Things ceasing to be: Cormac McCarthy’s environmental vision

Floating Worlds, Floating Words: Geoaesthetics and the Writing Process of Blood Meridian

Stefanie Heine (University of Copenhagen)

Based on archival research at the Wittliff Collection, I will elucidate the composition of landscape descriptions in Blood Meridian, combining a textual-genetic approach with a poetological and ecocritical perspective. Parsing how distinctive compositional practices function as a language-internal resistance against anthropocentrism and nomenclature, I will look closely at moments where written matter reveals a weak non-human agency. In Blood Meridian, desert terrain is staged as an elemental medium generating aesthetic effects. The geological and elemental forces in many desert descriptions are inseparable from forces of language and textual matter. In the passages from Blood Meridian I will discuss, one can observe a correlation of elemental and written matter assuming form. The elemental form-building and decomposition processes described in the passages (geological formations or figures emerging and disappearing in a desert landscape) resemble the processes of form-building and decomposition one can observe in the traces of the writing process when investigating the text’s drafts. In other words: the development of written matter in the novel-in-progress sometimes corresponds to geological processes like erratics and plate tectonics. For example, a pivotal landscape description in Blood Meridian is concerned with continental drift, which, in one draft is described as “floating worlds”. In McCarthy’s drafts, we encounter clusters of “floating words”: erratic textual blocs that are rewritten again and again, sometimes torn apart, moved around in the manuscripts, and placed in different locations of the novel.

Terror Nullius: Desert Gothic in J.M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy

Rune Graulund (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)

The talk will trace the development of colonial desert histories in order to outline different stages of assimilation of and to desert regions as a national landscape. In this, the concept of terra nullius is important. This idea of the desert as ‘nobody’s land’ should in principle have made it more easily subsumed by the imperialist project. However, with the eventual elision from terra nullius on to what will in the talk be termed ‘terror nullius’, it becomes clear over time that this has historically not been the case. In a comparative reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), the talk will argue that the horror of gothic can be expressed in the horrible clarity of glaring sunlight as well as it can in the obfuscation of darkness, albeit with a different inflection. In the negative aesthetic of the colonial terrain, the desert becomes a site of unsight in that, as is expressed by Coetzee as in McCarthy, atrocities remain easily hidden.

Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Extractivism

Harry Stecopoulos (University of Iowa)

Over the past twenty years, extractivist theory has revolutionized the way humanists and social scientists understand resource capitalism, broadly defined.  For Eduardo Gudynas, extractivism is “measured by the three characteristics of: (1) physical indicators (volume and weight); (2) environmental intensity; and (3) destination,” and any theory of this depletory practice must highlight these factors.  Other scholars have pushed back against this circumscribed understanding of extractivism, arguing that even as “extractivìsmo” may have originated in Latin American examinations of oil and mining, the theory has broader application.  For Verónica Gago & Sandro Mezzadra, “extraction cannot be reduced to operations linked to raw materials turned commodities at the global level…Extraction also targets the labor and life of populations, aiming at extracting value from them.” This emphasis on “the labor and life of populations” has proven crucial to how thinkers like Gago understand what she dubs “body-territory…a practical concept that demonstrates how the exploitation of common, community…territories involves the violation of the body of each person, as well as the collective body, through dispossession.”

In my talk, I draw on the expanded definition of extractivism articulated by Martín Arboleda, Gago and Mezzara, Saskia Sassen, and other theorists to reconsider the aesthetics and politics of Cormac McCarthy’s ecological vision.  Examining well-known works like All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian, and lesser-known texts like Cities on the Plain and The Passenger, I contend that McCarthy manifests a sensitivity to the interrelation of bodies and territories that overlaps with the work of these thinkers.  In Blood Meridian, for example, the Judge’s interest in extracting potassium nitrate and sulfur cannot be separated from his homicidal quest for the scalps of Indigenous people.  Yet I also argue that McCarthy approaches extraction in the converse manner, treating various practices of digging, excavation, and exploration as activities that don’t lead to the acquisition of minerals or labor or bodies but rather result in objects or animals of limited value, or nothing at all.  Consider the anonymous figure making countless small holes in the epilogue to Blood Meridian or the feral pups excavated in Cities on the Plain or the ruined oil rig explored in The Passenger.  Committed to the idea that, as one character in All the Pretty Horses puts it, “there’s still a lot of money in the ground,” McCarthy’s characters dig and disinter in the hopes of finding treasure, but their extractive designs often end up absurdist failures. McCarthy offers a critique of resource capitalism not only by depicting a postapocalyptic world as in The Road but also by representing extractivism as a neo-Beckettian pantomime endlessly repeated—a tragic performance that exhausts us as surely as it destroys the planet.

Whited Meridian: Cormac McCarthy, the Bomb, and the Anthropocene

Tore Rye Andersen (Aarhus University)

When the cover image of Cormac McCarthy’s much-anticipated novel The Passenger was first released, Reddit-users were quick to point out that the cover of the novel most of all resembled a pamphlet of the kind that religious cults usually hand out – a pamphlet promising a golden dawn. A few skeptical users speculated that the golden glow on the cover didn’t originate in Paradise or a bright future, and when the slipcased version of the two novels was published, the source of the golden light was finally revealed as the atomic bomb, or the Bomb, for short. The Bomb is evidently a central theme in The Passenger and Stella Maris, and in my paper I will analyze how it is portrayed across the two novels. I will also argue that the Bomb may to some extent have present all along in the margins of McCarthy’s fiction, and that its centrality in his last two novels can best be described as a natural culmination of his longstanding interest in humanity’s abuse of the natural world. Moreover, I will argue that this persistent interest in important ways anticipate current debates on the Anthropocene – the notion that we have entered a new geological period where human activities have now reached an extent where they leave a lasting impact on the planet.

In Lieu of a World: Scarcity and Material Determinism in The Road

Rasmus Simonsen

This paper examines the nature of scarcity in the post-apocalyptic world of The Road. With the world as we know it gone, McCarthy paves the way for a discussion of a new material ontology that depends on the dissolution of conventional agency. For this reason, the paper focuses on the enduring presence of things themselves to show how self-determinism gives way to a kind of material determinism that in turn orders the agency of the characters and the violent circumstances that they are exposed to and participate in to varying degrees. To this end, the paper moves away from the subject-centered readings that dominate scholarship on The Road to show instead that the “deterministic” quality of relations in the novel is a function of its exploration of interobjectivity and the “thingness” of things. The novel suggests that once a thing’s referent is forgotten, its “sacred idiom” is erased and the world is reduced to “a raw core of parsible entities” (McCarthy 88). Slowly, in the novel, the presence of things fades from the human gaze, as exemplified by the fact that, travelling through the wasteland, “the boy [used to] sometimes pick up something and carry it with him for a while but he didnt do that any more” (200). Turning to the perspective of things opens the novel to a new set of relations and connections that are not bound by the concept of human intentionality. Developing what I call the “deterministic materiality” of the novel, my argument explores moments of rest in the novel—what we could also call its narratological sojourns—to consider the fading thingness of the world that nevertheless makes room for a kind of objective metaphysics.

A Flood of Imitation: Recycling Faulkner’s Wasted Landscapes in Child of God

Martyn Bone (University of Copenhagen)

Cormac McCarthy is no stranger to comparisons with William Faulkner. Orville Prescott’s New York Times review of The Orchard Keeper (1965) opined that McCarthy’s debut employed “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.” Eight years later, The Washington Post declared Child of God (1973) to be “an extraordinary book” while lauding McCarthy as “a genuine heir to the Faulkner tradition.” This presentation reconsiders the intertextual relationship between Faulkner and McCarthy’s fiction by reading Child of God with reference to what Susan Scott Parrish calls the “modern aesthetics of ecological crisis” permeating Faulkner’s work, especially As I Lay Dying (1930). McCarthy “recycles” Faulkner in Sineád Moynihan’s sense of moving beyond familiar debates about “literary worth and value” associated with “‘recycling’ a canonical text” to address “all that is framed as ‘waste’ (including human beings).” I also take seriously (and somewhat literally) Prescott’s early charge that McCarthy’s fiction is “submerge[d]” in “a flood of imitation”: in As I Lay Dying and Child of God, land and people alike are laid waste by catastrophic flooding, as well as deforestation and despoliation.

The novel’s mapping of wasted land and “wasted humans” (Zygmunt Bauman)—not only Ballard but also the corpses he accumulates--builds to an extreme weather event. Child of God’s flood recycles the equivalent sequence in As I Lay Dying: Ballard’s attempt to cross the swollen creek includes a log looming over Lester much like the log that bears down on the Bundrens’ cart. McCarthy’s flood sequence is harder to historicize, however, than Faulkner’s, which mediates the 1927 Mississippi flood. On one hand, Ballard’s “vitriolic invocation for the receding of the waters” may index how humans have become God-like (or child-of-God-like) in our destructive belief that we can command the environment. On the other, the log’s “animate ill will” may suggest that ultimately we exercise little control over a wasted world recast in our name: the Anthropocene.

Environmental Lost Cause-ism: McCarthy’s Diagnostic Vision in The Road

Jay Watson (University of Mississippi)

Interestingly but also fittingly, the US South is emerging as an important locus for speculative climate fictions or “cli-fi”: fables of rising sea levels, superstorms, species loss, zoonotic disease, resource wars, global weirding, cultural collapse, and other unintended consequences of planetary-scale terraforming on regional ground.  In what follows, I want to take up Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, the first SF novel to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as an example of how southern writers have turned to speculative fiction to interrogate a form of environmental melancholy and nostalgia I call Holocene lost cause-ism, and to entertain potential alternatives to its stultifying symptoms.

The environmental signature of the planetary-scale catastrophe that occasions the narrative—perhaps an impact event, perhaps volcanism, perhaps an act of war—is climate derangement: the descent of bone-chilling cold as the atmosphere fills with particulate matter, and the constant threat of wildfires after the cessation of photosynthesis reduces the forests of the former US South to massive tinderboxes of standing deadwood.  The climate disaster brings cultural disintegration in its wake, a spiral of ecological cause and social effect that invites comparisons with our current specter of the Anthropocene.

The novel’s focal character is a deeply melancholic personality, a widower and father whose sharply focused mourning for his wife is dwarfed by interminable grief for the entire world wiped out by the catastrophe, a lost oikos whose affordances he tends to evoke, and encrypt, in environmental terms.  As he struggles to keep life in himself and his young son, his primary survival strategies reveal the telltale symptoms of Holocene lost cause-ism: his psychic overinvestments (1) in the road network and other elements of petromodern infrastructure that still stretch across the novel’s devitalized landscapes, (2) in houses and dwellings that evoke a no longer tenable sedentary life, and (3) in the humanistic worldview he clings to against the seeming meaninglessness of existence on a dying planet.  Against this obsolescent and dangerous Holocene mentality, The Road poses the emergent Anthropocene and posthuman orientation of the son as a literal child of environmental collapse.  McCarthy, in other words, employs a generational scheme to test Holocene and Anthropocene sensibilities against the exigencies of climate change and mass extinction.