Pub Date : 2016-03-14DOI: 10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0003
Russell M. Hillier
On reading Cormac McCarthy’s works readers and scholars have been fascinated by the cunning and violent characters that haunt his fiction, notably the “grim triune” of Outer Dark (129), Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and Malkina. Some might say that, together with McCarthy’s mastery of style and narrative, it is on account of these charismatic characters, all compelling studies in malevolence, that McCarthy’s fiction is best remembered and, others might go further, his literary reputation largely rests. This article advances the complementary idea that McCarthy’s painstaking portrayal of John Grady Cole has an equal, if not greater, appeal. John Grady is perhaps the closest a reader comes to a complete rendering of human goodness acting in the world in McCarthy’s fiction. McCarthy’s endeavor to imagine a virtuous human, hard to find and yet worthy of emulation, far from being reductively two-dimensional or tiresomely didactic, should exert its own claim on his readers’ attention and admiration, because in John Grady’s choices, behavior, and actions, McCarthy presents his readers with his idea of the good. John Grady’s representation of a good life illustrates how arduous it is to strive to live an honest and decent life, free from moral compromise.
{"title":"“Like some supplicant to the darkness over them all”: The Good of John Grady Cole in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain","authors":"Russell M. Hillier","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0003","url":null,"abstract":"On reading Cormac McCarthy’s works readers and scholars have been fascinated by the cunning and violent characters that haunt his fiction, notably the “grim triune” of Outer Dark (129), Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and Malkina. Some might say that, together with McCarthy’s mastery of style and narrative, it is on account of these charismatic characters, all compelling studies in malevolence, that McCarthy’s fiction is best remembered and, others might go further, his literary reputation largely rests. This article advances the complementary idea that McCarthy’s painstaking portrayal of John Grady Cole has an equal, if not greater, appeal. John Grady is perhaps the closest a reader comes to a complete rendering of human goodness acting in the world in McCarthy’s fiction. McCarthy’s endeavor to imagine a virtuous human, hard to find and yet worthy of emulation, far from being reductively two-dimensional or tiresomely didactic, should exert its own claim on his readers’ attention and admiration, because in John Grady’s choices, behavior, and actions, McCarthy presents his readers with his idea of the good. John Grady’s representation of a good life illustrates how arduous it is to strive to live an honest and decent life, free from moral compromise.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130565763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-03-14DOI: 10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0117
C. Jergenson
This paper analyzes the material, social, and ideological composition of The Road’s post-apocalyptic world through the lens of Benjaminian historical materialism. The Road historicizes the post-apocalyptic condition through its framing of the relationship between the novel’s present and its late capitalist prehistory. The ideological project of the father and son, as they seek to convey “the fire” across the desiccated wasteland, entails the performance of a mode of human relationality that conflicts with the late capitalist ideologies of the past and their behavioral residue in the cannibalistic practices of the apocalypse’s other survivors. The Road transcends purely negative social criticism by offering, through the praxis of the father and son, the outline of a utopian alternative to the social order that produced and continues to shape the novel’s post-apocalyptic world.
{"title":"“In what direction did lost men veer?”: Late Capitalism and Utopia in The Road","authors":"C. Jergenson","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0117","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes the material, social, and ideological composition of The Road’s post-apocalyptic world through the lens of Benjaminian historical materialism. The Road historicizes the post-apocalyptic condition through its framing of the relationship between the novel’s present and its late capitalist prehistory. The ideological project of the father and son, as they seek to convey “the fire” across the desiccated wasteland, entails the performance of a mode of human relationality that conflicts with the late capitalist ideologies of the past and their behavioral residue in the cannibalistic practices of the apocalypse’s other survivors. The Road transcends purely negative social criticism by offering, through the praxis of the father and son, the outline of a utopian alternative to the social order that produced and continues to shape the novel’s post-apocalyptic world.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128285947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-03-14DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.14.1.0037
S. Knepper
At first glance McCarthy’s recent screenplay seems to be a rather formulaic Aristotelian tragedy. But on closer examination, its unflinching look at cartel violence raises questions that have long animated critical debate about tragedy. Is tragedy more about the existential plight of a lone individual or the political crisis of a community? Is tragic recognition a matter of stoic acceptance or solidarity with the suffering? Does tragedy veil particular contingent instances of loss and violence as immutable aspects of the human condition? Is true tragedy resolutely pessimistic? If so, is tragedy effectively dead in the modern West, which has inherited religions of messianic hope and mythologies of secular progress? Or do these currents open up the possibility of new forms of tragedy? The Counselor explores all of these questions, and it ultimately stages a choice between two possible responses to the tragic—stoic resignation or radical hope.
{"title":"The Counselor and Tragic Recognition","authors":"S. Knepper","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.14.1.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.14.1.0037","url":null,"abstract":"At first glance McCarthy’s recent screenplay seems to be a rather formulaic Aristotelian tragedy. But on closer examination, its unflinching look at cartel violence raises questions that have long animated critical debate about tragedy. Is tragedy more about the existential plight of a lone individual or the political crisis of a community? Is tragic recognition a matter of stoic acceptance or solidarity with the suffering? Does tragedy veil particular contingent instances of loss and violence as immutable aspects of the human condition? Is true tragedy resolutely pessimistic? If so, is tragedy effectively dead in the modern West, which has inherited religions of messianic hope and mythologies of secular progress? Or do these currents open up the possibility of new forms of tragedy? The Counselor explores all of these questions, and it ultimately stages a choice between two possible responses to the tragic—stoic resignation or radical hope.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126292205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-03-14DOI: 10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0096
Harriet Stilley
This article explores the crisis of masculinity in Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God (1973), so as to stress a detrimental linkage between the modern masculine condition and that of the late capitalist economic structure. By way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous feminist and Marxist theory, this paper will forepart Lester Ballard’s murderous misogyny as a means to a practical, sexual end, emphasizing the theme of necrophilia to highlight the reality of women as sexual property, and the extent to which man uses “objects” to know himself at once as man and subject. Child of God can then be read further as a gothic allegory, condemning the social ills of nationalistic ideals by positioning the serial killer as both reflective and symptomatic of an American culture of materialism. An examination of the progressive perversion of this “child of god” in such terms therefore will effectively signal the novel’s resolute engagement with the epochal processes of capitalist restructuring in which it arises, and, what is more, position this particular reading of the text as a discourse of men in crisis that stands apart from any previous feminist criticism offered on Child of God or its author, Cormac McCarthy.
{"title":"“White pussy is nothin but trouble”: Hypermasculine Hysteria and the Displacement of the Feminine Body in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God","authors":"Harriet Stilley","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0096","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the crisis of masculinity in Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God (1973), so as to stress a detrimental linkage between the modern masculine condition and that of the late capitalist economic structure. By way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous feminist and Marxist theory, this paper will forepart Lester Ballard’s murderous misogyny as a means to a practical, sexual end, emphasizing the theme of necrophilia to highlight the reality of women as sexual property, and the extent to which man uses “objects” to know himself at once as man and subject. Child of God can then be read further as a gothic allegory, condemning the social ills of nationalistic ideals by positioning the serial killer as both reflective and symptomatic of an American culture of materialism. An examination of the progressive perversion of this “child of god” in such terms therefore will effectively signal the novel’s resolute engagement with the epochal processes of capitalist restructuring in which it arises, and, what is more, position this particular reading of the text as a discourse of men in crisis that stands apart from any previous feminist criticism offered on Child of God or its author, Cormac McCarthy.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130352568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-03-14DOI: 10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0055
J. Christie
This article offers a new interpretation of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, reading the novel on the basis of the appeal to ideas of craftsmanship and manual labor that explicitly characterizes much of McCarthy’s wider writing. It argues that the attraction to the life-world of manual work signals the presence of a substantial aesthetic philosophy within McCarthy’s textual practice (marked in particular by a deeply Heideggerian approach to language) and that Blood Meridian constitutes one of the most fully developed articulations of this philosophy in his canon. Within this framework the novel’s Oedipal structure is then approached on the basis of the confrontation between the worker and the intellectual, highlighting the significance of the kid’s status as a frustrated or misdirected worker and his subsequent struggles against the authority of successive intellectuals cast in the paternal role. In particular, an extended reading of Judge Holden is proposed in this context. The judge is seen as the focal point for the projection of the anxieties and tensions that McCarthy invests in the position of the intellectual, with particular emphasis placed on the transcendence of the judge’s discourse that occurs in Blood Meridian’s epilogue and the explicit re-emergence of manual labor that it articulates.
{"title":"“Days of begging, days of theft”: The Philosophy of Work in Blood Meridian","authors":"J. Christie","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.1.0055","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a new interpretation of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, reading the novel on the basis of the appeal to ideas of craftsmanship and manual labor that explicitly characterizes much of McCarthy’s wider writing. It argues that the attraction to the life-world of manual work signals the presence of a substantial aesthetic philosophy within McCarthy’s textual practice (marked in particular by a deeply Heideggerian approach to language) and that Blood Meridian constitutes one of the most fully developed articulations of this philosophy in his canon. Within this framework the novel’s Oedipal structure is then approached on the basis of the confrontation between the worker and the intellectual, highlighting the significance of the kid’s status as a frustrated or misdirected worker and his subsequent struggles against the authority of successive intellectuals cast in the paternal role. In particular, an extended reading of Judge Holden is proposed in this context. The judge is seen as the focal point for the projection of the anxieties and tensions that McCarthy invests in the position of the intellectual, with particular emphasis placed on the transcendence of the judge’s discourse that occurs in Blood Meridian’s epilogue and the explicit re-emergence of manual labor that it articulates.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129967361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-09-24DOI: 10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.13.1.0086
Christopher Jenkins
This article will offer a reading of Child of God that integrates the supposedly black and white discourses of theology and psychoanalytic theory. One of the main themes in Child of God is the close relationship between sex and death as drives that shape human action and fate. These drives, as fundamental to human nature, have most notably been theorized by Freud. Accordingly, this article argues that in Child of God McCarthy offers a vision of reality in which the sex and death drives are situated in the greater context of a Christian metaphysics of self, thereby repositioning certain Freudian insights within a view of reality repudiated by Freud.
{"title":"One Drive, Two Deaths in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God","authors":"Christopher Jenkins","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.13.1.0086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.13.1.0086","url":null,"abstract":"This article will offer a reading of Child of God that integrates the supposedly black and white discourses of theology and psychoanalytic theory. One of the main themes in Child of God is the close relationship between sex and death as drives that shape human action and fate. These drives, as fundamental to human nature, have most notably been theorized by Freud. Accordingly, this article argues that in Child of God McCarthy offers a vision of reality in which the sex and death drives are situated in the greater context of a Christian metaphysics of self, thereby repositioning certain Freudian insights within a view of reality repudiated by Freud.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123819070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0069
Megan King
Men are still largely in charge, mind you, but they are slipping fast. Modern America is a society where... women complete high school and college at significantly higher rates than men, and have new doors of opportunity open to them every day. A society where a third of all wives make more money than their husbands. A society where women are increasingly in control of their biological and economic destinies, often choosing to raise their children alone or not to have children at all or to leave an identifiable man out of the reproductive picture entirely, through the miracles of the sperm bank. A society, in other words, where a man is not necessary in the way he was customarily needed-to protect, to provide, to procreate... So, given the current culture, it's no wonder that a guy... would want to move to Alaska and reclaim some noble and antique ideal of manhood.(Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man )In The Last American Man (2002), Elizabeth Gilbert describes a "crisis" wherein Americans, citizens of an "impotent nation," stmggle with the social and cultural repercussions of the post-Fordist economy (225). Despite her apparent concern over the miserable state of U.S. citizens in general, Gilbert's text primarily chronicles the feminization white men incur as a result of laboring in the service economy as well as the emasculation these men feel in consequence of women's advances in equality. Gilbert's hero, Eustace Conway, counteracts the resultant impotence by enacting an iconic American fantasy: he recovers his "soul" by engaging in physical labor and returning to nature (a womanless milieu). In so doing, he negates society's "corruption and greed and malaise" (13-14).1 On Turtle Island, Conway invokes folk labor and cultural practices: he acts as a homesteader, wears homespun clothing, engages in traditional agriculture (clearing the land himself, sowing crops without use of machines, growing only enough to sustain his household), and embraces Native American culture and lifeways (building and living in a teepee, adopting a Native American name). Conway's overtly physical work sharply contrasts with the post-Fordist service economy, conventionally gendered as feminine. Beyond that, Conway's pre-Fordist utopia also reverses women's increased participation in the workforce and their resultant potential to achieve the social and financial independence to reject male authority.2 The masculinity premised on women's performance of the role of housewife was, historically, available only to middle- and upper-class men; more specifically, this normative manhood has been the privilege of primarily white men. As such, folk labor practices restore white middle- and upper-class men to power and therein recuperate the masculinity which relies upon exploiting an imbalance between the sexes, as well as retaining a class prerogative in which minorities are relegated to the margins.3White middle-class men's displacement from power and their response to th
{"title":"“Where is your country?”: Locating White Masculinity in All the Pretty Horses","authors":"Megan King","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0069","url":null,"abstract":"Men are still largely in charge, mind you, but they are slipping fast. Modern America is a society where... women complete high school and college at significantly higher rates than men, and have new doors of opportunity open to them every day. A society where a third of all wives make more money than their husbands. A society where women are increasingly in control of their biological and economic destinies, often choosing to raise their children alone or not to have children at all or to leave an identifiable man out of the reproductive picture entirely, through the miracles of the sperm bank. A society, in other words, where a man is not necessary in the way he was customarily needed-to protect, to provide, to procreate... So, given the current culture, it's no wonder that a guy... would want to move to Alaska and reclaim some noble and antique ideal of manhood.(Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man )In The Last American Man (2002), Elizabeth Gilbert describes a \"crisis\" wherein Americans, citizens of an \"impotent nation,\" stmggle with the social and cultural repercussions of the post-Fordist economy (225). Despite her apparent concern over the miserable state of U.S. citizens in general, Gilbert's text primarily chronicles the feminization white men incur as a result of laboring in the service economy as well as the emasculation these men feel in consequence of women's advances in equality. Gilbert's hero, Eustace Conway, counteracts the resultant impotence by enacting an iconic American fantasy: he recovers his \"soul\" by engaging in physical labor and returning to nature (a womanless milieu). In so doing, he negates society's \"corruption and greed and malaise\" (13-14).1 On Turtle Island, Conway invokes folk labor and cultural practices: he acts as a homesteader, wears homespun clothing, engages in traditional agriculture (clearing the land himself, sowing crops without use of machines, growing only enough to sustain his household), and embraces Native American culture and lifeways (building and living in a teepee, adopting a Native American name). Conway's overtly physical work sharply contrasts with the post-Fordist service economy, conventionally gendered as feminine. Beyond that, Conway's pre-Fordist utopia also reverses women's increased participation in the workforce and their resultant potential to achieve the social and financial independence to reject male authority.2 The masculinity premised on women's performance of the role of housewife was, historically, available only to middle- and upper-class men; more specifically, this normative manhood has been the privilege of primarily white men. As such, folk labor practices restore white middle- and upper-class men to power and therein recuperate the masculinity which relies upon exploiting an imbalance between the sexes, as well as retaining a class prerogative in which minorities are relegated to the margins.3White middle-class men's displacement from power and their response to th","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121327201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Estes, Andrew Keller. Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 239 pp. Paperback. $70. ISBN 9789042036291.Review by O. Alan NobleAndrew Keller Estes' new book reveals the usefulness of environmental criticism for reading Cormac McCarthy's novels. His central argument is that McCarthy's later works present a dialectic vision of nature as either utopian or dystopian without privileging either vision. A synthesis of these perspectives comes out occasionally: "some of McCarthy's texts hint at a new way forward, an escape from traditional ways of conceiving space and a better approach to environment" (16). Estes describes this as a "biocentric" map: "an egalitarian view of nature in which all members of the ecosphere have intrinsic rights" (41). As an introduction to trends in environmental criticism and their applications to contemporary literature, Estes' book is insightful. His application of this criticism to McCarthy's novels varies in effectiveness. Interpreting the voices in the novels within the framework of environmental criticism generally is helpful for situating McCarthy in the larger movement of modernity and its relationship to environments. The most daring claim of the book, that McCarthy offers a "new way forward," is regrettably less persuasive than it could be. Despite this deficiency, Estes has contributed a notable addition to McCarthy scholarship. His book will be an essential text for any scholars who wish to consider McCarthy and environmental criticism.Estes begins by presenting providing some theoretical context for environmental criticism and the American tradition of writing about nature, and then presents a survey of McCarthy scholarship. For readers who are new to this movement, the chapter on environmental criticism chapter will be particularly helpful. Estes lays out a brief survey of the important literature surrounding the major binaries that define environmental criticism (space/place, nature/culture, wilderness/civilization, etc.) and then connects that terminology to McCarthy's later works. In his second chapter, Estes gives a rich survey of the tradition in American literature of writing nature either in strongly positive or strongly negative terms. Estes traces each of these trends through American history, from the Edenic vision of Columbus and the demonic vision of Vespucci through the the utopian perspectives of Crevecoeur, Jefferson, and Emerson. Finally, Estes surveys McCarthy scholarship in general and choses three articles to focus on that pertain more closely to his thesis. Much of this survey feels extraneous to his argument. Of note is his treatment of John Cant's article on The Road included in Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy. Disappointingly, Estes chides Cant's reading of the "roadmap" as a metaphor for McCarthy's "literary past" (96). Estes objects because Cant "fails to point out that it is an oil company roadmap, something which implies a very spec
{"title":"Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces","authors":"O. Noble","doi":"10.1163/9789401208994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208994","url":null,"abstract":"Estes, Andrew Keller. Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 239 pp. Paperback. $70. ISBN 9789042036291.Review by O. Alan NobleAndrew Keller Estes' new book reveals the usefulness of environmental criticism for reading Cormac McCarthy's novels. His central argument is that McCarthy's later works present a dialectic vision of nature as either utopian or dystopian without privileging either vision. A synthesis of these perspectives comes out occasionally: \"some of McCarthy's texts hint at a new way forward, an escape from traditional ways of conceiving space and a better approach to environment\" (16). Estes describes this as a \"biocentric\" map: \"an egalitarian view of nature in which all members of the ecosphere have intrinsic rights\" (41). As an introduction to trends in environmental criticism and their applications to contemporary literature, Estes' book is insightful. His application of this criticism to McCarthy's novels varies in effectiveness. Interpreting the voices in the novels within the framework of environmental criticism generally is helpful for situating McCarthy in the larger movement of modernity and its relationship to environments. The most daring claim of the book, that McCarthy offers a \"new way forward,\" is regrettably less persuasive than it could be. Despite this deficiency, Estes has contributed a notable addition to McCarthy scholarship. His book will be an essential text for any scholars who wish to consider McCarthy and environmental criticism.Estes begins by presenting providing some theoretical context for environmental criticism and the American tradition of writing about nature, and then presents a survey of McCarthy scholarship. For readers who are new to this movement, the chapter on environmental criticism chapter will be particularly helpful. Estes lays out a brief survey of the important literature surrounding the major binaries that define environmental criticism (space/place, nature/culture, wilderness/civilization, etc.) and then connects that terminology to McCarthy's later works. In his second chapter, Estes gives a rich survey of the tradition in American literature of writing nature either in strongly positive or strongly negative terms. Estes traces each of these trends through American history, from the Edenic vision of Columbus and the demonic vision of Vespucci through the the utopian perspectives of Crevecoeur, Jefferson, and Emerson. Finally, Estes surveys McCarthy scholarship in general and choses three articles to focus on that pertain more closely to his thesis. Much of this survey feels extraneous to his argument. Of note is his treatment of John Cant's article on The Road included in Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy. Disappointingly, Estes chides Cant's reading of the \"roadmap\" as a metaphor for McCarthy's \"literary past\" (96). Estes objects because Cant \"fails to point out that it is an oil company roadmap, something which implies a very spec","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127136201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0020
J. Carson
What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward? (Blood Meridian 343).W ~%loodMeridian possesses a curious power to enthrall even as it r^Z meticulously carves landscapes of violence the likes of which many readers have never witnessed. Readers have been surprised and disturbed by this, and some have been compelled to investigate the alarming possibility that they had been enamored of a novel that offers neither moral vision nor meaning nor even catharsis. Dana Phillips argues that McCarthy's unanthropocentric language makes no distinction between the equally violent realms of nature and humanity, presenting everything with the same eye of indifference. The book's perspective then is that of natural history-the "raw orchestration of events" (447)-which offers no moral insight. Blood Meridian certainly interrogates the radical anthropocentrism that fuels the idea of Manifest Destiny, but this interrogation is only one component of the novel's larger moral thrust. Steven Shaviro manages to find a "cheerful nihilism" in his bleak conclusion that the novel's message is that all of us "end up like the kid, violated and smothered in the shithouse" but cannot "dare attach a unique significance even to this" because we have no individual distinction, being only part of the dance (157). Recent studies have seen more hopeful readings of the kid as the heroic character. But even most critics who read the novel as a prophetic tale or locate some kernel of moral import interpret the death of the kid as a failure or tragedy. Such readings overlook the moral context of the kid's death; neither the fate of the kid nor the ending of the book is so ignominious or arid.Blood Meridian discloses its moral insight through the antagonism of the judge and the kid. The novel questions the limits of language, casting its inquisition fictionally in the rhetoric of the judge and the conflict between Holden and the kid. As I'll argue, Blood Meridian suggests that language-the meaning-for-us of words and the definitions assigned to them-is communally, cooperatively determined, and this collective agreement involves agreement in judgments. Furthermore, the novel posits that every individual possesses a moral autonomy out of which he or she may assess communal meanings and judgments. The judge embodies what Joshua Masters calls a "textual enterprise" (25), by which he seeks complete mastery. His antagonist, the kid, represents the moral autonomy through which the judge's enterprise may be weighed, measured, and found wanting. Throughout the story, the kid is associated with fire, which symbolizes moral autonomy and the perpetual creative potential of human beings. As Rothfork, Holloway, and others have indicated, the judge's rhetoric finally holds the key to its own demise: he must have an audience who is convinced for his verdict to abide. The kid is never convinced, and goes to his grave of his own volition, in refusal of the judge's account. The kid's final re
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Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0001
J. Cagle
McCarthy's border fiction-to date, five novels including Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), and No Country for Old Men (2005)-demonstrates a committed interest in games and game playing. These works continually mobilize tarot cards, Monte and poker playing, chess, and coin flipping as harbingers of fate and chance as well as evidence of unique skill. Although relatively little is yet known about Cormac McCarthy's private life, conversations with McCarthy betray his sincere interest in games. Richard Woodward's 1992 New York Times Magazine interview locates McCarthy at a pool hall in a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, where he "ignores the video games and rock-and-roll and patiently runs out the table. A skillful player, [McCarthy] was a member of a team at this place, an incongruous setting for a man of his conservative demeanor" ("Venomous"). Thirteen years later, in a 2005 Vanity Fair interview accompanying the release of No Country for Old Men, Woodward reports that one of McCarthy's longtime friends is legendary poker champion Betty Carey, and that McCarthy's current hangout is no longer a noisy pool hall, but a perhaps equally unlikely location: the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. At the Institute, known as a "hub for complex-systems theory," McCarthy attends workshops on "bounded inferences for decision-making in games" and follows the work of leading thinkers in chaos theory, such as J. Doyne Farmer, the famed "economist-physicist-gambler" ("Cormac Country").In what follows, I will look closely at games and game playing as they figure formally as well as thematically in McCarthy's most recent addition to his border fiction, No Country for Old Men. I base my argument on the ideas of Jean-Francois Lyotard, whose sociocultural analyses have become central to postmodern studies. The McCarthy text, I argue, "rewrites" postmodern jouissance through a deferral of narrational and thematic resolution. The narrative's plotting, its logic and dynamic, exhibits a type of "play" by refusing to develop toward a proper resolution between opposing forces. In this sense of "play," No Country for Old Men embodies the optimistic qualities of "usefulness" Lyotard associates with Cold War game theory: "Game theory, we think, is useful in the same sense that any sophisticated theory is useful, namely as a generator of ideas" (Postmodern 60). Ultimately, the novel's adherence to game-theoretic logic as well as its expression of unresolved tension demonstrates the "rewriting" of postmodern play.Playing GodIn McCarthy's border fiction, games and game playing are often associated with the work of narrative production. The workings of chance concern not only players engaged in parlor games, but also the serious storytellers populating McCarthy's fiction as they carefully-and strategically-craft their tales. McCarthy's narrators construct stories of "biblical gravity" to emphasize issues of life and
麦卡锡的边境小说——到目前为止，他写了五部小说，包括《血色子午线》(1985)、《骏马》(1992)、《十字路口》(1994)、《平原之城》(1998)和《老无所归》(2005)——展示了他对游戏和游戏玩法的浓厚兴趣。这些作品不断地将塔罗牌、蒙特和扑克、国际象棋和抛硬币作为命运和机会的预兆，以及独特技能的证据。尽管我们对科马克·麦卡锡的私生活知之甚少，但与他的交谈却透露出他对游戏的真诚兴趣。理查德·伍德沃德(Richard Woodward) 1992年在《纽约时报》杂志(New York Times Magazine)的采访中，把麦卡锡安排在德克萨斯州埃尔帕索(El Paso)一家购物中心的台球厅里，在那里他“无视电子游戏和摇滚乐，耐心地跑出了桌子。”作为一名技术娴熟的球员，[麦卡锡]在这个地方是一个团队的成员，对于他这样一个保守的人来说，这是一个不协调的环境。”13年后的2005年，在《老无所居》出版的同时，伍德沃德接受了《名利场》杂志的采访，他说麦卡锡的老朋友之一是传奇扑克冠军贝蒂·凯里，麦卡锡现在常去的地方不再是嘈杂的台球厅，而是一个可能同样不太可能的地方:新墨西哥州的圣达菲研究所。在被称为“复杂系统理论中心”的研究所，麦卡锡参加了“游戏中决策的有限推理”研讨会，并跟随混沌理论的主要思想家的工作，如著名的“经济学家-物理学家-赌徒”J.多恩·法默(J. Doyne Farmer)。在接下来的文章中，我将仔细研究游戏和游戏玩法，因为它们在麦卡锡最新的边境小说《老无所依》中既有形式又有主题。我的论点基于让-弗朗索瓦·利奥塔的观点，他的社会文化分析已成为后现代研究的核心。我认为，麦卡锡的文本通过推迟叙事和主题的解决，“重写”了后现代的欢爽。叙事的情节、逻辑和动态表现出一种“游戏”，拒绝在对立的力量之间朝着适当的解决方向发展。在这种“游戏”的意义上，利奥塔将冷战博弈论与“有用性”联系起来，体现了“有用性”的乐观品质:“我们认为，博弈论的有用性与任何复杂理论的有用性相同，即作为思想的发生器”(后现代60)。最终，小说对博弈论逻辑的坚持以及对未解决的张力的表达表明了后现代戏剧的“重写”。GodIn McCarthy的边界小说、游戏和玩游戏通常与叙事制作工作联系在一起。机遇的作用不仅与室内游戏中的玩家有关，也与麦卡锡小说中严肃的讲故事者有关，因为他们小心翼翼地、有策略地编造故事。麦卡锡的叙述者构建了具有“圣经引力”的故事，以强调生与死的问题——麦卡锡认为这是所有“好作家”(伍德沃德的《毒》)的标志。在麦卡锡的边境小说中，没有哪部作品像《老无所依》那样充斥着对游戏、死亡和叙事的关注。小说的情节集中在Llewelyn Moss身上，他是一名36岁的焊工，也是来自德克萨斯州桑德森的越战老兵，在他意外地发现了一个失败的海洛因交易地点和一个装有240万美元的文件箱后，各种党派都在寻找他。这次搜寻的两个主要角色是特雷尔县警长埃德·汤姆·贝尔和一个名叫安东·齐格的神秘刺客，贝尔认为他是“一个真正的、活生生的毁灭先知”(《老无所乡》4)。在海洛因交易的大屠杀现场，莫斯遇到了一个受伤的人，他脱水了，向他要水。莫斯没有水，也没有给这个人提供任何其他形式的援助，而是继续检查现场，决心找到“最后一个站着的人”(15)。…
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