Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy

Beyond Reckoning

Christopher Eagle, Christopher Eagle, Christopher Eagle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317435297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the first edited collection to explore the role of philosophy in the works of Cormac McCarthy, significantly expanding the scope of philosophical inquiry into McCarthy's writings. There is a strong and growing interest amongst philosophers in the relevance of McCarthy's writings to key debates in contemporary philosophy, for example, debates on trauma and violence, on the relationship between language and world, and the place of the subject within history, temporality, and borders. To this end, the contributors to this collection focus on how McCarthy's writings speak to various philosophical themes, including violence, war, nature, history, materiality, and the environment. Emphasizing the form of McCarthy's texts, the chapters attend to the myriad ways in which his language effects a philosophy of its own, beyond the thematic content of his narratives. Bringing together scholars in contemporary philosophy and McCarthy Studies, and informed by the release of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, the volume reflects on the theoretical relationship between philosophical thinking and literary form. This book will appeal to all scholars working in the rapidly-growing field of McCarthy Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and to philosophers working on a wide range of problems in ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Film across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy.

1 Editor’s Introduction

Beyond Reckoning

Chris Eagle

The idea for this collection first came at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, a three-week symposium on Continental Philosophy held each Summer in the hills of Umbria, Italy. Reading Blood Meridian between sessions one day, I was approached by a fellow participant, who pointed at the novel in my hands and simply asked, “You too?” When similar scenarios played out a second time, and then a third, I realized I had a project on my hands. To those familiar with McCarthy’s biography and his corpus, this will probably come as little surprise. McCarthy has long been considered a philosopher’s writer, a novelist of ideas of the likes of Melville, Dostoyevsky, or Thomas Mann. Such comparisons have been based not only on the themes explored in McCarthy’s published works, but also on what scholars have pieced together so far of his reading habits as well. In his letters, in his rare interviews, and throughout his archive as well, one finds passing references to Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximander, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Wittgenstein, along with the three great aitches of German thought: Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. While the philosophical possibilities opened up by McCarthy’s writing have been recognized for decades now, most interdisciplinary studies of this connection have tended to focus either on the existential or quasi-religious themes that run through his works. Philosophical approaches to Blood Meridian, for instance, are still a little too anchored in my opinion to the kind of Nietzschean reading of the text put forward by Shane Schimpf in the introduction to his Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian. Similarly existentialist readings of works like Outer Dark, Suttree, The Road, No Country for Old Men, Sunset Limited, and The Counselor have taken McCarthy either to be a Camusian existentialist or a sort of Irish Catholic moralist malgré soi. In either case, the philosophical thrust of his novels, plays, and screenplays is generally seen as a pyrrhic quest for transcendental meaning in our post-theological, post-industrial, late-capitalist, technocratic world, a world that is as violent as ever and rapidly headed towards an all-too-literal apocalypse. In this context, one should also note the many Gnostic readings of McCarthy by Leo Daugherty, Dianne Luce, and more recently, by Petra Mundik, all of which filter McCarthy’s worldview through the interesting lens of mystical symbology. Without taking anything away from these important foundational works, the main goal of this collection is to broaden the scope of philosophical inquiry into McCarthy’s writings, in other words, to read him across a much wider range of philosophical topics and alongside a much wider range of philosophical interlocutors.

One of the other goals of this collection, for me, has been to locate McCarthy’s ‘philosophy’ as much as possible in his viscous yet remarkably expressive style of writing, rather than simply reducing his philosophy to a set of conceptual ‘themes.’ Of course, there is no hurdle more easily, or more often, tripped over in philosophical approaches to literature, but I have tried to select contributions which pay adequate attention to the philosophical weight behind McCarthy’s unique use of language. In this regard, I have always thought that James Joyce makes a much better point of comparison than those more prosaic philosophical novelists McCarthy is so often paired with (Dostoyevsky, et al.). Thanks to the computational work done by John Sepich, we now know that McCarthy has used over 30,000 different words across his career, roughly 16,000 of which he has used only once. These numbers (both of which are bound to drastically increase with his forthcoming scientific novel The Passenger) put McCarthy’s working vocabulary on par with that of Shakespeare, and I would argue that the real philosophical force of McCarthy’s works happens as much in his language as in his narratives. There is, in other words, a philosophy to his remarkably vast and occasionally neologistic diction, to his experiments with positional syntax, and to his elaborately speculative similes. Much like Joyce, McCarthy is a writer who constantly probes the limits of language, and his goal would seem to be akin to that of Joyce as well: both to elevate language to a higher level of precision and to transform it in the process into something beyond mere signification.

Over the centuries, Philosophy has felt a need to turn at times to Literature in order to understand its own limitations and to expand its set of possibilities. If we take the examples of what Heidegger sought in Hölderlin, or Derrida in Joyce, what we find there is Philosophy locating in literary language the execution or incarnation of something it can only explicate, whether that be the naming of Being or the moment of Deconstruction. For this reason, in the coming decades, I would hardly be surprised if the discovery of McCarthy by philosophers should produce an encounter every bit as fascinating and productive as the one which occurred between Derrideans and Joyceans in the 1980s and 1990s.

If the chapters that follow are any indication, there would seem to be three main areas where such an encounter between McCarthy and Philosophy would have to take place. The first involves an outlook that is decidedly non-anthropocentric, post-humanist, or even perhaps anti-humanist. Scholars such as David Holloway have already noted McCarthy’s strategies for deprivileging the human vantage-point on nature, life, and world, along with the moral vacuum this creates regarding our practice of violence. To paraphrase the words of the Kid to the Hermit early on in Blood Meridian, God doesn’t seem to have had us much in mind in the world’s creation, and the Kid’s outlook is reflected in the very “optical democracy” with which McCarthy renders the material world across his corpus. Reading McCarthy in these terms alongside Heidegger, Derrida, as well as the contemporary analytic philosopher Thomas Nagel, the three chapters by Zachary Tavlin, Raymond Malevitz, and Alberto Siani, respectively, show us how McCarthy is constantly levelling hierarchies of mankind, animal, and nature, forcing us to confront what in The Road McCarthy himself baldly calls “the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth” (130).

The many questions this act of levelling raises–about the ontological priority of mankind over nature and animal, and about our perception or experience of the natural world–are addressed in the next grouping of chapters by Dianne Luce, Linda Woodson, Yuliya A. Tsutserova, Ryan Drake, and Julius Greve. Since his first novel The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy’s rendering of the natural world has always exhibited the same fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, Nature is regularly personified and mythologized in his works. In keeping with the conventions of the Southern Gothic and the Western, Nature acts almost as a protagonist alongside his other characters, and it often contains, as he writes in The Orchard Keeper, “a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep” (11). On the other hand, Nature in his novels is also just as often depicted as brute, senseless matter, a meaningless organic process without any depth or symbolism to it whatsoever. In this sense, the role of physics in McCarthy’s thinking can hardly be overstated. According to the narrator of Blood Meridian, there is in all his books some kind of “uttermost granulation of reality” down to which all matter can be ultimately understood (247). The role of the writer in this would seem to be to guess at the “unguessed kinships” this granulation produces (247) and to give names to all the forms of “nameless crud” (Suttree 464) that matter’s ceaseless reconfigurations produce in our lived environments. Apart from these two very contradictory models of Nature (mythopoeic and scientific), there is of course a third possibility, the post-apocalyptic, and in some sense, post-natural world offered by The Road in which all matter, and any notions of Nature or World along with it, have been reduced to ash. By reading McCarthy’s account of Nature and our ability to perceive it through the lenses of Plato, Nietzsche, Husserl, Adorno, and Schelling, the second set of chapters in this collection attempt to make sense of all the variety and fragmentation, and in the process, to articulate McCarthy’s philosophies of both nature and perception.

The final set of chapters by Robert Bernasconi, Jenny Bryant, Robert Metcalf, Ian Moore, and Patrick O’Connor all broach the classic problem of the ethical in McCarthy’s writings, however, they do so in a radically different way from previous readings of McCarthy’s ethics. What these chapters all share, it is fair to say, is a non-normative understanding of ethics and what it means to live ethically. By thinking McCarthy alongside Dostoyevsky, Levinas, Heidegger, Heraclitus, and Blanchot, each of these chapters attempts to glean some ethos from McCarthy’s pages, a way of dwelling in the world that is ethical, rather than another prescriptive set of rules by which we all ought to live. For this reason, these chapters face the same challenge faced by all the other chapters of this volume. With no transcendentals at our disposal, with no resort to traditional metaphysical grounds, how are we supposed to evaluate events as troubling as war, how are we to confront our own mortality, or make any sense of our obligations to one another?

As editor, I would like to close this introduction by acknowledging a few people who have made this collection possible. First of all, I would like to thank several directors of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum such as John Sallis, Dennis Schmidt, Walter Brogan, Michael Naas, Theodore George, Drew Hyland, and Maria Acosta, for creating such a wonderful space for interdisciplinary collaboration, and for allowing literary interlopers such as myself to participate in such an important tradition. I would also like to thank the McCarthy scholars Richard Wallach, Steven Frye, and Stacey Peebles for their many helpful suggestions throughout the initial compilation of chapters. Finally, I would like to thank my sister Nicole Bissinger, along with John and Mason Bissinger for all their support and inspiration during the work of editing this collection.

2 “Cloaca Maxima”

Conceptualizing Matter in Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Fiction

Julius Greve

[T]he old man felt the circle of years closing, the final increment of the curve returning him again to the inchoate, the prismatic flux of sound and color wherein he had drifted once before and now beyond the world of men.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Let us not forget that philosophy is also primate psychology; that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a minuscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust.

—Nick Land, “Spirit and Teeth”

To state that Cormac McCarthy’s work is immersed in the materiality of the world seems hardly to present a thesis at all but almost to reiterate a truism. Of the multiplicity of philosophical approaches to McCarthy’s fiction within the impressively diverse field of McCarthy scholarship, perhaps those emphasizing the author’s interest in material culture and, above all, nature, are not merely a faction of critics. Rather, the notion of materiality is itself the linchpin upon which the scholarship divides itself into various factions—gnostics, materialists, ethicists, and environmentalists, to name but a few of the most prevalent ones that address McCarthy’s notion of matter explicitly. From Leo Daugherty to Petra Mundik, critics have elaborated McCarthy’s investment in the religious tradition of gnosis, weighing in on the evil nature of matter, as opposed to the pneumatic spirit that manifests itself in the human capacity to think, to contemplate a given problem: the immaterial goodness that is also called “the lingering scent of divinity” in The Sunset Limited (Sunset 13).¹ Vereen Bell, Dana Philips, and others have argued that McCarthy’s narratives employ an almost scientific diction, a characteristically “forensic manner” of describing particular settings or moods, so that “the world seems to draw even language into itself to lay claim to a higher priority”—the priority of the material.² Conversely, critics like Edwin T. Arnold and Lydia R. Cooper have foregrounded the question of ethics vis-à-vis McCarthy’s depictions of the grim realities of material being; respectively emphasizing “the possibility of grace and redemption even in the darkest of his tales,” and theorizing an “ethics of empathy” that supposedly permeates the depictions of literary “characters [who] nevertheless exist in a naturalistic world.”³ Lastly, readings provided by scholars like K. Wesley Berry and Andrew Keller Estes, among others, home in on McCarthy’s engagement with environmental issues, and his ostensible ascription of “intrinsic rights” to the natural world, meaning here the regional and, by the same token, the global ecosphere.⁴

All of these approaches suggest the centrality of the material world as an issue in McCarthy’s narratives, even if, in some of these readings, this issue is central only insofar as it figures as a means to a certain end. In the gnostic accounts, for instance, the evil nature of matter is but secondary to, or rather in the service of, the self-revelation of the human spirit, in moral terms. McCarthy’s characters endure the archonic law—the nomos of externality—only to care for, or by means of, what remains intrinsically and eternally divine. As Mundik notes, many forms of gnosticism “taught that the pneuma was eternal and could never truly be destroyed.” So with the divine spirit that inheres in the kid of Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), for example.⁵ Along these lines, Cooper’s acknowledgment of McCarthy’s naturalism notwithstanding, her suggestion that the supposed ideal of “human communion” figures as a general ethos capable of grounding McCarthy’s poetics as a whole actually entails the conceptual priority of moral notions upon those of nature, that is to say, materiality.⁶ It results in the supervenience of the concepts of nature upon those of morality. Both gnosticist and ethicist accounts of McCarthy’s narrative conceptualization of matter seem to treat it as a material, as something that is malleable according to the spiritual becoming of the pneuma, or else the virtue of empathetic behavior. The materialist perspectives on McCarthy tend to ground their discussions either in the dialectical materialist philosophies of human praxis, concomitant with a downright refusal of religious symbolism, or according to existential reasoning that traces “a kind of moral ecology.”⁷ Ecocritical interpretations, on their part, seem to use the words “nature” and “the environment” synonymously, which also results in an ethico-aesthetic determination of the ontological question at stake, namely, “what is nature?” And yet, despite these caveats in the diverse analyses of this key issue in McCarthy, they nevertheless lead us to a question that might seem naïve at first sight, but which is actually indispensable to pose at this point: What concept of matter exactly are we dealing with here, when we are dealing with the importance of materiality in McCarthy’s novelistic work? Which concept of nature can be discerned in his fictions, given their explicit emphasis on questions concerning the interdependency of humans and their environment, the bond between the human and the animal, and the genesis of forms of life issuing forth from a realm “beyond the world of men” (Orchard 222)? Is the reality of the material world coterminous with corporeality in McCarthy’s narrative conception of it or does his negotiation of nature’s identity exceed the body as its constitutive factor?

Thinking Matter

Taking its cue from scholarly work put forward by Dianne Luce, Carole Juge, and Christopher Dacus, this essay will address these questions in a new reading of McCarthy’s Southern fictions.⁸ In tracing their implicit references to the Platonic “idea” of matter in the Timaeus, I will make use of both the reconstruction of that conception in the German idealist tradition of Naturphilosophie—that is, the work of Friedrich W. J. Schelling and Lorenz Oken—and the contemporary philosophies of nature that are heavily indebted to that tradition, including the writings of speculative realist philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant and Reza Negarestani.⁹ All of these accounts suggest a concept of nature that is neither determined by an ethos of humanistic commonality, nor by an environmentally aware critique or “vision of ecological holocaust.”¹⁰ Grant’s reconstruction of Schelling’s “speculative physics” reveals an account of materiality that is all-encompassing, meaning that it includes bodies and ideas. Thus premised on the conceptual isomorphism of “nature” and “matter,” rather than “nature” and “environment,” as in many ecocritical perspectives, this reconstruction is also in accordance with Schelling’s proviso that “[a]nything whose conditions simply cannot be given in nature, must be absolutely impossible.”¹¹ Like some of the materialist ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Editor’s Introduction: Beyond Reckoning
• 2 “Cloaca Maxima”: Conceptualizing Matter in Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Fiction
• 3 The Cave of Oblivion: Platonic Mythology in Child of God
• 4 “The Ruined Shack”: Language and Being-at-Home in Heidegger and McCarthy’s Outer Dark
• 5 Literature and Death: McCarthy, Blanchot, and Suttree’s Mortal Belonging
• 6 Heraclitus and the Metaphysics of War in Blood Meridian
• 7 Borders, Landscapes, and the Earth: Eco-Phenomenology and All the Pretty Horses
• 8 “The Lighted Display Case”: A Nietzschean Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction
• 9 “For the other only”: The Radical Existentialism of the Priest’s Tale in The Crossing
• 10 Narrative Disruption as Animal Agency in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing
• 11 Fantasy and the Expiration of Nature: The Road as Film
• 12 Seeing Nothing: Making Phenomenological Sense of the Counterspectacle in McCarthy’s The Road
• 13 Nowhere Between River and Road: A Nagelian Reading of Suttree and The Road
• Notes on Contributors