the naturalist plot of decline. Edith Wharton’s The Valley of Decision (1902), The House of Mirth (1905), and The Age of Innocence (1920) display the same naturalistic concerns but in a largely unprecedented way. Wharton employs the formal conventions of the nineteenth-­century novel of manners, focusing primarily on the lives of the middle and upper classes. But in an age of the nouveau riche, when a new industrial aristocracy was emerging, social stratification became increasingly malleable, leading to both opportunity and fluidity for individuals and communities. In this new urban economy, people worked, succeeded, struggled, and died according to laws ethically neutral and unthinking. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Wharton’s The House of Mirth are remarkable as they focus on the lives of women who strive to find success in an economy of suffering and indifference. The novels of Dreiser and Wharton are motivated by an essentially tragic vision and are conditioned by the fatalism at the heart of tragedy. But it is a fatalism made materially concrete in these narratives, considering the deterministic reality at the center of the naturalist worldview. In employing this tragic vision and choosing to imbue these stories with sympathy, both novelists imply the same potential for change that motivated Progressive Era politics and the tradition of reformist writing that has its roots in literary naturalism. In this sense, literary naturalism offers a comprehensive and polyphonic response to the modern moment.27 In the last two centuries intellectuals and artists have been preoccupied with the nature of physical reality, and they implicitly ask a vexing but perpetually relevant question. How do we live with moral rectitude in a world circumscribed by natural law? Cormac McCarthy’s works continue this search and struggle to find an answer. There are many issues at play, existential and ethical as well as ontological and aesthetic.28 Critics such as Walcutt, Pizer, and Link have brought to the fore a more nuanced understanding of literary naturalism, one that argues for the movement’s polyvalence and ambiguity. For writers like McCarthy, natural selection does not comprehend the realities of avarice, greed, and violence as human history presents them. The actual truth is infinitely worse since the degradation

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and bloodletting so pervasive in the world seem to transcend any material rule or principle. The field of conflict is the human heart, and in a strange blend of counterforces, virtues like commitment and brotherhood find sustenance in that place as well. Can the biological imperative described in the science textbook define a parent’s love for a child? On one level, it must: it is a verifiable truth elucidating natural law. But McCarthy and his forebears in the naturalist tradition explore other possibilities and realms; they suggest that no mere description can capture the totality of the human condition.29 It is in this space that McCarthy’s work charts a redemptive cartography and a geography of hope. As The Road makes clear, when a father looks into the face of a child, no text can explain the experience or reveal its depth and significance. There is an epistemological content to subjective life, as personal and singular as the experience may be. Near the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady ponders these evasive concerns: He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret . . . the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. (282)

In McCarthy’s vision, truth is a prize hard won. It reaches its meridian in the words of Judge Holden as he muses on the divinity of war. But John Grady Cole’s bleak apotheosis finds a compensating hope in the beauty of nature: in all its contours, colors, and bloody indifference. For the genuine seeker meaning in the human experience emerges from the raw material of science and philosophy, but it lives perpetually in the realm of the aesthetic. The truths of nature find tentative repose in the expansive territory of the artist, the literary naturalist, Cormac McCarthy.

2 All Limbo’s Clamor History, Nature, and Parable in McCarthy’s South I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

M

cCarthy returned home in the late 1950s after serving in the US Air Force. He was stationed in Alaska, and while there he developed an active interest in reading, which he carried with him as he enrolled for a second time at the University of Tennessee. Though he had grown up in the South, he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. At four years old he moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee. His father was a Yale-­educated lawyer who took employment with the Tennessee Valley Authority and served as special assistant to the attorney general in the Justice Department in Washington, DC. McCarthy’s family home was spacious and comfortable, especially compared to the humble shacks and small houses that were common in the rural areas around Knoxville. Many of his novels reflect his childhood experiences, and all of them demonstrate his eclectic intellectual sensibility. He grew up exploring the mountain landscapes of southern Appalachia, where he rode horses, hunted, and fished, presumably with various childhood friends who were equally acclimated to a distinctive and rather isolated lifestyle.1 He was raised a Roman Catholic and attended parochial institutions until he graduated from high school. He never adapted to life in this seemingly narrow and doctrinaire environment, and the heterodoxy that infuses his works throughout his career seems to demonstrate a kind of rebellious spirit. He told the interviewer Richard B. Woodward that he “felt early on that he was not going to be a respectable citizen.” But he displayed from the earliest age an active tendency to engage and

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interact with the world around him. He mentioned to Woodward that he remembered a circumstance when “in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. . . . Name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it.”2 It is an early activity that found its way into the texture of his adult life, and his intense and varied research found expression in his writing from the beginning, particularly in the natural settings that surrounded his emerging urban community. When McCarthy returned to the university, he enrolled in Robert Daniel’s course in fiction writing. He wrote well and was chosen to receive the Ingram Merrill Award in the 1950–51 academic year. He published two short stories in the university’s literary magazine, the Phoenix, “Wake for Susan” (1959) and “A Drowning Incident” (1960). The first begins with a quote from Sir Walter Scott, suggesting an early interest in the historical romance. The narrative recounts the experience of a young man named Wes, who on a hunting trip happens across a gravestone wrapped in vines. It is the grave of a young woman with the inscribed date of 1834, and Wes conjures the detail of the girl’s first dramatic experience with love. The tale is full of natural description and works as an extended meditation on time and its passing. The girl’s short life becomes a universal emblem of brevity and mutability as Wes creates a complex human narrative from the fabric of his own imagination. The second story, “A Drowning Incident,” tells the tale of a young boy who recovers the drowned body of a puppy that has been thrown into the Tennessee River. The sketch concludes in grotesque fashion as the boy, motivated by a thinly repressed rage, places the dead puppy in a crib next to the infant form of his young sibling. The narrative evokes the rural setting of McCarthy’s upbringing and channels some of his early influences, including William Faulkner and perhaps Flannery O’Connor.3 The tale is rich in description, with a stark and naturalistic, even bestial, rendering of setting and circumstance. These stories and the early novels anticipate the concerns of later works set in the South, including his screenplay The Gardener’s Son (1979) and the stage play The Stonemason (1994). Both display the influence of literary naturalism in their representation of violence and the shaping influence of natural law. The Gardener’s Son is a historical drama drawn from actual events that took place in 1876 in the textile village of Graniteville, South Carolina. McCarthy wrote the screenplay in 1975 for the Visions series, which was a collection of dramas broadcast on public television. He collaborated with Richard Pearce, who initially invited McCarthy to become involved in the project. It was a time in his writing life when he seemed

All Limbo’s Clamor  /  21

preoccupied with many of the historical concerns endemic to the region and the nation, specifically the transition from agrarian to industrial economies and the effects of these changes on communities and individuals. It is the story of Robert McEvoy, the handicapped son of a working family who murders a member of the mill owner’s clan. The film details in naturalistic terms class struggle and competition as well as the human impulse to violence that is often unleashed under economic stress. A play written much later but set in the South, The Stonemason evokes many of the central themes in McCarthy’s southern novels: the value of intimacy in the context of family heritage, as well as the mystical and nevertheless worldly experience that characterizes the work of the traditional craftsman, who understands that “true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity . . . by the warp of the world” (9). These two works emphasize McCarthy’s interest in the dramatic medium and the way that form can be employed to convey naturalist themes. As with the novels, they emphasize scarcity, the innate drive to acquire and possess, and the struggle between raw desire and a contravening sense that higher principles may be alive in the world. In the case of The Stonemason human communities and even families offer some compensatory balance that challenges darker forces and conflicts. These concerns become evident in McCarthy’s first three novels: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1974). Each work is original and innovative in terms of content and narrative form, with an emerging and distinctive voice that would characterize the later work.4 But they involve the clear influence of the southern gothic and the southern grotesque as historical change bears down on characters and often brings them to a place where violence seems the only response.5 The natural world figures large in these early novels, as characters struggle to adapt to changing environments and contend with the limitations inherent in the lived experience of material and animal existence.6

The Orchard Keeper (1965) The University of Tennessee is situated in central Knoxville and emerged in the late nineteenth century as a large land-­grant institution steeped in the egalitarian tradition of American higher education. The model was implemented under Abraham Lincoln and the Morrill Act of 1862. Like most public universities this southern college was a product of region and nation, with a student body primarily from Tennessee and an educational mission both national and global. As Cormac McCarthy was finishing his time there in the early 1960s, the nation was becoming absorbed in a maelstrom of change, and the university itself reflected an

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increased connection to the nation and the world. Though set three dec­ ades before, The Orchard Keeper reflects the tumultuous era of its composition, and its central concern is historical change and the transition to a globalized modernity. It is an American historical romance that embodies the perennial conflict between the forces of progress and reaction. The novel is set in southeastern Knox County and northeastern Blount County in the region near Brown Mountain, where McCar­thy lived with his family as a child. In a series of interlaced strands that reflect the formal experimentation of William Faulkner and other modernists, the narrative tells the story of Arthur Ownby, an aging man of the wilderness, a character emerging from the naturalist tradition, and a manifestation of American frontier mythology. Ownby is independent, self-­defining, and committed to the land with all its promises and limitations, and he is willing to protect his way of life with the violence endemic to the natural world, the region, and its history. In genuinely mythic fashion, Ownby serves as mentor to John Wesley Rattner, a young man drawn to the life exemplified through the old man but caught by the historical forces that are defining the area. John Wesley’s father, Kenneth, is an itinerant who in a random moment tries to rob and murder Marion Sylder, a local bootlegger. The novel presents the internal thoughts and memories of all its major characters, as their mutual destinies become bound through a series of independent choices with consequences that cannot be anticipated. At the center of their lives is a beautiful and ultimately unknowable landscape, embodied with mystery and the numinous, yet defined by the harsh indifference and unmitigated strength associated with a naturalist worldview. The legacy of literary naturalism is ubiquitous in the novel, though The Orchard Keeper is especially concerned with the human consequences of change in a specific American context. Arthur Ownby and John Wesley Rattner are acutely conscious of their relative insignificance, especially in the face of progress and all its transformative and potentially destructive consequences. But nature itself is at the center of this struggle, and even as the natural world recedes in the face of an advancing technological modernity, the physical laws that govern remain inexorable. In Ownby’s dedication to an older era, The Orchard Keeper reflects sympathy for the forces of reaction, but McCarthy’s tragic vision acknowledges the omnipotence of fate and the portentous reality of time and its ebb and flow. The historical conflicts that condition the territory of McCarthy’s youth are rich in moral ambiguity, and these tensions are influenced by the basic exigencies and defining principles of the natural world. Development and modernization are neither inherently good nor inherently

All Limbo’s Clamor  /  23

evil, and The Orchard Keeper reflects McCarthy’s ambivalence to the technological changes he had observed when growing up. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an innovator who understood that progress was inevitable, and that the sweep of history must be navigated with a moral vision and a sense of the common good. In the 1930s the country was still primarily rural, and for many people everyday experience was effectively medieval, unchanged by the Industrial Revolution and the birth of industrial society. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived on in the routines of normal people as they worked to till the land and exchange for the necessities of living. Agrarian modes of subsistence were themselves dependent on mercantile economies not dissimilar to those found during the colonial period in the middle regions of the nation east of the Alleghenies. Formal currencies were the primary medium of exchange, as farmers sold their produce to limited markets and bought what they needed for themselves and their families, although barter was not uncommon in insular communities, as folks from varied social positions exchanged in more direct and unmediated ways. Given these interdependencies the town was inseparable from the small farm, and the Jeffersonian ideal of a democratic and agrarian space was not far from reality. But along the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians and farther west in the Ozarks of southern Missouri and Arkansas, the topography was rugged and the cultural geography more complicated. Much removed from the intricacies of material exchange, people in the mountain regions were fiercely independent in terms of both economics and patterns of mind. Extended families formed social units less oriented to outside influence, and the pace of historical change was slow in coming. The currents of progress, though largely unstoppable, were met with a resistance and skepticism born of experience and rational concern, as well as from an unconscious fear of the new that is all too understandable and human. The federal government and the Tennessee Valley Authority worked to bring advantage to these middle regions, but as new modes of living were driven by new technologies, patterns of existence were disrupted, and the daily realities of cultural practice were ignored. More remote and rural spaces were being modernized by roads and electrical power, as well as dams, canals, and other physical infrastructure, and as this occurred cultural practices at the heart of perception and values were forcefully changed. How do married couples relate to each other when they are separated by a day’s labor? How do families define their relationships when economic and territorial dependency is less prescient? These pressures were not new to rural America, and the tensions between the forces of progress and reaction had been real for centuries. They were expressed in the most popular American mythologies as they

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appeared in the frontier romances of James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and, later, William Faulkner. In the decades before McCarthy’s time, settlement had extended the influence of banking, finance, and national and global exchange even to the most remote regions, and industries like mining and rail had been a part of the economic texture of life for as long as many could remember. But values like independence and self-­sufficiency, even a seemingly eccentric desire for solitude, are hard to change. Especially in the mountains inland of the Eastern Seaboard and west into Tennessee and beyond, the land was more than a mode of physical sustenance. It was a thing to be embraced and preserved. Historically, various forms of Christianity occupied the region, but one dominant strand emerged from the northern British and Scots-­Irish migrations of the eighteenth century.7 In a regionally influenced Presbyterian and Baptist context, nature was a thing to be appeased and even worshipped. These are many of the values that find their way into The Orchard Keeper. In genuinely naturalist terms, the land was harsh and unforgiving, and the people’s experience with nature often involved conflict and hardship. But rural and mountain folk felt a kind of interdependence with the land that transcended the material. They were fatalists, and they experienced the mountain region as brutal and at times indifferent to their daily concerns. But it was also their home and a place they had adapted to over decades and generations, and this relationship informed their actions and self-­perceptions. In The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy blends his concern with the cultural patterns he observes in the rural areas around Knoxville and the literary naturalist insights he derives from his experience and from his literary forebears. In Arthur Ownby we reencounter the frontiersman committed to the implacable and violent wilderness. We experience an exemplar of adaptation, a man attuned to the environment and responsive to its laws and daily demands. We also witness the tragedy that emerges in the natural world as the environment and its ecosystems change. The novel is rooted in a kind of romantic naturalism, as an indifferent nature makes demands and sustains at levels beyond the material and economic. In this sense the literary naturalism that informs The Orchard Keeper is bound to a host of regional and historical concerns. As it is a novel set in the American South, many have observed the influence of William Faulkner, particularly the character of Isaac McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (1942). Faulkner’s narrative aesthetic can also be seen in the interlaced strands, the italicized memory sequences, and the stream of consciousness narrative technique.8 What is clear in both Faulkner and McCarthy

All Limbo’s Clamor  /  25

is a preoccupation with style itself, with the effect of a well-­crafted sentence, an archaism, an effectively chosen word, and the lyrical impact of devices such as polysyndeton. But the tendency of early reviewers to note the influence of Faulkner is arguably overstated and somewhat predicated on the incidental fact that McCarthy’s first editor was Albert Erskine, who was Faulkner’s editor as well. In truth, there is much that is new in The Orchard Keeper. In addition to echoing the rich subordinate constructs of Faulkner, McCarthy varies his sentences and displays the minimalism and parallel constructions of Hemingway. More recent critics have tended to approach the novel on its own distinct terms, both stylistically and otherwise. Dianne C. Luce provides a detailed context for reading the novel by elucidating the history informing the narrative, arguing that “the unifying conflict in The Orchard Keeper is the contention between traditional mountain culture and the modern, commercial, and technocentric culture of ‘mainstream’ America, endorsed by the federal government.”9 Natalie Grant argues that nature is not merely backdrop or conventional setting in the novel, but an elaborate metaphor for natural, psychological, and spiritual states. She writes, “nature depicted as a surreal, often hostile environment bounds, emphasizes, and defines McCarthy’s characters.”10 In a similar vein, David Paul Ragan argues that the novel’s unconventional form reflects an innate human desire to seek structure in the apparent chaos of perception and experience, and that McCarthy’s narrative methods and themes examine “the intrinsic human need to order, or at least to interpret, the world of nature and to understand the motives of men.”11 Each of these inquiries either directly or by implication places nature as a central concern in The Orchard Keeper. In line with naturalist preoccupations, images of the primordial appear in figuration patterns that enrich the novel’s imagistic texture. The past bears on the present in transformative ways, and the omnipresent pressure of time is a theme ubiquitous in McCarthy’s fiction. Arthur Ownby is intimately associated with the primordial, which, taken in totality, forms a kind of metaphorical system that illuminates his character and his connection to an eminently physical but also spiritually embodied nature. As he traverses the landscape, his perception is imbued with a sense that there is a meaning to be read in nature essential not only to survival but to identity and personal sustenance and rejuvenation. Late in the novel, as the conflict between Ownby and the modern community heightens to its ultimate and tragic resolution, he harks back to a time before humans and their imprint were present on the land:

26 / Chapter 2

By day flocks of rails gathered. A pair of bitterns stalked with gimlet eyes the fertile shallows. At night the tidelands rang with peepers, with frogs gruffly choral. Great scaly gars from the river invaded the flats, fierce and primitive in 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. (173)

The prehistorical in all its portent is at the core of Ownby’s worldview. Nature is a place rich in physical substance, and like a hieroglyphic or primordial urtext it speaks forth in a language full of meaning. But the material world is unreadable except by those attuned to its peculiar and mysterious patterns of signification. Remote from the present as they may seem, the “mesozoic fens” are emblematic of a stark naturalistic insight. The absence of the human speaks to the indifference of the same. The land and nature are self-­sustaining and seemingly indomitable, and even in the larger context of the novel, as civilization intrudes and invades, there is a sense that forces far beyond the human will respond and survive. But those influences do not protect a benevolent or beneficent nature attuned to human needs and desires. The primordial imagery suggests not only the indifference of nature but, in the evocative image of the gar, its positive malevolence and predacious monstrosity. Beauty and its antithesis in suffering blend and demand from Ownby a fatalism bound to the natural world, one that requires adaptation and a willingness to align with its dictates. In his evocation of the primordial McCarthy moves beyond biology to meteorology and the geological, elevating time and placing harsh limitations on the present value of human endeavor and hope: A warm wind on the mountain and the sky darkening, the clouds looping black underbellies until a huge ulcer folded out of the mass and a crack like the earth’s core rending rattled panes from Winkle Hollow to Bay’s Mountain. And the wind rising and gone colder until the trees bent as if borne forward on some violent acceleration of the earth’s turning and then that too ceased with a clatter and hiss out of the still air a plague of ice. (171)

The natural world is a realm of predation and regeneration through violence, but it is also a place where the wind and rain enact a perennial process of change, and where the earth’s turning connotes a system of laws unseen but ultimately defining. It remains for the adept human to

All Limbo’s Clamor  /  27

apprehend their place in a natural order and to accept consignment to blind destiny, where adaptation and a malleability to fate are guiding principles. The evocation of the primordial in The Orchard Keeper is intimately bound to Ownby as mythic figure, as adaptability and the acceptance of nature’s timeless omnipotence define heroism in a naturalistic context. But this eradication of time does not amount to an eradication of history, since Ownby’s fate is tragically dictated by the time-­bound and limited constraints placed on him by the tide of human civilization in the twentieth century. Arthur Ownby’s mythic stature owes much to the historical romance that precedes him in the tradition of American nature writing. But when drawn well this genre-­specific character always transcends type in his human contours and concerns. It is also true that the figure is drawn from experience, and that the frontier encouraged certain virtues that are in many ways misplaced outside the wilderness. This is Ownby’s plight and his ultimate tragedy, as the world he knows changes around him under the onslaught of progress and modernity. But the way McCarthy conceives the wilderness is at its most basic level naturalistic. The world Ownby encounters is a realm of sustenance and perpetual rejuvenation. But it is also full of mystery and spiritual implication, a dark realm of indifferent forces that define and constrain, a harsh and sometimes brutal place that demands appeasement and acceptance. Nature is not just a material space divorced from civilization; it is the whole of the physical world, and one cannot escape the laws that bind. As Ownby traverses the land, he blends with nature only insofar as he aligns himself with its movements and inexorable processes: The old man kept to his course, over last year’s leaves slick with water, hopping and dancing wildly among the maelstrom of riotous greenery like some rain sprite, burned out of the near-­darkness in antic configuration against the quick bloom of the lightning. . . . A clash of shields rings and Valkyrie descend with cat’s cries to bear him away. (172)

Nature is destructive and unpredictable and can be cajoled only as Ownby is transformed and “taken away,” absorbed by the world he has come to know and accept as his home. McCarthy integrates natural description with mythic terms and figurations, evoking most clearly pagan and specifically Nordic myths that in their substance comport with later naturalist conceptions. The hills, the wind, and the rain are the portentous manifestation of laws that to the ancients could only be represented in terms of narrative and story. But they are no less accurate in their presentation of

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the environment as a place defined by force and violence. The “Valkyrie that descend with cat’s cries,” are female figures from Norse tales that decide the fate of warriors in battle, choosing who will live and die. The Norse of the European Iron Age share much in common with the hero of the American frontier romance and with the mountain folk in the Alleghenies and the Appalachians. These people are ignorant of the scientific processes that govern physical reality, but in their lack of knowledge they are no less aware of how those forces affect their lives. Nature both contains and defines, and it must be appeased as well as respected. The wilderness demands that Ownby blend and integrate, and he appears as a “rain sprite” dancing to the tune of fate. In modern language, the laws of nature can be described in terms of adaptability, natural selection, and geological time. But the ancient, premodern, and mythic conception is effectively the same, as nature asserts itself as dominant, mysterious, and unchanging. But adaptation is not a perpetual absolute, and nature is more than landscape and geography; it includes human communities, and the technologies people create to advance their lives in the context of modern civilization. Adaptation is fluid as ecosystems change and individuals and species find themselves unfit and face extinction. This naturalist conception and basic law is metaphorically represented in Ownby’s fate. He struggles, even violently, to fend off forces that would change his environment and render him ill-­suited for survival. But like any inexorable force of nature, those processes consume him, and he is finally caught and institutionalized. The ultimate irony lies in the fact that Arthur Ownby is finally contained and bound by an amorphous power structure that is a metonym for modern technological civilization in all its complexity and naturalistic indifference. It is a new ecosystem unconscious of his concerns, values, and heartfelt desires and acquired needs. The old man seems to acquiesce as best he can, and when John Wesley visits him in the convalescent home, he seems resigned to his sad and unavoidable fate. As the frontier figure reduced and consigned, he is no less heroic, but in the final resolution his mythic stature is rounded with tragedy and a sense of inevitability. In nature the only constant is change, which is a reality true of organisms, species, and entire ecosystems. Ownby’s story is the universal and naturalistic process of living, adapting, and surviving for a time, and it is ultimately a tale of extinction and death in a natural world that supersedes all consciousness and desire, all hope and aspiration for an eternal future. In this mythic pattern, the hero in the making is John Wesley Rattner, and Ownby serves as mentor as the young man learns to find a place in

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the changing wilderness. Their relationship is endearing, and John Wesley’s reaction to Ownby’s fate is one of transformation and possibility. The same pattern of naturalistic perception informs him as he emerges into adulthood. He is attracted to the changing wilderness in much the same way as the old man. Nature is a homeplace and a thing to be understood and learned, its processes and laws essential to the young man’s sense of meaning and purpose. The most telling interaction between John Wesley and Arthur Ownby happens as the latter discusses panthers. There is a playfulness in the way Ownby recounts his experiences, but his narration is not lacking in significance. After telling a story that recalls a time when panthers were more common and could be heard calling to one another across the hills, Ownby concludes by ruminating on the animal as an emblem of nature in all its mystery: You see, he said slowly, darkly, they’s painters and they’s painters. Some of them is jest that, and then others is right uncommon. That old she-­painter, she never left a track one. She wadn’t no common kind of painter. (157)

Ownby comes from an oral culture, and exaggeration informs his storytelling practice. McCarthy captures a moment when an old man tells an appealing and entertaining tale rich in regional history. But he also channels the written tradition of his canonical forebears in American literature, specifically those in the tradition of southwestern humor. It is a genre born of realism and naturalism, cognizant of the rich texture of American folk life and the stark realities of an incomprehensible nature. Panthers are an evocative metaphor for the natural world. They are wild, elusive, predatory, and irredeemably violent. But they are also, at least in some cases, emblems of mystery and metaphysical implication, appearing and leaving no track, ghostlike and apparitional but no less dangerous. In the figure of the panther, nature presents itself in all its brutality and darkness, and whether John Wesley has acquired this perspective through stories or direct experience, he sees the natural world in much the same way. This becomes clear as he observes the sparrow hawk he has captured for a bounty: It was in August that he had found the sparrowhawk on the mountain road, crouched in the dust with one small falcon wing fanned and limp, eyeing him without malice or fear—something hard there, implacable and ungiving. (77)

Like the panther, the sparrow hawk suggests the natural world in small. For John Wesley there is little romanticism in his perception, nothing

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particularly beyond knowing when he ponders the wounded hawk as it faces death. In the work of literary naturalists such as Jack London and Stephen Crane, nature is often positively malevolent and demonic. But here the natural world is “without malice or fear.” The hawk as John Wesley observes it appears indomitable and without the capacity to yield even to death, though die it must. The creature is bound and inextricably integrated with a nature that is “implacable and ungiving,” and the hawk seems to betray a kind of acceptance, a peculiar awareness that as a creature of the wild it will recede back into a process that binds all things material in a unity without concern or awareness. But the passage appears in italics, which indicates memory or interior monologue, as well as subjectivity and individual consciousness. These are John Wesley’s perceptions rather than objective observation. The image of the sparrow hawk and the boy’s reading of the animal reflect a naturalistic mindset emerging and evolving as the young man interacts with the world and the receding wilderness. There is a deep sense of isolation and alienation in the hawk and a sense that the creature is Ownby’s and even John Wesley’s double: the natural being facing extinction as the civilized world moves blindly forward in the headlong pursuit of progress. But in the end that same human pursuit is ultimately contingent. The opening vignette in The Orchard Keeper is an evocative analogue suggesting nature’s inexorable primacy. Two men gather to repair a fence, only to discover that the trunk of a tree has grown around the barbed wire. The scarring image of the fence itself is consumed by time and the wilderness in a blended beauty and primal force that brings growth to the tree. The powerful scene is one of many such pictures drawn by American writers of a naturalist and romantic tendency. In two of his most well-­known poems, “Mending Wall” (1914) and “Birches” (1916), Robert Frost makes vivid the fate of human endeavor as it confronts the laws that define the physical world over the eons. The stone barrier in “Mending Wall” is repaired in time with the seasons, but it falls away as well, even to the point where the persona wonders at the fruitless waste of his labors in rebuilding it. In “Birches” the ice storm is sublime in its beauty and power to destroy, and the boy in the poem seeks solace from that truth in a plaintive memory that imbues the poem with emotional tension and sympathy. In this sense, in The Orchard Keeper McCarthy joins his forebears as he articulates an insight central to any sustaining relationship to nature. Humans must know their place and understand that time is the harbinger of a fate inexorable, since it is bound in mystery to a natural world consigned to its own sometimes indiscernible principles,

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made meaningful in the human sphere through the benevolence of an old man in the acts of heroic defiance he both teaches and makes real.

Outer Dark (1968) Interlaced and invested with naturalist themes, this second novel is richly drawn from the Bible and inflected with the Jacobian rhythms of the King James Version, first published in 1611. Outer Dark takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 8, verses 10–13. In response to a humble centurion who comes to faith as he seeks healing for his servant, Jesus says: Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, that many shall come from east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And Jesus said, go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so it be done unto thee. And his servant was healed the selfsame hour.

Since the “children of the kingdom” are destined to occupy a place of exile, the “outer darkness” should be understood not as a hellish realm of everlasting punishment but as a purgatorial wasteland typologically derived, where a chosen people must undergo a spiritual test before they are delivered into a promised land. In many ways Outer Dark takes the form of a parable elucidating this analogy, as its deeply flawed and even perverse protagonist travels through an alien land in search of a home he will never find.12 The novel is the first of McCarthy’s journey narratives, and it charts a torturous pathway for its main character that is deeply spiritual, interior, and psychological. As with many works in a naturalist vein, human interiority does not emerge from thought or studied reflection, since we must intuit those thoughts as they appear in action and dialogue.13 But there is a strange and persistent inertia to the narrative, and McCarthy is deft in creating a story that reveals character motivation through a representational pattern drawn perhaps from cinema. The protagonist’s words and behavior are mirrored in a rich array of images and descriptions, and through careful and studied poetic development and exposition. Outer Dark is an allegory of sin enacted and punished, guilt obliquely expressed and partially but not adequately expiated. It is also a tale of retribution in a naturalist context, as the world itself, in all its power and indomitability, consigns one young man to a journey universal and without conclusion. Judging from initial reviews and early criticism, William Faulkner

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casts a long and foreboding shadow on McCarthy’s work, particularly on his early novels, set in the American South. McCarthy even acknowledges the reality of influence and deems it essential to any worthwhile creative endeavor. But the tendency to evoke Faulkner is too narrow and limits a more complete understanding of McCarthy’s accomplishment. As The Orchard Keeper draws from the American historical romance and the tension between the forces of progress and reaction, so Outer Dark derives from another strand of the romance: the gothic. In the hands of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, the gothic in the ambiguous mode explores the relationship of a troubled humanity to metaphysical realms beyond apprehension, as well as to a natural world both material and indifferent. The genre secularizes Christian Manichaeism, seeing nature as complicit in the perpetual conflict of dark and light, known and unknown, good and evil. More contemporaneous to McCarthy’s time, the gothic romance was adapted by twentieth-­ century southern writers concerned with the devastating legacy of the antebellum South and the Civil War. As has long been attributed to an address at the University of Virginia in 1935, Ellen Glasgow used the term “Southern Gothic School” to describe the works of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, authors she thought tastelessly emphasized the dark and perverse with their particular and all-­too-­vivid rendering of “aimless violence.” Cormac McCarthy certainly reflects this evolution, but he innovates and transforms the genre in the process. Outer Dark contains elements of the southern gothic, but the novel is equally a historical romance, a metaphysical romance, a parable of guilt and retribution, and a stark inquiry into the way the natural world circumscribes any human journey, whether interior or exterior. More particularly, those elements of mystery that we associate with the gothic generally are equally an element of many works of literary naturalism. Outer Dark tells the sad and looming tale of a poor itinerant brother and sister who occupy a territory distinctly American and recognizably southern. The people speak an Appalachian dialect. The landscape is rural and agrarian, and Protestant religion and religiosity are omnipresent throughout. But for all the specificities of locale the narrative is out of time and space, with only hints to historical period and little specificity regarding geography. The modes of living and the technology characters employ suggest the nineteenth century, but McCarthy seems intent on illuminating the universal in a narrative removed from historical particulars. Much like Faulkner, McCarthy creates a simulacrum of specificity, but at other times he crafts mythic terrains that sound alien but are geographically precise. He combines thinly veiled fictional locales with mythic

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renderings of actual places. Culla and Rinthy Holme are poor and alone, having left their home on the Chicken River in Johnson County. From the onset their relationship is troubled, and it soon becomes clear that the pregnant Rinthy has been made so by her brother. After the birth Culla abandons the child to die in the woods, where it is recovered by a wandering tinker. Brother and sister then embark on separate journeys, Rinthy to find the child and Culla to seek work and a repose from suffering. Culla’s journey primarily involves an attempt at escape from the people he meets: a wealthy squire who seeks the boots Culla has stolen, a family of drovers who try to hang him for an offense he didn’t commit, and a mysterious group of three murderous men, the grim triune, who seem preternaturally aware of his inner conflict and the guilt that drives his flight. Central to McCarthy’s fiction is the presence or absence of a moral machinery that structures his narratives and gives meaning to the lives of characters. Vereen M. Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988) establishes one line of thinking that remains relevant, suggesting that McCarthy’s worldview is essentially nihilistic, since characters such as Culla Holme seek rest in a universe that seems to deny them recourse to meaning or redemption.14 In contrast, Edwin T. Arnold argues that moral systems and modes of understanding are pervasive in McCarthy’s novels, often taking the form of moral parables. In reference to Outer Dark, Arnold writes, “Culla is a tormented man, haunted by his sin. . . . He is a man who wishes to be cured, forgiven, but who can cry out only in his sleep.”15 The world itself continually reminds Culla of his guilt and seems to conspire against his attempt to flee, and his antagonists, though often real, are deeply internal as well, as his own moral sensibility haunts him beyond reckoning. John M. Grammer locates the conflict in the territory of the pastoral, a storied and mythic realm of rest that ironically denies Culla the calm he hopes to find. William C. Spencer views the narrative as a parody of the Bible, through the “unholy trinity” that seems to externalize his own dark musings and search for redemption.16 Dianne C. Luce sees the plight of Culla and Rinthy in terms of “cosmic estrangement,” as they travel through a shadow world that suggests a bleak reality beyond human knowing.17 At the center of all these arguments are the laws that bind, the natural world that both provides and constrains, the harsh realm of materiality and stark contingency. James  R. Giles reads Outer Dark in terms consistent with naturalist scholars such as Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, and Eric Carl Link.18 Particularly in McCarthy’s use of the gothic mode, his embodied world involves the blend of the transcendental and the immanent in a kind of romantic naturalism long-­standing in the American tradition.

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This perspective takes thematic shape through what Donald Pizer has called a “multilayered determinism.”19 In his reading of Frank Norris and other naturalists, characters are circumscribed by an array of forces beyond their control that cannot be reduced entirely to biological and chemical spheres of influence. Social systems and the material contingencies associated with them are reinforced by the intractability of economic conditions. Issues of class are central to many naturalist novels, and the people who occupy the world are often tragically limited in agency and force of will. Through dialogue and description, Outer Dark is imbued with a proletarian mood, as rural modes of living are rendered in a way that seems exotic and foreign to a modern and urban reader. But McCarthy is careful to chart the rigid caste systems that govern everywhere and across time. Virtually every class is represented and placed in interrelation. There is a squire who puts men to work. There are farmers, town merchants, doctors, itinerant hog drovers, clergy both formal and informal, and sheriffs and judges. There are even the triune, who stand outside the system only because they have chosen to reject social constraint through an embrace of lawlessness and murderous violence. At the center are Culla, Rinthy, and the tinker. Brother and sister bear all the markings of the socially and economically bereft. They are wanderers without a home; they are desperately impoverished, uneducated, and illiterate, and McCarthy is precise in displaying the consequences of their alienation. Far from the romantic poor who humbly work the land, Culla is corrupted by circumstances and is driven to theft by the simple impulse to survive. Even his act of incest might be read as the perversion of an inexcusable instinct made monstrous by his social isolation and economic deprivation. Rinthy is much like the women in naturalist novels such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). She is noble in her devotion to her lost child but ill-­equipped to alter the situation, as she wanders painfully dependent on the occasional kindness of strangers. She frequently confesses her isolation and points to the fact that she is alone, bereft of family or community. A sense of fatalism colors her expression with pathos and sympathy, and she is circumscribed not only by class but by gender. The tinker has more in common with Culla and Rinthy than the conflicts of plot suggest. He is drawn to acts of rapacious monstrosity in part by the conditions he shares with Culla, and he might in many ways be seen as Culla’s double. After ripping his arm away from Rinthy as she pleads for him to return her child, the tinker says:

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I give a lifetime wanderin in a country where I was despised. . . . I give forty years strapped in front of a cart like a mule till I couldn’t stand straight to be hanged. I’ve not got soul one in this world save an old halfcrazy sister that nobody ever would have like they never would me. I been rocked and shot at and whipped and dogbit from one end of the state to the other and you can’t pay that back. (193)

The material world has presented him with the same constraints and heartless limitations as Culla and Rinthy, and the experience of his recollection seems almost uncanny in its similarity to Culla’s, including an absent sister who is the only relation he can recall. All the characters are bound and broken by the indifferent forces of class and economic contingency in a determinism both material and intractable. This same determinism has a rich psychological dimension, so much so that it becomes tempting to read the behavior of characters too exclusively in a fatalistic vein. But Culla and Rinthy should be understood in the context of Walcutt’s “divided stream,” which blends naturalist explanations in human motivation with more mysterious romantic and even transcendentalist considerations.20 The biblical frame evoked in the context of the novel’s title suggests that the guilt that drives Culla and the love and devotion that sustain Rinthy find a source in realms perhaps beyond material and biological spheres of influence. But a rooted and comprehensible determinism is at the heart of their thoughts and actions. At the most basic level, Culla is motivated by a sexual impulse that cannot be entirely explained, except insofar as his isolation and poverty move him to perversion and incest. But given that his transgression takes place before the action of the novel begins, its bleak source finds origin in the realm of mystery and in the impenetrable psychology of the human animal. His act emerges from a desire essential to the preservation of the biological realm, sexual reproduction, and McCarthy seems intent on exploring the way natural human needs find horrific expression in a naturalist realm devoid of ethical frameworks of understanding and control. Rinthy has a natural impulse to protect her child, and it is easy to sympathize with her plight, especially when considering her moving and tragic interactions with the tinker. But McCarthy figures her as he might a mother in any species. Her quest to recover the child involves more than thought and sympathy, and it is more than a matter of mind. Her body craves to nurse the baby as her breasts secrete milk even months after the child has been taken away. In this context her instinct to nurture and protect can be understood in naturalistic terms, and her behavior seems

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to transcend speciation and humanity. But at the novel’s conclusion and in the absence of her son, sustained only by his memory, she walks the world in a “frail agony of grace” (237), recalling the plight of the fallen and the tragic nobility of the centurion as he seeks healing through faith. Culla is motivated by guilt and a desire to escape that finds its source in forces external to him—namely, the grim triune. But the allusive context established by the novel’s title and the alien realm of outer darkness Culla must traverse suggest that his guilt and the concomitant retribution can only be reconciled outside the physical body in a place obliquely perceivable. This other realm that blends with the natural world becomes clear in the description of the abandoned child: And as he [the tinker] lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark in a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried. It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor. (17–18)

The description is replete with the features of the physical grotesque so frequently evident in the gothic romance, and the space that surrounds the child seems utterly divorced from history. It is almost allegorical in its evocation of a purgatorial wasteland. Culla’s journey can never be made distinct from this preternatural realm of reckoning and implied purification in suffering. But his behavior is clearly driven by internal motives that defy any recourse to agency or choice. He seeks escape and acts in accordance with the instinct to run so recognizable in determined human behavior. His flight is motivated by internal logics and clearly predictable traits of animal nature, recalling in many ways Henry Fleming’s retreat in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Fleming runs from danger in his first forceful encounter with battle, and afterward in a moment of reflection he sees his own actions mirrored in the flight of a squirrel. Culla never achieves this moment of studied recognition, perhaps because his act is morally reprehensible to an infinitely greater degree. But his behavior is clearly that of an animal moved by the irrepressible desire to survive and find rest, in Culla’s case from the world itself and from the forceful weight of his own inner demons. As such the

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natural and the otherworldly blend in the multifaceted contours of a psychological determinism. In the spirit of romantic naturalism these deterministic forces have a blended material and spiritual dimension. An integration of seeming opposites finds its strangest and most evocative expression in the mysterious triune. In Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders (1895), segments XLIV and XLVIII foreground the hard reality of the natural world in the context of epistemological confusion, doubt, and metaphysical dread. Segment XLIV reads: .

I was in the darkness; I could not see my words Nor the wishes of my heart. Then suddenly there was a great light— “Let me into the darkness again.”21

There is an uneasy mix of ignorance and innocence in Culla’s relationship with the triune. Crane’s poem suggests the darkness of sin and intellectual blindness that resolves itself only in the desire to remain blind to the realities of an indifferent natural world. But the triune emerge from a realm wholly other, a place beyond knowing, defined by the same darkness. The triune reveal to Culla the reality of a violent world that seems to transcend the material. In the end they reveal to him the wishes of his heart, and he retreats from exposure to the garish light of his own transgression. The triune become the strange incarnation of a moral vengeance that is beyond any definable system of values. In a naturalist context, Crane’s The Black Riders continues to illuminate this irony. Segment XLVIII reads: Once there was a man,— Oh, so wise! In all drink He detected the bitter, And in all touch He found the sting. And last he cried thus: “There is nothing,— “No life, “No joy, “No pain,— “There is nothing save opinion, “And opinion be damned.”22

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The triune initiate Culla into the bleak wisdom of the wise man as he becomes acutely aware of his transgression. He travels through a mythic landscape and confronts nothing but the cold reality of human indifference. The outcome of Culla’s dubious flight is a life without joy or even the “frail agony of grace” mysteriously granted to his sister, Rinthy. Until the final scene with the blind man, Culla finds nothing but bitter loss and sting, as well as the despair that colors a relativistic world of “opinion” alone. He lives in a realm that finds moral rectitude only through the murderous desires of the grim triune. They are avatars from a liminal space simultaneously real and dreamlike, and they speak from the heart of a natural world that finds expression only through pain. They are at once material and beyond time. McCarthy gives them this mysterious quality by initially separating them from the main narrative in a subplot called out in italics. As the story proceeds and especially near the end, in their meeting with Culla, they are tangible and real. One of them is named, another is bearded, and they speak in a regional dialect that marks them historically. Their speech and behavior make clear their social class, and they share much with Culla and Rinthy in the broad contours of their experience. They are natural beings, and as such they can be read emblematically as the force of nature itself in all its violence, amoral contingency, and unbounded motive to survive. But as with many figures in the literary naturalist canon, from Jack London’s Wolf Larsen to the bestial characters of Frank Norris, the triune are more than indifferent or immune to the suffering of others. They are positively malevolent, and they act out in a violence that seems without motive except in the dark and inaccessible recesses of an aberrant psychology. In this sense, McCarthy’s natural world in all its law-­bound materiality is imbued with a force driven by a darkness that cannot be accounted for in strictly scientific, Darwinian, or material terms. The opening frame in italics emphasizes that they are real in every sense, but they also seem to emanate from a realm beyond: They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge . . . then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well. (3)

The triune are at once a transient group of men and a bleak and purposeful reality traversing the land with a dark but directed intent. They are associated with nature but less with concrete and tactile objects and more with sun and shadow and streams of light. Their movements

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blend with natural elements inaccessible to touch but resident in a kind of dream space that at the same time can never be divorced from sensory apprehension. They travel the land with a peculiar comfort and a preternatural awareness of their environment and its limitations, and they seem indistinct from the world they occupy, which for Culla is a realm of wry indifference and senseless violence. The triune wander into the novel from another realm entirely, and in their mystery and otherworldly character they seem to define nature in terms both material and immaterial. These three mysterious men are no less emblematic in the penultimate scene as they become tangible through their interaction with Culla. One of them questions Culla with a peculiarly perverse enjoyment and a mysterious awareness of his guilt: “I figure you got this thing here in her belly your own self and then laid it off on that tinker” (233). Culla flails in response, but there is a palpable change in his character and even an emerging moral rectitude that seems to grow from his experience wandering. His primary motive has been the desire to survive and flee from the threats that would assault him. As he sits with the triune, he is no less preoccupied with personal welfare, but he is now concerned with the fate of his tortured and deformed son as well. They have murdered the tinker and taken the child, who is almost beastlike in appearance but is no less sympathetic in his vulnerability and innocence. Culla remembers Rinthy and pleads with the triune to release the boy: “My sister would take him. . . . That chap. . . . We could find her and she’d take him” (236). But a moment later they slit the child’s neck, and one of them drinks its blood. In this strange and ambiguous parable, Culla is at once redeemed and condemned as he tries in vain to reverse the effects of his previous sin and to return the child to its mother. His attempt fails, and he is again consigned to wandering, but there is an otherworldly and allegorical quality to this last scene that gives the novel a religious aura that by no means undermines the naturalistic patterns that circumscribe the lives of the characters. From the Judeo-­Christian ethos that frames the narrative, incest is a sin against God, but McCarthy is careful to develop another provocative theme that informs his romantic naturalism. Religious systems mirror and perhaps emerge from nature itself, since incest deforms the natural world by corrupting the very material process by which life perpetuates. In this sense “sin” is a violation of natural law, and Culla’s transgression can be understood as a violation of both religious and naturalistic systems of value. This blend of the natural and preternatural finds figurative expression in the final scene as Culla’s wanderings lead him to an itinerant blind man. It is many years later, and he is still on the road. As he meets the

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old sightless man it becomes clear this is not their first encounter, as the old man bids “good day out of his constant dark . . . his head erect in that air of wonder the blind wear” (239). The blind man greets Culla and singles him out as distinctive: “I’ve passed ye on these roads afore. . . . I knowed I seen ye afore” (240). There is an otherworldly and prophetic quality to the old meandering figure, but his interactions with Culla are marked with sympathy and a knowing desire to help in any way he can. He denies he is a preacher with the telling rhetorical question: “What is they to preach. It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preaching” (240). Given the arc of the novel and its tendency toward parable, this seems a reasonable and evocative reference to the prophets of the Bible and even to seer figures such as Tiresias from the Greek epics and dramas. But the allegory moves in two directions, with word and flesh pointing to the world itself and to the truths that give that world order and coherence, even in its immanence and materiality. Like the triune, the blind man seems the outer projection of nature itself, but he suggests not monstrosity and malevolent indifference, but a principle of meaning bound to natural law. In this sense naturalism’s sphere of descriptive influence must necessarily point to the symmetry that perpetuates the natural world into the future. It is a fearful symmetry without question, but human beings can hope the scales that weigh good and evil might rest in their favor. That balance may only be a matter of chance, and given the biblical implication of the meeting the order that presides over nature is born out of shadow and outer darkness. The blind man in all his portent suggests the determinism of the naturalist worldview. Culla asks him why he doesn’t pray back his eyes, and with his peculiar and parabolic wisdom the blind man responds: “What needs a man to see his way when he’s sent there anyhow?” (241). Culla has experienced alienation, violence, and isolation, and the blind man is powerless to do anything substantial to improve their mutual condition. But the old man’s weak act of hopeful kindness evokes in Culla an unexpected and emerging benevolence, and the novel ends as Culla stands on the edge of a choice: “Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way” (242). The world is indifferent and harsh as it reduces two men to blindness and impoverished wandering. But it is also a world that allows them to meet, and in the deterministic spin of atoms they find a moment of rest in human connection and grace.

Child of God (1974) In his first two novels McCarthy portrays the violent extremes in lived experience and the personal consequences of isolation and abandonment.

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From the devastating effects of history to incest and murder, the world from his perspective is rife with darkness, and much of the brutish reality experienced emerges from the mysterious and impenetrable forces of the human will. Child of God takes this seemingly hopeless worldview to new realms of degradation and despair. But in McCarthy’s hands even Lester Ballard is a figure of sympathy, a victim of the inexorable currents of the natural world. His father has committed suicide, and he is displaced from his land. Though his social circumstances make his mental capacities unclear, he is removed from society and uneducated, and he appears to lack intelligence as he acts primarily by instinct and impulse. McCarthy pre­ sents us with an example of a man ill-­adapted to the civilized world that is emerging around him, unable to find in himself the capacity to survive and find place, and that environment is equally unforgiving as it confronts him with dubious choices and a harshness that seems almost personal. It is the mid-­twentieth century, and there is a mixed reality in the American South, with a dark and pristine nature still present in the woodlands and hills and among the creeks and hollows. But towns are growing, industry is thriving, and modern land speculation is the economic force that leads initially to Ballard’s displacement.23 There are courthouses, jails, and sheriffs, and most importantly there is the material force of human civilization, social mores, and their concrete manifestation in civil law. Ballard is unquestionably a monstrous figure, but his aberrant behavior involves the confrontation of impulses gone bad with moral systems that are created by humans but that nevertheless reflect the principles of the natural world. The very act and process that leads to the perpetuation of nature is perverted and made sickeningly malevolent, suggesting that nature itself is imperfect and colored by circumstances and eventualities that ironically work against it. John Lang emphasizes that Ballard should be seen not as a case study in depravity but as an exemplar of humanity.24 But Gary M. Ciuba is skeptical of Ballard’s identification with humans, suggesting he is “divine” as he participates in a tradition of “sacred violence,” a set of ancient religious practices that emerged from the “salutary transcendence of violence by violence.”25 On the other hand, Dianne C. Luce argues that “one of the notable achievements of Child of God is its compassionate portrayal of one of the most offensive criminals in all of serious literature—a man whose acts challenge the limits of our optimistic definitions of humanity.”26 Luce’s and Lang’s more centrist perspectives link Ballard to a range of philosophical and religious systems that bear relation to romantic naturalism broadly conceived. John M. Grammer echoes this idea, suggesting that Ballard is ill-­adapted not just to his current environment but to the historical moment that constrains his

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impulses and peculiar strengths, since he is an “anachronism, left behind by history: a Daniel Boone with only stuffed animals to shoot for.”27 All these critics point at once to Lester Ballard’s distinctive nature and the way he participates in (albeit in dubious relation to) a natural world that both reflects and denies him. The novel is set in Sevier County in eastern Tennessee, not far from the location of The Orchard Keeper and little removed in topography from the mythic realm of Outer Dark. Ballard is initially a landowner but loses his home as his mortgaged property is sold to the highest bidder. He wanders the woods and towns and is accused of a rape he didn’t commit, in part because of his own dubious choice to steal a garment from an apparently homeless woman. He is buffeted in his wanderings from prison to near begging, seemingly unwilling to acquiesce to circumstances and integrate into society.28 In a random confluence of desperate events, he finds a young couple naked and dead in a car, apparently asphyxiated. He begins by fondling the woman and finally takes her home, where he has sex with her many times. This sad happenstance leads him inward to a discovery of his own perverse depths as his course becomes murderous. He then kills young women and gathers them in a cave in a grotesque ordering of bodies that speaks to his own desire for structure and principle. He is a “child of God, much like yourself perhaps” (4), an extreme and horrific rendering of human possibility in a naturalist context.29 Lester Ballard is the ultimate manifestation of a character type drawn from the classic period in American literary naturalism, in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Central to many of these naturalist novels is the plot of decline, as well as atavism and the figure of the brute, and early naturalists Frank Norris and Jack London contribute to this conception. London’s The Sea Wolf (1904) provides a unique version of this figure in Wolf Larsen, who is erudite and well read as well as intelligent and critically aware. Despite these otherwise civilized characteristics, he is physically strong, and he uses that strength to dominate others at his own indiscriminate will. He is distinct insofar as he both manifests the traits of the beast in naturalist fiction and articulates verbally the logic of his existence. Channeling the basic themes of the naturalist worldview, particularly those of Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that morality is an exclusively human creation and that no living being can be justified on other than materialist terms. Human beings are “yeast,” with no more right to survival than the seals they kill for profit on the sea. Larsen’s horrific behavior is justified in thoughtful argument, which is in many ways only weakly answered in the character of Humphrey Van Weyden. In Vandover and the Brute (1894–95,

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published 1914), Norris charts the decline of a wealthy young man as chance and various circumstances propel him into a brutish state of being. Vandover begins as an aspiring artist supported by his father. He is educated at Harvard, and he returns to his home in San Francisco to begin an artistic career. But he was overweight as a child and has experienced persecution as a result, and he is a large man cursed with the capacity to harm. His latent tendency to excess begins to manifest early, even during his university years. A change in his financial circumstances brings to the surface his atavistic impulses as he descends into a bestial state. Norris portrays a similar circumstance in McTeague (1899), as an oafish dentist loses his occupation and finds himself in a loveless marriage that drives him to malevolent acts of brutality and murder. Both these novels show the decline of their protagonists as they are conditioned by external circumstances beyond their control or capacity to navigate. Vandover and McTeague reveal atavistic tendencies that have only been contained by a thin veneer of ethical training and social conditioning. Those civilizing forces are too weak to stand up against the brute strength of a nature that exists as external circumstances conspire with internal drives that come to the fore as the need to survive overwhelms any sense of right action. From this naturalistic perspective, beneath the thin gloss of manner and decency lies a beast waiting to attack whatever threatens or stands against it, whether it be weak or strong. Ballard’s murderous behavior involves the same dark trajectory, though his path is more brutal and monstrous than anything Norris or London conceived. He has nothing of the erudition of Wolf Larsen, and unlike McTeague or Vandover he does not begin in a stable or economically viable condition. Initially he owns land, but he is “small, unclean, unshaven” (4), and later he will be described as simian shaped. He is rash, stubborn, illiterate, and primarily driven by the desire to satisfy his immediate wants. He remains human enough in his frustration with his social stature, but as he quickly descends into murder and necrophilia, he becomes divorced from a human community that maintains its moral rectitude primarily though adherence to and respect for the law. The institutions and structures of a civilized society keep the beast at bay, and the implicit message is that Ballard is always there, the rare but consequential aberrant being who reminds us that a harsh and destructive natural world is latent even amid the human community. From a naturalist perspective it is important that the brute figure remain a part of this sphere because animal nature and a propensity to violence are ubiquitous in the material world. Ballard’s selfish and impulse-­driven animosity are obvious. But given the extremes of his behavior it is easy to miss his peculiar moments

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of recognizable humanity. When he is in jail after he has been accused of rape, he meets another prisoner who has committed murder. At this point in Ballard’s decline, he finds himself at the very least perplexed by the other prisoner’s lack of concern for anything ethical or moral. Ballard says, “All the trouble I ever was in . . . was caused by whiskey or women or both,” and the prisoner responds, “All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught” (53). Ballard at least seems aware of the principles he chooses to violate. There is a rational reason for his “trouble.” But the prisoner acts without concern or a need to excuse his transgression. Ballard has not confronted a uniquely inhuman animal in the prisoner, or someone qualitatively different than himself. He has met a man who is simply farther along in his plot of decline. Before his murderous and perverse rampage Ballard’s conscious desire is for an order that reflects the same state of mind that arguably has led to the creation of human law and moral principle. In a dark perversion of this desire, he later organizes the corpses of the women he has murdered into a grotesque but nevertheless structured configuration in the hollows of a cave. Even his perverse sexuality has an aesthetic dimension, as he dresses the dead women and himself in garish costumes that suggest a desire for beauty gone unsatisfied. In this sense it becomes clear that Ballard’s distinct and recognizable human qualities are at the heart and are perhaps the more horrific feature of his bestial animality. His crimes and deviant behavior are made more monstrous by the shocking human features that texture them. The brute and the human are integral features of each other in a natural world that will not allow them to be distinguished. For both Ballard and the prisoner, the founding cause of their monstrosity among many is social class and stratification. Ballard encounters this with the rural dumpkeeper and his nine sexually profligate daughters. McCarthy presents them in openly naturalist and animalistic terms: These gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits now sat idle and wide-­eyed day after day in chairs and crates about the little yard. . . . They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the air. (26)

The dumpkeeper’s daughters continually turn up pregnant, the youngest at twelve years old. McCarthy presents them in a degraded and objectified fashion, and their condition as young women is exacerbated and inseparable from social class. They are called Urethra, Cerebella, and Hernia Sue, all names derived from body parts that animalize them against their will. McCarthy shows in clear terms the way social class and the

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economic realities of an ungoverned natural world bear down with an enforced gravity on women. The father comes across one of them having sex with a “swain” and after chasing the young man away accidently falls next to the girl and on impulse has intercourse with her. His act is rapacious in the extreme, and he is driven less by desire than by frustration, anger, and a monstrous propensity to violence. The father is a keeper of refuse, waste from human life and endeavor, and the scene emphasizes not just their individual but their collective humanity. The family lives at the bottom of the social ladder, quite explicitly expressed though the metaphor of the dump and the dumpkeeper. As in many naturalist novels, its members’ acts are motivated by material condition, as economic and social deprivation releases behavioral traits that are “natural” in the most bestial and animalistic sense. Their lives are driven by impulses and instincts perverted in the semicivilized context of the situation, and there is no thought or reason associated with their actions or consequences. But these people exist in an animal state made extreme and degraded, as they function amid squalor and human waste in a manner abhorrent to any living thing. It is a case of adaptation gone awry, as a family finds itself victimized by “civilized” systems of social stratification and layering. Ballard shares much in common with the family and encounters it with a mixture of identification and peculiar awe: Then there was Ballard. He’d come up the path with his narroweyed and studied indifference . . . with the old man in the bloated sofa in the yard drinking with him from a halfgallon jar of popskull whiskey. . . . He [Lester] had eyes for a long blonde flatshanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers. She laughed all the time. He’d never seen her in a pair of shoes but she had a different colored pair of drawers for every day of the week and black ones on Saturday. (28)

Ballard’s response though natural is also aberrant and bestial, and though he begins with a sense of remove from the family’s degradation he quickly integrates with it as the “flatshanked” daughter draws and attracts him. She is a peculiar blend of the instinctual and the oddly civilized, as she tempts him with her drawers, garments the likes of which will dress his corpses. The dumpkeeper and his family exemplify the way animalistic and brutish tendencies lie underneath a thin veneer of social conditioning. Latent in all human beings under the right conditions are impulse and desire, which can quickly become distorted and perverse under the most pressing and darkest of circumstances. These naturalist themes find direct expression in Ballard’s interaction

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with nature itself. McCarthy and his protagonist are intimately attuned to the harsh brutality of the natural world, but they are equally attentive to its beauty. As Ballard traverses the woods in winter, he comes across a small group of robins huddled in a tree. A few of them fly away, and some gather in the snow. Ballard is amused, and he catches one, holding it “warm and feathered in his palm with the heart of it beating there just so” (76). His reaction is a medley of human and inhuman responses, and his behavior mimics in many ways a cat playing with prey, but as he holds the helpless creature and travels on there is a peculiar attachment to the life within it, and the bird seems to hold a kind of power over him. He comes to a house with a family and enters, and there he encounters another kind of beast in the form of a deformed and mentally disabled child: A hugeheaded bald and slobbering primate that inhabited the lower reaches of the house, familiar of the warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat, a consort of roaches and great hairy spiders in their season, perennially benastied and afflicted with a nameless crud. (77)

Characteristic of romantic naturalism the scene involves figurations of the physical grotesque, with the child deformed both internally and externally. The mother treats him carefully as Ballard with a kind of benign repose gives him the robin as a pet. In a perverse gesture of affection, the child chews off the robin’s legs to keep it from leaving or escaping. The entire situation suggests the distortion of natural processes as the characters confront the human world and its structures. Here even familial love and friendship find horrific expression in an environment of human making and degradation, with the “warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat” and the “consort of roaches and great hairy spiders.” The human world involves a perversion of the natural realm as the bestial overwhelms even the polite and benevolent gestures of a mother and a traveler with a gift. The beast in this scene is not a figure made brutal through the indifference of nature; it is a manifestation of the natural world itself in all its destructive capacities, especially in the context of a decimated society. Ballard seems attuned to the dark message of this experience, as he becomes aware of the apparent futility of his own gesture of decency and his attempt at personal connection. From the point of view of the various anonymous narrators who tell Ballard’s story, it is a false and woefully limited message since human community often finds expression in generative acts of kindness. But the world’s potential for perversity, indifference, and destruction is the pattern of behavior Ballard learns and continually internalizes.

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McCarthy’s blend of naturalist and more otherworldly conceptions appears in his rendering of the boar hunt. The brief chapter is reminiscent of sequences in Jack London’s classic and popular novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), and his short stories “To Build a Fire” (1908) and “Batard” (1904). In these tales the figure of the dog is presented in exquisitely personified terms, and the distinction between the human and the animal is muted and made inconsequential. Dogs not only display recognizable human traits, but those behaviors remain animalistic and focused on the need to survive, hunt, and thrive. But both animals and humans derive their contours from an environment that is both natural and strangely preternatural. Ballard watches as the dogs hunt their prey: The hounds crossed the snow on the slope of the ridge in a thin dark line. Far below them the boar they trailed was tilting along with his curious stifflegged lope. . . . The hounds’ voices in the vast and pale blue void echoed like the cries of demon yodelers. (68)

The hunting dogs are an integral part of the brutish world of predator and prey, and the hog is described in haunting and grotesque terms. The hounds act like a single being, and the fate of the boar seems decided from the opening of the passage. But the world they occupy together is more than a physical region of hills and trees; it is a “pale blue void” and a region of “demon yodelers,” evoking a fabled realm of hellish portent only to be found in the myths and stories that connote mystery and a strangely ambiguous transcendent reality. Despite these spiritual echoes the hunt resolves in the brutish natural world of blood and death, as the boar finds itself “enmeshed in a wheel of snarling hounds,” and in a peculiar turn of chance nature itself seems to connote its own patterns of inevitability as the prey fights back. The fight continues in a “holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done” (69). In this material space the processes that sustain the natural world are predicated not only on simple bloodletting but on the predacious patterns of the fight and on suffering and pain. The winners seem bound to their destiny from the beginning, but in the case of the boar the animal preyed on is not without fight, and its desire to survive seems indomitable. The struggle is perpetual and inconclusive until the human hunter intercedes with the gun. The hunt in McCarthy’s hands is a metonym for the natural world and the brutish and even monstrous laws that define the material realm. But as is frequently the case the bestial reality of the natural world is mitigated and blended in a naturalistic conception that preserves a

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place for human connection and sympathy. For all his perversion and murderous self-­interest, Ballard is a victim of circumstances beyond his control. He is by nature perhaps lacking in genuine intelligence, and he is uneducated and uncultured, even among the rural folk in the region. He is a perplexing and troubling figure to the local people who tell his story in the interlaced perspectives of the novel. But in the main narrative it is clear he craves something more, a certain order and symmetry to the world that is absent at least from his immediate perception. In the end he becomes the hunted one, and in his flight, he is dressed in women’s clothing and is daubed like a funhouse figure. Before he is finally captured, he hides by the side of the road, and as a bus passes he sees the face of a boy and exchanges a telling look. In this moment of human connection Ballard experiences a strange instance of identification, as he “was trying to fix his mind where he’d seen the boy when it came to him that the boy looked like himself” (191). It is only a brief spot of time, and Ballard is repulsed as he returns to his own isolated realm of loneliness and inhuman degradation. But the placement of this incident in the narrative’s trajectory suggests that before his ultimate decline and ignominious death, Ballard is unquestionably a “child of God,” a person like any other, darkly and horrifically revealing the potential latent within any human being walking the fallen earth. He is at once a beast and in his descent experiences the naturalist plot of decline. He takes the actions of the brute figure to new and perverse heights, but he by no means transcends the possibilities for malevolent action in the hands of the human animal. This focus on natural law and materialism finds it most direct expression in the penultimate scene, after Ballard has died. His body has been given over to a medical school, and students there will ostensibly dissect him to develop their surgical skills and their understanding of human anatomy. But as they carefully pull him apart another impulse takes over. In all his materiality, Ballard remains a mystery: He was layed out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. .  .  . His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. (194)

Lester Ballard is finally reduced to the state of bestial oblivion he apparently deserves after the carnage he has wrought and the inhuman horror he has visited on his innocent victims. As his physical parts are “delineated” the students will learn things about the nature of the human body,

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and in his evisceration his remains are of the same making and contour of any human body these young people have worked with before. In physical terms he is a cadaver like any other, and in this sense his commonality with the rest of animal humanity is confirmed. He is the offspring of an absent God, and this in the end is the shared condition of the human race in its entirety. But there is a reality connoted even after his death that his dissectors seem to recognize, as they stand over him like “haruspices of old.” Haruspices were ancient Etruscan diviners whose art involved determining the will of the gods from the appearance of entrails. In this sense even a studied inquiry into the natural world is an endeavor involving a kind of mystical yearning and hope and a desire to see beyond to cords that bind all things in a strangely preternatural unity. The naturalist perspective that governs the students and the doctors they will become is predicated on an acceptance of the firm materiality of objects as they stand in a relationship of discernible cause and effect. But from McCar­ thy’s perspective even the rules that motivate the students are vaguely informed by a spirit of dark metaphysical inquiry. The material world is subject to its own internal processes and to the perpetual and haunting specter of mutability. But in the end even the physical body is a repository for the unknown, the impenetrable mysteries of a timeless universe.

3 Stamped against the Night Suttree, Naturalism, and the American City It was easy to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree

M

odern American culture came into being in the swift and fluid milieu of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution brought changes unsurpassed in human history, and in many ways the United States is the ultimate consequence of technological modernity. In the eighteenth century the French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur framed in writing a cultural geography that was echoed contemporaneously by Thomas Jefferson. In “Letter III: What Is an American?” of Letters from an American Farmer (1782), St. John de Crèvecoeur maps the relationship of American lands to the people who live on and work them. Central to this new agrarian model is the notion of “associationism,” which suggests that identity is constituted though a learned relationship to physical environment. Those who occupy the coastal regions trade with the rest of the world and are an active mercantile people. They are productive and energetic, even frenetic in their daily lives as they work in a dense social and material context. Those who settle in the mountain regions at the edge of the wilderness are conditioned by the reality of subsistence living as they survive on the seasons and what the wild lands can provide. They are often violent and indolent and in the main uncivilized. But in the middle regions lies the heart of the emerging nation. In that bucolic space small farms and communities constitute themselves on a life pattern of simple husbandry. As this new citizen lives in relation

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with tilled and pastoral land they are nurtured by moderate labor and by whatever divinity might be discerned in the ongoing routines of the seasons. They are in tune to deeper realities, and this association makes something unique of them as living beings.1 In “Query XIX: Manufactures” of Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomas Jefferson writes that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” and Jefferson sought through various means to ensure that these people became the human heart of a growing nation and a new and radically democratic civil body politic.2 In some form this ideal remained a consistent pattern late into the nineteenth century as movement west was driven by the desire for land and the independence of the small farmer’s life. But Crèvecoeur and Jefferson could never have anticipated the transformation of economies brought on by technological change. Their notion of “associationism” or environmental determinism was conceived before the Industrial Revolution revealed the effects that human beings could have on the land. The process of identity formation is now understood to be more complex and intimately reciprocal as landscape and environment are both transformative in human development and highly affected by the changes wrought by civilization and progress.3 The Industrial Revolution began on the European continent and was in full swing in the American Northeast by the time of the Civil War. Farming remained central to the middle and frontier regions, but new communities emerged around the use and exploitation of natural resources as large cities emerged and evolved into what came to be the modern metropolis. In Melville: His Work and His World, Andrew Delbanco begins his treatment of Melville’s life by situating the writer in the dense social reality of his historical moment. Delbanco writes that in 1819, when Melville was born, New York City was a premodern space roughly medieval in size and physical features. But when he died in 1891, “the Brooklyn Bridge was carrying traffic, as was the Second Avenue Elevated Railway,” and Melville was living in a world that had become “recognizably our own.”4 Thomas  D. Young  Jr. reinforces Delbanco’s observation, noting that the 1950s Knoxville of McCarthy’s Suttree was not unlike medieval London or Jerusalem at the time of Christ, with “striations of its growth still plainly visible.”5 The birth of the modern city was a central concern for American literary naturalists such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. The physical laws that bind the material world were not limited to the wilderness or rural nature. It was in the urban realm that the struggle for survival was most transparent and acute, and the naturalist novel found itself emerging on

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the teeming and troubled streets of these new American industrial spaces. It is in this tradition of the American city novel that Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree finds itself participating. As the novel emerged as a literary form in the late eighteenth century, it immediately took the city as setting and theme. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) might be read as proto-­naturalist in their treatment of environment as a determining factor in identity formation and the city as a realm that demands strength and adaptability in a perpetual struggle to survive. As urban centers changed under the development of industry so in the Victorian period did the novel become an aesthetic means to explore the effect of new economies on the individual. The works of Charles Dickens are notable for their unvarnished treatment of urban life. Works such as Oliver Twist (1839), Great Expectations (1861), and David Copperfield (1850) figure the city as determinative setting in the context of the bildungsroman. It is a space where young men and women struggle to find place as a changing set of economic arrangements present both opportunities and significant challenges. More particularly Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) confronts the reality of lower-­and working-­class life in the industrial city as the struggle for survival becomes more dramatic on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Even the beautifully sentimental A Christmas Carol (1843) speaks to the inner psychology of the emerging capitalist. A host of other novelists in the nineteenth-­century British tradition explore the city in a manner that anticipates the concerns of later naturalists in America and on the European continent. There was something inherent in these new urban spaces that foregrounded circumstances that could only later be explained in empirical terms by scientists such as Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In America the first fully constituted industrial novel might be Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861), a tragic story in which a poor ironworker with an inclination for artistic expression finds his desires thwarted by the indifferent forces of a harsh factory setting. The figure of the brute as seen in Child of God (1974) takes its origin in the works of Frank Norris and Jack London. But these naturalist authors as well as others render the city as setting in a host of novels that anticipate Suttree. These include Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) and Vandover and the Brute (1894–95, published 1914), Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) and Martin Eden (1909), and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), The Financier (1912), and An American Tragedy (1925), as well as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946). The works of Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and

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Thomas Wolfe might easily be added to the pantheon. This significant strand of the novel takes urban America as a microcosm of nature writ large, as the laws that circumscribe the physical world are revealed in all their indifference and harsh contingency. McCarthy sets Suttree in Knoxville, Tennessee, the community in which he was raised and educated and where he spent his early adult years. Knoxville is the third largest city in Tennessee and is situated at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains in Knox County. The place is distinctive insofar as it reflects a confluence of rural and urban cultures, since as an industrial space it emerged from what was once a seemingly impenetrable frontier made challenging for settlers by the Southern Appalachians.6 Knoxville was first settled in 1786 in and around White’s Fort and was on the route known as Avery’s Trace, a road that led west to Nashville across the center of the state. The city was relatively isolated until the mid-­nineteenth century and the arrival of the railroad in 1855. During the Civil War, Knoxville was rife with division as the succession issue was contested in different quarters, and both Southern and Northern forces occupied the town at various times. Knoxville experienced significant growth after the Union victory as a new mercantile and trading economy took hold. Like all cities the material face of the town was affected by economic vicissitudes and the inexorable flow of time. Knoxville struggled in the 1920s amid regional pressures and the collapse of the manufacturing sector, and in the stops and starts of development a striated infrastructure emerged as the city became a home of both rich and poor as well as the enfranchised and the alienated. It was a portrait not at all dissimilar to the great urban centers of the North and the Eastern Seaboard, places such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston, all of which served as settings for the great naturalist novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emerging into the 1930s Knoxville was increasingly reliant on an industrial economy and was particularly vulnerable to the Great Depression. The surrounding rural regions experienced economic stress for other reasons as the nation evolved under the pressures of the modern era. Knoxville experienced some resurgence after 1933, with mixed and complex social consequences under the funding provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Various infrastructure projects brought resources and employment to Knoxville and accelerated the urbanization process. In the mid-­twentieth century the city began to display the features of a modern urban space, with a rich mercantile sector and a high degree of social stratification. It is this blended social reality that McCarthy captures in Suttree with such detail and moral force. Cornelius Suttree is a product of the monied class, but

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for various reasons he chooses to live among the socially marginalized and economically bereft.7 His friends are unemployed, alcoholic, indigent, and homeless, frequently Native and African American. They, along with Suttree’s wanderings, make clear the human variety of the modern city. McCarthy’s urban naturalism involves a heartfelt and sympathetic concern for the people that nature leaves behind in a collective and headlong pursuit of progress and survival. The novel is a detailed and lengthy treatment of environment as it conditions the interior life of its central character. The story is largely episodic with vague hints of the picaresque as Suttree lives on the fringes of a fully constituted modern society. His companions are the denizens of an urban underworld, and the novel echoes the setting of modern poems such as T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “The Waste Land” (1922). There is an artful blend of literary tropes as the picaresque and the classical underworld blend in a striking and evocative confluence of imagery, character interaction, and human exchange. McCarthy’s extensive reading of classical and modern literature is clearly on display, and his aesthetic of generative influence is evident. Drawing from the realist and romantic tradition the novel moves from subjective to objective modes of perception and representation. The story begins in epistolary form as an implied narrator addresses the reader directly and establishes the setting, but the narrative settles quickly on the character of Suttree, who lives in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River and works casually and reluctantly as a fisherman. Early on he is visited by an uncle, his mother’s brother, and their conversation reveals the internal heart of his alienation and self-­exile. His aristocratic father looks at his mother’s family with contempt and has treated her with social derision. This attitude extends to the uncle and to Suttree since the mother’s inferior blood flows in his veins. Though sympathetic in the main Cornelius Suttree is a morally ambiguous character. The reasons for his removal are not entirely clear, and McCarthy leaves his past largely in the shadows. Despite whatever slights and injustices he may have suffered he attended college, where he made a poor woman pregnant and later abandoned her. But to the derelicts of Knoxville’s McAnally Flats, Suttree is a fast friend, kind and indulgent, ready to help when he can, and patient to no end as he tolerates their indolence, alcoholism, and propensity to violence.8 He spends time with them, but he is not one of them, and they seem to recognize his social stature as they at once respect and depend on him. As the narrative proceeds Suttree emerges as a wanderer, traveling mostly on foot from the city to the country and from town to town. This peculiar and strangely localized nomadism involves a vacillating movement that

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is both interior and exterior, as Suttree ventures forward on a search for rest that seems elusive, shifting, and transitory when found. In naturalist terms Suttree seeks to adapt and survive, but his survival is more than physical, and the home he seeks is spiritual as well as material and social. Suttree displays McCarthy’s eye for sensory detail and his personal experience, memory, and meticulous research.9 The naturalist elements in the novel are made real because in many ways he has come home.10 His previous novels are set in the rural regions in eastern Tennessee, and they demonstrate McCarthy’s ear for the spoken language and his debt to the realist aesthetic so central to naturalist works. By its evocation of a modern city like others in America, Suttree blends regionalism and naturalism in a novel that resists the dreaded regionalist designation, which has haunted even the greatest southern writers. Knoxville was where McCarthy came of age, where he attended school and began his artistic and intellectual life. It was perhaps inevitable that he would transform the place into a novel that echoes many of his own personal experiences, and the general accuracy of this representation of Knoxville is largely undisputed. Considering his portrayal of the city, Dianne C. Luce writes: In Suttree McCarthy describes in some detail those buildings that we know were the loci of many of his own childhood experiences: the Church of the Immaculate Conception (still in use) on Summit Hill north of Knoxville’s market and city center, the Market House (razed after a fire in 1960), the old Catholic High School in the Victorian Ashe house on Magnolia Avenue northeast of the business district. . . . The bridges at Gay Street and Henley Avenue still span the Tennessee River, bracketing the business district of downtown Knoxville, but the riverfront structures of Front Street . . . have been entirely demolished, replaced by the new city-­county building and Volunteer Landing. . . . Mostly gone, too was the McAnally Flats neighborhood and its little shotgun houses west of Knoxville’s city center.11

Like many works influenced by the realist form and the naturalist world­ view, Suttree serves as a carefully rendered historical record and at the same time becomes a metonym for America as the nation sweeps blindly into an uncertain modernity. Much of what McCarthy describes remains to this day, but the city is an evolving entity that changes at the direction of no single intending mind. Knoxville is a human space that adapts to the same changing external contingencies that human beings in any environment must contend with. These unpredictable factors are physical and historical as well as social and economic, and no appeal can

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be made for respite or relief from the indifferent forces imposed by the material world, here embodied in the urban spaces of twentieth-­century America. McCarthy’s semi-­autobiographical treatment of his hometown works as a journey of self-­exploration in the context of a world rife with uncertainties. Suttree is not exactly a bildungsroman. But it portrays the conflicted life of a young man who must negotiate with an environment full of textured layers and social and cultural complexities. In his aimless wanderings Suttree seeks to find a place to adapt and survive, to find rest for body and spirit. In many ways Suttree marks a significant phase in McCarthy’s recognition as a major voice in contemporary American literature. The novel has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), and reviewers have noted the scope and epic complexity of its themes.12 Readers and critics of the three early novels had always regarded McCarthy as a figure worthy of renown, insofar as his works engaged universal concerns both human and broadly philosophical, with artistic and intellectual influences that spanned the globe.13 Suttree is certainly rooted in time and space, but perhaps the urban environment as well as the human reach of the narrative appealed to critics and convinced more readers of McCarthy’s genius and stature as a figure in twentieth-­century world literature. D. S. Butterworth argues that in its treatment of character types Suttree is distinctly concerned with the issue of marginalization broadly construed, since “McCarthy seems to adopt the project of re-­centering characters who have been marginalized by American culture and especially by the hierarchical economic structures of urban America.”14 Butterworth locates this disenfranchisement in the national context of the United States, but he notes that McCarthy’s placement of these socially bereft characters at the center of the narrative by no means humanizes them or elevates their stature. Broadening the scope of concern and suggesting naturalist themes in the novel, Butterworth foregrounds what appears to be McCar­thy’s “geological view of mankind,” since human beings always struggle amid “the world of things,” in the realm of “inert and passive objects with little or no control.”15 Equally cognizant of the leveling and indifferent character implicit in a naturalist worldview, William Prather explores the existentialist themes of the novel, arguing along with other critics that Suttree both reflects and refracts Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and a philosophical reasoning sympathetic to the absurd.16 Insofar as all these considerations emphasize the shaping influence of the material world and the tenuous nature of absolute meaning, they suggest not only the global reach of the novel but also its naturalist and even modernist sympathies.

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Suttree begins with an opening frame in italics that lends a personal quality to the narrative. This dark and evocative entry into Suttree’s world establishes the setting not only as a physical space but as a realm people have inhabited and with dubious portent affected in a manner both transformative and destructive. It is Knoxville in the early 1950s, during a period just after McCarthy’s own upbringing. At this time, the city had undergone a significant social and physical change partially under the influence of the Tennessee Valley Authority. McCarthy is unflinchingly precise in his use of the realist mode in description, as he begins: Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now the drunk and homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots. . . . The buildings stamped against the night are like a rampart to a farther world foresaken, old purposes forgot. . . .This city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad. (3)

The description evokes the morning and a time of quietude, silence, and reflection, when the contours of the physical world absent the frenetic energy of human activity are distinct and the perceptions of the unnamed writer are strikingly acute. The hours seem “clockless” and out of time, and the varied images of the silent city become suggestive and haunting. Despite the voiceless quiet the town is active and alive, not with humans or other animals but with the echoed movements they have created, as the water trucks darken the streets and blanket them in a steam mixed with dew. The effects of industrial transformation are visible in the walls and alleys and abandoned lots, and the novel displays the image patterns found in American naturalist novels of the late nineteenth century. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, New York in the immediate wake of the Industrial Revolution is a place equally altered by modernity, as a “very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley,” while from “a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman” and “laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight.”17 In McCarthy’s rendering Knoxville has evolved out of a process unplanned as time and its passing is the only force that mediates a natural process seemingly outside any collective human will. As such the city is built on “no known paradigm” and displays itself in “a mongrel architecture.” The forces that bring the city into being are tangibly historical and material, and the new urban spaces are stamped with the peculiar and destructive mark of human ambition and greed. But in observable

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romantic fashion this degraded realm suggests “a farther world forsaken, old purposes forgot.” McCarthy begins Suttree’s story by placing him in a richly textured environment real enough to shape his identity, despite the force he exerts in his strange and meandering journey toward a dark and portentous self-­awareness. The urban contours of Knoxville are given dimension in McCarthy’s rendering of McAnally Flats, a section of the city where the most desperate members of the human community live and struggle to survive. Suttree takes rest from work on the river with a strange and endearing brotherhood of waifs, bar owners, and merchants, as well as with prostitutes and a “transvestite” named John who calls herself Trippin Through the Dew. They all seem oddly attached to Suttree, and they not only wait for his arrival but coax him into dubious exploits and sometimes destructive behavior. In a wider world that seems often indifferent and malevolent, they offer Suttree a respite from his own physical and spiritual wanderings, and despite his better judgment he finds himself with them as they haunt the city and drink, laugh and fight, and then get into trouble with the law. They are a community of the socially and economically marginalized, and they imbue the naturalist realm of the city with a sad but rich human dimension. In the complex physical and social ecosystem that is this modern urban space, they have failed to adapt to the dynamic and unpredictable contingencies of a fluid material environment. They are a testimony to the necessity of adaptation, and they vividly demonstrate the result of its failure in a modern context. Nature is more than hills or birds and trees; predation involves more than the law of tooth and claw. The rules that bind become manifest in the brutality of economic indifference as class confronts class in a battle for resources that brooks no argument or moral principle outside the game of life. Suttree’s friends, the wandering and wasted human refuse of McAnally Flats, are an emblem of loss and adaptation gone awry in the natural world that is the new American city. The reason Suttree is with them is never fully articulated, and the degree of choice he possesses given his situation is in some sense an open question. He is driven to his current situation by a host of psychological forces and a spiritual yearning that never finds steady rest even at the novel’s conclusion. But at the most basic level Suttree does not need to be on the river, and he is never forced to associate with this community of lost and tragic lives. There is a peculiar freedom in his situation, and in a strange way he reminds all around him of another world where degradation and basic survival are less pressing in people’s lives. He rejects the privilege of class that chance has accorded him, and as such provides a window into the brute reality of social stratification as he travels

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observing and living in a realm of the maladapted and marginalized. He is never separate from the naturalist world of harsh contingency, and his fate in the end is far from clear, but his wandering and his intimate connection to the world make vivid the limits it places on choice and free will. This urban context is informed by the varied elements of McCarthy’s distinctive brand of romantic naturalism. Nature and the natural world are full of violence, but earth and wilderness are only one manifestation of a material realm of evocative mystery and cosmological implication. McCarthy’s vision lifts the reader out of a tangible world that is no less material for all its unknowability. It is a place that defies any sense of locale, a region universal and defined by eternity and infinite space but real and observable in the most tactile objects and moments. As Suttree visits his Aunt Martha, he peruses an old photo album and ponders painfully its strange and representative nature: The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. . . . The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am. I am. An artifact of prior races. (129)

The scene begins in a sitting room as Suttree holds in his hands the fading images of his ancestors. The figures are “wan and loveless” no doubt because the exposure of the old camera demanded their expressionless attention and stillness. The experience speaks to a sad mutability as the album exudes death and decay through its musty odor and ill repair. But the volume becomes a polyvalent symbol illuminating one material and telling moment in the vast spinning reach of an indifferent universe. Time is a force both brutal and beyond knowing that “staggers” living beings into a state of confusion and powerlessness. In a two-­dimensional space the faces are peculiarly alive as they convey a blighted sense of disorientation in the grand sweep of history. Born into the world unknowing, they are “pilgrims” cursed by a self-­awareness both pained and acute as well as by an intimate knowledge of their own insignificance in the face of impermanence and brute mortality. The natural world defined in the context of eternity has yielded human consciousness and the technology of the camera only to bequeath a strange memento that stands as

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testimony to Suttree’s own muted consequence. The indifferent arc of atoms circling in an empty universe resolves itself in transitory images and reminds him that he will one day stand beside other bleak figures as they fade into inexorable space and time. This same romantic naturalism appears as McCarthy channels again the literary tradition that precedes him. Few scenes in the novel are rigidly realistic, divorced from literary tropes and leitmotifs drawn from an array of works he has likely read. Derived from the classical tradition and sifted through such writers as Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton, many incidents in Suttree evoke the underworld and the underworld journey. But the archetypal movement of the main character through a forbidding and mythic realm is never removed from the world humans must negotiate in a modern and immanently natural space. McAnally Flats is described in precisely these imagistic terms: By this clangorous fanfare dull shapes with sidling eyes and pale green teeth congealed with menace out of the dark of the hemisphere. A curtain fell, unspooling in a shock of dust and beetlehusks and dried mousedirt. Amorphous clots of fear that took the forms of nightshades, hags or dwarves or seatrolls green and steaming that skulked down out of the coils of his poisoned brain with black candles and slow chant. He smiled to see these familiars. (80)

This is a funeral scene, and death, degeneration, and decay are foregrounded with a dark and pristine clarity. But the incident is rife with McCarthy’s signature blend of the real and the unreal, together with natural and mythological allusions. A procession of mourners appears disembodied and strangely mysterious. The fanfare is demonic and “clangorous” as people are reduced to “dull shapes with sidling eyes and pale green teeth.” Human figures are transfigured into “nightshades” from the underworld, and the realm of the living and the dead become one in an imaginary confluence of the physical and the darkly immaterial. But the otherworldly is never removed from the bleak reality of decay, exemplified by “dust and beetlehusks and dried mousedirt.” Suttree himself is aligned with these figures as his own metal state is corrupted and made resonant with all the scene implies about impermanence and the inevitable dissolution of the natural world. At the heart of the moment is the definitive reality of time and its passing. Human beings are circumscribed and consigned to all things physical, and the underworld functions metaphorically as a hellish suggestion of the monstrous and mad. But naturalism here is imbued with a sense of mysterious portent, and the fate

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of human consciousness is left in shadow and darkness. Still, the images artfully blend romantic myths and motifs with the sharp reality of a harsh and unforgiving, even painfully indifferent, world. These moments in Suttree forcefully exemplify the polyvalence of literary naturalism itself. To the philosophical naturalist a world that echoes an otherworldly and spiritual suggestion emerges merely from the human mind, which is a peculiar and unique by-­product of an evolutionary process entirely material in nature. Experiences as formless as fear will one day be traceable to mental states and reducible to the intricate play of electrochemical forces in the brain. In Suttree’s vision McCarthy does not deny this possibility, but the confrontation of mind and world and the imagistic contours marking realms that transcend suggest the universe cannot be reduced to a dynamic movement of atoms and quarks in a vast and empty space. Other realities may exist outside the confines of the body, and consciousness itself may be the untraceable and ubiquitous space where the spiritual and the material may meet. McCarthy makes clear that an indifferent contingency emerges from the physical laws that define the earth and give rise to the rat-­infested streets of McAnally Flats and the industrial and human detritus along the Tennessee River. This naturalistic vision is shared by other American city novels and points to the constraints and tragic limitations people face in a brutal and law-­ driven material world. But perhaps there is an outer darkness as well, beyond the world of suffering and pain that circles the bereft lives of Suttree’s friends, a thing that in his strange and portentous journey has brought him into the underworld of Knoxville. As Suttree walks through a cemetery he feels his own mysterious connection to another place and to a realm he occupies unknowing, as he comes to sense that “another went before him . . . some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods” (287). The cemetery in all its implication seems a refracted and broken window into a world he occupies without conscious awareness. Life and death seem at this moment not a finality but a parallel. This vision may only be an emanation of imagination and superstition, but it lives for Suttree in that moment and resonates later in his dreams. The rigid philosophical naturalism that appears in McCarthy’s work is echoed in a place where some other reality portends. But despite the ambiguity Suttree never loses his strange devotion to the material and the living. At one point at night, he stares up at a star in the firmament, as it appears “pale and constant” like “an old wanderer’s beacon.” He is drawn to reverie, “struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited,” as he experiences a “sudden love” for the world in which he lives (354). Even

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amid the mystery and shadow he must confront as a human being lost in a vast universe, he finds repose in nature not only as earth but as space and remote time. Toward the end of Suttree’s story he is taken ill with typhoid fever, and in a tortured dream he sees through a fractured window into another world. The many intimations of the metaphysical now coalesce in a nightmarish vision that may only be a result of disease but could also be a moment of dark transcendence. He finds himself in a realm where he moves by “floodlight through the universe’s renal regions,” with “pale phagocytes drifting over, shadows and shapes through the tubes like the miscellany in a waterdrop. The eye at the end of the glass would be God’s” (461). It is a vision of shadows and shapes and water that are at once material and indicative, suggesting a hidden other region where a strange and mysterious divinity resides. It is a hellish place of suffering made communal through a joining of the damned in universal pain, but it is also a world of fixed and natural order, where “disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining” (464). The suffering in the dream is clearly Suttree’s own as he struggles in body to survive the fever. But the order he perceives is an illuminating vision at once transcendent and immanent since it is never removed from justice and law. Even in this strange and entirely subjective nightmare, the world of material principle presides into the deep and liquid spaces where sleep defines and informs. When he wakes, the dark reverie remains, as he confesses to a priest, “You would not believe what watches” (461). He takes away from the moment a striking insight as he abandons the godlets and amulets of the church for the one presiding talisman and object of hope, which is “the simple human heart within him” (468). It is a basic and profound insight that speaks to the naturalist recognition found in such stories as Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) and Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (1904), narratives that emphasize the affective and intellectual awareness human beings possess as they confront a cold and seemingly heartless natural world. But all pervasive in the universe is a less comforting potentiality that encapsulates McCarthy’s long novel at its conclusion, as Suttree leaves the degraded urban setting of Knoxville for a place equally portentous and insecure: Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them. (471)

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Few passages in the canon of modern and contemporary literature more forcefully express the essence of romantic naturalism. The core image is the hunter and his hounds, predacious in their essence and driven by a ravenous hunger and malevolence. It is an image rife with the naturalist associations we find in writers from Jack London to Ernest Hemingway and later in the many writers associated with the American West. But in McCarthy’s rendering the hunt is more than material and the hunters more than immanent in the world. They are spirit creatures from an indefinable realm, and their prey is the human soul. What McCarthy has placed at hazard in the novel is the soul of its protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, whether that soul be defined in metaphysical and religious terms or in the more modern framework of human consciousness and emotion. Suttree remains a hunted man, and his existential condition is identical to that of all human beings in a universe that seems at once beautiful and full of heartrending possibility but consigned to its own indifferent and law-­driven processes. Suttree’s escape from the city is no escape at all, since that modern realm is a concentrated representation of the world writ large. His angle of repose is a wilderness where the hounds tire not. In the end he is bound to perpetual flight in a dark and limitless world of shadow and darkness. But while the novel concludes in this troubling place the narrative reflection finds context in Suttree’s final encounter with his fellow wanderers. As he prepares to leave Knoxville, he bids a sweet farewell to Trippin Through the Dew. She offers him money and whimsically pleads for his eventual return, and they join hands in a lovely moment of connection and sympathy. Suttree then finds himself waiting for a ride by the side of the road, watching a group of construction workers toiling away in a pit. A young boy brings the men water, and they accept refreshment as if in supplication. The boy sees Suttree and, crossing the road, offers him a drink as well. The scene recalls the people at the foot of the cross, giving vinegar to the dying Christ, who accepts the gift in a state of loneliness and incomprehensible suffering. It is a moment of hope, a respite from the harsh vicissitudes of a fallen world, a flash of incidental time that mitigates and redefines, since amid the shapeless horrors of the fathomless universe the subtle brotherhood of the human community abides and sustains.

4 In Light and Shadow Contingency and Kinship in Blood Meridian In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.” Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines

P

opular myth has since antiquity been a destructive and a redemptive force in world culture, and the Western is America’s most resilient and persistently defining mythological conception. It is a genre that might best be called the American morality play, because from its inception in the nineteen-­century frontier romance it has served as the generative expression of the nation’s evolving identity. At the center of this mythology is the natural world, the wilderness, which in the Judeo-­ Christian tradition is more than a place. It is an idea. From the perspective of biblical typology, nature in the form of deep and mysterious forest regions, bucolic and pastoral spaces, or even unforgiving deserts and arid plains is where human beings ponder and negotiate their relationship with the divine. In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites after their release from Egypt must wander the desert where Moses brings them

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the commandments after a direct encounter with Yahweh. From a disparate community that shared only an identity of exile and displacement, they become a chosen nation with a divinely ordained purpose and a mission to occupy the Promised Land. The American Puritans adapted this same typology as they traveled the Atlantic to the shores of New England. They saw themselves as a fated people who had been given an invaluable gift: a fresh place to dwell where they might make things new. But their warrant came with an obligation. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered a sermon on board the Arabella entitled “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), in which he echoed an admonition originally asserted centuries earlier by St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). The Puritans must cast themselves into the darkness and become a beacon that will illuminate the Old World and shine forth as an example of right living in the eyes of God.1 But the wilderness the Puritans encountered in what was to become the United States of America was foreboding, brutal, and mysterious, a place where large and transcendent realms seemed to collide in a battle of good and evil. Satan and his legions had authority there, and the new chosen people would be tested almost beyond endurance as they sought to create a New Jerusalem. But over time this first wilderness became a garden, and settlement along the Eastern Seaboard transformed wild lands into new agrarian spaces and human communities built around farming and simple mercantilism. Still, the West remained, first along the Alleghenies and Appalachian Mountains east of the Mississippi River, and later in the Great Plains and beyond to the Pacific Coast. It was a place-­bound geography of hope, where American mythology was born, a new set of adaptive skills emerged in response to the land, and a unique hero came to prominence in the popular mind.2 Like many heroic conceptions the storied figures of American mythology were drawn from history. Daniel Boone (1734–1820) lived in and explored the early western frontier, but he was made mythic in the John Filson (1747–88) narratives that both recounted and embellished his exploits. Early novelist James Fenimore Cooper transformed the historical Boone into the fictional Nathaniel Bumppo of the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41). This character then emerged as the prototype for an American hero that came to dominate the Western genre and was transformed much later in modern films and television series from the police drama to stories set in a new frontier in space. Like most heroes this mythic character was courageous, physically strong, adept in marshal virtue, and fully adapted to a natural environment that demanded his attributes in the struggle for survival. But what made him appropriate to the new political culture was his independence,

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self-­determination, and antiauthoritarianism, as well as an embrace of the violence necessary to reshape a seemingly impenetrable wilderness into a new nation. The American figure served civilization on his own terms and by his own rules, and this sweeping conception informed the notion of manifest destiny in the collective and popular mind. In Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985), Cormac McCarthy takes on this myth as he scrutinizes its darker proportions and reveals the naturalistic implications of what might otherwise be seen as merely a political ideology and a historically constituted social conception. McCarthy was sometimes viewed as a writer influenced perhaps too heavily by the southern gothic tradition. It was a linkage that ignored the influence of other movements such as literary naturalism and an unfair characterization to say the least. But with Blood Meridian he demonstrates a creative dexterity, a breadth of reading, and a complex and studied response to the tradition that precedes him in Western world literature.3 Much of McCarthy’s work embodies the major themes, motifs, and figuration patterns of the classical epics and the Bible forward to the Euro-­American traditions, particularly the Western. In T.  S. Eliot’s terms, this “historical sense” is particularly true of Blood Meridian.4 As McCarthy was drafting the novel, he initially called it his “Western,” and in using this term he shows awareness both of the genre and of the ethical framework that informs a uniquely American permutation of the novel form.5 It is a genre that owes a great debt to the nineteenth-­ century romance tradition in the mythopoetic expressions of writers like James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms, as well as the more philosophical novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In considering the polyvalence of the romance in America it is essential to understand that different authors affirm and reject popular national mythologies predicated on the assumption that violent expansionism was justified by divine mandate. The Western as it emerged from these rich thematic contours was ubiquitous in McCarthy’s early years, certainly in fiction but more generally in the arena of film and television. The genre in the postwar period was firmly rooted in a “progressive” tradition that involved a conservative ideology informed by a persistent allegiance to manifest destiny.6 In rendering the late nineteenth century, these films and episodic series conveyed the grand trajectory of westward expansion as a means to import democracy as well as the American values of individualism and utilitarian capitalism into the unsettled territories. The actor Marion Morrison, later John Wayne (1907–79), became an iconic figure, and his persona transcended the films in which he appeared. In life and in art he was larger than life, and he served as an advocate for

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American expansionism retrospectively in the West but contemporaneously throughout the world. He was an actor rather than a director, and in the hands of filmmakers such as John Ford in films such as The Searchers (1956), Wayne sometimes found himself acting in the role of a naturalistically inflected and morally ambiguous character. But more frequently he was the rugged individualist and the vanguard capitalist in a world in which cattle ranching emerged in the popular mind as the grand metaphor for the modern multinational corporation. The John Wayne figure was industrious and single minded, practical, hard working, and unflinching in his dedication to a mission: to carve a new economic order out of the American West. This same ideology found its way into television Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Rawhide (1959–65), Bonanza (1959–73), The Big Valley (1965–69), and The High Chaparral (1967–71). In most cases, these series were politically overt in their celebration of wealthy ranchers who built cattle empires though uncompromising commitment and grit. Typical plotlines involved a confrontation between the sympathetic capitalist and a villain made poor though jealousy and indolence, or perhaps the conflict came to the surface as an invading horde of avaricious Native Americans disrupted the emerging economic and social arrangement. Before and during the transformative period that was the 1960s, these films and television shows asserted the value of an industrial capitalism undergirded by the Western myth. But as the country began to change in the context of social revolution and the Vietnam War, so did the Western genre, and initially in the hands of directors such as the American Sam Peckinpah (1925–84) and the Italian Sergio Leone (1929–89), a more ideologically complex and ambiguous permutation of the form became prominent. Peckinpah presents a firmly naturalistic vision in his masterful The Wild Bunch (1969), and in other films he unveils the gravity and unvarnished cruelty central to the Americanist expansionist project. In his Man with No Name Trilogy, which includes A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Leone creates a self-­serving and morally ambiguous hero who undermines the Western myth as he builds nothing and seeks only to gain money and survive in a brutal world without regard for political ideals or personal ethics. Leone’s films introduced the actor Clint Eastwood, who, despite his relatively conservative politics, became a different heroic conception, a man who acted as a counterpoint to the affirmative myths embodied by John Wayne. In later films such as High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and Unforgiven (1992), the Western hero is a mysterious loner who is defined by tragedy and loss and is motivated by violence and a desire for vengeance. The

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world of these films is the West of a reimagined and more politically relevant history, one in which westward movement was not merely a process of democratic expansion but a rapacious pursuit built on exploitation and unmitigated greed, themes central to naturalist authors regardless of where their works are set. It is this realm of the revisionist “Western” that McCarthy embodies in Blood Meridian.7 The novel involves a creative blend of genre characteristics that reflects McCarthy’s engagement not only with the content of the frontier romance and the Western but also with its evolving form throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.8 Not unlike Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the narrative is built on conventions of the picaresque, a genre that precedes the modern novel and that became prominent in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. The picaresque includes an outsider figure or an indigent vagabond who hovers on the fringes of normal society and observes the human scene from an ethical distance. Blood Meridian lacks the satirical elements often associated with the picaresque but involves a series of episodes in a plot loosely structured around a meandering and formless journey through an indifferent and unforgiving world. McCarthy employs this genre to emphasize the main character’s status as a marginal and alienated figure.9 The novel also reflects characteristics of the nineteenth-­century travel narrative, made popular by such writers as Washington Irving (1783–1859), which makes use of the same episodic story and involves a series of epigrams at the beginning of each chapter identifying plot elements. These narratives were intended to bring dimension to exotic and foreign regions as the writer recounts a journey into western spaces unseen, otherworldly, and almost inexpressibly strange. In McCarthy’s rendering the new territory is both geographic and spiritual. The protagonist encounters the West in all its beauty and harsh malevolence and confronts ideas and possibilities unthinkable in the normal and limited scope of conventional human imagining. In the picaresque and the travel narrative a kind of proto-­naturalism is an evident plot motif as well as a thematic tendency. The land and the wilderness are central concerns and are presented in all their sublimity and brutish reality as well as in their mystery and harsh contingency. These genres that precede the conventional Western place a human figure in the context of a setting he must negotiate with a blend of ingenuity and luck, since the world he occupies is defined by a stark indifference to his life and his seemingly insignificant existence. Picaresque wanderings allow for journeys full of description and the evocation of place, and the travel narrative does the same as the West is made real in the imagination of the reader with all its dimension and strange

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portentous reality. Like the protagonists in later naturalist novels, characters in these genres are on their own and must adapt to an environment that is beautiful but blind to the needs of human beings that seek to survive and find a home. These same people either adapt and continue in their endless movement or are selected for an ignominious destruction. The world is imponderable, and the individual is dispensable and may be sacrificed at the unconscious whim of nature. McCarthy seems acutely aware of how these literary forms may be evoked and used as he explores the frontier as a metonym for an indifferent universe. The broader formal device is the late nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Western itself, a genre that explores the limits and possibilities of human action in both heroic and destructively antiheroic ways. At the heart of these character configurations is the violence that defined and made distinctive the American myth and the history of westward expansion.10 McCarthy derives the events in Blood Meridian from an actual historical account. His primary source is a personal narrative written by Samuel Chamberlain (1829–1908) entitled My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue (1861).11 Chamberlain’s reflections on his experiences in the West were appropriate raw material for a story with naturalist implications. Much in Chamberlain’s narrative cannot be verified by other sources, and the details themselves reflect an obvious embellishment. But the general outline is consistent with other accounts of events that took place in Mexico and Texas in the middle of the nineteenth century. The main figures in the story are Chamberlain himself and his commander John Joel Glanton (1819–50), who was initially a combatant in Texas’s war for independence from Mexico. After the conflict ended in 1849 Glanton led an infamous band of mercenaries who were hired by the Mexican government to eradicate the north country of hostile Native Americans, specifically Apaches. Scalps were the evidence they provided to confirm their work, and to Glanton it became clear that the dark hair of an innocent Native American or poor Mexican looked the same as that of a hostile. So together with his band he raided wherever he chose in a headlong pursuit of money and renown. According to Chamberlain, Glanton’s second-­ in-­command was a mysterious and seemingly monstrous figure named Judge Holden, who is characterized as bald and cold white, tall and imposing, expressive, thoughtful, and erudite. In McCarthy’s rendering the judge is larger than life and mythic in proportion, seemingly omnipotent in his capacity to intuit men’s thoughts and control circumstances at the bidding of his own unbreachable will. He articulates a philosophy of violence and bloodletting, and he argues that war itself is an emanation of the divine and the core identity of a godhead, however ill-­defined. More

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even than Glanton, the judge is central to the narrative since he provides the dark and seemingly impenetrable logic for their endeavors, one that transcends simple greed and brute avarice. After the Glanton gang became too much even for the Mexican authorities, the state of Chihuahua placed a bounty and declared them outlaws. They were driven out of Sonora and found themselves in Arizona, where the gang became partners in a ferry at the Yuma Crossing that traversed the Colorado River into California. They frequently killed Mexican and American travelers and robbed them as they returned from the gold fields. But on April 23, 1850, a band of Quechan (Yuma) Indians led by Caballo en Pelo attacked the Glanton gang and killed and scalped John Joel Glanton and many of the band. This was an act of retaliation against the scalp hunters for attacking the ferry the Quechans controlled at Pilot Knob. In McCarthy’s hands, the Glanton gang served as ideal source material to explore the violence that was so much a part westward expansion and the Western myth, and manifest destiny itself becomes emblematic of a naturalistic universe made blind by the will to power and the impulse to survive and dominate. Blood Meridian tells the story of an unnamed “kid” in his early teens who has left home in Tennessee to travel west. The year is 1849. He is from a deeply troubled family. His mother is dead, and his father is a drunken schoolteacher who neglects the boy, reciting old poetry in a semiconscious state of oblivion. The boy retains the depravity of the father since “in him broods already a taste for mindless violence” (3). The kid from the outset is both protagonist and villain. He is sympathetic insofar as his plight and identity are conditioned by circumstances. But there is something within him that embraces the inherent brutality of the natural world. He travels from town to town working and fighting until he finds himself with an ill-­fated irregular army troop that is slaughtered in a Comanche attack. He escapes and unwittingly joins Glanton’s gang. He becomes the reluctant protégé of the portentous Judge Holden, who counsels him on the virtues and the ultimate divinity of war.12 The essential conflict of the story is presented in a dialectic not dissimilar to those found in Dostoevsky’s novels, particularly The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) and Crime and Punishment (1866). At stake is not so much the kid’s life but his soul, in the sense that the judge seeks to convert him to a worldview bound to the apparent righteousness of violence and human degradation. Naturalistic conceptions echo, unmitigated by Holden’s active malevolence. The judge is by no means only the voice of an indifferent nature; instead, the extremes of his position suggest that at the heart of the natural world is blood and a cycle of death and decimation. The judge’s naturalism is polyvalent and ambiguous. Nature is not merely

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unconcerned but is active and destructive. The question at the center of the narrative is meaning, purpose, and value in the material universe broadly construed. In his landmark study The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1985), Vereen M. Bell argues that McCarthy’s worldview is essentially nihilistic, and in his consideration of Blood Meridian Steven Shaviro confirms this claim, arguing that nihilism in the novel takes the form of ritual celebration. Shaviro argues that “bloody death is our monotonously predictable destiny,” but that in Blood Meridian “its baroque opulence is attended with a frighteningly complicitous joy.”13 Edwin T. Arnold challenges this perspective, claiming there is an ethical machinery that circumscribes and defines McCarthy’s narrative. The kid makes an inauspicious decision because he does not confront the judge when he has the chance to kill him. But morality and agency remain a possibility. Arnold writes, “fences will neither hold the judge nor constrain the force he calls to in each of us. But moral choice remains; the judge can still be faced.”14 In this sense the issue at the heart of Blood Meridian is not only whether evil is the dominant force in the physical world but whether evil can be defined with any clarity.15 One of the most compelling and influential readings of the novel is Leo Daugherty’s “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” Daugherty argues that the overriding metaphysics that informs the narrative is ancient Near Eastern Gnosticism, which on close examination bears a strange similarity to a naturalist perspective. The origins of this worldview are obscure, though the metaphysical system took two principal forms: the Syrian-­Egyptian and the Iranian. The Iranian version probably emerged from Zoroastrianism, and its main proponent was Mani (215–77).16 A primary concern of Gnosticism is the nature of evil in the physical universe, and Gnostic conceptions work to explain the apparent dominance of destruction and malevolence in the world. This apparently dark reality is a preoccupation shared by virtually every philosophical system, and it forms the primary problem latent in the Judeo-­Christian conception. How can evil exist in a universe created by a beneficent and loving deity? Gnosticism works to resolve this issue by positing a metaphysics that places boundaries on the operative reality of goodness in the world of lived and natural experience. This ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern framework asserts that human souls are trapped in a material realm dominated by archons, lesser gods of malevolence and brutality that created man to trap and contain elements of divine substance. These archons emerged from a more comprehensive and indefinable force of evil referred to as the demiurge. Release and an apprehension of the divine “good,” which exists outside the material

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world, are difficult matters and are achieved only though gnosis, which is direct experience or knowledge of God. In this way evil becomes the most observable and present reality in the physical realm of nature. Blood Meridian embodies this perspective not only in setting and place but in the aberrant figure of Judge Holden, who appears at once to be a human being and a ubiquitous emanation from a space incomprehensible. The brute reality of the world from a Gnostic viewpoint bears a distinct similarity to naturalism, particularly in its more comprehensive and philosophically grounded romantic permutation.17 In this version of naturalistic conception, the world is harsh and indifferent, at times seemingly the active and conscious agent of bloodletting and pain.18 Taken in its totality Blood Meridian blends and makes consummate these historically disparate worldviews.19 Gnosticism appears to the kid in a dream as he imagines the judge standing over the mysterious artificer, who, echoing Melville’s weaver-­god, brings into being the world through the casting of a coin. But first McCarthy issues a warning: In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. (309)

It is clear throughout the novel that the judge is more than he appears. He has a literal reality within the story. He is described in some detail with physical features both tangible and disturbing. But like the white whale in Moby-­Dick (1851) he is suggestive as well. Through him McCarthy alludes to a host of philosophical, literary, and religious perspectives and figures, including Milton’s Satan, Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and Shakespeare’s Iago. But even as the narrator allows for these allusions, he is explicit in emphasizing that it would be a grave error to confine the judge to one conception of reality. To do so would be to undermine his ubiquitous reach and to contradict the gravity of his pronouncements. In this sense Gnosticism preserves without circumscribing Judge Holden’s significance within and outside the world of the novel. The suggestion of ancient Near Eastern Gnosticism appears immediately following this definitive warning. Standing over a mysterious figure in the kid’s dream, the judge presides: The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like

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his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. (310)

The coiner stamps out the future of earth and acts as the agent of material fate, casting in metal the destiny of all living beings who reside impermanently in an otherwise indifferent world. But standing above the coldforger is Judge Holden, who silently directs the actions of the artisan and looks on as the universe evolves through indifferent processes of cause and effect in a realm at once ordered by mathematical principle and blind to human suffering. From a Gnostic perspective the judge is archon or more likely demiurge. He is that source of destruction that traps divine substance within the physical space of being and present reality. It is a force of apparent evil, but it is not evil as conventionally understood. The judge is an entity within a consigned metaphysical system that separates the living from the light that presides elsewhere, external to the world of gnosis. The parallel to naturalism is striking as the world of human experience overseen by the demiurge is destructive, brutish, and distinct from light and divinity. It is the other more beneficent realm that appears only though intimations and in rare moments of human insight so brief they may only be imaginary. In this sense the narrator’s admonition to resist confining the judge to one philosophical system reveals the grand logic of his conception in McCarthy’s vision. In his ubiquitous presence the judge suggests the fluidity and comparable adaptability of all philosophical systems, and as the historical frameworks that separate them are eradicated in the figure of the judge, they become one single but multifaceted physical and metaphysical reality. Gnosticism and romantic naturalism are two sides of the same coin so to speak, and the blind labor of the coldforger suggests the fate of all humanity in a universe blind to a light that is distant and removed but nevertheless real. This metaphysics is complicated by an essential concern that appears early in the novel and rests at the center of literary naturalism as a worldview. The issue is human consciousness and its significance in an otherwise heartless universe. After the kid has left home and has been traveling for a year, he comes to a problematic awareness that the narrator articulates succinctly and lyrically: His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. (4–5)

Naturalism’s terms of existence are articulated here with a stark and vivid

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clarity. The world is wild and barbarous and revolves in an empty void without concern for the lived identity of any distinct species. It is the plight of all human consciousness to exist in finite space with an acute awareness and self-­knowledge in the face of mortality and existential isolation. The barbarity of the universe finds its most dramatic manifestation not in violence alone but in a process of turning, as movement and change make human identity irrelevant in the context of eternity and time immemorial. But the question that emerges is whether consciousness may bend the curve as it spins through the vast emptiness of the universe. May the stuff of creation be shaped to conform to human desires and hopes? Is the will an active agent within the evolution of the physical and immanent? Does the heart transcend the contingencies of time and space? Or is the mind another kind of clay and a thing destined to be cast and forged by forces external to itself? The novel never presents answers to these questions, but what is clear is the naturalist vision of a universe drawn forward in time by indifferent processes and entities—by a demiurge, a Yahweh-­like deity of divine justice and retribution, and always by tangible and materially constituted natural laws. In the kid’s early wandering he meets an old hermit who engages him in a conversation that illuminates and further complicates these vexing concerns: It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. . . .You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. (19)

In this context the species has not fallen victim to a universe that blights and consumes as it evolves through eternity. The human mind is a thing unfathomable since as the one instrument of right knowing it is insular and contained and has no ability to reason beyond the confines of its own material processes. The hermit articulates the paradox at the center of the novel and arguably at the heart of all of McCarthy’s work. How can we know the universe in absolute terms when we are bound within the limits of our own physical existence? In this sense the hermit ponders an issue central to the Enlightenment and later to philosophical naturalists. Seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century epistemology placed great faith in the power of the mind to know all things and to unlock the secrets of the universe through the power of reason. This is a legacy preserved by contemporary scientific and philosophical materialists, who reject any gesture toward transcendental categories of existence and knowing. But the hermit reveals the problem with this perspective. To achieve the absolute

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understanding that is the goal of eighteenth-­century positivism one must transcendentalize the mind. There can be no material limits to human understanding since the boundaries of mere “brain” would consign us to the epistemological shadows. Because major figures of the Enlightenment such as John Locke (1632–1704), René Descartes (1596–1650), and Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) were in various ways religious, their intellectual progressivism was internally consistent. Since the mind was linked to the divine it may hope to achieve an ultimate knowledge at some point in the grand sweep of human history. But the hermit ponders an alternative reality that stands against any epistemological system that assumes ultimate knowledge. If the mind is merely brain, a physical thing, it must have boundaries. If its purpose and function are to know then the brain will confront the impenetrable wall of its own physical limitations. For all his embrace of science, McCarthy’s critique of Enlightenment positivism becomes most relevant in this context. It is a modern critique bound and sympathetic to scientific endeavor and as such to naturalism. But it challenges the positivistic and utopian assumption common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To know all there is to know, one must elevate the mind to spirit and resort to transcendental categories that encourage an embrace of the divine, however thinly understood. For the hermit, mystery is central to any pursuit of wisdom. This same recognition informs a more complex and nuanced naturalistic perspective in McCarthy’s vision, one that acknowledges that materiality must remain our primary frame of reference, even as we hope to glimpse realms that exist at the edge of knowing. This same guarded romantic naturalism finds expression as the judge speaks to members of the Glanton gang about the mysterious relationship between the world and what may lie within or beyond. He delivers an extemporaneous lecture on geology and explores the hidden implications that emerge from any scientific inquiry: A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God don’t lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. (116)

At one level it may seem that the word of God is merely the earth in all its singular materiality. But considering the hermit’s thought on the

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nature of the mind, it may be that “the bones of things” are all the human species is given to understand. There is an ambiguity built into the judge’s words, and what makes him so compelling is that he often speaks the truth. From a naturalist perspective all we can know is the world, and the physical realm we occupy may be all there is to ponder. But the judge is a bloody old hoodwinker, and insofar as he appears to possess a preternatural power, he suggests himself as the Gnostic demiurge or as some entity akin to it. And yet he alludes equally to the Enlightenment principle of order and natural law that makes sense of apparent chaos as the world moves through a fathomless void. He may also be referring to the God members of the gang at least nominally worship, which is the anthropomorphic deity of the Judeo-­Christian tradition. All these suggestions stand together in the judge’s vague and evocative pronouncement. But each is bound to the naturalist assumption that logos can only be made real in human conception through the rocks and the grand desert plains of the American Southwest. The world is all we can know with any certainty, and Judge Holden sets out to know it, particularly when he proclaims that “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198). This is not only a testimony to the destructive potential of the scientific project in an expansionist and capitalist context but a harsh declaration of a naturalist view of reality. In Judge Holden’s words, “existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others” (245). The novel continues as the kid travels with the Glanton gang as they move from the pursuit of hostile Apaches to the mindless slaughter of innocents. The kid participates in ways we cannot see, and the bloodletting and murder proceed at a pace unrelenting and difficult to absorb. In the end the gang falls victim to a retribution well deserved, and Glanton himself is brutally murdered by the pursuing Yumas he has disenfranchised. A few escape the attack, with the kid and the judge among them. But before all this and at the apex of his dominance the judge had delivered his remarkable declaration on the divinity of war: This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last the forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. (249)

In his various pronouncements the judge embodies the skepticism of transcendental morality that emerges from the tradition of Continental

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philosophy, particularly the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in works such as Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), even as he precedes their articulation by nearly a half-­century. But more specifically and quite commonly he is seen as the embodiment of evil and an example of how the impulse to destruction plays out in the human realm. His words may seem to echo the claims made by many figures from myth and history, whether Iago or Satan, or even known figures such as the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). But McCarthy draws them from broader and more acceptable sources in the Western philosophical tradition. In the notes that appear in the first draft manuscript of Blood Meridian, McCarthy includes a quote from the pre-­Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535–475 BCE): “War is the father of us all and out [sic] king. War discloses who is godlike and who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a free man.” McCarthy then writes, “Let the judge quote this in part without crediting source.”20 From these two lines it becomes clear that the notions expressed are not the ideas of a Hitlerian monster who has blighted human history with a philosophy of malevolence and violence. They are the thoughts of a respected and influential thinker in the intellectual tradition that defines Western culture. By no means isolated in the remote past, they cannot be explained by theories of ethical progressivism. These concepts echo through the ages and find expression in many of history’s most respected men of thought. In a consideration of literary naturalism at its inception in Europe, one of the most important writers is the French author Émile Zola (1840–1902), who helped define the naturalist aesthetic in the mid-­nineteenth century. Considering war and violence after the surrender of the Sudan in the colonial context of the late nineteenth century, Zola wrote a three-­column article for a publication called Figaro. It is frequently quoted as a typical naturalist’s take on war. Zola writes: Would not the end of war be the end of humanity? War is life itself. Nothing exists in nature, is born, grows or multiplies, except by combat. We must eat and be eaten so that the world may live. It is only warlike nations which have prospered; a nation dies as soon as it disarms. War is the school of discipline, sacrifice, and courage.21

This perspective appears in various forms in the private and public words of such leaders as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, among many others. It is not the peculiar and horrific speculation of evil incarnate but a thought that has emerged from an honest though dubious reflection on observation and experience, in Zola’s case validated in his time by the latest insights from the scientific sphere. To call the judge

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evil is to inoculate him from a very human history, and what remains is an essentially naturalist insight. In Judge Holden we find not an evil we can isolate or a demon we can personify. We find ourselves: the wars we have fought, the territories we have conquered, and the science we have deified, expressed, and justified in our own words. At one level the judge’s actions seem commensurate with his expressions since both argue that there is a peculiar virtue hidden in even the most horrific acts of violence. But though he is war’s voracious avatar the judge did not invent it. War is a practice created and seemingly perfected by the human animal. A strange ritual quality accompanies Judge Holden’s actions and is given a portentous weight through a logic that is in no way peculiar to the uncommon wanderings of his distinctive and aberrant mind. It is a naturalist logic that the narrator articulates as the gang wanders a seemingly archetypal wilderness: In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence .  .  . and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships. (247)

This description and the idea of optical democracy defines the relationship of all things animate and inanimate in a material world circumscribed by a natural law the landscape makes visible. This is the world of Blood Meridian. There is perhaps no more succinct expression of a naturalistic worldview than this reflection on the individual objects that together make up the earth and its features. Human beings must live and die as the matter that composes them dissolves into stone and dust. But insofar as Judge Holden is the voice of this harsh reality, and given that he is the suzerain of war and violence, he must be pondered against his strange and unwilling protégé, the kid. The young boy’s rebellion—and, after many years, the man’s resistance—fails quite tragically as he dies ignominiously in the jakes and the judge resumes his fateful dance. But the kid has charted a realm of possibility in which the judge can be resisted, and his death at some level amounts to martyrdom. Even the judge recognizes a special and redemptive quality in the kid and an impulse to decency that marks him as distinctive. The unguessed kinship between men and rocks gains some clarity here. The kid’s rebellion is limited and circumscribed by the material conditions that define him as a thing born of the natural world. There are terms of possibility in the weave of McCarthy’s work, and they

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are never made more real than in the relationship of the judge and the kid. In a penultimate encounter with the boy Judge Holden makes a claim that is tinged with anger and regret, “You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (298). In some unspoken way and through some inarticulate action, the kid has responded to an inner voice of decency. In the Border Trilogy, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham display a dignity and heroic nobility the unnamed kid can never match. His resistance is tentative and mediate, and he responds to a moral code of ambiguous origins and limited reach. But his behavior foreshadows the more distinct nobility of the young men who will follow in McCarthy’s canon. In the context of this altruistic rebellion and wistful possibility, the epilogue concludes the book on a note of mystery, as it evokes the strange image of a group of wanderers working together on a barren plain.22 One of them strikes the ground with an implement and releases fire from the earth, and as they continue on, their efforts seem “less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it” (337). In their unnamed relation is the hopeful embodiment of “unguessed kinship.” It may or may not be a description of human collaboration, given that the leader is followed by those who “do not search” and are mechanistically engaged in their work, with no “inner reality” behind their apparent prudence or reflexivity (337). But together they form a kinship of things simultaneously material and spiritual since they release from the earth a fire that comes from God. The question of God’s existence is present in McCarthy’s works from the beginning, and here it takes on an even more tangible resonance. That divinity remains remote and only becomes real in physical terms in the order that finds expression in natural law. But it might also live in a place where humanity finds meaning, and where moments of sharp and momentary light appear in the black realm of shadow, indifference, and blind contingency. There are many truths unguessed. Among them are the bonds that bring the human community together in a natural world bound to material principles that find articulation only in the cold calculus of physics. But amid a despair and existential isolation so difficult for human consciousness to comprehend, one thing remains true: It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness. Jacob Boehme, epigraph to Blood Meridian

5 The World Lies Waiting Transitions and Contact Zones in the Border Trilogy There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Jack London, The Sea Wolf

I

n part to research Blood Meridian (1985), McCarthy explored the regions around El Paso, Texas, probably beginning in the early 1970s. He spent significant time in the American Southwest. The region clearly suited his inquiries into the natural world, and he chose to make it his home when he finally moved there in the late 1970s. In researching his Western works, he traveled the arid deserts and southern plains and developed an intimate relationship with a sparse and often pristine land.1 The manuscripts in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos, reveal a research practice predicated on a combination of focused reading and travel, and the vivid rendering of natural landscapes are evidence of his many journeys through Texas, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico.2 These forays were not always isolated endeavors since McCarthy certainly interacted with people along the way, and Richard B. Woodward implicitly confirms these relationships in describing him as “a gregarious loner.”3 He had been married and divorced twice by the early 1980s, and the pace of his literary output escalated with the Border Trilogy. Perhaps around 1980, he wrote a screenplay entitled “Whales and Men,” which remains unpublished and unproduced and is contained in the Wittliff Collections. As a dialogue-­driven screenplay featuring a marine biologist based on Roger Payne, the script suggests many of McCar­ thy’s naturalist preoccupations and interests. In conversation, a wealthy explorer, an Irish aristocrat, and a scientist discuss whales and treat them,

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much like in Moby-­Dick (1851), as symbols of nature in all its harsh indifference and its philosophical and impenetrably elliptical import. The work further illuminates McCarthy’s interest in the physical world as a material space defined by natural law and as a stage on which a universal drama reveals itself in glimpses though powerful images that present themselves vividly to the perceiving eye. In the three novels of the Border Trilogy this same natural space is rendered in all its evocative mystery in the liminal region that combines the United States and Mexico. In this contact zone the young characters John Grady Cole and Billy Parham live in a state of transition as they work to adapt to an environment that draws them but that they do not understand or comprehend.4 Their multiple journeys involve a universal quest for place and identity within a harsh and unforgiving land.5 The intermediary realm they travel works as a metonym for the universe at large, which is a realm of seeming indifference and brutality, and they encounter a beauty and a temporary home that inspires them to constitute lives based on a fading social paradigm.6 The range lands of the United States and Mexico attract these young men in John Grady Cole’s romantic conception of a large Mexican cattle ranch and in the refracted images caught in the flashing black eyes of the captured she-­wolf Billy Parham takes back to Mexico.7 But the land is irremediably violent, and it teaches these young men that adaptability in a naturalist context sometimes requires a commitment that extracts in blood.8 The contact zone along these border regions becomes a heightened representation of the natural world, much like Jack London’s Yukon or even the New York City and Chicago that are rendered in the works of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. In this sense it is more than character and plot that unify these three novels in a trilogy. It is the material world that subsumes John Grady Cole and Billy Parham and shapes their hopes and daily concerns.9 They act with genuine agency and heroism, but their behavior is reactive more than initiative. The natural world and border space require strength, resilience, and adaptability, as well as the capacity to see beyond, to find a place for commitment and a beauty that suggests as much as it renders.

All the Pretty Horses (1992) McCarthy’s engagement with naturalism in the first novel of the Border Trilogy is informed by a distinctive American history that began centuries ago. Any understanding of the concerns of the central character, John Grady Cole, must emerge from an acknowledgment that the novel and its protagonist are born of a rich and embodied past. The movement westward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an endeavor

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full of possibility but fraught with risk. The vast desert spaces from the Rocky Mountains southwest to the Pacific Coast were for the most part uninhabitable. There is a stark beauty to places like Bryce Canyon, Zion, and Monument Valley, and the Grand Canyon has always inspired a kind of reverie in those who encounter it as they confront at once the image of their own vulnerability and limitations, the vast breadth of nature, and a sublime sense of its indomitability. Native Americans had occupied the land for millennia, surviving in small villages by hunting and gathering and by cultivating small plots of arid land made fertile by hard work and the ingenuity the need to survive inspires. They were perhaps drawn away from the more water-­rich northern regions by the more hospitable winter climates, and they learned to adapt in vast areas seemingly devoid of the conditions hospitable to human life or husbandry. The Spanish came from the south in Latin America in search of gold, and finding little they nevertheless found reason to stay, as the vast territories offered great potential for those with minds to think and the imagination to invent new modes of living amid the heat and the arid plains of these vast desert landscapes. In later centuries, migrating populations originally from northern Europe and the British Isles and later from the United States came in search of a place where democratic spaces might create a path for people with the will to carve something fresh out of what they saw as free land on an uninhabited frontier. The notion that this opportunity might be pursued without the displacement of others was the sad product of an imagination limited by the dark logic of greed and the impulse to acquisition, since the Native populations had made something habitable there, adapted with success, and achieved a preindustrial sustenance in the vast and waterless regions of what became states like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The Southwest was an area more suited to Indigenous people since they were light in population and limited in their ability to extract the fragile living the land might offer. But as large populations moved west in the nineteenth century, the exigencies of survival dictated that people apply their considerable skill in altering nature to their purposes. New communities demanded water, but the rivers and lakes were fewer than in the East, and the movement of water to new agrarian spaces demanded the invention and application of modern technologies. The American West, then, for all its association with pristine landscape and sublime apprehension of a metaphysical absolute, was a place that demanded ingenuity as well as adaptability and motivated a voracious impulse to change the environment to suit the needs of new migration patterns and populations. In this sense, and from the

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perspective of settlement, the West became an essentially modern space that was defined by incessant movement. As in the rest of the world, the history of the American Southwest has displayed in dramatic terms this story of perpetual adaptation. After the near extinction of the North American bison displaced Native Americans, a new breed of capitalist emerged around the breeding of cattle, and the vast plains and prairies gave way to open range grazing and ultimately to vast but insular ranches that permanently transformed the face of the land. Whole empires were built in the Southwest by North Americans from the United States and by aristocrats from Mexico. In many ways, this practice persists but not with the original weight and dominance of the late nineteenth century. There were other opportunities and resources to be exploited in the headlong pursuit of survival and economic success. In the mid-­nineteenth century, whale oil gave way to another source of energy as petroleum was discovered in the rural fields of Pennsylvania and provided the sustaining fuel for industry, railroads, and the automobile. Ranch culture receded as vast amounts of oil were drawn from what had for a while been range land, and those hard-­bitten men and women who had thrived in the age of the cattle ranch changed and made their way, forming small communities surrounded by derricks and pump jacks. Cattle workers and cowboys who had developed an appreciation for a certain wandering lifestyle with the horse as its grand symbol became roughnecks, all the while retaining their attachment to the values they had learned as they bred and nurtured the beef they would drive across broad open spaces to the markets of the East. The West from Texas to California existed from time unrecorded in a state of perpetual fluidity, as new conditions forced continual adaptations necessitated by the need to survive. But these changes did not come without a cost. The inevitable human displacement is defining in the region, and McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses charts the nobility and tragedy that attend a young man’s attempt to survive in a naturalist context, respond to a new history, and find a home. The novel’s protagonist, John Grady Cole, is committed to the lifestyle that harks back to the nineteenth century, with its cattle ranges and open prairies, and he longs for the freedom he imagines might emerge from a life working the Texas plains.10 He is a romantic, and the latitude he seeks was as illusory in the height of the cattle era as it is in the modern moment. Those rugged men who worked the cattle ranches became the stuff of myth and, along with the gunfighter, became major figures in the Western genre in its various permutations. But the reality of their

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lives was darker and more brutish.11 The cattle industry offered work at low wages, under harsh conditions, and with little genuine adventure. The plains were wide ranging, but life there was hard and demanded a stamina most men could not muster. The average cowboy’s life was full of drudgery and boredom, and there was a danger in the job that made it for the most part unappealing. The opportunity to work as a ranch hand and a laborer driving cattle to market attracted few adventurers since the life offered little variation. Only the desperate and poor took employment with the great cattle empires of the West. They came from all directions, and they were often inexperienced and without skill. John Grady Cole’s family on his mother’s side owned the ranch for nearly a century, and even though the family had apparently lived at a top of the social ladder life was hard, and the many sons of the original Grady clan died young, either by violence or by accidents related to their work. The freedom John Grady Cole imagines never really existed except in the free realm of his imagination, and the novel charts a border territory that is more than geographic but spiritual and psychological. The novel begins at the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather. The young man is silent and stoic as he observes the body in state, but McCarthy makes it clear that his attachment to the old man is powerful and difficult to estimate. It is a bond not only to the man but to the way of life he represents. John Grady’s mother is different. She longs for the activity and the vibrant life of the city, and she is set on selling the ranch and becoming an actress in San Antonio. Committed to the land of his forebears, the young man tries to change her mind, even seeking legal help in retaining the property. His father is a good man, but he is a war-­torn loner who is unwilling to help his son maintain ownership of the land. For all these reasons and together with his friend Lacey Rawlins, John Grady Cole leaves for Mexico to seek the nineteenth century of his vivid imagining.12 It is 1949, and no industry more typifies the modern moment than petroleum. In this sense, All the Pretty Horses is a modern Western in every sense of the term, as its lost hero seeks virtue and freedom in an environment that is ever changing and indifferent to the desires of its inhabitants. From a naturalistic perspective, it is a shifting and mindless realm that demands perpetual adaptation, and the anachronistic heroism of John Grady Cole initiates a story of wistful tragedy. True to the American hero as he has appeared in the frontier romance from its inception, the values that undergird the novel involve a stoicism that appears in character and seems the only rational response to a harsh and unforgiving land. Silence is a feature of John Grady Cole’s personality and a core aspect of his response to the world. But his strange quietude

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is also central to the novel’s style. Nancy Kreml notes differences in language use and the relationships of words and character between All the Pretty Horses and McCarthy’s previous novels, especially Blood Meridian, and she argues that scenes are presented without an excess of narrative interpretation. Figures like Cole remain in the best ways ciphers who are given to the reader with the same mystery and hidden complexity of the natural world itself. There is a leveling of character and landscape as they all seem one, and for Kreml the novel reads in many ways like a cinematic narrative with the visual taking precedence over the intellectual.13 This stylistic practice does much to enhance the heroic qualities displayed by John Grady Cole and to heighten the tragic implications of that heroism in a modern context. Dianne  C. Luce notes the implausibility of this heroism in a sixteen-­year-­old boy, together with the fact that it is unlikely he could possess the level of experience that constitutes the myth of the natural horseman. But she emphasizes that the novel presents significant evidence of a misplaced romanticism in John Grady Cole as well as an immaturity and a sense of entitlement with respect to the ranch he hoped to inherit.14 The young man’s age is central to how the narrative engages naturalist themes, insofar as his unwillingness to respond to a changing environment can be associated with naive preconceptions and his own commitment to an outdated Western myth. In pointing to the sweep of history and the new reality of the modern world that has transformed the West, Pierre Lagayette suggests the Cold War as a context that ironically infuses what on the surface seems like a nineteenth-­century romance.15 In the young men’s travels in South Texas and into Mexico, the novel and its characters take life from the natural landscapes of the desert, with its plains and rugged mountains and occasional rivers and creeks. But with some frequency this same setting is invaded by highways with cars and trucks and by the aircraft that separates John Grady from the young Mexican woman he has taken into his heart. Gail Moore Morrison argues that the story is “firmly grounded in the details of time (1949–1951) and place (west Texas in and around San Angelo, southeast to San Antonio, southwest to Langtry and Pumpville, farther south to various locations in the Mexican border state of Coahuila, and farther south still to Zacatecas).” She argues that this intervention of the modern and the motive to escape from it amounts to an “expulsion from Paradise.”16 Of course, this prelapsarian space was less a reality in history and was primarily the territory of popular myth, but it remains true that the core of John Grady Cole’s tragic dilemma involves the need to adapt to a world for which his values and intrinsic skills make him in many ways unsuited. He seems aware of this, and in his earliest reflections he harks back to a time even

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before the arrival of Europeans, an era in unrecorded history when violence and harsh contingency ruled the moment. He rides across the land, and an image of the past comes to mind: When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses . . . and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders . . . and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost 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)

The past lives for John Grady Cole even though it is not his own. In his imagination he conjures for personal sustenance a history that is accurate but remote from his experience. Built into his sense of wonder is an insight universal and pressing given his need to make a life in his own time. The Comanche were a new people in the context of a primordial history, and like many tribes across the western plains they built and sustained their lives as they read the map of an evolving nature and attuned themselves to its demands as well as its physical opportunities and limitations. They perfected themselves for a time around the horse and elevated the act of riding, running, and hunting to a virtual art form. They survived on the North American bison in the era when the animal blanketed the plains, but they also raided and plundered with a voracious regularity and a brutality that haunts the historical imagination of the Southwest to this day. The Comanche were a people with values foreign to Western culture, with its binary emphasis on the tension between right and wrong. Their lives were “secular” in the sense that they felt no allegiance to a single god who by nature constituted an ethical system that inspired particular action. They were animists, and their religion involved primarily a divinity linked to nature and natural processes. The divine as it presented itself to them was integrated with a natural world that was itself devoid of love or commitment as traditionally conceived by the Western mind. Violence presented itself as the organizing medium of life on the land they occupied, and they integrated themselves with it as they hunted animals and raided the surrounding people.17 They adapted to and reflected the harsh natural world that had given them their precarious existence. Their story, which is by no means lost on John Grady Cole, is one of success and survival for a time as they responded to an environment that was otherwise indifferent to them as a distinct people. The only ethic for them was the unspoken admonition to condition their lives to the physical realm they occupied and to mirror its operative principles.

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Adaptation to environment is at the heart of John Grady Cole’s dilemma. He possesses the physical strength and the intellectual capacity to change in response to the modern moment, but his heart lies elsewhere, in another place and time. The geographic space where John Grady seeks a home and hopes to recover a life centered on older modes of existence is particularly suited to his imagination and his illusory pursuits. It is a border region and a contact zone where the old world and the new come to interact and blend. He exists in a realm where naturalist principles become defining and where competition for resources is particularly acute. Historically and at a political level the border region between Texas and Mexico had been contested for two centuries, first between the Spanish and the Indigenous population, then between Mexico and the Republic of Texas, and later between the United States and Mexico after the annexation of Texas in the period of US westward expansion. Violence was at the center of the human effort to dominate as the colonizers occupied the land and displaced the Native Americans, who re-­created themselves on the same rapacious terms. John Grady enters this world in many ways aware of the demands the land will make. Together with Lacey Rawlins and later with Jimmy Blevins he travels the old world in search of the life of the Old Waddies. After a storm Jimmy Blevins loses his horse and seeks to recover it, and the three young men find themselves in conflict with the Mexican authorities. It is in the hands of a police captain that John Grady Cole learns even more fully that ethics and an ideal sense of right and wrong are mitigated by a reality more ambiguous and indicative of the morally neutral principles that govern the natural world. During an interrogation, John Grady commits himself to the truth: the lost horse was nominally owned by Jimmy Blevins at least insofar as it was brought by him across the border. It was not stolen by Blevins in Mexico, and as such his attempt to recover it was justified. But the captain’s concept of truth is provisional and conditioned by unmitigated competition. He warns John Grady that he will not survive the prison in Saltillo, and that a new “truth” can be made as they speak. Ever committed to ideals that transcend the exigencies of survival, John Grady resists and says, “There aint but one truth. . . . The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody’s mouth” (168). In this scenario, the young man is an example of moral resistance as he seeks to respond in humanistic terms to a world committed only to the law of tooth and claw. But in that defiance and after the ignominious murder of Jimmy Blevins, he finds himself with his friend Lacey Rawlins incarcerated in a place that works as a metaphor for a naturalist universe. There they fight daily with the other inmates, and

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John Grady must kill another young man in self-­defense. It is an act that will haunt him, though he knows his actions were unavoidable. He is conflicted and torn as he confronts natural law and its brute reality. His impulse to right action in the world he has entered seems sadly misplaced. But before these events have brought him to this harsh recognition, another feature of nature has presented itself not only on the land but internally, in John Grady’s response to the horse as an emblem of nature’s deeper and spiritually imbued identity. He and Lacey have taken work as ranch hands on the Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, a large ranch owned by the aristocratic Don Héctor Rocha y Villareal. There John Grady demonstrates that he understands the mystic import of the horse as a natural animal and works the creature with skill though a spiritual awareness that cannot be learned. After John Grady displays those abilities in breaking a group of horses, Rocha singles John Grady out for special duties, and in various ways his unique aptitudes become clear. At one point, he is working in the mountains with Rawlins, and in a conversation with an old working man, they turn to the idea of the horse as an emblem of the natural world. The old man speaks directly from John Grady’s sensibility: Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion. Rawlins asked him in his bad spanish if there was a heaven for horses but he shook his head and said that a horse had no need of heaven. Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing. (111)

The horse for the working man and for John Grady as well is a mystical symbol of nature in all its mystery and metaphysical portent. It is a dark transcendentalist insight, not at all incommensurate with Charles Child Walcutt’s “divided stream,” Donald Pizer’s “multilayered determinism,” and Eric Carl Link’s “literary” naturalism.18 The natural world is an integrated physical system in which all things play a part, and the horse writ large is an entity that embodies and reacts to the inarticulate principles that find manifestation only in movement, change, and response to laws that originate in a darkness that divides the known from the unknown in human consciousness. God would not permit such a thing. The divine

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here as articulated by the old man is equally mysterious and suggests not so much an anthropomorphic deity beyond nature but nature itself, insofar as the natural world depends for its sustenance on the physical truths that find expression in evolutionary time through the powerful image of the horse. Behind these patterns is a complex and incomprehensible set of deterministic principles that human beings may apprehend in some oblique way even as they fail to understand them. This sense of things is revealed to John Grady’s emerging awareness after he has been released from prison. He returns to the hacienda. He had fallen in love with the hacendado’s daughter, Alejandra, and she returned his affection, much to the objection of her father and her aunt, the dueña Alfonsa. The aunt has purchased him out of prison but has exacted a promise from Alejandra that she never see him again. He confronts the older woman, and she responds with a benevolent firmness. She explains her perspective through her own story, which parallels the history of Mexico in the twentieth century. It is a tale that has conditioned her thinking and made her a world-­ wrought philosophical and historical determinist. She says: My father had a great sense of the connectedness of things. I’m not sure I share it. He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. (230–31)

McCarthy evokes the coiner who worked at the will of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, though here the reference is inflected not by Gnosticism but by an apparently deterministic and closed system of material cause and effect. The judge is absent, and what remains is the perpetual turn of the coin. The metaphor reflects the influence of complexity science, the ideas that McCarthy was ultimately concerned with at the Santa Fe Institute.19 Nature is a physical complex of sequence and causality. Within that intricate pattern individual choices are remote from the circumstances that made them possible, and their consequences are unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. In John Grady’s case, the dueña Alfonsa refuses to permit a choice that allows him into the system that is Alejandra’s unfolding life, though the old woman admits she cannot anticipate how that life will reveal itself with or without him. Her view is even darker than her father’s:

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My father must have seen in this parable the accessibility of the origins of things, but I see nothing of the kind. For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets. (231)

For the dueña Alfonsa the world is an intricate matrix that “even God— who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change” (239). The divine is not eliminated from the picture, but here that force is circumscribed by the creation itself, which is a naturalistic system bound to deterministic laws and processes. The old woman follows these contemplations with her own life story, which parallels the history of her country and the failed regime of the ill-­fated and idealistic Madero brothers. Human agency is a reality but with little effect since choices and intentions are irremediably divorced from each other in a causal system that wounds the thinking human being and leaves him bereft of any hope of the heart’s realization. It is a realm of physicality and indifference: The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I’ve thought a great deal about my life and about my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. (238)

The naturalism reflected here is grounded in scientific inquiry and in the operative parameters of physical systems, but any epistemology that assumes that those laws may be apprehended by the mind is put to rest with a peculiar and poetic finality. Not unlike the hermit the kid encounters in Blood Meridian, the old woman at once acknowledges the power of the material world to dictate past and present but denies the human capacity to comprehend. But after John Grady Cole is released from prison and before he speaks to the dueña Alfonsa, he sees a more human and even hopeful reality in a group of farmworkers as he travels. They affect him, and they brand themselves on his memory: And after and for a long time to come he’d have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had the power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted. (219)

In a world where incessant change and violence have seemingly defined his experience, John Grady Cole becomes aware that brute competition,

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adaptation, and survival are only part of what has defined his journey across the border. It is true that the modern world has emerged and that the ranch life he hoped for is fading into a misty and irrecoverable past. He has been ill-­suited in many ways to the world that has come to define the twentieth century. But he finds meaning and sustenance in the many people he encounters along the way, particularly in the laborers he meets and their simple smiles as he communes with them on the heat of the plain in the flatbed of a truck. It is a brotherhood immediate, forged from struggle and conflict with other men, with the land itself, and with the inexorable sweep of history and modernity. But their image makes it clear that rugged individualism is a privilege of the wealthy and of those who are shielded from the hard reality of the natural world. It is in this communion of the misbegotten that another face of nature presents itself, lifting like a sculpted form in bas-­relief from the arid deserts of the Mexican and American borderlands. What defines the human condition in this scene is the power of community, which can stand against the indifferent and seemingly malevolent laws that bind, rules that were reflected in darkest terms in the prison in Saltillo. It is a power that persuades and integrates and brings them together in honor and commitment to something beyond the human organism that seeks above all things to adapt and survive. For John Grady this is an experience that stands beside his darker reflections. In his pondering of nature, his own thoughts have sought some reconciliation between the hard and unforgiving naturalist imperatives that reveal themselves in a changing modern environment and some larger and more compensatory reality: He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. (282)

The universe forces on the unsuspecting human even from childhood the imperative to adapt to new historical conditions and an existence born of bloodletting and pain. The world is defined and gains perpetual life though these realities, which cannot be ignored or wished away. To remain blind to things is to corrupt our social arrangements though a willful ignorance that transforms sentimentality into selfishness and into the cruelty that seems embedded in the modern world. But nature is imbued and rendered palatable through this relationship of strange and diverging equity, through material interconnections that must be understood to be made right in the mind. The beauty that gives meaning to

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the arid landscape, the fall of a sparrow, or the vision of a single flower is made rich as we understand the multitudes that have given all to make it tangible and real. The natural world to be experienced fully must be seen in this way, and to envision these realities is to bear the necessary and terrible cost of knowing, which is both the blessing and the curse of human consciousness.

The Crossing (1994) In the second novel of the Border Trilogy the act of perception and interpretation in the human animal is a necessary survival mechanism. The Darwinian account of human origins has been confirmed through endless evaluation, observation, and discussion over the space of more than a century. But there are problems when ideas are conceptualized too dogmatically, and once transformed into narrative new concepts take on a peculiar valence. Scientific truths have been both valuable and destructive, and in the wake of their application the world is threatened today with a universal annihilation by human hands. That decimation may take place in the single flash of a nuclear moment or more gradually as the earth dies a slow death from global warming.20 We cannot underestimate the determination and avarice with which human beings have come to dominate their environment in response to an unguarded impulse to acquire and control. But even in the context of this dark and headlong pursuit there is a truth that has become apparent. The most profound naturalist insight is captured in the concluding lines of The Crossing: He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction. (426)

The history of evolution has revealed a commonality between the human and the animal and shown that the distinction between the two is in large part a false one. All organic matter emerges from a genetic code and responds to the rules that govern the combination of genes that make up an individual organism in any species. But in that realm of nature what a piece of work is man. How can we encapsulate in moral judgment a creature that has conceived the means of self-­annihilation and at the same time created monuments like the Pyramids or the indescribably prescient words of William Shakespeare? Even the great cities of the developed world are themselves works of a designer’s art, and they emerge from a creative intent that is remarkable beyond words. As they explore the implications of a Darwinian vision the greatest writers of the naturalist tradition have felt compelled to assert the particular and remarkable

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contribution human beings have made to the world. Even if we consider the leveling of man and nature that modern thought has legitimately envisioned there remains a difference. The things people create are cast not merely by their hands but by intellect and the imagination as they blend creativity and the desire for progress. It was this way from the Paleolithic Period forward and is evident in figures that illuminate the walls of caves in France, images that were painted in a time of rudimentary musical instruments and have been found amid the shards of an anthropological record. Before history was written and not long after the miracle of language was born people created myths, narratives to explain the largest and smallest natural phenomena. Gods and goddesses emerged, and later came the great religious traditions that still live for billions of believers today. At the heart of these phenomena is story. Without the narratives that give structure and meaning to the bleak pastiche that appears before our perceiving minds, we would have no place to ease our pensive thoughts and our expansive capacity to perceive and imagine. It is the natural and distinctive human propensity to create stories that in many ways defines us, and to acquire meaning they must have a witness. This is the essential relationship in a naturalist context that gives meaning and resounding purpose to The Crossing. The border between the United States and Mexico in Cormac McCarthy’s work is a geographic as well as universal space where the human story becomes manifest in the most profound sense. The Crossing, along with the other novels in the trilogy, is ensconced in time and modernity, as its characters contend with the inexorable pace of historical change and the need to adapt and respond to a new world they do not understand.21 The characters cross into the old world in search of an experience that exists only in the broad realm of imagination and narrative, and they encounter a violence that seems hard to reconcile with the regions of possibility they have spent their young lives pondering and rendering privately in thought-­visions they by nature have been reticent to share. The brute realities encountered in Mexico are by no means specific to that space; they are characteristic of any country that has been blighted by war and revolution and struggles to compete in accordance with a new capitalist logic that would absorb it and make it a mere footnote in history. In All the Pretty Horses, the dueña Alfonsa has more than hinted at the indifferent force of those processes, as in naturalist terms time for all things living is a thing to be reckoned with and appeased as it demands the capacity to adapt, change, and contend for resources and a right to place. For the old woman the laws that bind are made manifest in the troubled history of her homeland, which is an infant nation that breaks

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and falls even as it grows into the future. Right and wrong seem misplaced notions in a region where avarice knows no boundaries of class, as rich young men such as the Madero brothers live precarious and tentative lives and find ignominious death even at the hands of those they would serve and strive to sustain. These historical realities are mirrored in the experience of anyone who encounters the land in its natural state, where historical contingencies cannot mask the principal facts of existence. In that realm the deterministic laws of a brute existence are things that Billy Parham must internalize in The Crossing. But there is a strange quality to his character. As he changes and learns he blends his initial idealism with a guarded realism in an alchemy of perspective that works for him. As he makes three arduous border crossings under tragic and bleak circumstances, he encounters a humanity that enriches his own. The border territory and the contact zone for him become more than a historical space. It is a region at once bound in time but out of time, where the universals of the human experience may be witnessed in all their dark shapes and hidden contours. There he meets people who embrace him intellectually and spiritually. They seem to be waiting for him as if he is more than just one young man traveling the country. To them he is the witness, the one who will hear and testify to the narratives that have shaped their lives, and through the act of telling they will lend purpose to his existence even as in listening he confers value and meaning on their own. The novel tells the story of Billy Parham and the lessons he learns from people and communities as he travels through the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest and North Mexico. It is roughly a decade before the events of All the Pretty Horses, and as such the narrative retrospectively informs the previous novel. The Second World War is looming, and there is a sense of strange anticipation and unspeakable dread in the atmosphere. The livestock at the ranch Billy lives on with his family have been ravaged by a pregnant she-­wolf who has risen ghostlike from the southern mountains. Billy leaves to hunt the animal and, after capturing her, decides not to return home but instead to take the wolf into Mexico and release it back into its natural environment. Billy displays an innate connection and adaptability to the natural world and a respect for its laws and impenetrable mysteries. The she-­wolf is a symbol of mysterious import, suggesting nature itself and working as a glass Billy must gaze through darkly, a clouded portal into a strange and foreboding absolute. The animal seems an embodiment of brute reality, instinct, and the will to survive, and Billy respects and in his own quiet way worships it. He refuses all offers to sell the wolf and defends it to the end of its life. Billy is detained by the Mexican authorities, and when he is released, he

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finds the wolf imprisoned by a carnival circus, where it is baited and cruelly mistreated for show. Understanding the deep significance and value of the wolf as a creature of nature, Billy risks his own safety and kills it rather than see it debased and brutalized.22 He then returns home to find his parents murdered by an Indian he met at the opening of the novel. He recovers his brother, Boyd, who is staying at a neighbor’s house, and the two boys undertake another crossing into Mexico to recover their horses. After an unfortunate set of circumstances, the two boys are separated, and Billy returns to the United States. He tries to join the army but is refused because of a heart condition, and he returns to Mexico only to find that Boyd too has been killed. In his three crossings, Billy comes of age as he encounters the stark and unforgiving purity of the natural world and the benevolence of people who stand ready to tell him their tales. They are principally the priest at Huisiachepic who witnesses the tragic story of the pensioner, the blind man who lost his eyes but gained a second sight in the revolution, and the gitano (Romani) who has been hired to recover a lost plane in the mountains by the father of the ill-­fated pilot. Their stories are disparate in the particulars but the same in their subtle shapes as they tell a tale of loss and recovery, stark reality, and survival in a naturalistic context and in an unknowable universe. The narratives are bound together in Billy’s conception from the beginning since they are the human story in minute particular, and they must be rendered in sequential form to a witness to be understood and made meaningful. Billy understands this from his encounter with an old man he meets before the three stories are told to him. The man claims that amid all the loneliness and existential isolation human beings must experience they are bound and unified in the single trajectory of the human plight. As the priest later articulates, “The corrido. The tale . . . like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one” (143). Even amid the stark materiality of the world, in The Crossing there are operative principles of order that lend value to the lives of characters who must negotiate their path through a naturalistic universe. Dianne C. Luce argues that the novel is essentially a “road narrative” that takes its form from the corrido, the tale that constitutes the perceived reality Billy must contend with. In the end it is essentially an affirmative story, since it concludes with a new beginning, “the rising of the ‘right and godmade sun’ . . . to make the world anew despite man’s enactment of a destructive false dawn, suggesting that the tale of the world continues to unfold, flowing from the hands of the weaver god in a web which enfolds and contains man’s desire and tantrums.”23 The weaver-­god from Moby-­Dick

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works from the depths of an oceanic abyss and weaves the tapestry that is creation from a loom that deafens him and makes him oblivious to the prayers of men. He hears no voice and cannot respond except by continuing the act of weaving. It is to the natural woven fabric that the human race must make an appeal, and the weave itself from the perspective of the many storytellers in The Crossing is synonymous with the one narrative of human striving that must be told, retold, and witnessed.24 Molly McBride points to the storied elements of the novel by suggesting that McCarthy reenacts the myth of the Old West but that in doing so by elevating the figure of the wolf to mythic stature, he undercuts the progressivist tendency to privilege civilization over the wilderness.25 In this context nature is a thing not to be conquered but at best to be contained and appeased, since in the end the mysterious laws that govern nature apply also to any social structures that human beings might create. Stacey Peebles argues that the Border Trilogy itself is an “artistic whole” constituting in many ways the single narrative referred to in The Crossing and that McCarthy “reveals not only a vision of the changing Southwest, but also of a bordered region of narrative itself.”26 In this conception the West of the imagination is a grand metaphor for a natural world that cannot be comprehended by the human intellect in any complete way except through the arc of a story and its telling.27 Jacqueline Scoones addresses the role of Darwinian evolution directly, pointing to the fact that McCarthy in the Border Trilogy implies that the human experience is a fragment of a broader earth history in which extinction past, present, and future is an ever-­present reality.28 But despite Scoones’s reminder, the human story is one of many in the larger context of evolutionary time, and even those nonhuman moments are part of a history that is itself linear and sequential in form and can be understood by humans only through the linguistic architecture of narrative. But the idea that human beings live within a framework of perception is bound to the notion that human consciousness is an important adaptive mechanism that has led to the success of the species. What distinguishes humans from the rest of the natural world is not size, speed, or physical strength, but an intellect that orders a seeming chaos of events into sequenced patterns of meaning that structure their behavior and responses to the exigencies of nature. As narratives have an element of order and predictability so does the physical universe, and before science allowed for an understanding of natural phenomena there was myth. The first of the three stories Billy encounters is just this kind of narrative of survival and tragic resilience. It is the tale of a priest that speaks to the experience of the pensioner, who, after a period of wandering, travels back

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to Bavispe, where he must contend in mind and body with his own grief after the loss of his young son in an earthquake that devastated the town years before. Here the weaver-­god makes his appearance and becomes the organizing entity that gives purpose and order to nature itself. Before even venturing forth with the substance of the tale, the priest articulates its meaning in a naturalist context. Again, in line with the figure from Melville’s Moby-­Dick, this divine figure is at once creator and observer as the world of his making works of its own accord: Who can dream of God? . . . Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. . . . A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping. (149)

Like Melville, the priest does not see the natural world in purely materialist terms. God is a figure that works through secondary cause and only indirectly through the indifferent cycling of the loom as it brings forth the tapestry of the world. It is a fabric that inspires tears at its creation and contains the destiny of all human beings, who are small but essential threads that together make up its intricate tapestry. Each human life including that of the pensioner’s fallen son is on the one hand seemingly inconsequential, only one strand in the elaborate weave. But the fabric of nature would be nothing without those threads. God is not so much an indifferent creator as a self-­willed subordinate to the loom of his own making. It is the matrix of blind but intricate cause and effect that forms the world and the sometimes tragic and fated lives of those it comprises. It is a realm of law, order, and principle, and even as human beings are central to its making and unmaking, they are absorbed into an elaborate system that is unconscious, like the weaver-­god himself, of their distinctive hopes and heartfelt desire for connection and intimacy. The story of the pensioner and his journey to Bavispe is one of incommensurable tragedy and a search for meaning. The man has lost his son and has wandered for years in grief and anger. He returns to the site of the event to confront its origin and hopefully find relief through the act of confrontation. He seeks an encounter with the source of his pain, and in the end his journey becomes a search for God. Like many who have dealt with this kind of moment, the man begins as a person of faith and comes to a point where he finds himself on the cusp of radical change. The potential trajectory his evolving sensibility might take is multiple. He might lose his faith, or he might emerge from the experience with an even

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stronger dependence on God. The pensioner’s experience is distinctive in that his reflections and intense spiritual inquiries lead him down a different path that blends a theistic and philosophically naturalistic world­ view. As the priest articulates in retelling the tale: “It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him” (148). The same God who weaves out the world from the loom might find it sensible and consistent with the texture of the weave to dispense with a single thread, as he did with the man’s son in the earthquake. It is a rationale unfathomable to both the man and the priest, but it finds its terrible logic in the fabric of the world in all its material necessity. As the priest expresses at the beginning of the tale: So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. (143)

Here the priest in his reading of the pensioner’s experience blends a heterodox theology with a concept of the world as a material system of cause and effect in which all things and events contribute in small but significant ways to the life and survival of the whole. By implication, celebratory events like births and weddings are a part of the joinery that makes the world, but so too is the loss of children in earthquakes, through disease, and to starvation. The universe is a thing of God’s making, and in its elaborate textures and contours lies the necessity of joy and despair as well as irrecoverable loss and pain. Nothing can be dispensed with. Because the threads of that fabric must be of different colors and shapes, and only the God who weaves can have a vision of the final creation and can see how its pattern makes meaning in the ultimate reality of the one universal tale of human striving. The second tale Billy hears again secondhand, from the wife of a blind man who has lost his eyes in a malevolent act of sadistic brutality. In the context of the Mexican Revolution, the man had been taken prisoner, and his eyes were sucked out of their sockets by a German mercenary commander in what first appeared to be a kiss. Like the story of the pensioner, the blind man’s tale takes on a special gravity and acquires meaning in the telling, and it is essential that the man who experiences the horrific event is a central character rather than the one who articulates the narrative. The story derives its significance from the primary witness, who renders the tale to another witness, and the liminal space

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between figure and teller is traversed and made inconsequential. It is as if the narrative is at once particular and universal since the core of the experience is shared in the broadest sense by all, in one form or another. Ever the artistic iconoclast, McCarthy violates a basic principle in fiction by allowing the woman to recount the story as if she were present and able to remember even the finest detail. This artistic transgression is apparently purposeful, and entirely consistent with the notion that all tales are one. No experience can rightfully be rendered secondhand since no event or tragedy or confluence of pain is distinct from the witness and those who hear the tale. The idea of listening in this context has a double connotation as the storyteller both sees the events at least in the mind’s eye and rearticulates them like a religious witness to others, making the experience real to all who hear. This is the process by which the world renders meaning to the human observer, who is likewise an indistinguishable participant in the human story. The apparent chaos of material reality is given structure and organization through the act of telling and retelling. As in other novels, McCarthy evokes blindness as a metaphor for a kind of prophetic insight. Through sightlessness, the blind revolutionary comes to a dark but valuable epiphany. The apparent disorder of his experience takes on a universal form. The man begins to see the world of appearance as a veil of falsification since beneath the realm of physical sense there is a guiding principle of order and seeming purpose as the material universe moves “with perfect cohesion in all its parts” in a space that is present and immediate but invisible to the perceiving eye. The notion of the divine is present and real but strangely beyond the personal, as there is meaning in the harmony that emerges from physical law: in “the deepest dark of loss . . . there was a ground” (292). In this way the naturalist conception of physical principle that subdues the human in an elaborate matrix of cause and effect takes on a tangible humanistic meaning. The tale itself is a material manifestation of that natural order. As people are bound to this system so they are intimately connected to the blind man’s story. Though the tale is horrific there is a sense of identification evoked as the events are reimagined by the listener and the witness. It is a structure that emerges perhaps from an otherworldly source since it is bound to grace, and given the weaver-­god’s apparent indifference, the question of divine concern and beneficence emerges in full force. In a universe where God seemingly works only by secondary cause, through the structured operation of the mechanism created, how do human beings assess their own value in the eyes of a deity whose existence is real? The question is never answered, but the tale illuminates

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the issue as the blind man takes over the narrative with his own reading of its significance: He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. (292–93)

The articulation of the man speaking is imbued with biblical rhetoric, and the question of good and evil is figured here with force and clarity. But these forces find themselves in conflicted interaction only as it relates to natural principles of order and disorder. Evil serves an inherent and necessary purpose in the dynamic movement of the machine and the tale, which are themselves the structures of cause and effect that define the physical universe. Though the language preserves the dichotomy of good and evil in a more traditional context, nature itself derives meaning by maintaining the structures that gain strength through opposition and resistance. In this sense it becomes apparent that the evil the blind man conceives is not a traditional malevolence but a kind of entropic force that drives the good toward a fearful symmetry. It is in this way that traditional ethical categories are reconceived in a naturalist context, and the forces of destruction and regeneration are commensurate and in a peculiar way cooperative. In the end the man gestures toward the transcendent, which is a reality he is attuned to in blindness. Billy asks him why his sightlessness is a blessing, and after a moment of silence he responds: because what can be touched falls into dust there can be no mistaking these things for the real. At best they are only tracings of where the real has been. Perhaps they are not even that. Perhaps they are no more than obstacles to be negotiated in the ultimate sightlessness of the world. (294)

There is a strangely Platonic flavor in the blind man’s final reflection, one that is entirely consistent with the naturalist worldview he has thus far suggested. The physical objects that may be subjugated to the senses are temporal and mediate and fall to dust. But the abstract principles that bring them into being are the only things that remain permanent. They are the natural laws that bind all in a system, and they can only be

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expressed in the concrete but purely immaterial language of the universe: mathematics. These in fact may be the words of God in their purest form, and the issue of the divine remains a resonating question in a firmly naturalistic realm. In the end the tale of the blind revolutionary is human and highly identifiable in the context of experiences that all may at least imagine. These experiences derive their significance in part from the sufferer’s own thoughts, but Billy comprehends them first as the very tangible details of a tale of universal suffering and pain. The abstract realities of natural law find expression in a human story that is tragic and ultimately redemptive. It remains for Billy to ponder whether the redemption is worth the price paid. The last story emerges into the larger narrative of The Crossing when Billy encounters a gitano who has been commissioned to recover a downed plane in the mountains by the father of the pilot killed in the crash. Billy asks the gitano’s purpose in rearticulating the events in narrative form, and the man responds with three stories that are later denied by an American traveling with them. The seeming purpose is not dishonesty but a desire to render a truth that may not be entirely captured by actual events that present themselves in a disparate form. In essence the gitano makes an argument for truth in fiction by transforming events in such a way that a deeper truth may be revealed that a genuine history might misrepresent. The father wants the plane recovered so he might retain it as an artifact, which works to stabilize his response to the tragic event. It is not that the plane serves as a simple object. It is not a desperate attempt to recover what may be left of his son. He seeks the artifact so it will no longer have the power to “commandeer his dreams” (406). There is a means of recovery for the father insofar as his grief binds him to the events and limits his capacity to continue living in the same harsh world that has taken his beloved son away. For human consciousness, the essential adaptive mechanism emerges in practice as the oldest and most resilient form of human response to the world: ritual. The recovery of the plane provides the father with a physical thing that renders the events tangible such that they are purged from memory and externalized in sense. This sacramental act that makes objective the contours of experience in a new story demonstrates the distinctive nature of the human animal, which is unique in its capacity for intellect and imagination since without this adaptive capacity the father may himself be destroyed by the sad intensity of his own memory and consciousness. The gitano recovers two planes and cannot say which is the one sought, and it seems not to matter since both serve as evidence of the tragic event and a reminder of what has been lost. Perhaps more importantly they become the artifacts

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that lead to the sad but evocative story of the young man, the father, and the gitano himself. In this final narrative it becomes clear that the one tale and the essential story of human striving and woe serves as a means for human beings to reconcile themselves to the experience of an indifferent nature they cannot understand or control. Articulated here is a naturalism bound to the firm realities of a world that is driven by laws unconcerned with the suffering of the individual. But it is also a natural realm in which the human species emerged from an evolutionary context with the adaptive means to cope emotionally and spiritually with tragedy through the ritual enactment of memory. There is a leveling of the human and the animal insofar as both must respond to the environment, but the specific means necessary for survival are distinctive to the species. For humans, what remains essential is ritual, narrative, and story. It is in this final tale that McCarthy integrates naturalism’s divided stream as he blends the notions of nature’s physical laws and material contingencies with ideas of fate and the divine. For the gitano the two concepts of reality are by no means incommensurate and are a part of the same universe since they work in tandem. In a part of his monologue, he expresses this integration: He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one’s own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless. (410)

Fate seems to be conceived here in a traditional sense, with all the metaphysical implications the concept might have in conventional discourse. But even as it is evoked in this way the gitano reconceives it in naturalist terms as Billy listens to the tale. It may be true that humans desire things and outcomes that contravene the facts of their own lives as they are circumscribed by natural law. But those principles themselves reinscribe the truth that nature imposes and remind people that they are themselves part of the organic machinery of a physical space. It may be right that the “will in the world” that is fate itself may yield results that confound the human beings who live as a part of that world. But the “truth” the gitano speaks of seems in this context to be natural law itself, “necessity” as the Greeks came to understand it, which resolves itself in a mystery beyond human understanding. To engage in acts of ritual is to acknowledge the broad parameters of those laws and to appease the apparently immaterial or at least incomprehensible forces that give them life and power. It

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is a naturalism with a comprehensive sweep of understanding and operation, since men and women are subject to material laws that define their actions in accordance with empirical and philosophical truth. But when people comprehend these relationships, they are in no way denying the mysteries that provide unity and purpose to the physical world and make it sublime. On the ground floor of human experience, human beings are merely subject to a natural world that both includes and seems unconcerned with them. But the traditional dichotomy of the material and transcendent is eradicated, and by implication at least the terms become anachronistic. In a universe of quarks and multiverses as well as curved space and relative time, how can the “metaphysical” be conceived in conventional terms? All may be “material” in the final analysis, including fate, necessity, and God, but not all is comprehensible by the limited frame of understanding permitted by the human intellect. In The Crossing these metaphysical and philosophical concerns are never distinct from the intimately human. In the end the novel tells the story of Billy Parham, his three border crossings, and the murder of his parents and his younger brother, Boyd. In the three journeys three stories merge into one singular tale of human striving, connection, and tragedy. Early in the novel, when Billy travels into Mexico to return the she-­wolf to its place of origin only to find an avarice and brutality that is beyond explanation, he is forced to kill the wolf to save her from degradation. When he returns home to find his parents dead and his brother waiting, the two young men cross again in an encounter with the natural world that inspires their grit and commitment to the task of living. After Billy separates with his brother in Mexico, and he returns home and tries to join the army as World War  II looms large in his imagination, he finds that he has a heart condition that prevents him from serving. He returns a third time to Mexico only to find that his brother too has been killed, and in an act of ritual and reverence that parallels the father and the recovery of the downed plane, he exhumes Boyd’s remains to return them home. It is a story rich in naturalist implications, and like many novels in this vein The Crossing is a tale of brotherhood and human commitment. Each of the three main tales that Billy hears speaks of human love and devotion: between the father and the young son he has lost in the earthquake, the man and the woman who tells his story, and the second father who has lost his son in the plane crash. The novel presents the human plight in a naturalist context as one of survival and adaptation to a fathomless universe, but human beings stand out in their capacity to hope, fear, and strive amid the hardship that is inevitable in the experience of the world. In the closing moment in The Crossing, Billy is yet again alone

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and wandering. He sees a stray dog, and in a moment of anger and desperation he chases it away. In reflecting on this one rash moment Billy sits down and cries. Seemingly wondering at his act in the face of all he did to save the she-­wolf he tries to call back the animal, but both seem bound to life alone. Billy has a future full of associations and friendships, but he will remain an emblem of the human condition in existential and spiritual isolation. No one can enter his consciousness except in the shared experience of the witness, as the one tale of brotherhood and suffering is experienced by all and individually. The natural world is a thing indomitable, but within and a part of it remains the human species, the collective body of sympathy and brotherhood that abides and remains perpetually to speak, to witness, and, amid all adversities and constraints, to survive and live into an uncertain but embodied future.

Cities of the Plain (1998) The Border Trilogy is set during a time of unprecedented social and cultural transformation in America. It is a devastating and consequential history that confirms many of the insights of the literary naturalist. All the Pretty Horses takes place in the aftermath of World War  II, and The Crossing precedes it as the war is impending. This conflagration marked a significant change as the modern moment escalated and emerged from the dark days of the Great Depression into what many historians characterize as the contemporary period. The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated a new social democracy and altered the relationship of the individual and government. As a world power the United States continued its ascendency after acting as a principal agent in bringing the war to a close and halting the spread of fascism throughout Europe. Advancing scientific inquiry and technology was the key, as the machine age expanded and become the computer age. For the rancher and ranch workers in Cities of the Plain, young men such as John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, historical progress continued in a dynamic and personally devastating trajectory through the Southwest and the rest of the nation, as rural regions gave way to urban modes of living and cities expanded to suburbs and the calm and placid neighborhoods of the 1950s. But the backdrop for all these seemingly positive changes was the Cold War. World War II ended on a chilling note, as the Japanese Empire was brought to its knees by the atom bomb. The USSR and later China soon achieved nuclear capability, and the age of the atomic test was born in the very region where portions of the Border Trilogy take place. Certainly, it was a period of optimism and prosperity, as people in many social classes were able to make a living, own homes, and nurture a hope for the future. But those

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very aspirations were plagued by the deepest and most persistent anxieties. The same middle-­class homeowners who worked and consumed the plethora of new products available in the time often built bomb shelters under pristine lawns, and children at school regularly drilled for the haunting and persistent possibility of nuclear attack. The idea of world annihilation had entered the conceptual vocabulary as individual ambition stood in tension with the daily reminder of universal and personal vulnerability. The Cold War became a penultimate culmination of a modernity that continued to transform the culture, in terms of American values, social institutions, and technological advancements, and it serves as a metaphor for the changing circumstances faced by the characters in Cities of the Plain. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are strong and resilient, but they are heroes of an older order, and in naturalist terms they are men adapted to an ecosystem that is sadly disappearing before their eyes.29 Both young men are acutely aware of these changes but are stubborn and at a loss as to how to face a new world. Cities of the Plain is in this sense a tale of adaptation and its guarded success and failure. The title “Cities of the Plain” is drawn from chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis, when Abraham, after he has established a covenant on behalf of Israel, attempts to stay God’s hand against the hopelessly depraved cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. But in the end God decides against the people on the plain in an act that to them must have seemed apocalyptic. McCarthy’s novel is set in another place but in many ways an equally iniquitous one. Its setting is the border cities of El Paso, Texas; Alamogordo, New Mexico; and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. All three seem destined to depravity, different though physically linked and separated only by nationality and an amorphous border. El Paso and Alamogordo are American towns in an intermediary state. Ranch life is yielding in this case to the US government, which is taking the land for military purposes, specifically nuclear testing. Ciudad Juárez is plagued by poverty and all that attends it: crime, prostitution, and the drug trade. The apocalyptic echoes of Genesis are clear as these border cities reside in a liminal space and brace for an uncertain future in a world that seems to stand against them. They constitute a brutal and unforgiving region where the impulse to survive knows no bounds. It is autumn 1952, and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham have become friends. Though they are separated in age by eight years, they are close to each other, and both remain committed to a premodern life on ranch lands that echoes the daily rhythms of the nineteenth century. They work together on Mac McGovern’s Cross Fours Ranch in Alamogordo and reside in community with a congenial and loyal group of fellow workers. They serve Mac well, and he responds

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not so much as range boss but as father figure and mentor. From the beginning McCarthy establishes all the workers as the kind of brotherhood frequently found in naturalist novels, as they stand in tentative commonality against the brute realities of the natural world. Billy is both a friend and a protector to John Grady, and the novel presents them as dual protagonists. The plot initially revolves around their casual forays into the Juárez bars and brothels, and in true and expected romantic fashion John Grady falls in love with a beautiful but sickly prostitute, Magdalena. In this context the tensions between two rival nations become localized, as both young men must contend with Eduardo, the menacing pimp who effectively owns her. The story culminates in a confrontation that has historical, transhistorical, and naturalist implications. They must fight for Magdalena against this backdrop of universal and ubiquitous conflict, between two men and two countries that struggle for dominance and resources in the modern world. Their struggle is contextualized by a dialogue between all three men, a conversation that centers on the nature of competition and the role of violence in a process determined by unknown but nevertheless material forces. Years later Billy must ponder the naturalist and other philosophical implications of a hard experience. Even though Cites of the Plain is the apogee of a three-­volume story with a through line and commonality in theme and character, the world is significantly altered, especially since the prewar era of The Crossing. The first two novels preserve patterns of heroism, albeit only as an echo of traditional configurations, as John Grady and Billy stoically confront a naturalist environment that presents them with all the steady intensity we expect from a post-­Darwinian understanding of the natural world. In Cities of the Plain that world is transformed by a fog of potential annihilation as human forces foreign to the characters’ lives threaten to deal a devastating blow to nature itself. Edwin T. Arnold considers this third novel in the trilogy a worthy culmination of an extended story of modern heroism in a new context. He writes: “This is a diminished world McCarthy creates in Cities of the Plain, a post-­war West suffering through its final mockeries and subtractions, a world hard pressed for heroics and depending instead on simple decency. Neither John Grady nor Billy has been spared by these diminishments.”30 Arnold brings to mind the storm-­tossed setting of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897), in which a small group of characters derive strength only from the resilient bond of brotherhood as they stand against what appears to be an inevitable destruction and death at the hands of nature. The powerful connection between the two friends in Cities of the Plain, which is strengthened by their connection to a larger community, is necessary

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at least for a time as they adapt to a world defined by a violence both immediate and global. John Wegner argues that the essential context of the trilogy is war itself, beginning as the Second World War looms and ending as the United States is beginning its involvement in the Korean conflict.31 In the Border Trilogy, McCarthy does not take war in isolation but places the inevitability of struggle in the broader context of nature and natural law, as violence emerges from a set of material processes that require the characters to respond and react rather than act as agents of significant change.32 Yet amid all these rigidly naturalist conditions, there are otherworldly implications that color that naturalism by enriching and complicating it. Kim McMurtry argues that Cities of the Plain is preoccupied with a distinctly human destiny that may in fact be bound to Christian notions of salvation.33 In this sense the novel preserves a naturalistic worldview but heightens it with echoes of an eschatology. Even the natural world in all its indomitability is diminished by the threat of annihilation from within, as human beings, themselves the product of nature, have managed to unlock and release the violent force of atomic energy that may tragically destroy the world and with it the organic life that has risen to consciousness over eons of geological time. Like Suttree (1979), Cities of the Plain is in many ways an urban novel. The textures of natural landscape loom large in the Southwest region of the novel, and the life the young men live on the ranch near Alamogordo is a thing they treasure and hope against all probability to sustain. But the social environments that condition their lives are the border cities of Texas, New Mexico, and Old Mexico, and much of the story takes place in Ciudad Juárez. Like many novels in the naturalist tradition, the modern city is the place where the laws of nature are most prescient, as characters struggle to compete, adapt, and often violently contend for dominance. But McCarthy is careful to situate John Grady and Billy within a broader earth history. The novel begins in the dense context of the city, amid bars and brothels where working men and women make their way. But the setting alternates between the urban and the natural, as ancient landscapes inform the sensibility of the young men who live and survive in both realms. Early in the novel, John Grady is traveling through the desert, and he stops to rest his body even as his thoughts continue their contemplative struggle: He ate his lunch at noon in an outcropping of lava rock with a view across the floodplain to the north and to the west. There were ancient pictographs among the rocks, engravings of animals and moons and men and lost hieroglyphics whose meaning no man would ever

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know. The rocks were warm in the sun and he sat sheltered from the wind and watched the silent empty land. (49)

Here the distinction between the natural and the human is erased and made one. The earth has rendered itself anew through volcanic activity, which over time has cooled into hard formations of lava. On them human beings have left their mark in a complex and iconographic language that is telling in its own time but lost to present understanding. There is a sense that John Grady is drawn to them as he is to everything material, especially in the stark desert spaces he has come to call his home. This scene and others paired with images of the city alternate in the story with such frequency that both must be taken together as two faces of a world more broadly and thoughtfully conceptualized. The natural and the human have existed since time immemorial in a strange tension and harmony, and both are subject to physical forces that defy comprehension and that perhaps revealed themselves in oblique ways to the ancients, who were less distracted by the influences of civilization and modernity. Implicit in John Grady’s experience and subdued contemplations is the recognition that natural law subsumes all in the sweeping trajectory of time, including desert, ranch, town, and city. It is a natural law that takes on dark undertones both in remote desert spaces and in dense communities. After John Grady has met and fallen in love with Magdalena, who is essentially the property of the devilish and preternaturally intellectual Eduardo, he intuits that world in a dream. As he enters the tavern in Ciudad Juárez the room seems an externalization of the depraved world Eduardo controls: When the lights dimmed the master of ceremonies strode onto the boards and doffed his hat and bowed and smiled and held up his whitegloved hands. In the wings the alcahuete stood smoking and behind him milled a great confusion of obscene carnival folk, painted whores with their breasts exposed, a fat woman in black leather with a whip, a pair of youths in ecclesiastical robes. A priest, a procuress, a goat with gilded horns and hooves who wore a ruff of purple crepe. Pale young debauchees with rouged cheeks and blackened eyes who carried candles. (103–4)

McCarthy employs the carnivalesque in a more modern context in this passage, not as it was used in the medieval period, as a purgative expression of depravity that ends in purification and restoration. Here it involves a ritual interpretation of external reality, one that unmasks the essential darkness of the world as it exists in perpetuity. Naturalism here

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is constituted in such a way that it transcends the brute reality of indifference and reveals itself, not unlike the place where Judge Holden presides, as a realm of positive malevolence. Even in the small space of a tavern the universe appears as a metonym for an evocative mystery in which large realms must contend and seek dominance. But it is still a world where living beings struggle to survive and find a tentative place, and John Grady is only partially adapted to this world. In All the Pretty Horses he has proven his strength and willingness to engage his natural environment through the violence it apparently demands, particularly when he kills a young man in the Saltillo prison and when he recovers the horses from the corrupt Mexican captain. But even in this acquiescence to the laws that bind he remains resolute in a principled romanticism and a dedication to an ideal that stands against the brute contingencies he has encountered. The master of ceremonies is presumably Eduardo, and his preeminence in the scene transcends the material, particularly as rendered in the dream state that suggests the world as John Grady conceives and has experienced it. The pimp becomes an iconic representation in carnivalesque form of a naturalism bound to physical laws that are brutal, lacking in ethics or sympathy, and linked to an active and evil intent. As with many figures conceived out of a naturalist worldview, his existence connotes a brutality beyond comprehension, even as it works in a physical space in accordance with the hard law it seems to embody. But in this extreme context a rigid determinism governs each human destiny. In a tale reminiscent of The Crossing, John Grady listens to a blind man speak of the troubled life of the padrino. The man’s experience speaks to his subjugation to material forces beyond his control: Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. (195)

Through the words of another blind seer, McCarthy explores a form of determinism bound to an intricate web of material cause and effect. Choice remains a thing that human beings can perceive and act on, but that same agency is illusory in its tangible consequences. There is a limited range of possibilities, and individuals must choose among the scant

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choices the world offers in a rigidly materialist context. In the realm in which humans must live they are circumscribed by a complex physical space in which material law sets in motion a dynamic and apparently closed system of action and consequence. Individual lives themselves are defined by constraint, and history itself can respond only in limited ways to the same principle. In John Grady’s final confrontation with Eduardo, even during a knife fight, the pimp articulates the same harsh reality as he challenges John Grady’s idealism and associates it with a naivete linked to the United States as a nation and a culture: That it contain nothing save what stands before one. But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world—he passed the blade back and forth like a shuttle through a loom—your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire. (253)

Eduardo, though actively malevolent, speaks here with a chilling and analytical indifference. He sees himself as nature’s agent, not its principal, and his native Mexico is a country torn and made wise through the ravages of violence and revolution. Any romanticism is shorn of all reference, and what remains is a nation attuned to the material and natural conditions that permit a pimp to subjugate and abuse a young prostitute and a young American to stand powerless in the face of chance and resolute destiny. It is true that only the strong survive, but strength here is defined not only in physical terms but as a human will that gains sustenance through experience and a hard-­won wisdom. The acknowledgment is that the human experience is defined by struggle, conflict, and eventual death. Eduardo’s hard determinism finds an alternative but by no means contradictory expression in Billy Parham’s encounter decades later with the traveler at the novel’s conclusion. Billy is an old man and a wanderer, and as he travels along the road, he sees a figure beneath an underpass. Billy joins him, pondering that the man might be the angel of death, and begins a conversation that evolves into a monologue in which the traveler recalls a dream. It is a vision full of portent and metaphysical implication, as in the dream the man traverses time and explores questions relating to the divine, to destiny or fate, and to the nature of physical and psychological experience. The dream places in the foreground a deterministic world that nevertheless seems divinely embodied, where human beings must contend with forces not only immediate but beyond time and history:

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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 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. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all. (285)

Human agency is reduced to nothing, and individual lives have meaning only insofar as they constitute one material feature in the shape of the universe itself, despite the fact that individuals see their moment in time as important beyond expression. The hard determinism that governs all things physical and immaterial is a principle that was “forced in the void at the onset,” and there are no alternative histories that may be initiated by an individual choice. The world and its indifferent processes constitute the only meaningful reality. But still there is God, and though there is no mention of the weaver-­god of Melville’s Moby-­Dick, the same figure that McCarthy employs in The Crossing, the divine here is configured in the same terms, as an entity that sets the world in motion and is existentially powerless to alter the material contingencies it has initiated. What remains is the natural earth of deterministic physical law, in which all things and beings have significance only in terms of their contribution to the whole and to a historical process that has no alterative trajectory. To ponder the possibility of other stories is pointless because the physical system that was constituted at the beginning is a complex, fixed, and determined closed system, one that contains human life and death, as well as the violent and indifferent processes that dictate their significance. But the traveler’s dream has many facets, and the story of the mysterious everyman figure within that vision suggests many themes and aspects of experience. Even amid the fated path that human beings must travel there is something genuinely distinctive about their existence, and in the midst of a world that seems unconcerned they emerge as essential and at a strange and basic level heroic in their resilience, distinctive awareness, consciousness, and capacity for human commitment: “Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us.” This truth compels certain questions. “He passed here long ago. . . . Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?” (288–89). Consciousness is apparently

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distinctive because even in moments of calm and repose the fear of death remains. That complex awareness is the essential tragedy and even the beauty that makes the experience unique, since human beings are the only creatures that must contend with this apprehension and deal with it as a daily fact of their evolving lives. Certainly, other creatures in nature experience fear and the impulse to fly in the face of danger. But the pure and unvarnished awareness of death and the possibility of annihilation is the exclusive property of the human species. The unavoidable need to face this reality plagues our dreams, even as we ponder the possibility of death as a dreamless sleep. It leads us to ever more troubled relationships with our fellows as we acknowledge in hidden ways that we must leave them, and out of our trepidation we create stories that mute the fear and myths that constitute our religious traditions. It is these things real or unreal that give us some measure of comfort. But in the end, and most essentially, we find a tentative repose in the ritual act of remembering, through ceremonies that make a celebration even of death itself. Through those moments we express the emotion that gives us identity: that is love and the brotherhood and community it inspires. As the traveler continues to tell the story of the man in his dream, he reaches for the meaning embedded in their mutual journey: What he saw was the strangeness of the world and how little was known and how poorly one could prepare for aught that was to come. 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. (282)

Near the end of his life, Billy revisits the same lesson that was seared into his experience in The Crossing. Every man’s path is the same and finds a steady and perpetual unity in an infinite realm of time and space. Human living is fraught with struggle and the need to respond to the power and influence of the natural world. But that experience is imbued with a conscious awareness and an empathy, as the universal story reveals itself to anyone who is willing to listen, anyone open to hear a tale that can take them away. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. (283–84)

6 Maps and Mazes Choice, Vision, and Synthesis in the Later Works You are dealing with forces, young man . . . not with men. Frank Norris, The Octopus

M

cCarthy was awarded the MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1981, and at a dinner honoring the recipients he met the Nobel Prize– winning physicist and cofounder of the Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-­ Mann. In part due to their relationship McCarthy became a fellow and eventually a trustee.1 As a general rule he was disinclined to spend much time with artists and writers, and true to his naturalist sensibilities he preferred the company of scientists.2 This was an attitude consistent with his hard-­won commitment to remain largely out of the public eye. But with the publication of the Border Trilogy, particularly All the Pretty Horses (1992), he had to contend with a degree of celebrity, and in the early 1990s he granted an interview to Richard B. Woodward of the New York Times Magazine. In that interview, he articulated the basic precepts of an unvarnished naturalism. He said, “There is no such thing as life without bloodshed. .  .  . I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”3 In subsequent years McCarthy would consent to other interviews. In 2006 Oprah Winfrey selected The Road (2006) for her celebrated book club, and he agreed to appear on her daily television broadcast. But aside from these brief conversations McCarthy remained steadfastly private, preferring to continue his various inquiries into the natural world with a focus on the complexity science that was the special interest of intellectuals at the Santa Fe Institute. This affiliation and fascination certainly provide focus to the naturalist elements in his later works. The notion

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of predictability and consequence in closed physical systems served as another means to explore the role of human agency and fate in the natural world. Novels such as No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road inquire into themes and make use of metaphors that can also be found in Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses. Principal among these is again the coin and the coin toss, which in Blood Meridian suggests the naturalistically inflected Gnostic demiurge who stands over the mysterious cold forger as he casts the coin in metal and stamps it with images that by implication dictate the fate of millions. In All the Pretty Horses, the dueña Alfonsa explores determinism in a more materialistic context through the same analogy of the coin toss, which makes apparent the role of chance in dictating a future that seems immune to a conscious human agency. McCarthy ponders the same concerns expressed by Herman Melville in “The Mat-­Maker” chapter in Moby-­Dick (1851), which develops the metaphor of the loom to suggest the intricate relationship between free will, fate or necessity, and chance. Melville strikes a balance between the three, suggesting that the weaving of the mat depends on an interaction of choice, fortune, and natural law. In naturalist fashion, McCarthy intervenes in the direction of nature and the rules that govern, as the coin toss dictates all things in a universe that limits not only human volition but the ability to apprehend the consequences of choice. Agency for human beings seems blind to outcomes and as such is not genuine agency if considered carefully. But in No Country for Old Men and The Road, this lack of volition does little to reduce the contours of humanity displayed in characters, a humanity that resonates in contemplation, reflection, and human commitment. In a distinctly contemporary context, many of McCarthy’s naturalist themes display an existential philosophy that was emerging during the time of Darwin and parallel the works of American literary naturalists. But these ideas culminated during and after World War II in the existentialist and absurdist thinking of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In his late career, McCarthy wrote two works for the stage and screen, The Sunset Limited (2006) and The Counselor (2013). The first is a “A Novel in Dramatic Form” that emerges in many ways as a companion piece to The Road and involves naturalist themes of indifference and endemic violence with an even more strident and explicit philosophical engagement. It was staged initially at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago from May 18 through June 25, 2006, and was directed by Sheldon Patinkin. It was later performed in other venues including the Triad Stage, a regional theater in Greensboro, North Carolina, during its 2010–11 season. It was finally adapted for the screen in 2011 by Tommy Lee Jones in

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an HBO production that featured Jones himself and Samuel L. Jackson. The play involves a suicidal college professor who is rescued by an African American street preacher after he attempts to throw himself in front of a subway train. The characters are given simple but evocative names: White and Black. The professor is profoundly depressed not only by his individual circumstances but by his worldview. To him, life is nothing more than the bereft experience of a forced labor camp in which suffering people are pressed into drudgery only to be summarily executed in the end. The drama involves little or no action except, in true Aristotelean fashion, the implied and very real activity that takes place in thought, expression, and verbal interchange. At issue are the questions McCarthy has been dealing with from the beginning: Is there purpose to living given the reality of suffering in a naturalistic universe? Does God exist, and is God concerned with the fate of creation? Does human brotherhood offer any genuine compensation for the reality of pain and eventual death? The perspective the professor has come to echoes Camus’s notion of the absurd as expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). But unlike Camus, White cannot move beyond his own painful recognition of meaninglessness to a place of acceptance. He is caught by the death drive and sees no exit from the sense of emptiness and abysmal distress that emerges from a recognition that the world is governed by natural laws that are indifferent to the desires and hopes of individual human beings. Black is a former convict who has come to a belief in God through a painful process born of a life hard lived. He attempts to convince White that there is a purpose to be found in a divine reality that can be seen in friendship and connection. Both interlocutors make their case, and neither carries the day, though White’s final expression has tremendous emotional power as he conveys ideas that have been previously and more conventionally articulated by philosophers and writers worldwide. White leaves, presumably to commit the final act, and Black remains guardedly faithful, leaving the audience to ponder the intensity and rationale of both arguments. The structure and content of the play reflects McCarthy’s admiration for Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in many novels, principally The Brothers Kara­ mazov (1879–80), places two opposing points of view in fair and dialectical interchange. In the end the relationship of naturalism and absurdism becomes apparent in the voice of White since he sees no acceptable solution to his dilemma but suicide and oblivion. Black remains, but only as a questionable counterpoint to an otherwise abysmal condition. The Counselor is a screenplay that was brought to fruition by director Ridley Scott and deals with the same social world as No Country for Old Men. A young lawyer falls victim to his own greed and becomes involved

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in a drug deal that ends tragically both for him and for his young wife. There is a sense of inevitability and tragic absurdity to the story as the characters are lost in a deterministic spin of cause and effect. This reality is expressed with simple eloquence to the counselor by a diamond dealer early in the narrative as he uses a cut stone and its setting as a metaphor. The counselor begins the exchange: COUNSELOR: The crown and pavilion don’t fit. The girdle comes out crooked. DEALER: (Raising his eyebrows) Yes. The crown and the pavilion may be well cut each in itself and yet stand alien to one another. Once the first facet is cut there can be no going back. What was meant to be a union remains forever untrue and we see a troubling truth in that the forms of our undertakings are complete at their beginnings. For good or for ill. COUNSELOR: (Looking up) But there is no perfect diamond. DEALER: En este mundo nada es perfecto. As my father would say. (17)

The world is absent the perfection the counselor seeks in his ill-­conceived and tragic pursuit of an ideal. His ambitions suggest a bereft existence that is absurd, misaligned, and distinct from any system of values that transcends the physical. The earth and the human endeavors that animate it are fully determined from the outset, and even the pursuit of beauty must realize itself in discord and a kind of baroque excess that finds ultimate expression in violence. The image of the diamond stands in for a beauty corrupted by the material. The setting McCarthy renders is one of avarice, brutality, and an active malevolence that seems at times to transcend contingency. In both The Sunset Limited and The Counselor, McCarthy forces a confrontation with the natural world broadly conceived, which is a place where violence, desperation, and indecency hold the field against a faith and hope that stubbornly refuse to concede the victory. McCarthy evokes the idea of the absurd as expressed by Camus and others, but unlike Camus he is less direct in offering a solution. For Camus, the answer is an acceptance and recognition of a bleak existential condition. But for McCarthy, through Black, there is the brotherhood of the commuters on the train. In a genuine Kierkegaardian fashion, Black links this human connection to the divine as emotional bonds draw sustenance from a realm immaterial. McCarthy seems less certain but retains a faith in the tangible possibility of community and benevolence whether materially constituted or transcendent.

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No Country for Old Men (2005) As a writer who acknowledges the role of influence and creatively reenvisions the concerns of the authors he most admires, McCarthy draws from perhaps the most important subgenre of the novel in the American tradition—the romance.4 In the context of literary naturalism, Frank Norris points to the expansive reach of this genre in “A Plea for Romantic Fiction.” For Norris, the basic formal contours of the romance may be used to explore common rather than exaggerated or exotic subjects and themes.5 A strict realism is unsuited to examine the more intricate and interior textures of the natural world. The romance is a strand that includes such canonical figures as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner, as well as lesser known authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, William Gilmore Simms, and Lydia Maria Child.6 In its early years American culture was less developed, and American cities and even rural locales did not lend themselves to the novel of social texture so prevalent in the British tradition. The dense forests and frontiers together with the emerging stories of exploration inland encouraged early American writers to adapt the epic romances of Sir Walter Scott, specifically his Waverley Novels, as a new narrative of nation building came to dominate the genre in the United States.7 Writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms were unabashed in their prefaces as they set out to reconstitute the classical Greek and Roman epics in lengthy prose form. The new nation was appropriate ground for romance novels that set about the task of mythogenesis, and the new American story took its energy and source material from the ideology that drove the nation into the wilderness and justified a productive and often rapacious movement west. It is out of this tradition that the Western genre grew, and in its earliest stages an expansionist ethos was an obvious thematic element. Violence and the harsh laws of nature were the shaping forces that defined the new mythic hero and the narratives he embodied. Brute impulse was foregrounded as necessary and essentially positive as an emerging egalitarian democracy served as ideological fuel for a national expansion that took justification from ideas that coalesced in John O’Sullivan’s notion of manifest destiny. The Western has remained a resilient and persistent form of popular culture, in America and in many ways worldwide, and this is in large part due to the thematic and political flexibility of the genre. As a revisionist tradition emerged during and in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Western served as an artistic means to explore the darker elements of American expansionism.8 This revision is reflected in the films of Sam

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Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood, and in the novels of Larry McMurtry, whose work has been successfully adapted numerous times into films for both television and cinema. It is in this alternative and revisionist Western that McCarthy participates, which becomes clear in Blood Meridian and the novels of the Border Trilogy, all of which demonstrate clear and unvarnished naturalist leanings. But there is another aspect of the romance tradition in America that is of perhaps an even greater influence on McCarthy’s work and worldview. That is the philosophically oriented works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. As the novel came to fruition as a viable literary form there were two subsequent bifurcations: the aforementioned social novel, which contrasted with the romance, and the dual strands of the romance, which included the epic and the philosophical broadly construed.9 It was writers of the American Renaissance that initiated and developed the latter, in such short stories and novels as Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and perhaps most notably Melville’s Moby-­Dick (1851). This subgenre of the romance form engaged philosophical and theological questions directly, often exploring in narrative the intellectual systems of figures such as Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, as well as later romantic thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schlegel and their more popular avatars in Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Moby-­Dick uses the grand symbol of the white whale as the prime mover in a complex metaphorical system to contend dialectically with questions of God’s existence and nature, the role of necessity, chance, and free will, and the proper purpose of the intellectual life in a world full of doubt and existential uncertainty. It is this tradition McCarthy employs, envisions, and reenvisions in a naturalist context, very much in accordance with Frank Norris’s plea, and he is ever cognizant of the intricate relationship of form and idea. The gothic romance through its very architecture foregrounds themes of mystery, imponderability, and incertitude on issues ranging from the metaphysical and epistemological to the psychological and personal. McCarthy’s early works make clear use of this genre, and echoes of the gothic remain even in his later work. But in No Country for Old Men, he artfully blends elements of the detective novel and all its gothic inflections with a revisionist Western executed in a naturalist vein. The novel was written with the explicit intention that it would be adapted into film, and McCarthy seems aware not only of the various conventions of the novel that might be employed but also of film noir and the cinematic Western. The narrative establishes a set of expectations. As in the crime story, darkness and corruption are pervasive

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in the world presented, but the detective is up to the task of confronting the murderous perpetrator and solving the crime. In accordance with the conventional Western, the hero must confront a formidable adversary and defeat him. In No Country for Old Men, there is a sheriff (both a Western hero and a crime fighter), a mysterious crime to solve, and a malicious antagonist. All the standard genre elements in plot and character are present. But the conclusion arrives in a fashion consistent with the dark romance in the naturalist tradition, since what is at issue is not a traditional victory but a set of philosophical and quasi-­religious questions about the place of violence in the world and the role one man might play in mitigating its ubiquitous and transhistorical presence. Ultimately it is a narrative that finds only tentative resolution in the quiet consciousness of one man, who derives meaning only from a guarded reflection and the dark and portentous act of dreaming. The novel was adapted into film in 2007. It was coproduced by Miramax Films and Paramount Pictures and was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, who took great care in crafting the language and content of the novel. In an article written by Kenneth Turan, Ethan Coen is quoted as saying, “One of us types while the other holds the spine of the book open flat.”10 It was the first adaptation of a novel that the Coen brothers had directed, and they admired the source material such that they deviated only when the limitations of genre made it necessary. There are certainly moments when their signature humor is present, and the film benefits greatly by the mark of a distinctive style, but the movie maintains the tone of the source material, and the themes McCarthy engages tally with concerns the Coen brothers had displayed in films such as Blood Simple (1984), Miller’s Crossing (1990), and Fargo (1996), specifically the role of violence in a world corrupted by human depravity, malevolence, and greed. Enhanced by the extraordinary performances of Tommy Lee Jones (Ed Tom Bell), Javier Bardem (Anton Chigurh), and Josh Brolin (Llewelyn Moss), the film opened to rave reviews from critics. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2007, and went on to be nominated for 109 awards, winning 76 of these, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director(s), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Bardem). Both the novel and the film called attention to the body of McCarthy’s work, which had only gained broad reception with the Border Trilogy. The film displays the same naturalist elements that are present in all of McCarthy’s novels, and the directors seem conscious of McCarthy’s participation in that tradition. The dialogue is minimal throughout the film and is drawn mostly from the novel. There is a significant focus on landscape, and many shots

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alternate synthetically between close-­up, medium shot, and long shot, with each calling attention to different aspects of the natural world and emphasizing the harsh beauty of the inhospitable West Texas landscape. One establishing shot combines the sky, the prairie, and a broken fence, and the hard contrast of the natural and the man made is accompanied by a monologue taken directly from the novel, when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell contemplates the mystery of the violence perpetrated by a young murderer he sent to execution.11 Bell’s monologue is pensive, reflective, and questioning, as he ponders the reality of violence and its extremity in a modern context. Even as Bell inaccurately associates that violence primarily with the present, the camera and the scenes willfully contradict this perception, as images of an unforgiving and expansive natural world are blended with human contemplation to emphasize the timeless reality of bloodletting and brute force as a shaping framework of the West and the material world more expansively considered. After the popular success of the Border Trilogy, particularly All the Pretty Horses, critical attention to McCarthy’s work advanced significantly with No Country for Old Men. While some journalistic critics and fiction writers drew attention to McCarthy’s use of genre conventions, most scholars observed the way in which he subverts and reinvents them. Considering the naturalist implications of setting, Ron McFarland points to the importance of place in McCarthy’s novels, suggesting that topography contributes significantly to the novel’s concerns, since McCarthy’s use of imagery is “couched in terse sentences that underscore the sparseness of the landscape.”12 This mapping of visual detail in geographic context foregrounds the land in a dramatic way, suggesting its influence on character identity and perception. Benjamin Mangrum explores “the problem of justice” in No Country for Old Men in terms of a proto-­naturalist and Nietzschean concept of situational ethics that comports well with Darwinian notions of amoral nature.13 Exploring No Country for Old Men and The Road through the lens of trauma studies, Francisco Collado-­ Rodríguez sees the two novels as linked in their consideration of pain and recovery in an unforgiving world of violence and brutish indifference, since both narratives constitute a literary project that “warns readers about the human capacity to generate violence while also questioning the role of storytelling to sooth traumatic pain.”14 In this sense, McCar­thy challenges his own subtle claims in the Border Trilogy regarding the palliative role of narration in balancing suffering, suggesting instead a more tragic view that trauma is not entirely reparable. Arguing that McCarthy’s language in No Country for Old Men in a sense mirrors the sparse and deserted landscapes he evokes in the novel, Lydia R. Cooper suggests that

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in a “meta-­textual” approach that is orchestrated through blended narratives, McCarthy resists nihilism in favor of a worldview less defeatist or hopeless.15 All these inquiries acknowledge the presence of the land and its pervasive influence on the lives, choices, and perceptions of the people who survive on it. In this context characters must seek moral ground in and among one another, in the tentative environment of brotherhood and human connection they must constitute themselves. The novel pre­ sents three principal characters who travel paths that intersect and collide: Llewelyn Moss, a working man who stumbles on a drug deal gone bad and in an ill-­fated moment decides even against his own best judgment to steal the money that is left behind; Anton Chigurh, the sociopathic killer who seeks to recover the money and lives by a deterministic code that defies any system of human accountability and ethics; and Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff who pursues the perpetrators of the crime in an attempt to protect Moss from Chigurh. Their stories interpenetrate in a novel that explores the historical presence and defining nature of violence in the natural world, as well as the role of human agency in mitigating a process of material cause and effect that is frequently unconcerned with its consequences in destruction and suffering. Certainly, the novel has the audience appeal associated with popular genres, so much so that a successful film ensued. But claims of genre adherence belie the genuine formal innovations the novel displays. It is structured around a main narrative that is primarily focused on the story of Llewelyn Moss and his wife, Carla Jean, as they work to survive. Participating in their story is Ed Tom Bell. The narrative ends in a peremptory fashion, with the death of Llewelyn and Carla Jean and the disappearance and apparent triumph of the villain, who comes to represent at a symbolic level a ubiquitous evil that expresses itself in violence and justifies its existence through a rigid determinism that is unforgiving and impossible to mitigate. Chigurh rises above the conventional Western villain or the mysterious antagonist in the detective novel and film, insofar as he becomes the metonymic representation of naturalism itself, as the agent that brings to fruition the violent trajectory of the natural world and stands in opposition to any force or motive that would disrupt nature’s seemingly malevolent intents. In this case it is a naturalism that transcends indifference and reveals itself as an active force of destruction, one that finds an antecedent in many of Jack London’s short stories as well as in the beast figure that appears in Frank Norris’s novels, specifically McTeague (1899) and Vandover and the Brute (1894–95, published 1914). In all these works the representation of the principles that govern the natural world vacillates between a balanced and impersonal indifference and an active and

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brutish force that seems to take pleasure in pain and suffering. In both versions of a naturalistic perspective humans are made small, in terms of both their ability to orchestrate a personal destiny and the capacity to affect the world intentionally in any morally cogent and effective way. McCarthy captures these more personal consequences through the interlaced narrative in italicized text that presents the thoughts and reflections of Bell, who ponders his own lack of agency but fails to understand fully that he is like any other man who struggles to act in the world. Through this monologue McCarthy reveals the personally devastating toll the natural world and its immutable laws must exact on an individual human being, particularly one who has been given the responsibility of keeping the more violent contingencies of the environment at bay. Formally, the novel moves in these narrative strands between objective and subjective modes of perception as both the world and its effect on an individual consciousness are rendered with genuine pathos. In all this there is something distinctive about the present moment Ed Tom Bell must confront. It is the 1980s, and the American Southwest is plagued by the drug trade and the cartels that smuggle deadly contraband across the border to the hungry markets in the United States. There is a veiled but nevertheless very real element of class and social stratification that leads to a demand for cocaine and heroin. It is the market for narcotics especially that demonstrates the debilitating effects of inequitable wealth distribution and the survival impulse these imbalances release in a naturalist context. The territory and the world writ large have always been a violent place, and in his interior monologues Bell reflects a nostalgia for a less degraded past that is largely an illusion. Near the end of the novel, after Bell has retired, he visits his Uncle Ellis, a former sheriff himself, who seeks to set Bell right in his misperceptions of a uniquely violent present. Ellis tells him a story of a distant relative who was killed in a conflict and speaks of his death and burial in moving but laconic terms: They was seven or eight of em come to the house. Wantin this and wantin that. He went back in the house and come out with a shotgun but they was way ahead of him and they shot him down in his own doorway. She run out and tried to stop the bleedin. . . . When did he die? Eighteen and seventy-­nine. No, I mean was it right away or in the night or when was it. I believe it was that night. Or early in the mornin. She buried him herself. Diggin in that hard caliche. Then she just packed the wagon

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and hitched the horses and pulled out of there and she never did go back. (269–70)

The killers are never described in detail since this is a memory that emerges from the informal and orally rendered history of a single family. But Ellis considers it a universal story of violence and devotion. He reflects on the experience and ponders: How come people dont feel like this country has got a lot to answer for? They dont. You can say that the country is just the country, it don’t actively do nothin, but that dont mean much. . . . This country will kill you in a heartbeat and people still love it. You understand what I’m sayin? (271)

The people of which he speaks are acclimated to the brute reality of a harsh land, and that hard indifference and challenge manifest themselves across the span of history in various ways: in the random murder of a working man on his front porch, or later in a drug deal gone bad and through a murderous psychopath who lives at the behest of forces seemingly beyond the observably material. Violence is pervasive, and adaptation and acceptance lead to a dedication and commitment to a life that draws sustenance from a land that is “just the country” but that remains in all its bleak reality a thing to be loved, served, and sustained. But even though Ed Tom Bell has come from a long line of sheriffs and is courageous and dedicated to making the world a better place, he struggles to adapt to the environment he has always lived in, preferring to muse on an idealized past that never existed. Still there is wisdom built into the texture of this illusion. The world of the novel is unforgiving, but Bell reflects frequently on the compensatory aspects of his experience, the chance occurrences that have kept him safe even in a world that seems governed by random events and circumstances. He is especially grateful for his marriage, and he credits his wife for giving him focus and a reason to continue. He reflects, “She’s a better person than me, which I will admit to anybody that cares to listen. Not that that’s sayin a whole lot. She’s a better person than anybody I know. Period” (91). Bell’s apparent conservatism is predicated on a tension between his emerging recognition of a brutal and determined world and his skepticism of a completely amoral nature. His wife represents a decency and a realm of quiet resistance even in an indifferent world where ethical frames of reference seem irrelevant. In the same monologue he thinks about people in general, who often respond to events with ingratitude:

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People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did. (91)

Bell suggests a frequently missed commonality between the Judeo-­ Christian perspective and a naturalist conception, insofar as both assume a fallen world of brute reality and violence defined at least in part by a destructive force that might be understood in terms of evil and malevolence. But amid that reality, for most at least, there is reason to be thankful. In the mixed realm of lived experience there is the good and the bad. There is the calm commitment that takes place in marriage and perhaps a benevolent force that circumscribes even the laws that bind a deterministic universe. Of course, these are Bell’s momentary reflections, and he comes from a Christian culture. His interpretation of events is conditioned by both his experience and his apparently religious upbringing in the American Southwest. It is an internalized vision that even finds its way into his unconscious. At the conclusion of the novel, he recounts a dream in which he rides into the dark of a desert night with his father, who in the waking world is long deceased. It is a dream in which his father is at once departed and waiting in a dark place where he builds a fire to warm them both. In this vision the world is simultaneously indomitable and unconcerned but imbued with a human brotherhood and commitment that act in a compensatory manner. For Bell, gratitude for this measured redemption is the only reasonable and fair response. But survival in that world is by no means certain, and the main narrative deals with Llewelyn Moss and his attempt to stay alive after having taken the drug money from the crime scene. Ed Tom Bell sets the terms of their mutual plight in his interior monologue as he reflects on his role in a contemporary world he does not understand. As he considers the social and personal consequences of crime and drugs, he ponders: “I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics” (218). It is a thought full of insight insofar as it dislocates the drug trade from history and ties it to a corruption that transcends. This is the process that Moss has found himself caught within. As he attempts to escape, he is led to ponder his actions and his own very real but limited agency, as the events of his life bring his fated decision to the fore and his later struggles are in many ways beyond his capacity to control. He meets a wandering woman in a café. She is perhaps a prostitute,

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and she playfully attempts to seduce him. After a few moments she is confounded as he transforms her into a foil for his emerging thoughts: He looked at her. After a while he said: It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. .  .  . You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? (227)

It is true that Moss is pondering his choice to take the money, and his musings are infused with regret and a tragic sense of inescapability. But like any experience his decision has led him to comprehend certain truths that rise above his circumstances. He articulates a determinism that preserves the notion of choice in a tangible and material context but limits its affects on outcomes and intentions. It is true that he “chose” to take the money, but that moment of agency was initiated by his own predilections and nature as well as by the social and historical circumstances that heighted his temptation. He was a welder, married, and living in a trailer in South Texas. He struggled to make a living and for one fated moment saw the money as a way out of a blighted life. That choice bears down on every decision he later makes. In that sense an array of forces determines one man’s destiny, and the agency exercised is circumscribed by events and realities that he cannot control. He lives within a physical space that changes before him, and he is left only to react in a desperate attempt to adapt and survive. The overriding emphasis on the goal of survival is displayed with vivid clarity in the character of Anton Chigurh. McCarthy’s relationship to the romance tradition is evident in his use of emblematic characters such as Lester Ballard in Child of God (1974) and Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Ballard is in essence an everyman figure, an exemplification of a human depravity that is real and observable in the world, more common than it might be comfortable to contemplate and just sympathetic enough to make Ballard identifiable as a strange and dark brother who shares the world with the rest of the human community. The indomitable Judge Holden seems on the one hand human in his bloodlust, dark humor, and connection to the men he travels with. But he is also the portentous voice of a dark perspective that, disturbing as it may seem, has been articulated by philosophers, writers, and world leaders. Like both these earlier characters, Chigurh is a fully rendered if persistently mysterious figure that in his murderous and psychopathic exploits has a

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genuine referent in the world of experience. His actions alone have antecedents in human history too numerous to mention. But as an emblem he has a representational quality that transcends his dark but recognizable humanity, and this becomes obvious in his actions as well as his words as he casually justifies his behavior. Carson Wells, the private investigator who pursues the money as well, seems to intuit the meaning built into Chigurh’s actions in a conversation that Wells has with Moss as the latter recuperates in a hospital in Mexico. Wells reflects on Chigurh: “He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that” (153). For Wells it is not a recognition that can ultimately save him, as he becomes a victim of the logic Chigurh articulates before Chigurh kills him: “If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?” (175). Chigurh acts according to a set of parameters he sees as just as immutable as they are inscrutable. The world within which they all live is governed by a complicated process of cause and effect that makes human agency very real. Choices matter since the present moment is an accumulation of decisions that cannot be made right or changed. The forces and processes that define an individual life and perhaps lead to ignominious death are not outside the will. They are within it and co-­implicated in a grand and horrific pattern of cause and effect that could not take place without a blind and consequential human agency. But human beings are ignorant of the various histories they set in motion. In the chance moments when Moss and Wells make their dubious decisions, they are motivated by the desire not so much to survive but to succeed, as they risk their own lives and the lives of others to acquire and accumulate. In a naturalist context there is a question as to whether their choices are really choices in the first place, because they are driven by impulses almost instinctual or animal in nature. Ironically, it is Chigurh who seems even in his brute malevolence to comprehend the reality he makes real and universal. Chigurh does not present these “principles” as his own. He is agent rather than originator. He functions without guilt or remorse, and he is certainly sociopathic in his sense that moral precepts and individual lives seem irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. He travels through Texas and Mexico and murders people with a casual disinterest that is chilling for its routine quality and lack of concern for the implications of his actions. He murders a man driving a car on the highway as well as a deputy that arrests him, and he chooses to leave a service station attendant alive for reasons impossible to discern. At the center of his worldview is again the metaphor of the coin toss, which was first developed in Blood Meridian and later in All the Pretty Horses. It is a metaphor that emerges

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from McCarthy’s interactions at the Santa Fe Institute, whose many scholars are concerned with the predictability or lack thereof in complex adaptive systems that are broadly physical in nature and include computational, biological, and even social arrangements. It is all these arenas that McCar­thy engages in a broad philosophical context. The notion of a complex system is built around the learned assumption that a grasp of individual components does not yield a complete understanding of the whole. Complexity itself is the defining reality. The philosophical implications of these inquiries are wide ranging and ultimately varied, but in McCarthy’s vision complexity is related to the coin toss as a vivid example of how human beings, as a part of the physical reality that is the world, might make choices without even a remote understanding of results or implications. Even the most casual decision may be consequential: free will thus remains, but it is mitigated almost to oblivion by the unpredictability of those choices. Chigurh articulates his role in this deterministic system as he explains to Carla Jean why after she has tossed the coin there can be no other outcome but her death: I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. (259)

She pleads for her life, but he denies even his own ability to alter the course of events: This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see? (260)

In these casual pronouncements Chigurh articulates a literary naturalism that is contemporary and supremely relevant. The “shape is drawn,” and the “accounting is scrupulous.” The natural world is governed by a set of physical laws and defining realities that consign human agency to participation in its own seeming irrelevance. In the complex physical system that is the natural world the entire question of free will is rendered pointless even as it is acknowledged as meaningful. In this sense late in his career McCarthy develops and advances a naturalistic worldview by humanizing it in the darkest and most tragic way, as humans must struggle

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to adapt in an environment that forces choices even from blind agents in an indifferent world. But the novel concludes not with death but with memory, as Ed Tom Bell dreams of a moment somewhere in the grand sweep of universal time. It is a moment in which his father waits for him, having taken the fire out of a gourd and made it grow. That fire illuminates a dark and unforgiving world to say the least, but one that holds a place for reflection, thought, conscience, and heartfelt memory.

The Road (2006) The bombing and obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place in August 1945. Since that devastating moment people across the world have lived in the fog of a vague and constant anxiety. The lessons of the past carried with them the false notion that nature was an external phenomenon and an ambient reality. But the nuclear age revealed the demonic face of an Enlightenment project that for all its virtues was still cursed with the darker spirit of a flawed species.16 Nature was no longer a thing one could touch with the hand or perceive with the senses. The atom itself was an animal caged, one that required only the human intellect to release its almost incomprehensible capacity to destroy. The imagination could barely compass what it had revealed about the hidden forces and energies that composed both the physical universe and the human soul. The modern moment had reached a bleak culmination as the greatest conflict in human history came to an end in a blinding instant that rendered the world speechless, and following those events nation-­states worked to reimagine a future that rested tentatively on the human ability to stay a collective and violent hand. At the heart of this uncertain endeavor is the age-­old issue of evil, which in a philosophical and theological sense is conventionally divided into two strands. There is human evil, which involves the actions and agency of people who make choices in the world, and there is natural evil, which emerges from the destructive capacity of nature itself, a power that might become manifest in earthquakes and hurricanes or in the microworld of immune deficiency, infectious disease, and cancer. Considering the Cold War and naturalism, these two forms retain a certain identity, but they also become deeply co-­ implicated. In a naturalist context it might seem strange to think of evil in a conventional and broadly religious sense. But human beings are a part of nature and as such are motivated by instincts that can be reduced to impulses traceable in the genetic makeup of the individual organism. Destructive vices such as avarice, greed, and the will to power have biological components or motives that are palpable to human comprehension. But as Andrew Delbanco argues in his influential work of cultural

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criticism, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (1995), the late twentieth century in its tendency to seek the material causes for various phenomena wrought a subtle havoc on the human capacity to understand the darker forces latent in the world and inherent in the species: The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak. We have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass before our eyes in the outer world.17

In The Road, McCarthy finds a new language that connects the interior life of human consciousness to the exterior experience that takes shape in the act of perception, all in a postapocalyptic space where the species is reduced to its bestial essence and a man and a boy must seek redemption.18 They live and travel through a realm in which evil reenters the human imaginary. It is not a force external to human contemplation but a ubiquitous reality that expresses itself both in a cataclysmic event that has brought devastation to the earth and in the hollow emptiness of people who savagely consume one another to survive. It is this blend of passively destructive and actively malevolent forces that McCarthy’s The Road resolves in mystery, through a peculiar metaphysics that holds nature and the natural world before us like a material sacrament. In the wake of the atomic bomb and in the context of the nuclear age a set of related literary genres became active and popular: namely, the postapocalyptic and the dystopian novel. In these subforms, human beings both alone and in community must survive in a world that has been devastated, usually by a nuclear event. There is a clear naturalistic element to these stories, as characters struggle to adapt to a new environment that is critically defined by scarcity and want. It is in many ways a naturalism gone mad, no longer balanced by images of the material world in all its beauty and pristine reality.19 The realm of nature almost personified exists in a state of wounded struggle, having perhaps been brought to a point of near obliteration by a species of dubious insight that rose to a consciousness and technological awareness that in turn led to a tentative command over nature. Humans are the victims of their own worst impulses, and the world that has sustained them fights from within to find the resources if not the conscious will to remake itself. The good and its counterpoint in evil are unmasked in this new reality, as they contend both inside and outside the human community for dominance and power. This is the essential dramatic conflict that is carefully rendered in The Road. A man and his young son traverse a blighted landscape in search of food and a place they might call home. The horrific event that

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has brought them to their current state is unnamed. It may have been a nuclear holocaust, but it may also have occurred as the result of a natural evil such as the strike of a meteor. The novel’s details are carefully wrought such that no firm conclusion can be reached. McCarthy’s purpose here seems relatively clear: to ensure that the state of the universe cannot be reduced to either a human evil or a natural evil. On the one hand, we might imagine that the story is less about what caused the event and more about how the man and the boy contend with circumstances. But given that the story foregrounds the natural world in a painfully reduced state, the question of how it came to be that way is pressing. In a naturalist context the reason for the lack of clarity is that both forms of evil are deeply and intimately related, since the man and the boy must struggle with the same impulses that broadly applied may have led to their situation in the first place. The man is often angry, and he is willing to destroy anything that threatens them. He is the survival impulse made real and potentially destructive. The boy vaguely understands but often tries to stay the man’s brutal hand. The people who struggle to survive within the confines of nature form its most recognizable features. The man is a natural being, nature itself made conscious, and his inner conflict might best be characterized as a struggle with a Satan that is mythological and figurative but nevertheless practically manifest in the man’s darkest survival impulses. A preoccupation with the vulnerability of the natural environment informs much critical treatment of the novel to date.20 A few questions emerge from these inquiries. How did the world come to a place where it must confront the reality of its own destruction? What was the role human beings played in this process of decline? How significant is the “human” as an ontological and epistemological category in a contemplation of nature as material reality?21 These questions have led to a variety of approaches to The Road. The novel centers on two richly drawn human characters, and the narrative is concerned less with the status of the earth and more with the survival of the man and the boy and the emotional and spiritual bond that keeps them together even after death. Any concern with the environment must be considered important but secondary to these profoundly humanist preoccupations. In this sense the novel resists the posthumanist strand of a late naturalism that would level the human and other aspects of the natural world and make them indistinguishable. Still, the notion of the Anthropocene and its dubious end echoes throughout the novel.22 Critics who work from the posthumanist paradigms of contemporary ecocriticism have found fertile ground for valuable inquiries into the relationship of nature and its various and even conscious

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participants. Adeline Johns-­Putra explores the novel’s engagement with climate science, arguing that “at the heart of climate change discourse resides an anxiety about whether we have cared enough about and for the future. . . . The novel enables a critical interrogation of humanity and its ability to survive environmental crisis.” Johns-­Putra preserves and even asserts the idea of the “human” since as a species we possess the unique opportunity to mitigate the destructive processes we have set in motion.23 Jordan J. Dominy examines the novel’s apocalyptic themes in the context of cannibalism as both a trope and an example of the rampant consumerism that marks the end of capitalism.24 In this sense the apocalyptic has an economic dimension as human behavior in a social context at least contributes to the decline and ultimate loss of the redemptive and sustaining powers of nature. It might even be that an ungoverned and avaricious fight for resources led to the cataclysm itself. Derek J. Thiess places this entire line of inquiry in the context of the scientific enterprise as he acknowledges the sociohistorical dimension of science as an endeavor with both positive and negative implications and effects.25 He explores ideas of complexity in The Road and the intricate relationship of these concepts to the human participants who work to understand and improve the world and their own personal circumstances. This implicit blending of the human and the natural, which is so important to a naturalist understanding, is explored by other critics who contend at a thematic level with McCarthy’s relationship to the philosophical and literary traditions in tandem.26 In suggesting that the quest motif in The Road alludes to the grail legend in the medieval romance, Lydia R. Cooper explores the use of the apocalyptic and postapocalyptic genres by emphasizing the way the novel foregrounds the theme of searching as a form of recovery. At the heart of this consideration is the question of whether the novel finally bends beyond naturalism to nihilism, since on one level the journey of the man and the boy seems hopeless, given the state of the world, the man’s declining health, and the scathingly articulate pronouncements of his wife, who has died by suicide. The woman’s decision is grounded not in weakness but in a thoughtful conclusion about the nature of their circumstances. Cooper argues that The Road “examines pervasive apocalyptic fears in order to explore if and how the human project may be preserved.”27 In a context in which the determined processes of the natural world have sadly wrought destruction from within, the issue of nature’s long-­or even near-­term survival is the question. But given that the novel is intimately concerned with the lives of two people, the issue of a human future is brought to the foreground and becomes central, and Cooper concludes: “In a world poisoned by

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greed, disassociation, and despair, longing itself may be a form of redemption.”28 Human consciousness in all its manifestations and contours finds its way into the natural world and asserts itself as an integral part of that world, perhaps emerging as the force that brings recovery to life. This same sense of possibility in an apocalyptic environment finds a grounding in philosophy and theology. Citing a note in the first draft of The Road, which is contained in the Cormac McCarthy Papers in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos, O. Alan Noble explores a geography of hope that draws sustenance from Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843). Kierkegaard’s text is an early existentialist reconciliation that parallels the naturalistic worldview that was emerging in his time, and the notion that the divine becomes tangibly manifest in the love and devotion of two human beings is a central concern in the novel.29 Bill Hardwig locates the narrative explicitly in a naturalist realm by exploring McCarthy’s use of the forms and concerns of science fiction, specifically as a means of examining issues of trauma, loss, and mourning in a way McCarthy has never done before.30 In this sense the wasted world and the state of human consciousness are intricately bound in a material context in which connection and consequence form a kind of matrix that makes them part of the same collective body. The traditional and arguably false distinction between the human and the natural is challenged, and in the Christian existentialism and proto-­naturalism of Kierkegaard even God becomes a physical manifestation of human emotion and commitment. This unconventional blending of the natural and the immaterial is orchestrated at a figurative level in the novel’s treatment of the blighted landscape. The implications of this strange confluence make sense insofar as McCarthy attempts to reconsider the whole notion of materiality in a naturalist realm, as previous ideas of the transcendental are reconceived as part of an infinitely more complicated nature. Early in the narrative the boy is asleep, and the man looks out over the world they must survive in and against. The man ponders the landscape: With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. (4)

The land is rendered richly and figuratively throughout the narrative. A central question revolves around the thematic implications embedded in descriptions of setting. It is tempting to read the landscape as simple metaphor, as an emblem of a cosmological void that has been revealed as the protective structures of human society have been violently swept away. In this reading there are no transcendental categories that the man and the

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boy can rely on, and the only simple and inadequate compensation available is the fleeting, emotionally ambiguous, and torturous joy that comes from the love they share. But even considering the man’s brief observation of the landscape as “godless,” the novel is full of the sacred and sacramental, which is expressed in the unvarnished use of religious language that may owe something to McCarthy’s Catholic upbringing. A more multifaceted understanding of the figurative nature of the material world appears when The Road is read in the context of the biblical tradition that is so often at play in his works. In this sense, the landscape should be read typologically, in connection with the wilderness motif that has become ubiquitous in Western literature. In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites are delivered by Yahweh, and they are consigned to wander for forty years in the desert, where they will be tested spiritually before they are delivered to the Promised Land. This is the Old Testament type, which is antityped in the New Testament. In the later rendering Christ must wander for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, where he is tested by Satan before he enters on his mission. This relationship of type and antitype lends coherence to the biblical story and makes it more than a collection of books, but a literary and cultural tradition bound by a tangible coherence of idea and form. The literature that follows in the Western tradition develops this idea further, as in the later configuration of the romance in the Middle Ages, in which the wasteland is a place where the questing knight must undergo a trial as he seeks to discover his identity and place in the world. For the American Puritans, this same typology was used to interpret their encounter with the “howling wilderness” they met as they attempted to survive along the Eastern Seaboard.31 This figuration of nature takes place in The Road as the man and the boy must confront their own ethical and spiritual limitations in a wasteland and wilderness that both divide them and bring them together. In all of this, the land is central and defining, and in naturalist terms it is seemingly harsh, unforgiving, and without concern for the human plight. This figuration of landscape by no means resists a naturalist conception; it reinforces the idea that nature itself is a shaping influence on human identity. Nature is the ground on which individuals and communities find a tentative and often insecure sustenance and the place they look to for meaning in the absence of any other point of reference. In this sense it is important to remember the polyvalence of naturalism as it has appeared in the literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. In all cases the natural world is indomitable, and human beings seem at once inconsequential and supremely dedicated to their own survival. But in some naturalist works the cold indifference of nature is foregrounded,

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and the notion of an active evil that weighs down on people is seemingly a construct of a premodern past. In other naturalist texts the material world involves a malevolent force that actively works against a human impulse that leads to selflessness and compassion. While this more active concept of evil had dominated the religious and intellectual culture since antiquity, it waned in the wake of the Enlightenment and became a genuinely weak force in the context of modernity. By figuring typologically the moral choices the man and the boy must make in the context of a post­ apocalyptic wasteland, McCarthy preserves nature’s predominance but foregrounds also the living reality of a blended natural and human evil. In The Road, nature is not merely indifferent but actively malevolent. The land yields nothing to sustain them, and walking on it are the perverted avatars of a fallen humanity that hunt human flesh for sustenance. In this sense evil returns in all its demonic configurations and expresses itself in a rapacious impulse to live. The same motivating instinct that animates all life is revealed as a dark and brutish force that cannot be characterized or justified. It is in this context that the man and the boy must struggle, and the man not only is willing to kill but gives into his own anger and forces another traveler who has stolen from them to remove his clothing and stand naked in the cold. The boy is perpetually preoccupied with remaining one of the “good guys” and openly challenges his father’s actions. Both must encounter the Satan figure Ely, who encourages them to abandon hope. It is precisely this temptation that the typological figuration of the wasted landscape initiates, all within a world that levels the human and the natural and binds them in their mutual desire to survive. In the general context of an environment blighted and unsustainable, the landscape is not the only feature of the novel that is rendered figuratively. In the opening pages the man looks out over the land they must traverse, but he returns to the sleeping boy and ponders what the child means to him and the world: He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke. (5)

This may be taken as a father’s emotionally rendered articulation of his love and commitment to the boy, but it is expressed in an evocative language that continues elsewhere in the novel as the man refers to the boy in sacramental terms, calling him a “golden chalice” and a “god” (75).32 The boy is presented here as more than divine; he is messianic, a being that holds in many ways the salvation of the world in his grasp. Even at the end of the narrative, the question of how the child might bring about that salvation remains unanswered. As the story proceeds the boy

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articulates his ethical status in childlike but pressing and relevant terms. He distinguishes between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” and continually reminds his father that they must remain on the right side of the moral equation. As they travel the road and struggle to escape the rapacious cannibals that would kill and consume them, this tension remains at the center of their relationship. The natural world is harsh, and they are an inseparable part of it. Nature binds them since their primary motive is to find food and consume it, which requires at times that they deny others. They are naturalist competitors in a world of scarcity. The man is singularly focused on making sure they get more than their share as he stores food in a shopping cart and only reluctantly gives to others and only at the boy’s persistent urging. Ironically in his selfless love for the boy the man becomes a brute animal who is more than driven to keep them alive, an angry creature willing to harm those who stand in their way. It is the boy who is grounded in the idea that as “good guys” they are “carrying the fire.” In this way the novel foregrounds the kind of romantic naturalism that acknowledges the brute reality of the world and the animal nature of human beings, while at the same time holding out an image of brotherhood, love, and human commitment. But there is a kind of redemption even in the man’s willingness to kill. Again, as he and the boy travel, they must continually hide not only from the elements but from the roving remnants of a starving humanity. The survivors, whoever they are, have been confronted with the same choice faced by the protagonists, a choice between good and evil as well as self-­sacrifice and survival. Many have chosen to become “bad guys,” hunters and consumers of human flesh. The man carries a handgun with only two shells. In his mind they are meant not for defense but for self-­ annihilation. In the face of their potential rape and murder, the man prepares himself to take his own and the boy’s life if necessary. But the plan goes awry as they are confronted with a cannibal who takes hold of the boy. The man kills the cannibal with one of the bullets, and they escape. But the boy is silent and brooding. He is concerned that in killing they have lost their ethical compass. But the man instructs him on the ways of the world: You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand? (77)

There is a heart-­wrenching logic to the man’s pronouncement that is blended with a strange irony implicit in his thinking. From his perspective

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he is commissioned by God to kill in the service of the boy’s ultimate survival. The question of God’s existence and role in the world is ever present in the novel, and the issue of the divine remains active even to the story’s conclusion. The reference to God is no mere figure of speech. But God’s moral rectitude remains ambiguous since the man must kill in obedience to divine mandate. There is little distinction between the man’s ordained and sacred mission and the biological imperative. God’s appointment is to live, survive, and ensure the life and the sustenance of the child. Any concept of the transcendent is inextricably bound to the material world. The man continually ponders whether he can kill the child to save him from degradation and finally concludes he cannot. The situation and his final resolution are powerful, moving, and redemptive, but they are never separate from a naturalist reality since in the end the man’s most driving internal motive is to see the boy into the future no matter how uncertain and potentially blighted that future may appear. It is a drive that seems to take root in a divinely ordained mission, but that mission is entirely consistent with a world that circumscribes even the most noble human motives and aspirations. This dual emphasis on both the material parameters that bind human existence and a mysterious religious echo appears as McCarthy reinforces the landscape as typological. The man and the boy have experienced a luck that almost seems providential, as they stumble across a stash of food in a cellar. They rest awhile and experience a kind of domestic remembrance. Consistent with the boy’s messianic status, he is concerned that in taking the food they are stealing from others. The man reminds him that the people that stored the food are likely dead, but the boy persists, and they decide to thank the people in prayer. There is a strange sense that among the contingencies of the natural world there is promise and perhaps in the end some form of immortality. Consistent with a Kierkegaardian existential Christianity an implied divinity reveals itself in human existence. After staying for a while, they fill their stores with food and continue their journey on the road. They have experienced a moment of rest before they must contend with the typological wilderness, and as they join the wasted world again, they encounter an old traveler. Against the man’s best judgment and at the urging of the boy they give the traveler some food and allow him to rest with them for a time. The old traveler goes by the name of Ely, which alludes to the biblical prophets Elijah and Elisha, but he emerges as the ubiquitous voice of an evil that is not so much rapacious as self-­destructive and despairing. As the boy sleeps, the two men talk. Ely argues that life is not worth living and is pointless after the apocalypse. From his perspective one’s

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individual death is all encompassing since all human connection and intimacy is eradicated in the irremediable loss of human consciousness. The man responds somewhat meekly by challenging him: How would you know if you were the last man on earth? he said. I dont guess you would know it. You’d just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too. I guess God would know it. Is that it? There is no God. No? There is no God and we are his prophets. (169–70)

This strange contradiction finds resolution in an idea articulated toward the end of the novel, as the divine is seen not in traditional terms as outside of creation but as intimately bound to it and manifest in the naturally constituted reality of the material world. It is a pronouncement both compelling and abhorrent, since it emerges from a nihilism motivated by the death drive. In a typological sense, Ely, who admits to falsifying his name, is a Satan figure who in the wilderness must test the travelers and tempt them with a point of view that has been expressed to the man before, in a conversation with his wife before her suicide. The woman’s decision is by no means isolated or even emotionally driven but is intellectually constituted, finding its source in modernity and in the many intellectual currents that give it definition. The influence of scientific, philosophical, and literary naturalism was ubiquitous in the twentieth century and was reinforced by the same historical and intellectual changes that emerged from the modern moment. The scientific era brought about a revolution in ideas that can be found in the complementary concepts of Darwin in the biological sciences, Marx in the social sciences, Freud in psychology, and Einstein in physics and cosmology. These concepts were heightened in the wake of two world wars and in a late modernism that found philosophical expression in the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. After World War II, nihilism and the literature of the absurd ran parallel with the widespread notion that physical reality was governed by a complex set of laws that cannot be rightfully interpreted beyond themselves. The material universe was everything, and categories of transcendent meaning were remnants of a premodern understanding of the world. Though many argue that there is a subtle distinction to be drawn between existentialism and nihilism, the two perspectives share common features. In McCarthy, the voice of

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this naturalistically inflected nihilism finds expression in The Road and, again, in his play written in the same year, The Sunset Limited (2006). In the novel these ideas are represented in the words of the mother. Again, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that the essential condition of human existence is meaningless and that the only responsible response to that condition involves the recognition of the absurd. This understanding makes suicide the only reasonable option. One may transcend this moment through a kind of acceptance that leads if not to happiness then at least to a willingness to live. Like White in The Sunset Limited, the woman in The Road cannot move beyond the intermediary phase of the death drive, principally because the world she lives in finds the absurd in the form of an unspeakable and rapacious violence. The man recalls how she expressed her nihilism just before she left him to take her own life: That’s all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so dont ask for sorrow now. There is none. (57)

The man pleads, but she is adamant as she defends her decision in firm and well-­constituted intellectual terms. In a meaningless and destructive world suicide seems the only reasonable and indeed morally justifiable answer. In the end, cannibals will rape them and voraciously consume their bodies, and the man is doing nothing for the boy but preserving him temporarily and condemning him to this fate. The woman is by no means weak, and her point of view is a rational response to their circumstances and one that the man has a difficult time responding to thoughtfully. He can only rely on what in their interchange seems the unconvincing language of love, family, and commitment, language that appears as irrelevant to this modern apocalyptic moment as conventional notions of transcendence and redemption. Her nihilism involves a naturalism unvarnished. The man resists the extremes of her perspective and with a strange and tentative acceptance allows her to remove herself from them forever, reflecting in retrospect that “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift” (58). At issue is the question of meaning in a universe that reduces them to the elements in its blind turning and movement toward a material oblivion. But it is the conclusion of the novel that brings a tentative resolution to the internal conflicts that have plagued the characters in their journey on the road. As they travel the man is coughing blood, and it is clear he

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will not survive. This gives a tremendous weight to the mission he has accepted in his commitment to protect the boy. There will soon come a time when he will no longer be there for the boy, who will then be left on his own. There is some hope that they might encounter some decent people on the road, and their occasional sighting of another child makes this possibility quite real. But they cannot know that other human beings would be willing to help in an environment of scarcity and want. The man’s rejection of his wife’s solution is thus a profound act of faith in a traditional and religious sense. The man finally succumbs to his illness, but before he dies, he expresses that faith to the boy in the most direct and resolute terms. The child begins: Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant. You said you wouldnt ever leave me. I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see. . . . I’m really scared Papa. I know. But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be lucky. I know you are. (279)

It is a stark choice for the man. The woman has reminded him that if caught the boy will be brutally killed, and the man leaves the boy to this potential fate. It is a finality that would likely drive away any hope that is grounded in mere contingency and would compel the man to take the boy’s life even given the unthinkable nature of the act. But the man is confident in the boy’s “luck,” which he considers bound to his vaguely divine status and virtue. It is tempting to attribute this simply to the man’s powerful love for the boy, but that same emotion rightly considered would in all probability lead the man to use the gun, perhaps in much the same way that a tortured parent watching a terminally ill child would agree to remove life support. For the man it is a transcendent hope that drives him as he leaves the boy to a world of possibility that from his perspective exists against all the evidence of his senses. But the man’s faith in something more does not resolve itself in a transcendental metaphysics. The natural world is all that remains, but it is a realm imbued with a materially defining force that binds all things together in meaning. In asking the boy to

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talk to him he is asking him to pray, and the response will be more than an attribute of memory. It will be an unconventional acknowledgment of the divine. The boy is taken in by a family, and sometime later the woman brings these ideas home: She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time. (286)

As Allen Josephs argues, The Road involves a quest for God, however inadequately understood that divine reality may be.33 But how is the divine conceived in this penultimate passage? The woman could respond sympathetically to the boy’s connection to his departed father but still encourage him to pray to a God that is separate and distinct from the world. This would be the response of a traditional theist, especially in the Christian tradition. But she does not. For her the divine breath is immanent in the natural world. It is an existential metaphysics that binds the world intimately to the presence of God and eradicates the distinction between the material and the immaterial. The natural world remains absolute, and the laws that bind exist both external and internal to the species that is man. It is a connection that cannot separate the living from the dead, a bond that finds expression in human relationships that are real and sustaining even in a universe dominated by brute indifference and apparent cruelty. It is a compelling perspective, but it is not the last word. The novel ends with a vivid rendering of the earth before the cataclysm: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (286–87)

Maps and mazes. The inextricable. The Road ends with a vivid image of the natural world. It is a material realm that is beautiful and evocative but expresses its identity in an iconographic and hieroglyphic language. The perpetual seeking for what might lie beyond, which has defined the

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human quest since time immemorial, may be nothing but a misbegotten hope that finds its source in the evolutionary history of an accidental consciousness. Perhaps if the earth survives, the contours of the map may appear more clearly to those who remain to interpret its figurations. But until that time and in the indefinite sweep of an incomprehensible universe what remains is mystery. In that infinite space the unity of existence may find safe home only in the imponderable regions of the human heart.

7 Prospects Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

C

ormac McCarthy is by all appearances an independent spirit and an author inclined to his own interests. He has seemed at least to approach his life with a quiet intensity, and writing has only been one facet of his experience. The novels, plays, and screenplays he has written emerge from the strange and inexplicable alchemy of a life lived with energy and intellectual focus. The subjects he explores are clearly fascinating to him on their own terms. They are not just raw material that serves the artist’s creative vision. But his works demonstrate that aesthetics rest at the heart of his interior life, and the implicit questions he tries to answer in response to the seeming brutality and indifference of nature are these: How does beauty render itself to the human sensibility amid so much destruction? What compensation does the world offer, given the reality of human suffering? They are as much philosophical and theological questions as they are aesthetic ones, but in his ultimate uncertainty one thing remains true. It is expressed with clarity in All the Pretty Horses. From the blood of multitudes comes the beauty of the single flower. It seems that this compensatory reality finds resolution in the realm of artistic expression, as human beings comprehend the capacity of the world to render itself to the eye and the perceiving heart. But this apprehension is by no means merely affective. It is not a momentary and transitory pleasure. Beauty is bound to the order that presents itself in fleeting images, even to a man as lost to decency as Lester Ballard. In a kind of dreamscape,

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it appears to the wanderers in the epilogue of Blood Meridian. McCarthy tries to glimpse that order in science, and with his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute he seeks it from various disciplinary vantage points in the idea of complexity. But in his work and his occasional commentary, he eradicates the false dichotomies that have emerged since the eighteenth century, schisms that seem to divide rationality and art and especially science and religion. His works are informed by and are dependent on observation and critical acumen, but they are haunted by the persistent specter of the divine. Along with his respect for scientific endeavor he displays a religious sensibility, a desire to render the world in vivid and unequivocally naturalistic terms without abandoning at least the possibility of the transcendent, however narrowly understood. His religious speculation is never doctrinal, sectarian, or even narrowly Christian, but the realm of spirit imbues his work from the beginning. In a November 2009 interview for the Wall Street Journal dealing primarily with The Road, John Jurgensen asked McCarthy: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in “The Road” questions and curses?

McCarthy responded, It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.1

Without being aggressive in pressing the point McCarthy encourages an integration of the competing approaches of science and religion, and he is not alone in this intellectual approach and sensibility. There is a historiographic tradition that came into being in the late nineteenth century and intensified in Great Britain and elsewhere. As James Turner argues in Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1986), only in the wake of the later stages of the Scientific Revolution did atheism and agnosticism became viable options in the intellectual mainstream.2 Before that time religious belief or at least theism broadly construed dominated university culture and the philosophical and scientific writings that emerged from that realm. At the very least the idea of God as first cause and prime mover was largely assumed. For those who were oriented to the

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biological sciences and found in Darwin’s concept of natural selection a materialist alternative to the divine, this cultural dominance demanded a forceful response, which appeared in histories that emphasized the contention between science and religion. This became known as the “conflict thesis,” and its argument rests in the many occasions when voices expressing new scientific understandings found themselves silenced by traditional religious explanations of physical reality. It is certainly true that these moments of vigorous disagreement took place, and both church and state in their intricate relationship possessed all the political power and ability to dominate. Early and influential histories that foreground this “conflict thesis” include Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom (1896) and John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). But as time passed and the rise of secular scientific endeavor came into a position of power at the center of intellectual culture, historians were less aggressive in their defense of the scientific project. What emerged was a revisionist historiography centered on a more nuanced and layered treatment of the relationship between science and religion. This tendency in historical writing emphasizes what has come to be known as the “complexity thesis.” Gary B. Ferngren describes this approach in the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (2002).3 In this context the relationship of these two fields has always involved an intricate series of conflicts as well as moments of cooperation and productive interaction. In all his work McCarthy seems to reflect this kind of tense but cooperative interchange. Advanced commentary and speculation suggest that McCarthy’s forthcoming novels, The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022), deal with this interaction between scientific and religious concerns. The Passenger is set in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and deals with a salvage diver who is apparently haunted by deep issues related to personal loss and mortality. A series of mysterious events are tied to his tortured relationship with his sister, and the novel purportedly deals with the unfathomable complexities of human consciousness, sin, and the mysteries of an unknowable world. An immediate sequel, Stella Maris, involves the sister, a doctoral student in mathematics, who has been admitted to a psychiatric facility under the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. She ponders the relationship of mathematics and philosophy, and she considers questions related to God, epistemology, and the meaning of human existence. McCarthy’s novels, plays, and screenplays are strongly influenced by a naturalist conception of reality, as the universe, the planet earth, and the human species are circumscribed by natural law and material contingency. But from an evolutionary perspective religion emerges as

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a defining force in human consciousness. Its positive and negative effects on human culture are hard to overestimate. Religion, spirituality, and the questions related to these spheres of influence resonate in essential ways in McCarthy’s work. This cross-­fertilization and cooperation have frequently led to interesting and fruitful lines of inquiry in our intellectual culture, even among those who possess different worldviews. In the religious realm, process theology and theistic evolution have worked to incorporate and acknowledge the reality of scientifically based naturalistic conceptions. These new understandings remain firmly in the realm of belief and continue to find intellectual coherence in faith, which to these theologians is separate from but nevertheless compatible with reason. Modern religious understandings share with romanticism a respect for the scientific mind, but they privilege the epistemological value of the affective, which is founded on the idea of imagination, intuition, and the visionary capacity. New considerations in science have emerged that contradict the conflict thesis, which asserts the idea that the force of reason must guard against the irrationality of the religious impulse. The older historiographic conception envisioned a scientifically based utopia that would emerge over time in a kind of grand apotheosis of reason. For those historians and scientists, in the context of genetics traditional concepts of sin and human depravity are recast as the natural impulse to acquisition, rapacity, and greed. They are conceived as endemic to the species in a naturalist context. But previous religious forms of apprehension elevated these impulses to a transcendent concept of evil that considering evolution may have been necessary for the collective survival of the species. As Robert Wright argues in The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (1994), evil as a separate and distinct reality doesn’t fit easily into a modern scientific worldview. Still, people seem to find it useful, and the reason is that it is metaphorically apt. There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long-­term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there’s no reason not to.4

In evolutionary psychology we evade the unanswerable questions related to transcendental categories, but we retain their value. Notions of good and evil become essential to the survival of humanity both individually and collectively. As Andrew Delbanco writes in response to Wright:

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I would, and have, put it more emphatically, the idea of evil is not just a metaphor that “some people find . . . useful”; it is a metaphor upon which the health of the society depends.5

In a literary naturalism that seems always preoccupied with human beings and their plight in the world, McCarthy engages without denying or accepting the role of metaphysics and the divine.6 But he retains a notion of an evil that transcends the simple exigencies of nature, and he chooses not to sever the alignment of that idea from the notion of a physical world governed by natural law and material contingency. The literary naturalism that informs McCarthy’s work has a long history in a social and intellectual culture that precedes the nineteenth century. He is by no means alone in modern and contemporary literature in his impulse to engage the natural world. Writers and poets such as Robert Frost, T.  S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Larry McMurtry also channel the ideas that were explored by early naturalists. None of these artists should be considered exclusively from the vantage point of a single aesthetic paradigm. But a naturalist worldview in all its varied forms finds expression in artistic and philosophical movements worldwide, from existentialism to the literature of the absurd. The question of how meaning may be constituted as consciousness craves its own perpetuation is by some accounts the blended curse and blessing of the human endeavor. We are at once capable of self-­awareness and the capacity to experience an exquisite pleasure in one another, the world, and the works of art we create. But we are also painfully aware of the brevity that circumscribes and colors that pleasure. In a way that perhaps emerges from our evolutionary history, we have responded with stories, myths, and metaphysical conceptions, and in many traditions, we constitute hope in the idea that we live on in another and even more meaningful realm of being. The insights that are just emerging from the inquiries of evolutionary psychology do not deny or validate these hopes, but they do emphasize that conceptions of transcendence are part of what makes us human. The natural world reigns supreme, and the works of Cormac McCarthy render that world in all its unspeakable darkness and shadow. The status of the “human” itself has been called into question in posthumanism, a contemporary manifestation of naturalism that emphasizes themes that are by no means new. The Anthropocene as a proposed geological epoch is a powerful concept in delineating our impact on the environment. It presupposes the fragility of our efforts in an evolving earth history that will continue after the last human footprint has been eroded

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by time. But until then human beings remain an indistinguishable part of the material universe and are perhaps not as distinctive as previously conceived. Seen from McCarthy’s perspective we live in the world of sense and intellectual seeking. We must calm our restive thoughts in the reality of “unguessed kinships,” in our inseparable bond with the world that brought us into being. The experience of living may be compromised by doubt, existential isolation, and suffering. But we may find a guarded and tenuous meaning in moments of bright awareness and connection—to an environment that sustains us in community, allows us the experience of wonder, and in the end draws us home.

NOTES Chapter 1 1. For two article-­length treatments of naturalism in the works of Cormac McCarthy, see Eric Carl Link, “McCarthy and Naturalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149–61; and Adam H. Wood, “Naturalism,” in Cormac McCarthy in Context, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 87–97. For another treatment of naturalism in McCarthy, see Michael Tavel Clarke, “The New Naturalism: Cormac McCarthy, Frank Norris, and the Question of Postmodernism,” Studies in American Naturalism 9, no. 1 (2014): 52–78. See also Vereen M. Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 2. For “historical sense,” see T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” part 1, Egoist 6, no. 4 (September 1919): 55. 3. For a general discussion of McCarthy as “philosophical” novelist, see Steven Frye, “Histories, Novels, Ideas: Cormac McCarthy and the Art of Philosophy,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 3–14. For a treatment of McCarthy’s relation to the traditions that precede him, see Bill Hardwig, “Allusion and Allegory,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 107–18. 4. See Steven Frye, “Life and Career,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 3–12. See also Bryan Vescio, “Formal Aesthetic Choices,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 169–79. 5. Quoted in Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1992. 6. See Phillip A. Snyder and Delys W. Snyder, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language: McCarthy’s Style,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 27–40. 7. See Katharine A. Salzmann, “Letters and Correspondence,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 300–315. 8. See Michael Lynn Crews, Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). See also Robert L. Jarrett, Cormac McCarthy (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne, 1997). 9. See Frye, “Histories, Novels, Ideas.”

150 / Notes 10. For varied treatments of the moral frameworks informing McCarthy’s fiction, see Edwin T. Arnold, “Naming, Knowing, Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 45–69. See also Russell Hillier, Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Souls at Hazard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 11. Edgar Allan Poe, quoted in David C. Krakauer, ed., Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Santa Fe, NM: Santa Fe Institute Press, 2019), xxvii. 12. For comprehensive reviews of McCarthy scholarship, see Stacey Peebles, “Cormac McCarthy: A Critical History,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 273–80; and Steven Frye, “Prospects for the Study of Cormac McCarthy,” Resources for American Literary Study 39 (2017): 19–33. For broad thematic analyses that deal with form, philosophical and religious influence, and historical context, see John Cant, Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (London: Routledge, 2013); and Steven Frye, Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009). See also David Holloway, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002); and Matthew Potts, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 13. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1930), 325. 14. George Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 35. 15. Malcolm Cowley, “ ‘Not Men’: A Natural History of American Naturalism,” Kenyon Review 9, no. 3 (1947): 414–35. 16. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), vii. 17. Lee Clark Mitchell, “Cinematic Adaptations,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 248–58. 18. Donald Pizer, “Introduction: The Problem of Definition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Realism and Naturalism: From Howells to London, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10, 11. For a thorough treatment of the critical inquiry into American literary naturalism, see Eric Carl Link, “Defining American Literary Naturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook to American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71–91. 19. Eric Carl Link, The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). 20. McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 247. All subsequent citations to McCarthy’s texts across the volume appear parenthetically by page number. See the bibliography for the full citation information for these texts. 21. See Frank Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” Wave 15 (June 27, 1896), 3, reprinted in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 71–72; and Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957). 22. Frank Norris, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1901, 14, reprinted in Pizer, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, 75–80.

Notes / 151 23. Herman Melville, “The Lightning-­Rod Man,” 1854, in Great Short Works of Herman Melville (New York: Perennial, 2004), 193. 24. Thomas H. Huxley, “Agnosticism,” Nineteenth Century, February 1889, reprinted in Christianity and Agnosticism: A Controversy (New York: Humboldt, 1889), 9–29. 25. Stephen Crane, “War Is Kind,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Robert Levine, 9th ed., vol. C, 1865–1914 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 1067. 26. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground and the Grand Inquisitor, 1864, 1880, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 1993), 14. 27. See Jay Ellis, No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2006). 28. See Ty Hawkins, Cormac McCarthy’s Philosophy (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 29. See Ashley Kunsa, “Mystery and Possibility in Cormac McCarthy,” Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 146–52. See also Petra Mundik, A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016).

Chapter 2 1. Mark T. Banker, Appalachians All: East Tennesseeans and the Elusive History of an American Region (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011). 2. Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1992. See also Dianne C. Luce, “The Archives and the Tennesee Years I: The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark,” in Cormac McCarthy in Context, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 281–87; and Luce, “The Archives and the Tennessee Years II: Child of God, The Gardener’s Son, and Suttree,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 288–99. 3. For detailed considerations of McCarthy relationship to the South and southern literary traditions, see Scott D. Yarbrough, “The South,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 13–22. See also Jay Watson, “William Faulkner,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 47–58; Lydia R. Cooper, “McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41–53; and Brian Evenson, “McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 54–66. 4. For a comprehensive and foundational treatment of McCarthy’s early southern novels, see Dianne C. Luce, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Pe­ riod (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009). 5. See Vereen M. Bell, “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy,” Southern Literary Journal 15, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 31–41. See also Vince Brewton, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy,” Southern Literary Journal 37, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 121–43. 6. For a thorough consideration of the pastoral as it relates to the South in McCarthy’s early novels, see John M. Grammer, “ ‘A Thing against Which Time Will Not Prevail’: Pastoral and History in Cormac McCarthy’s South,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 29–44.

152 / Notes 7. See David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Fischer’s discussion of the religious characteristic of the fourth migration is particularly relevant. 8. See William Prather, “ ‘Like Something Seen through Bad Glass’: Narrative Strategies in The Orchard Keeper,” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 37–54; David Paul Ragan, “Values and Structure in The Orchard Keeper,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 17–28. 9. Luce, Reading the World, 37. See also Barbara Jane Brickman, “Imposition and Resistance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper,” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2000): 123–34. 10. Natalie Grant, “The Landscape of the Soul: Man and the Natural World in The Orchard Keeper,” in Sacred  Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995), 61. 11. Ragan, “Values and Structure in The Orchard Keeper,” 18. 12. See Russell Hillier, “ ‘In a Dark Parody’ of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: The Presence of Subversive Allegory in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 19, no. 4 (2006): 52–59; William C. Spencer, “Cormac McCarthy’s Unholy Trinity: Biblical Parody in Outer Dark,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: A Reader’s Companion, 69–76; O. Alan Noble, “The Bible,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 98–106; and James Dorson, “The Judeo-­Christian Tradition,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 121–31. 13. For a detailed textual reading that deals with McCarthy’s consideration of a polyvalent naturalism in Outer Dark, see James R. Giles, “Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 95–106. 14. Vereen M. Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 15. Edwin T. Arnold, “Naming, Knowing, Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 47. 16. See Grammer, “A Thing against Which Time Will Not Prevail”; and Spencer, “Cormac McCarthy’s Unholy Trinity.” 17. Luce, Reading the World, 62. See also Christopher Metress, “Via Negativa: The Way of Unknowing in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark,” Southern Review 37, no. 1 (2001): 147–54. 18. Giles, “Outer Dark and Romantic Naturalism,” 95. 19. Donald Pizer, Twentieth-­Century American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 13. 20. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), vii. 21. Stephen Crane, The Black Riders, in Prose and Poetry, by Stephen Crane (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1314. 22. Crane, 1315. 23. See Cooper, “McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic”; and Chad M. Jewett, “Revising the Southern Myth: Persephone Violated in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and McCarthy’s Child of God,” Faulkner Journal 27, no. 1 (2013): 133–45. 24. John Lang, “Lester Ballard: McCarthy’s Challenge to the Reader’s Compassion,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: A Reader’s Companion, 87–94. 25. Gary M. Ciuba, “McCarthy’s Enfant Terrible: Mimetic Desire and Sacred  Vio-

Notes / 153 lence in Child of God,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: A Reader’s Companion, 77. 26. Luce, Reading the World, 134. 27. Grammer, “A Thing against Which Time Will Not Prevail,” 39. 28. See Travis Franks, “ ‘Talkin about Lester’: Community, Culpability, and Narrative Suppression in Child of God,” Mississippi Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2014): 75–97. 29. See Nell Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God,” in Wallach, Myth, Legend, Dust, 68–77.

Chapter 3 1. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, “Letters from an American Farmer: Letter III: What Is an American?,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Sandra M. Gustafson, 9th ed., vol. A, Beginnings to 1820 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 639–40. 2. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia: Query XIX: Manufactures,” in Gustafson, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. A, 721. 3. Recent reevaluations of environmental determinism have been articulated by historians such as William Cronon and Patricia Nelson Limerick. See William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987). 4. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His Work and His World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 3. 5. Thomas D. Young Jr., “The Imprisonment of Sensibility: Suttree,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 97. 6. For thoughtful historical context with respect to the social history informing Suttree, see William Prather, “ ‘The Color of This Life Is Water’: History, the River, and the Tennessee Valley Authority in Suttree,” in You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville, ed. Rick Wallach (Miami, FL: Cormac McCarthy Society, 2012), 27–41. 7. See Jay Watson, “Lighting Out of Civil Rights Territory, Suttree, the Quentin Problem, and the Historical Unconscious,” in Wallach, You Would Not Believe What Watches, 128–37. See also Noel Polk, “A Faulknerian Looks at Suttree,” in Wallach, You Would Not Believe What Watches, 62–77. 8. For a detailed consideration of race and social stratification in Suttree, see Karissa McCoy, “Whiteness and the ‘Subject’ of Waste: The Art of Slumming in Suttree,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 4, no. 1 (2005): 85–89. 9. See Young, “The Imprisonment of Sensibility.” 10. For a consideration of the concept of predestination as it emerges from regionally specific Appalachian folklore and values, particularly as it related to style, see Steven Frye, “Fate without Foreknowledge: Style and Image in the Late Naturalism of Suttree,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 4, no. 1 (2005): 184–94. 11. Dianne C. Luce, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 195. 12. See Bryan Giemza, “Mirror-­Image Asymmetry, Chirality, and Suttree,” European Journal of American Studies 12, no. 3 (2017). 13. See Patrick O’Connor, “Literature and Death: McCarthy, Blanchot, and Suttree’s Moral Becoming,” in Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Beyond Reckoning, ed. Chris Eagle (New York: Routledge, 2017), 73–92.

154 / Notes 14. D. S. Butterworth, “Pearls as Swine: Recentering the Marginal in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” in Sacred  Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995), 95. 15. Butterworth, 95–96. 16. William Prather, “Absurd Reasoning in an Existential World: A Consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: A Reader’s Companion, 104. For additional discussion of existential thought in McCarthy’s work, see John Ditsky, “Further into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy,” Hollins Critic 18 (1981): 1–11. 17. Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in Prose and Poetry, by Stephen Crane (New York: Library of America, 1996), 36–37.

Chapter 4 1. See John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Sandra M. Gustafson, 9th ed., vol. A, Beginnings to 1820 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 178–89. 2. See Neil Campbell, “Liberty beyond Its Proper Bounds: Cormac McCarthy’s History of the West in Blood Meridian,” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 217–26. 3. For an effective treatment of style and imagery, see Arthur Bingham, “Syntactic Complexity and Iconicity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Language and Literature 20 (1995): 19–33. 4. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” part 1, Egoist 6, no. 4 (September 1919): 55. 5. For a treatment of the aesthetic influences on Blood Meridian, including the carnivalesque and cinematic affect, see Steven Frye, “Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 107–20. For an even more comprehensive consideration of film adaptation potential, see Stacey Peebles, Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. 6. For a treatment of the distinction between “progressive” and “alternative” Western, see Richard Slotkin, Gunfigher Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­ Century America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). 7. For analyses of aesthetics as they relate to political themes in Blood Meridian, see Frye, “Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence”; John Beck, “Filibusters and Fundamentalists: Blood Meridian and the New Right,” in Polemics: Essays on American Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. David Holloway (Sheffield: Black Rock Press, 2004), 3–26; and Molly McBride, “From Mutilation to Penetration: Cycles of Conquest in Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses,” Southwestern American Literature 25, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 24–34. 8. For a thorough consideration of the tremendous influence of the romantic movement and related genre, see G. R. Thompson, “Herman Melville and the American Romance Tradition,” in Cormac McCarthy in Context, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 68–78; Dustin Anderson, “Romanticism,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 79–86. 9. See Nicholas Monk, “ ‘An Impulse to Action, an Undefined Want’: Modernity, Flight, and Crisis in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian,” in Sacred  Violence, ed.

Notes / 155 Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002), 83–104. 10. See Dana Philips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68, no. 2 (1996): 433–60; Michael Lynn Crews, “The San Marcos Archives: Blood Meridian and the West,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 288–99. 11. Samuel Chamberlain, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue (1861; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956). For a comprehensive account of the various historical sources that inform Blood Meridian, see John Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian, rev. and exp. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 12. See Joshua J. Masters, “ ‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 25–27. 13. Steven Shaviro, “ ‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 146. See also Vereen M. Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Rick Wallach, “From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystification of the Martial Code,” Southern Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1998): 113–20, reprinted in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, ed. James D. Lilley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 199–214. 14. Edwin T. Arnold, “Naming, Knowing, Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 65. 15. See Petra Mundik, “Terra Damnata: The Anticosmic Mysticism of Blood Meridian,” in Cormac McCarthy’s Borders and Landscapes, ed. Louise Jillett (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 29–43. 16. Leo Daugherty, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Trag­ edy,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 159–74. See also Benjamin West, “Gnosticism,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 132–42. 17. Dwight Eddins, “ ‘Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted’: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45, no. 1 (2003): 25–32. 18. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1992); and Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979). 19. See also David Williams, “Classical and Pre-­Classical Philosophy,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 143–54; Julius Greve, “Nineteenth-­and Twentieth-­ Century Philosophy,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 155–68. 20. This draft is collected in box 35, folder 1, Cormac McCarthy Papers, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University, San Marcos. 21. Émile Zola, quoted in James Joll and Gordon Martel, The Origins of the First World War, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007), 275–76. 22. See Mark Busby, “Rolling the Stone, Sisyphus, and the Epilogue of Blood Meridian,” Southwestern American Literature 36, no. 3 (2011): 87–95.

Chapter 5 1. For a textual reading of landscape and the interior life of character, see Steven Frye, “Wilderness Typology, American Scripture, and the Interpreter’s Eye: The In-

156 / Notes terior Landscapes of McCarthy’s Western Novels,” in Cormac McCarthy: Un­charted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, ed. Christine Chollier (Reims: University of Reims Press, 2003), 115–21. 2. See Daniel Cooper Alarcón, “All the Pretty Mexicos: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Representations,” in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, ed. James D. Lilley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 141–52; Mark Eaton, “Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 155–80; and Susan Kollin, “Genre and Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western,” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 557–88. 3. Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1992. 4. See Linda Woodson, “McCarthy’s Heroes and the Will to Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15–26; and Nicholas Monk, “Modernity,” in Cormac McCarthy in Context, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 227–35. 5. For a thorough treatment of McCarthy’s reconsideration of traditional concepts of heroism in an ethical context, see Lydia R. Cooper, No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); and Cooper, “The Southwest,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 23–32. 6. See Timothy Parrish, “History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 67–78; Linda Woodson, “ ‘The Lighted Display Case’: A Nietzschean Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction,” in Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Beyond Reckoning, ed. Chris Eagle (New York: Routledge, 2017), 126–41; Phillip A. Snyder, “Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 198–227; and John Wegner, “ ‘Wars and Rumors of Wars’ in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 73–91. 7. For compelling considerations of dreams and visions in McCarthy’s novels, see Edwin T. Arnold, “ ‘Go to Sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy,” in Arnold and Luce, A Cormac McCarthy Companion, 37–72; and Christopher T. White, “Dreaming the Border Trilogy: Cormac McCarthy and Narrative Creativity,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 13, no. 1 (2015): 121–42. For a gendered critique, see Nell Sullivan, “Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 167–85. 8. See Jacqueline Scoones, “The World on Fire: Ethics and Evolution in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Arnold and Luce, A Cormac McCarthy Companion, 131–60; and Parrish, “History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels.” 9. See Barkley Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000); and George Guillemin, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

Notes / 157 10. All the Pretty Horses was adapted into film in 2000 by Billy Bob Thornton. The production and distribution history was controversial, and the reception was problematic. For a complete discussion, see Stacey Peebles, Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); and Peebles, “McCarthy and Film,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 162–74. See also Lee Clark Mitchell, “Cinematic Adaptations,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 248–58; and Petra Mundik, “Cinematic Influences,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 259–70. 11. For a thorough discussion of heroism in McCarthy’s works in the context of models of masculinity, see John Dudley, “McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculin­ ity,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 3–14. 12. For a detailed treatment of the border experience as it relates to ethnicity and contact zones, see Nicholas Monk, “All the Pretty Horses, the Border, and Ethnic Encounter,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 121–32. 13. Nancy Kreml, “Stylistic Variations and Cognitive Constraint in All the Pretty Horses,” in Sacred  Violence, ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002), 37–50. 14. Dianne C. Luce, “ ‘When You Wake’: John Grady Cole’s Heroism in All the Pretty Horses,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 57–70. 15. Pierre Lagayette, “The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 79–94. See also Richard Walsh, “(Carrying the Fire on) No Road for Old Horses: Cormac McCarthy’s Untold Biblical Stories,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 24, no. 3 (2012): 339–51. 16. Gail Moore Morrison, “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 175. 17. For a detailed and objective treatment of the history of the Comanche Nation, see S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (New York: Scribner’s, 2010). 18. See Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), vii; Donald Pizer, Twentieth-­ Century American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 13; Eric Carl Link, “Defining American Literary Naturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook to American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71–91. 19. See Lydia R. Cooper, Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 20. For a detailed discussion of the Border Trilogy and The Road in the context of Cold War anxiety, see Lagayette, “The Border Trilogy, The Road, and the Cold War.” 21. For another reading of The Crossing as a naturalist novel, see Steven Frye, “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘World in Its Making’: Romantic Naturalism in The Crossing,” Studies in American Naturalism 2, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 46–65. 22. See Raymond Malewitz, “Narrative Disruption as Animal Agency in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 544–61. 23. Dianne C. Luce, “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 212.

158 / Notes 24. See O. Alan Noble, “Narrative, Being, and the Dialogic Novel: The Problem of Discourse and Language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing,” Western American Literature 47, no. 3 (2012): 236–57. 25. Molly McBride, “The Crossing’s Double Savagery: The Wolf, the Indian, and the Empire,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 71. 26. Stacey Peebles, “What Happens to Country: The World to Come in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 127. 27. See Jenny Bryant and Robert Bernasconi, “ ‘For the Other Only’: The Radical Existentialism of the Priest in The Crossing,” in Eagle, Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy, 142–51. 28. Scoones, “The World on Fire.” 29. See Charles Bailey, “The Last Stage of the Hero’s Evolution: Cormac McCar­ thy’s Cities of the Plain,” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 28–42. 30. Edwin T. Arnold, “First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain,” in Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, 222. 31. Wegner, “Wars and Rumors of Wars.” 32. See John Scaggs, “The Search for Lost Time: The Proustian Theme in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain,” in Chollier, Cormac McCarthy, 73–82. 33. Kim McMurtry, “ ‘Some Improvident God’: Metaphysical Explorations in Cormac McCarthy’s the Border Trilogy,” in Hall and Wallach, Sacred  Violence: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 143–58.

Chapter 6 1. For an account of McCarthy’s experiences and his relationship to the Santa Fe Institute, see Ciaran Dowd, “The Santa Fe Institute,” in Cormac McCarthy in Context, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 33–44; Nick Romeo, “Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy Halls,” Newsweek, February 2, 2012. 2. For a discussion of McCarthy’s interest in these subjects and categories, see Jay Ellis, “Science and Technology,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 180–94. 3. Quoted in Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1992. 4. For a comprehensive discussion of the romance tradition from its inception to the present, see G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link, Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 5. Frank Norris, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1901, 14, reprinted in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 75–80. 6. See Terrell Tebbetts, “Sanctuary Redux: Faulkner’s Logical Pattern of Evil in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men,” Philological Review 32, no. 1 (2006): 69–81. 7. For a discussion of the continued relevance of the novel/romance distinction first posited by Richard Chase, see George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 8. For a treatment of McCarthy’s engagement with political and historical con-

Notes / 159 text in the modern and contemporary moments, see David Holloway, “North American Politics,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 197–206. For other contextual studies, see also John Dudley, “Race and Cultural Difference,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 207–15; and Susan Kollin, “Ecology,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 216–26. 9. Again, there is some controversy in recent decades about the legitimacy of the novel/romance tradition articulated by Richard Chase. An archival study of the periodical literature in the nineteenth century together with a theoretical rearticulation and affirmation of the bifurcation of genres appears in Thompson and Link, Neutral Ground. 10. Kenneth Turan, “Coen’s Brutal Brilliance Again on Display,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2007, 1. 11. See Stacey Peebles, Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); and Peebles, “McCarthy and Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 162–74. See also Lee Clark Mitchell, “Cinematic Adaptations,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 248–58; and Petra Mundik, “Cinematic Influences,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 259–70. 12. Ron McFarland, “Mapping Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men,” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 58, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 442. 13. Benjamin Mangrum, “Democracy, Justice, and Tragedy in Cormac McCar­ thy’s No Country for Old Men,” Religion and Literature 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 107–33. 14. Francisco Collado-­Rodríguez, “Trauma and Storytelling in Cormac McCar­ thy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal of Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 48 (Winter 2012): 45. 15. Lydia R. Cooper, “ ‘He’s a Psychological Killer but So What?’: Folklore and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal of Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 45, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 38. 16. See David Holloway, “Mapping McCarthy in the Age of Neoconservatism, or the Politics of Affect in The Road,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 4–26. 17. Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995), 3. 18. The Road was adapted into film by John Hillcoat in 2009. For thorough discussion of the adaptation process, see Peebles, Cormac McCarthy and Performance; and Peebles, “McCarthy and Film.” See also Mitchell, “Cinematic Adaptations”; and Mundik, “Cinematic Influences.” 19. See Olivia Carr Edenfield, “Ernest Hemingway,” in Frye, Cormac McCarthy in Context, 59–67. 20. See Laura Gruber Godfrey, “ ‘The World He’d Lost’: Geography and ‘Green’ Memory in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Critique 52, no. 2 (2011): 163–75. 21. See Gabriella Blasi, “Reading Allegory and Nature in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Towards a Non-­Anthropocentric Vision of the Language of Nature,” Arcadia 49, no. 1 (2014): 89–102. 22. See Lydia R. Cooper, Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

160 / Notes 23. Adeline Johns-­Putra, “ ‘My Job Is to Take Care of You’: Climate Change, Humanity, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 62 (Fall 2016): 520. See also Paul Sheehan, “Road, Fire, Trees: Cormac McCarthy’s Post-­ America,” in Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, ed. Julian Murphet and Mark Steven (London: Continuum, 2012), 38–54; and Paul Patton, “McCarthy’s Fire,” in Murphet and Steven, Styles of Extinction, 31–43. 24. Jordan J. Dominy, “Cannibalism, Consumerism, and Profanation: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the End of Capitalism,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 13 (2015): 143. 25. Derek J. Thiess, “On The Road to Santa Fe: Complexity in Cormac McCar­ thy and Climate Change,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 20 (Summer 2013): 533. See also Markus Wierschem, “The Other End of The Road: Re-­Reading McCarthy in Light of Thermodynamics and Information Theory,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–22. 26. See Sean Pryor, “McCarthy’s Rhythm,” in Murphet and Steven, Styles of Extinction, 27–44. 27. Lydia R. Cooper, “The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative,” Studies in the Novel 5 (Spring 2019): 174. 28. Cooper, 191. 29. O. Alan Noble, “The Absurdity of Hope in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” South Atlantic Review 76 (Summer 2011): 95. 30. Bill Hardwig, “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a ‘World to Come,’ ” Studies in American Naturalism 8 (Summer 2013): 39. 31. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975). 32. See Olivia Carr Edenfield, “A Different Kind of Love Story: Cormac McCar­ thy’s The Road,” in A Companion to the American Novel, ed. Alfred Bendixen (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 582–97. 33. Allen Josephs, “The Quest for God in The Road,” in Frye, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 133.

Chapter 7 1. John Jurgensen, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy,” Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2009. 2. James Turner, Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 4. 3. Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 4. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 368 (original emphasis). 5. Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995), 227. 6. For a discussion of religion in McCarthy’s fiction, see Manuel Broncano, Religion in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands (New York: Routledge, 2016). The idea of emergence in McCarthy’s work is discussed in Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, The Re-­Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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INDEX Abbey, Edward, 146 Abraham, 105 absurd, the, 56, 114–16, 137–38, 146 Academy Awards, 119 adaptation: the city and, 52, 54–56, 58, 107; in Cold War era, 105; consciousness’s role in, 96, 101–2; in contact zone of border, 81, 87, 90– 91, 93–94, 103, 109; in pervasively violent world, 123, 125, 127–29; in picaresque/travel narratives, 68–69; in the South, 24, 26–28, 41, 45; the West/Southwest and, 65–66, 81–87. See also evolution; natural selection; survival Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 68 aesthetic of influence, 2, 54, 56, 60, 66, 117 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 17 agnosticism, 12, 143 agrarian spaces, 21, 23, 32, 50–51, 65, 82 Alleghenies, 23, 28, 65 allegory, 31, 39–40 All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), 81–92; and American dreams of freedom, 81–84; anachronistic hero in, 84–87, 109; coin toss in, 89, 114, 126; dignity/nobility in, 79, 83, 106; dueña Alfonsa and troubled history of Mexico in, 89–90, 93–94, 114; film adaptation of, 157n10; glimpse of

beauty in, 18, 91–92, 142; historical moment of, 84–85, 94, 104; horse as emblem in, 88–89; and meaning in human experience, 13, 18, 89–92; naturalistic vision in, 9–10; success of, 113, 120 American Tragedy, An (Dreiser), 16–17, 52 animality (of humans), 14, 43–45, 47–49 animals: birds, 29–30, 46; boars/bison, 47, 83, 86; cattle/livestock, 67, 81, 83–85, 88, 91, 94; dogs, 15, 47, 62– 63, 104; horses, 19, 83, 85–89, 95, 109, 123; leveled with humans, 7–8, 92–93, 102; panther, 29; she-wolf, 10–11, 81, 94–96, 103–4; squirrel, 36; whale, 72, 80–81, 83, 118 Anthropocene, 130, 146 Apache, 69, 76 apocalypse: post-1945 fears of, 104–7, 128–29, 131; and postapocalyptic space/genre, 129–34. See also Road, The Appalachia, 19, 22–28, 32, 53, 65 archaisms, 25 archons, 3, 71 Aristotle, 118 Arnold, Edwin T., 33, 71, 106 associationism, 50–51 atavism, 5, 7, 9–10, 15, 42–43 atom bomb, 104–7, 128–29 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 65

172 / Index Baptists, 24 Bardem, Javier, 119 “Batard” (London), 47 beauty: glimpsed in a flower, 18, 91–92, 142; of land/nature, 1, 30, 46, 68, 80–82, 120, 129; perverted, 44; and truth, 4, 112, 142; and violence/suffering, 18, 30, 91, 116, 142 Becker, George, 6 Bell, Vereen M., 33, 71 benevolence, 15, 26, 31, 40, 46, 63, 71, 89, 95, 116, 124 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 77 Bible: Exodus, 64–65, 133; Genesis, 105; as influence on McCarthy, 2, 31, 66; Outer Dark and, 31, 33, 35– 36, 40; prophets in, 40, 136; rhetoric of, 100. See also Christianity Big Valley, The (TV series), 67 bildungsroman, 52, 56 “Birches” (Frost), 30 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 117 Black Riders, The (Crane), 37 blindness, 37–40, 91, 95, 98–101, 109, 128 Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West (McCarthy), 64–79; coiner in, 72–73, 89, 114, 126; Gnostic metaphysics in, 71–73, 76, 89, 114; human spirit in the wilderness in, 12, 78–79, 143; Judge Holden as embodiment of evil in, 72–73, 77–78, 109, 125; Judge Holden’s philosophy of war in, 13, 18, 69–71, 76–78; language use in, 85; and myth of the West, 64–69, 118; naturalistic vision in, 9–10; and picaresque and travel narrative, 68–69; plight of human consciousness in, 73–76, 90; source and plot of, 69–71, 80; “unguessed kinships” in, 10, 78–79, 147 Blood Simple (Coen brothers film), 119 Boehme, Jacob, 79 Bonanza (TV series), 67 Book of Exodus, 64–65, 133 Book of Genesis, 105 Book of Matthew, 31 Boone, Daniel, 42, 65

Border Trilogy (McCarthy): as artistic whole, 81, 96, 107, 118; heroes in, 79, 105–6; setting of, 9, 80–81, 87, 93–94, 104–5; success of, 113, 119–20. See also All the Pretty Horses; Cities of the Plain; Crossing, The Brolin, Josh, 119 brotherhood. See human connection Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), 70, 115 brutality. See violence brute, the, figure of, 41–44, 48, 52, 125, 142 Butterworth, D. S., 56 Caballo en Pelo, 70 Caldwell, Erskine, 32 Call of the Wild, The (London), 6, 15, 47 Camus, Albert, 56, 114–16, 137–38 Cannes Film Festival, 119 cannibalism, 129, 131, 134–35, 138 capitalism, 17, 52, 66–67, 76, 83, 93, 131 Carlyle, Thomas, 118 carnivalesque, 108–9 Catholicism, 19 cave paintings, 93 Chamberlain, Samuel, 69 Chase, Richard, 10, 159n9 Child, Lydia Maria, 117 Child of God (McCarthy), 40–49; animality in, 43–45, 47–49; Ballard as the brute in, 41–44, 48, 52, 125, 142; naturalistic vision in, 9, 21, 48–49; social stratification in, 42, 44–46 Christ, 63, 133 Christianity, 11–12, 19, 24, 32, 107, 132, 136, 140. See also Bible; divine, the; Judeo-Christian framework Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 52 Churchill, Winston, 77 Cities of the Plain (McCarthy), 104–12; contact zone in, 81, 107–8; historical moment of, 104–7; material determinism in, 109–11; naturalistic vision in, 9–10; setting/plot of, 105–6; tavern/pimp as externalization of depravity in, 108–10; traveler’s metaphysical dream in, 110–12

Index / 173 Ciuba, Gary M., 41 Civil War, 32, 51, 53 class system: harsh weight of, 44–46, 58, 122; middle-class suburbia and, 104– 5; naturalist/realist focus on, 6, 21, 34–35, 38; in urban environments, 16–17, 52–54, 56 closed systems, 89, 110–11, 114. See also determinism Coen, Joel and Ethan, 119 coins/coin toss, 72–73, 89, 114, 126–27 Cold War, 85, 104–7, 128 Collado-Rodríguez, Francisco, 120 Comanche, 70, 86 community. See human connection complexity science, 3–5, 89–90, 113, 127, 131, 137, 143–44 “conflict thesis,” 144–45 confusion, 37, 59 contact zones, 81, 87, 93–94, 107–8 Cooper, James Fenimore, 10, 24, 65–66, 117 Cooper, Lydia R., 120–21, 131 Cormac McCarthy Society, 3–4 corrido, 95 Counselor, The (McCarthy), 10, 114–16 Cowan, George, 3 Cowley, Malcolm, 6–7 Crane, Stephen: city in works of, 6, 9, 16, 51–52, 57, 81; human awareness in, 13, 34, 36–37, 62; human connection in, 7–8, 13–14, 106; malevolence of nature in, 30 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 15, 70 Crossing, The (McCarthy), 92–104; blind man’s story of brutality and insight in, 95, 98–101, 109; dignity/nobility in, 79, 106; gitano’s story of act of ritual in, 95, 101–3; historical moment of, 94, 104, 106; and human propensity to create stories, 92–96; naturalistic vision in, 9–10, 92–93, 103–4; plot/ characters/setting of, 94–95; priest’s story of tragic resilience in, 95–98; real and otherworldly in, 11, 111; she­wolf in, 10–11, 81, 94–96, 103–4; witnessing in, 93–96, 98–99, 103–4, 112

Daniel, Robert, 20 Dante Alighieri, 2, 60 Darwin, Charles, 6, 38, 52, 106, 114, 120, 137, 144. See also evolution; natural selection Daugherty, Leo, 71 David Copperfield (Dickens), 52 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 52 decency, 43, 46, 78–79, 106, 123, 142 Defoe, Daniel, 52 Delbanco, Andrew, 51, 128–29, 145–46 demiurges, 71, 73–74, 76, 114 Descartes, René, 75 detective fiction, 5, 118–19, 121 determinism: biological, 9, 18, 35–36, 61, 74–75, 92, 128, 136, 145; environmental, 50–52; historical, 89; materialist, 6, 33–35, 89, 94, 109–11, 114, 116; multilayered, 33–37, 88–90; naturalist, 7, 17, 40; philosophical, 9, 89; psychological, 35–37; rigid, 121, 123–27. See also indifference of natural world; natural laws dialectic, 9, 70, 115, 118 Dickens, Charles, 52 “divided stream,” 7, 10, 14, 35, 88, 102 divine, the: and deterministic world, 110– 11, 115–16, 135–36; and historical views of God, 143–44; manifest in human existence/connection, 75, 132, 136, 139–40; manifest in material world, 64–65, 86, 137, 140; and natural law, 88–90, 101–3; prayer as acknowledgment of, 136, 139–40; as specter in McCarthy’s works, 143, 146; war and, 13, 18, 69–71, 76–78; as weaver-god, 72, 95–97, 99, 111, 114 Divine Comedy (Dante), 2 diviners, 48–49 Dominy, Jordan J., 131 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 2, 15–16, 70, 115 doubt, 11–12, 37, 74–75, 118, 137, 147 Draper, John William, 144 dread, 11, 36–37, 94 dreams and dreaming, 38–39, 61–62, 72–73, 108–12, 119, 124, 128 Dreiser, Theodore, 6, 9, 16–17, 34, 51–52, 81

174 / Index “Drowning Incident, A” (McCarthy), 20 drug trade, 105, 116, 121–24, 126 Eastwood, Clint, 67, 118 Einstein, Albert, 137 Elijah, 136 Eliot, T. S., 2, 54, 66, 146 Elisha, 136 El Paso, Texas, 9, 80, 105 emblematic characters/figures, 29, 38–39, 58, 88, 104, 125–26 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 118 Enlightenment, 3, 74–76, 128, 134 Erdrich, Louise, 8 Erskine, Albert, 25 eschatology, 107 everyman figure, 111, 125 evil: and conflict with good, 32, 40, 65, 135; embodiment of, 72–73, 77–78, 98, 108–10, 121, 136–37; as entropy, 100; as essential to human survival, 145–46; as force of nature, 121–22, 124, 134; Gnostic view of, 71–73; as jointly human and natural, 128–31, 134–35. See also Satan evolution, 14, 61, 74, 89, 92, 96, 102, 141, 144–46. See also adaptation; natural selection; survival evolutionary psychology, 145–46 existentialism, 15, 56, 114–16, 132, 136–38, 140, 146 existential isolation. See isolation “Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 118 Fargo (Coen brothers film), 119 fatalism, 17, 24, 26, 34–36 fate, 22, 27–30, 73, 102–3, 110–11, 114–15, 124–25 Faulkner, William, 2, 8–9, 20, 22, 24– 25, 31–32, 117, 146 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 132 Ferngren, Gary B., 144 Figaro (newspaper), 77 Filson, John, 65 Financier, The (Dreiser), 16–17, 52 Fistful of Dollars, A (Leone film), 67

Flaubert, Gustave, 6 For a Few Dollars More (Leone film), 67 Ford, John, 67 free will, 59, 114, 118, 127–28 Freud, Sigmund, 137 frontier: and collective world imaginary, 1, 82; mythic figures of, 22, 24–28, 83–85; urban transformation of, 53; and the Western, 64–66, 69. See also nature; wilderness Frost, Robert, 30, 146 Gardener’s Son, The (McCarthy), 20–21 Gell-Mann, Murray, 3, 113 Genealogy of Morals, The (Nietzsche), 77 geological time. See time Giles, James R., 33 Glanton, John Joel, 69–70 Glasgow, Ellen, 32 global warming, 92 Gnosticism, 5, 71–73, 76, 89, 114 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 24–25 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (Leone film), 67 gothic, 21, 32–33, 36, 66, 118 grail legend, 131 Grammer, John M., 33, 41–42 Grand Canyon, 82 Grant, Natalie, 25 Great Depression, 53, 104 Great Expectations (Dickens), 52 grotesque, 20–21, 36, 42, 44, 46–47 Hard Times (Dickens), 52 Hardwig, Bill, 132 haruspices, 48–49 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 10, 32, 66, 117–18 Hemingway, Ernest, 2, 8, 25, 63, 146 Heraclitus, 77 heroism, 13, 27, 79, 81, 84–85, 105–6 High Chaparral, The (TV series), 67 High Plains Drifter (Eastwood film), 67 Hillcoat, John, 159n18 Hiroshima, 128 “historical sense,” 2, 66 Hitler, Adolf, 77 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 17, 34

Index / 175 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 118 human agency: as circumscribed by array of forces, 71, 81, 109, 124–25, 135–36; denied, 36, 111, 121–22; and finality of coin toss, 89–90, 114, 126–27; as limited in naturalism, 6, 13, 34; and propensity for evil, 128–31, 135 human connection: and brotherhood of workers, 13, 63, 79, 90–91, 105–6; built in the wilderness, 64–65, 135; and hope amid darkness, 7–8, 40, 63, 139; kinship and, 10, 78–79, 147; loss of, at death, 137; as manifestation of the divine, 132, 136, 139–40; on the margins of society, 54, 58; as moral ground on deserted landscape, 121, 123–24; and recognition of self in other, 48; and shared experience of witness, 93–96, 98–99, 103–4, 111–12; as source of meaning and sustenance, 18, 90–91, 115–16. See also storytelling human consciousness: and act of perception, 16, 25, 92, 95–96, 98, 102, 129; as adaptive mechanism, 96, 101–2; and brain, 61, 74–75; and capacity to comprehend world, 88–92; and creativity/storytelling, 29, 92–96, 104, 111–12, 120, 146; amid heartless/unknowable universe, 73–76, 89–90, 95–98, 102–3; McCarthy’s form and, 30, 122; and redemptive power of longing/searching, 131–32, 140–41; religion as defining force in, 144–45; and the soul, 5, 62–63, 70– 71, 79, 128; and tragedy of awareness, 59–61, 110–12, 115, 137–38, 146. See also dreams and dreaming humanism, 7–9, 87, 99, 130–31 humor, 29, 119, 125 hunts and hunting, 47, 62–63, 94 Huxley, Thomas, 12 Iago (character), 72, 77 incest, 34–35, 39, 41, 45 indifference of natural world: on the

frontier, 68–70, 72–74, 79; hope amid, 13, 18, 91, 123, 140; in liminal realm of border, 81, 84, 86, 90, 93, 110–11; limited agency amid, 13, 46, 127–28; vs. malevolence, 120–22, 133–34, 140; naturalist worldview and, 5, 8, 10, 13–17, 22, 24, 26–28, 32, 102, 142; polyvalence of, 59–60, 70–71, 133–34; triune as embodiment of, 36–40; urban representation of, 52–53, 56, 58, 61, 63; weaver-god and, 72, 95–97, 99, 111, 114. See also determinism; natural laws Indigenous populations. See Native American populations Industrial Revolution, 16–17, 23, 50–52, 57 Ingram Merrill Award, 20 interlaced narrative strands, 24, 48, 121–22 Iron Age, 28 Iron Heel, The (London), 16 Irving, Washington, 68 isolation, 30, 34–35, 40, 48, 63, 74, 79, 95, 104, 147 Israelites, 64–65, 105, 133 italicization, 24, 29–30, 38, 57, 122 Jackson, Samuel L., 115 Jałochowski, Karol, 4 James, Henry, 6 Jefferson, Thomas, 23, 50–51 Johns-Putra, Adeline, 131 Jones, Tommy Lee, 114–15, 119 Josephs, Allen, 140 Joyce, James, 56 Judeo-Christian framework, 39, 64, 71, 76, 124. See also Christianity Jurgensen, John, 143 Kant, Immanuel, 118 Keats, John, 4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 116, 132, 136 King James Bible. See Bible kinship, 10, 78–79, 147 Knoxville, Tennessee, 1, 19–22, 24, 51, 53–58, 61–63 Korean conflict, 107

176 / Index Krakauer, David, 3–5 Kreml, Nancy, 85 Lagayette, Pierre, 85 Lang, John, 41 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 65 LeConte, Joseph, 14 Leone, Sergio, 67, 118 Letters from an American Farmer (St. John de Crèvecoeur), 50 leveling of human and animal/nature: humanistic value amid, 7–8, 92–93, 102, 130–32, 147; naturalist worldview and, 10, 56, 85, 107–8, 134 Lewis, Sinclair, 8, 15, 52 Life in the Iron Mills (Davis), 52 “Ligeia” (Poe), 118 “Lightning-Rod Man, The” (Melville), 11–12 limbo/purgatory, 31, 36 liminal space, 38, 81, 98–99, 105 Lincoln, Abraham, 21 Link, Eric Carl, 8, 17, 33, 88 literary naturalism: conceptualized (romance and realism), 5–11, 117–19; “divided stream” of, 7, 10, 14, 35, 88, 102; plot of decline in, 14, 17, 42–44, 48; polyvalent response to modernity in, 7–8, 11–18, 61; scientific inquiry and, 2–5, 90; search for truth and, 17–18, 73–75, 146; urbanity and, 9, 14, 16–17, 51–53, 57–58, 61, 107–8 Locke, John, 75 London, Jack: figure of the brute in, 9, 15, 38, 42–43, 47, 52, 62–63; malevolent force of nature in, 15, 30, 121–22; naturalist world in, 6, 15–16, 51–52, 81 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot), 54 Luce, Dianne C., 25, 33, 41, 55, 85, 95 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” 113 Madero brothers, 90, 94 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 6, 14, 34, 52, 57 malevolence. See evil

Mangrum, Benjamin, 120 Mani, 71 Manichaeism, 32 manifest destiny, 66, 70, 117 Man with No Name Trilogy (Leone), 67 Martin Eden (London), 52 Marx, Karl, 137 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 65 material contingency: economic/urban, 33–35, 55, 58–59, 61; force of nature and, 38, 53, 102, 122, 144, 146; the wilderness and, 68, 74, 79, 86 mathematics, 5, 73, 101, 144 McBride, Molly, 96 McCarthy, Cormac: and aesthetic of influence, 2, 54, 56, 60, 66, 117; artistic practice of, 2, 80; and literary naturalist tradition, 5, 8–9, 17–18, 51–52, 113, 146–47; at Santa Fe Institute, 2–4, 12, 89, 113, 127, 143; youth/education of, 1, 19–22, 53, 55, 57, 133, 143. See also individual texts McFarland, Ron, 120 McMurtry, Kim, 107 McMurtry, Larry, 8, 118, 146 McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Norris), 10, 14, 43, 52, 121 Melville, Herman: historical moment of, 12, 51; literary tradition of, 2, 4, 10– 12, 32, 66, 81, 117–18; weaver-god of, 72, 95–97, 99, 111, 114 memory, 1, 24, 30, 36, 90, 101–2, 122– 23, 128, 140 “Mending Wall” (Frost), 30 metaphysics: and animal emblems/ embodiments of nature, 10–11, 29, 81, 88–89, 94–96, 103–4; and human awareness of time and death, 110–12, 115, 137–38, 146; and materiality, 48–49, 102–3; and Suttree’s transcendent vision, 60–63; of world bound to God, 129, 139–40. See also beauty; Gnosticism; gothic metonyms, 28, 47, 55, 69, 81, 87, 108–9, 121 Mexican Revolution, 90, 94–95, 98 Mexico, 10, 69–70, 80–81, 87, 89–90, 93–94, 98, 110

Index / 177 Miller’s Crossing (Coen brothers film), 119 Milton, John, 60, 72 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 7 Moby-Dick (Melville), 72, 81, 95–99, 111, 114, 118 “Model of Christian Charity, A” (Winthrop), 65 modernism, 5, 9, 22, 56, 137 modernity: and changed relation to the land, 1, 85, 91; force of, in the rural South, 21–24, 53, 55–56; literary naturalism’s polyvalent response to, 11–18; religious/scientific doubt in, 11–12, 137; technological, 22–23, 28, 50–51, 59–60, 82, 104–5; violence/brutality of, 13–16. See also urbanization/urbanity Moll Flanders (Defoe), 52 monstrosity: of built environment, 46; of humans, 5, 7, 14, 34, 41, 43–45, 69, 77; of nature, 14, 26, 40, 47; of underworld, 60 moral/ethical machinery, 33, 37, 43–44, 71, 86, 99–100 Morrill Act, 21 Morrison, Gail Moore, 85 Morrison, Marion (John Wayne), 66–67 Morrison, Toni, 146 Moses, 64–65 murder: in Blood Meridian, 76; in the Border Trilogy, 87, 95, 103; in No Country for Old Men, 120, 122–23, 126; in The Road, 135–36; in Tennessee Period novels, 21–22, 39, 41–44. See also violence Mussel Slough Tragedy, 14 mystery. See metaphysics Myth of Sisyphus, The (Camus), 56, 115, 138 mythology and mythic figures: blind seers, 40, 99, 109; Boone/Bumppo, 65–66; centurion, 31, 36; force of, 64–65, 92–93, 96, 112, 146; frontiersman, 22, 24–28; haruspices, 48–49; manifest destiny and, 66, 70, 117; Nordic, 27–28; and the pastoral, 33, 64; romance and, 6,

10; roughnecks/ranchers, 83–85; underworld traveler, 60; Valkyrie, 27–28; and the West, 64–69, 85, 96, 117; and the wilderness, 27–28, 64–65, 133, 136–37. See also Satan; storytelling Nagasaki, 128 Native American populations, 54, 67, 69–70, 76, 82–83, 86–87, 95 Native Son (Wright), 52 naturalism: as active force of destruction, 121–22, 137; conceptualized, 5–6; scientific, 8, 137; urban, 54. See also literary naturalism; philosophical naturalism; romantic naturalism natural laws: human meaning in, 99–103; inexorable nature of, 22, 26–28, 38, 96, 107–9, 140, 144, 146; and matrix of cause and effect, 49, 73, 89, 97–100, 109–10, 116, 121, 126–27, 132; sin as violation of, 39; tangible/material nature of, 74, 78– 79, 81; and tension with human consciousness, 15–16, 33, 87–88, 90; in urban spaces, 16–17, 51, 53, 58, 61. See also determinism; indifference of natural world natural selection, 5, 7–8, 15–17, 28, 144–45. See also adaptation; evolution; survival nature: beauty of, 1, 18, 30, 46, 68, 80– 82, 91–92, 120, 129; as destructive, 46–47, 71, 77, 106, 121–22, 124, 128, 130–31, 134, 142; and the divine, 64–65, 86, 88–89, 97–99, 101; inexorable primacy of, 30; and limits of human knowledge, 75–76; “maps and mazes” of, 140–41; as monstrous, 14, 26, 40, 47; outer projection of, 38, 40, 70–71, 94, 121; and the primordial, 25–27, 86; repose in, 61–63; vulnerability of, 129–31. See also animals; indifference of natural world; leveling of human and animal/ nature necessity, 11, 98, 102–3, 114, 118 necrophilia, 9, 42–43

178 / Index Neoplatonism, 5 New England transcendentalism. See transcendentalism “new science,” 6–8, 10–12, 137 Newton, Isaac, 75 New York City, 51 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 15, 42, 72, 77, 120 nihilism, 33, 71, 121, 131, 137–38 Nobel, O. Alan, 132 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), 117–28; Bell’s reflections on violence and redemption in, 122–24, 128; Chigurh’s malevolent determinism in, 15, 125–27; coin toss in, 114, 126–27; film adaptation of, 118–20; language/form of, 120–22; Moss’s struggle to survive in, 124–25; social world of, 115, 122; and Western genre, 117–19 “no known paradigm,” 1, 57 Nordic myths, 27–28 Norris, Frank: bestial characters of, 9, 38, 42–43, 52, 121–22; on naturalism and romance, 10–11, 117–18; naturalist novels of, 6, 14–16, 34, 51–52 Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky), 15–16 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 51 nuclear age/disaster, 92, 104–7, 128–30 O’Connor, Flannery, 20 Octopus: A Story of California, The (Norris), 10, 14 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 4 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 52 “Open Boat, The” (Crane), 7–8, 62, 106 Orchard Keeper, The (McCarthy), 21–31; historical change and, 21–24, 28; influences on, 24–25; mythic frontiersman in, 22, 24–28; naturalistic vision in, 9, 21–22, 29–31; panther and sparrow hawk imagery in, 29–30; primordial imagery in, 25–27; setting/plot of, 22, 42 O’Sullivan, John, 117

Outer Dark (McCarthy), 31–40; Bible and, 31, 33, 35–36, 40; blindness in, 38–40; influences on, 31–32; multilayered determinism in, 33–37; naturalistic vision in, 9, 21; setting/plot of, 32–33, 42; triune in, 9, 33–34, 36–40 Outlaw Josey Wales, The (Eastwood film), 67 Paleolithic Period, 93 parable, 31–33, 39–40, 90, 115 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 6 Passenger, The (McCarthy), 144 pastoral, the, 33, 50–51, 64 Patinkin, Sheldon, 114 Payne, Roger, 80 Pearce, Richard, 20 Peckinpah, Sam, 67, 117–18 Peebles, Stacey, 96 People of the Abyss, The (London), 16, 52 perversion, 31–32, 34–35, 39, 42, 44–46, 48 Petry, Ann, 52 philosophical naturalism, 5–6, 8, 13–16, 61, 74, 114, 137 philosophy, 2, 5, 10–11, 18, 77, 114, 132, 137, 144 Phoenix (literary magazine), 20 picaresque, 54, 68–69 Pit, The (Norris), 10, 14–15 Pizer, Donald, 7–8, 17, 33–34, 88 Plato, 118 Platonism, 5, 100, 103 Plotinus, 118 plot of decline, 14, 17, 42–44, 48 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 32, 117–18 polyphony, 15–17 polysyndeton, 25 polyvalence: of literary naturalism, 7–8, 11–18, 61; McCarthy’s, 5, 59–62; of nature’s indifference and destruction, 59–60, 70–71, 133–34; of romance in America, 66–68 positivism, 11, 74–75 postapocalyptic, the, 129–34. See also Road, The posthumanism, 130, 146

Index / 179 Prather, William, 56 Presbyterians, 24 primordial, the, 25–27, 86 process theology, 145 progress: creativity and, 92–93; and effect on environment, 51, 54, 104–5; onslaught of, 27, 30; reaction and, 1, 22–23, 32 Progressive Era, 14, 17 purgatory/limbo, 31, 36 Puritans, 65, 134 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe), 5 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 11 Pyramids, 92 Quechan (Yuma) Indians, 70, 76 Ragan, David Paul, 25 ranching, 67, 81, 83–85, 88, 91, 94, 104–6 Rawhide (TV series), 67 realism, 6–7, 10–11, 29, 54–55, 57, 117–18 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 6, 36 reformist ethos, 13–17 regionalism, 24, 29, 38, 55 religion, 143–46. See also Bible; Christianity; divine, the ritual, 71, 78, 101–3, 108, 112, 133–34, 136, 139–40 Road, The (McCarthy), 128–41; the boy’s messianic status in, 134–36; Ely as Satan figure in, 133–34, 136–37; figuration of landscape in, 132–34; film adaptation of, 159n18; human and natural evil in, 128–31, 134–35; humanism of, 18, 114, 120, 130–32, 138; the man’s brutality in, 130, 134–36; the man’s faith in, 138–40, 143; naturalistic vision in, 9–10, 140–41; post-1945 context of, 128–29; postapocalyptic world of, 129–34; success of, 113; the woman’s nihilism in, 131, 137–38 romance/romanticism: disabusing of, 110; dual strains of, 10–11, 66, 117–19; and emblematic characters, 125; frontier, 64, 68, 83–85, 117; the

gothic and, 21, 32–33, 36, 66, 118; historical, 20, 22, 24, 27, 32; medieval, 131, 133; vs. realism/rationality, 3, 5–7, 10–11, 54, 117–18, 145; Sir Walter Scott and, 20, 117. See also mythology and mythic figures romantic naturalism: blended spiritual and material dimension of, 24, 33, 37, 59–60, 62–63, 75; physical grotesque in, 46; religious systems and, 39, 41, 73, 135 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 23, 104 Roosevelt, Theodore, 77 sacrament. See ritual Sade, Marquis de, 77 Santa Fe Institute (SFI), 2–5, 12, 89– 90, 113, 127, 143 Sartre, Jean Paul, 114, 137 Satan, 65, 72, 77, 124, 130, 133–34, 136–37. See also evil Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 118 Schlegel, Friedrich, 118 science: climate science, 92, 130–31; destructive potential of, 76, 92, 104– 7, 128–29, 131; doubt in, 11–12, 74–75; “new science,” 6–8, 10–12, 137; as ordering principle, 96; religion and, 143–46. See also complexity science scientific naturalism, 8, 137 Scientific Revolution, 143 Scoones, Jacqueline, 96 Scott, Ridley, 115 Scott, Walter, 20, 117 Searchers, The (Ford film), 67 Sea Wolf, The (London), 6, 15–16, 38, 42–43, 62 Second World War, 94, 103–4, 107, 114, 128, 137 Shakespeare, William, 2, 60, 72, 77, 92 Shaviro, Steven, 71 Simms, William Gilmore, 10, 24, 66, 117 sin, 31, 33, 37, 39, 144–45 Sinclair, Upton, 52 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 16–17, 34, 52 social class. See class system

180 / Index Sodom and Gomorrah, 105 South, the: historical change in, 21–24, 28; McCarthy’s youth in, 1, 19–22; urbanization of, 1, 20, 41, 51, 53, 57–58, 61 southern gothic, 21, 32–33, 36, 66, 118 Southwest, the: contact zone of, 81, 87, 107–8; drug trade in, 121–24; history/historical imagination of, 81–83, 86; humor of, 29; landscape of, 76, 80, 82, 107–8; roughnecks/ranchers and, 67, 81, 83–85, 88, 91, 94, 104–6; urbanization of, 104, 107–8. See also West, the; Western genre Spencer, Herbert, 6, 52 Spencer, William C., 33 Stegner, Wallace, 146 Stella Maris (McCarthy), 144 Steppenwolf Theatre, 114 Sterne, Laurence, 52 St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector, 50 Stonemason, The (McCarthy), 2, 20–21 storytelling: of acts of ritual, 101–3; of brutality and insight, 98–101; exaggeration in, 29; human need for, 92– 96, 111–12, 146; of resilience, 96–98; and traumatic pain, 120; of violence and devotion, 122–23; witness to, 93–96, 98–99, 103–4, 111–12. See also mythology and mythic figures Street, The (Petry), 52 suicide, 41, 115, 131, 137–38 Sunset Limited, The (McCarthy), 10, 114–16, 138 survival: animalistic instinct for, 15, 34, 36, 38–39, 43, 47, 94, 126, 129; at the border, 13, 87, 90–91, 105, 107; and domination, 67, 70, 83, 92, 126; extreme/postapocalyptic drive for, 129–36; human capacity for, 28, 41, 82–83, 103–4, 109; and perception/ interpretation, 25, 92, 95–96, 98, 102; spiritual, 55–56, 110, 145; in urban setting, 9, 14, 51–52, 54, 58, 107; in violent/malevolent world, 121–22, 124–25; wilderness/frontier conditions and, 50, 65, 67, 69, 82,

86. See also adaptation; evolution; natural selection Suttree (McCarthy), 50–63; degradation of modern city in, 14, 57–58, 62, 107; on environment and interior life, 54–56; human death and decay in, 59–61; naturalistic vision in, 9, 51–53, 56, 63; setting/plot of, 53–54; Suttree’s metaphysical vision in, 60–63 Tennessee Valley Authority, 19, 23, 53, 57 Texas Revolution, 69–70, 87 Texas State University, San Marcos, 80, 132 theology, 97–98, 118, 128, 132, 143–45 Thiess, Derek J., 131 time: and artifacts of past, 59, 100–101, 107–8; and brevity of life, 20, 60, 73–74, 112, 146; and clockless hours, 57; ebb and flow of, 22, 30, 53; evolutionary, 96, 140–41; fixed trajectory of, 110–11; geologic, 26, 28, 56, 75, 96, 107–8, 130, 146–47; historical change and, 87, 93; human decay and, 59–61, 78; imagined past and, 83–86, 91, 122–23, 140–41; the primordial and, 25–27, 86 Tiresias, 40 “To Build a Fire” (London), 15, 47 tragedy: of anachronistic hero, 84–87; of awareness of death, 110–12, 115, 137–38; fatalism of, 17, 34–36; of frontiersman, 22, 24–25, 27–28; and pursuit of an ideal, 116; of resilience amid grief, 96–98; ritual response to, 101–3; of Western hero, 67 transcendence, 62, 100, 103, 132, 136– 39, 143, 145–46 transcendentalism, 7, 10, 14, 33, 35, 74–76, 88–89 transition, 1, 21–22, 81, 85, 91 trauma, 120, 132 travel narratives, 68–69 Triad Stage, 114 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 52

Index / 181 Turan, Kenneth, 119 Turner, James, 143 Twain, Mark, 6, 68 Ulysses (Joyce), 56 underworld, 54, 60–62 Unforgiven (Eastwood film), 67 “unguessed kinships,” 10, 78–79, 147 University of Tennessee, 19–21 University of Virginia, 32 urbanization/urbanity: literary naturalism’s concern with, 9, 14, 16–17, 51–53, 57–58, 61, 107–8; of Northeast, 51, 53; of the South, 1, 20, 41, 51, 53, 57–58, 61; of Southwest, 104, 107–8. See also modernity US Air Force, 19 Valkyrie, 27–28 Valley of Decision, The (Wharton), 17 Vandover and the Brute (Norris), 10, 14–15, 42–43, 52, 121 Victorian dilemma, 11–12 Vietnam War, 67, 117 violence: “aimless violence,” 32; of American expansionism, 66–70, 76, 82–84, 87, 117–18; of animals, 29, 43, 47; and beauty, 18, 30, 91, 116, 142; cannibalism, 129, 131, 134–35, 138; in competition for dominance, 106–7, 109–10, 135; economic stress as inciting, 21, 45, 93, 131; inherence in naturalism, 13–16, 114, 119–22; Judge Holden’s philosophy of, 13, 18, 69–71, 76–78; of natural world, 70, 81, 97–98, 121, 128, 130–31; as organizing principle of life, 86, 90–91, 94, 113, 120–24, 126; of regeneration processes, 26–28, 99–100, 107–8, 129; “sacred violence,” 41; suicide, 41, 115, 131, 137–38; of the triune, 34, 37–39. See also murder; war Visions (TV series), 20–21 “Wake for Susan” (McCarthy), 20 Walcutt, Charles Child, 7–8, 10, 14, 17, 33, 35, 88

war, 13, 18, 69–71, 76–78, 107, 117–18. See also violence; and individual wars “War Is Kind” (Crane), 13 wasteland, 31, 36, 54, 132–34, 136 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 54 Waverley Novels (Scott), 117 Wayne, John, 66–67 weaver-god, 72, 95–97, 99, 111, 114 Wegner, John, 107 West, the: barren landscape of, 9–10; Boone/Bumppo figure and, 65–66; and image of the hunt, 63; manifest destiny and, 66, 70, 117; myth of, 64–69, 85, 96. See also Southwest, the Western genre, 64–69, 83–84, 117–19; revisionist, 67–68, 117–18 “Whales and Men” (McCarthy), 80 Wharton, Edith, 6, 9, 16–17, 34, 51–52, 81 White, Andrew Dickson, 144 White Fang (London), 15, 47 Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah film), 67 wilderness: Appalachian, 22, 53; and collective world imaginary, 1, 5, 30, 64, 68; mythic figurations of, 27–28, 64–65, 133, 136–37; repose in, 62–63; “unguessed kinships” in, 10, 78–79, 147. See also frontier; nature Winfrey, Oprah, 113 Winthrop, John, 65 witness, role of, 93–96, 98–99, 103–4, 111–12 Wittliff Collections, 80, 132 Wolfe, Thomas, 53 women’s lives, 17, 34–36, 44–45 Woodward, Richard B., 19–20, 80, 113 World War II, 94, 103–4, 107, 114, 128, 137 Wright, Richard, 52, 146 Wright, Robert, 145 Young, Thomas D., Jr., 51 Yuma (Quechan) Indians, 70, 76 Zola, Émile, 6, 10, 77 Zoroastrianism, 71