Linguistic Entropy in Relation to Ecology in Cormac McCarthy’s Recent Fiction
Cornelis K.N. Uitterlinden Student number: 10187839
Ma Thesis for Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture, University of Amsterdam
Written under the supervision of Prof. C.A.P. Clarkson
This thesis is concerned with the literary expression of a reciprocal relationship between language and the material world in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. It will seek to show that in McCarthy’s recent fiction the environment is posited as a prerequisite for a functional system of human language. The aim of this thesis is to explore the multifaceted metaphysics that arises from the complex relationship between language and the material world in the American author’s recent fiction. The main argument in this thesis will be that McCarthy’s borderland novels speak of the adverse effects that the ongoing destruction of the natural world may have on our ability to narrate our lives into a coherent story. The first section will explore a number of ways in which the borderland novels engage with the environment as language as well as with language as an environment. Subsequently it will postulate that in McCarthy’s fiction, nature comprises a divine interconnected matrix. The second section will be concerned with some of the ways in which McCarthy’s literary style textually reflects the destructive effects that the commodification of the nature has had on the environment. The final section will analyze The Road in regard to the effects that the destruction of the environment can have on a narrative of life that is fit for the future and consistent with the past. It will show that McCarthy displaces the attention from problematic nature of the
signifier to the importance of the material environment of the signified, ultimately postulating that if we care about language, we should care about the natural living world.
Declaration of Academic Integrity:
I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and that I have read and understood the plagiarism guidelines that the University of Amsterdam has made available.
Cornelis Uitterlinden August 6, 2016 Amsterdam
1 Introduction--- 1
2 Environmental referentiality--- 6
2.1 Before nomenclature--- 8
2.2 Nature as language--- 9
2.3 Animal archetypes in The Border Trilogy--- 11
2.4 Language as divine creation; imitating the weaver God--- 15
2.5 The double referentiality of the simile--- 18
3 Linguistic Embodiment of A crisis of the Natural--- 22
3.1 From natural to unnatural in The Border Trilogy--- 22
3.2.1 Commodification of Nature in Blood Meridian--- 26
3.2.2 Hunting capital--- 30
3.3 Blood Meridian as poetic resistance--- 32
4 The Road: a dying world, a dying language--- 37
4.1 A narrative of a dying world --- 37
4.2 McCarthy’s rhetoric in describing a world of lost referents--- 39
4.3 The absence of the divine as problematizing linguistic referentiality 42 4.4 Inability to fashion a story of existence--- 44
4.5 The ecological sublime--- 47
5 Conclusion--- 49
Linguistic Entropy in Relation to Ecology in Cormac McCarthy’s Recent Fiction
Introduction
…the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life…
…he rode back in the dark…The last of the day’s light fanned slowly upon the plain behind him and withdrew again down the edges of the world in a cooling blue of shadow and dusk and chill and a few last chitterings of birds sequestered in the dark and wiry brush…but the warriors must ride on in that darkness they’d become rattling past with their stone-age tools of war in default of all substance and singing softly in blood and longing south across the plains to Mexico. (All the Pretty Horses 5-6)
In reading the opening scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s first novel after the critically acclaimed Blood Meridian, some of the grand scope of his recent fiction comes to light. Apart from connecting the novel to its predecessor historically, this scene draws the reader into a narrative that reiterates a naturalistic undercurrent of violence and atavism that is present in many of the author’s novels. At the same time in these lines the American novelists seems to revel in his richly poetic descriptions of and reverence for the natural world. McCarthy displaces the attention from problematic nature of the signifier to the importance of the material environment of the signified. Ultimately arguing that, if we care about language, we should care about the natural living world.
McCarthy is often heralded as one of the great living authors of our time. Indeed, eminent literary critic Harold Bloom has conferred on McCarthy’s Blood Meridian the title of “the strongest imaginative work by any living author” (237). McCarthy’s literary career, today spanning over 50 years, has been rewarded with, amongst others, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Price for Fiction and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. Subsequently, the lively body of scholarship on the novelist’s work has been growing steadily over the last decade. Literary critics have given considerable attention to the aesthetics, epistemological concerns, and ethical notions set forth by McCarthy in his work (Frye 46). However, the interpretation of McCarthy’s fiction
remains enigmatically challenging. The fact that McCarthy has refrained from becoming a public figure and therefore has given very few interviews indeed, does little to elucidate the interpretation of his work. As such, Dianne Luce’s call for more in-depth studies of his writing (ix-x) is not unwarranted. Erik Hage has pointed out that Blood Meridian, first published in 1990, marks a discernible shift in McCarthy’s style towards a style “that was strikingly his own” (153). He argues that in the preceding novels McCarthy’s work depended more on a mosaic of styles that he adapted from authors such as Faulkner, Hemingway and Melville. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Blood Meridian is seen to be the novel that firmly established McCarthy’s literary talents and is often regarded as his masterpiece (Hage, 43). The “vast metaphysical expanse” (Hage, 153) that the narrative of Blood Meridian depicts can be said to have carried over into The Border Trilogy that comprises three novels published separately as All The Pretty Horses in 1992, The Crossing in 1993 and Cities of the Plain in 1998. In a broad taxonomy of McCarthy’s work these novels are often grouped together as the borderland novels, or the western novels. They share a geographical location, the
southwestern American border, yet more importantly they deal with the border as a metaphor that marks the ontologically and culturally problematic region between “existence and
obliteration” , “dead and dying civilizations”, “life and death, past and present, waking and dream worlds” (Hage, 51). Mark Busby, writing on McCarthy’s literary border crossings writes that the border is “a metaphor for a complex and oxymoronic melding of nihilism and optimism, good and evil, illusion and reality” and for the “complex intertwining of positive and negative forces” (227). Moreover, another symbolic borderland that can be productively examined in relation to these narratives is that between the material natural world and its linguistic embodiment. This thesis will postulate that through a profound interest in this relationship, McCarthy’s borderland novels display a critical attitude towards the destruction of the natural world. Since these concerns culminate in the authors’ Pulitzer Price winning novel The Road, first published in 2006, I have decided to include it in the taxonomy of the borderland novels.
Defined by bleak narratives of failure, both on an individual and communal level, the world depicted in the novels under discussion is portrayed as atavistic, visceral and
necessarily contingent and violent. The atrocious and mindless historical violence in Blood Meridian, the narratives of stunted ambition and blood drenched revolution in The Border Trilogy – and the anthropophagy taking place in The Road’s apocalyptic waste-land, push back against a belief in the merits of traditional humanism. Indeed, in the spirit of American literary naturalism many characters in McCarthy’s fiction are driven to failure by the internal logic of entropy that is inherent in nature (Clarke, 55). From the narrative a pessimistic and material vision of nature arises.1 However, McCarthy likewise displays “a near-mystical regard for the natural world” (Caldwell, qtd in Hage 117). Whereas it is often represented in a relatively objective and unadorned yet highly precise fashion, at other times the descriptions of natural world are lyrical, animated and imbued with meaning (e.g. “the gray and malignant dawn” (All The Pretty Horses 19) or “the chary dawn [of the] cold illucid world” (The Road
1 For a comprehensive account of historical American literary naturalism see Charles Walcutt American Literary
Naturalism, A Divided Stream. With Naturalist Fiction; The Entropic Vision David Baguley has written a
123).The role that the natural world plays in McCarthy’s borderland novels can be aligned with questions of ontology, epistemology and language, or in other words with the manner with which we know about ‘being’ and make sense of the world through language. As such, it can be argued that it engages with the problematic relationship between reality and language which is characterized by the notion that “we cannot access a real knowable world as some objective reality, since language always intervenes in our interpretations” (Barron 20).
McCarthy’s borderland fiction engages with the instability of language in an
interesting way through linking it to one of the more pressing concerns of contemporaneity; the environment. In the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, literary critic and McCarthy scholar Steven Frye mentions the growing role of ecocriticism in America’s Western literature and states as one of its reasons that “the notion of region itself invites these approaches because eco-poetics and environmental literary
criticism often begins at a fundamentally ontological level, as it inquires into the very meaning of place as a category of understanding” (6). Professor of literature and ecocritic Arran Stibbe, writes in his introduction to Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, that “[Ecolinguistics] is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction, and aiding in the sear for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world” but emphasizes that “[t]his is a superficial explanation but at least starts to create connections in people’s minds between two areas of life – language and ecology – that are not separate at all” (1). Likewise, in literary and cultural ecocriticism it is relatively commonplace to analyze and discuss the ways in which human language, and in particular anthropocentric human language2 might influence our relationship to the
2 Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) define anthropocentrism as “[a dangerous] story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures” compare to Judge Holdens attempts in Blood Meridian to ‘dictate his own fate’ through knowing and naming everything that exists when he says about the world:” This is my claim…And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life…In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” and moments later “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos” (209)
environment. However, McCarthy’s recent fiction shows that our treatment of the environment might have profound effects on language. This thesis will seek to show that McCarthy’s borderland novels speak of the adverse effects that the ongoing destruction of the natural world may have on our ability to narrate our lives into a coherent story.
Indeed, in “The World, the Text and the Ecocritic” Lawrence Buell states that “…texts are themselves arguably “ecosystems” (44) and quotes Harré et al., “languages depend for their survival on an ecological support system” (45). The following analysis will refer to the dialogic process of language as it could be seen as the operating principles governing the reciprocal relationship between language and the environment. It will do so by exploring a number of ways in which the borderland novels engage with the environment as language as well as with language as an environment. Moreover, it will postulate that in McCarthy’s fiction, nature comprises a divine interconnected matrix. The second section will be
concerned with the destructive effects that the commodification of the nature has had on the environment in the fictive world of the borderland novels. Furthermore, it will show that Blood Meridian may be read as poetic resistance against the unnatural. The final section will analyze The Road in regard to the effects that the destruction of the environment can have on a narrative of life that is fit for the future and consistent with the past. It will seek to show that McCarthy displaces the attention from problematic nature of the signifier to the importance of the material environment of the signified, ultimately postulating that if we care about
language, we should care about the natural living world.
In this analysis Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective on the transient dialogism of language may be useful. In his theory, words have been dialogic from the moment they were first uttered. They exist inescapably in a polyphonic and heteroglossic matrix that apart from linguistic elements includes a history of sociocultural relations. Indeed, he writes in his
and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped…this dialogical inter-orientation with the alien word that occurs in the object” (279). He elaborates the concept of dialogical field of language by employing a beautifully imaginative metaphor when he writes that
if we imagine the intention of such a word, that is, its directionality toward the object, in the form of a ray of light, then the living and unrepeatable play of colors and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray word, not within the object itself…but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value judgments and accents through which the ray passed on its way toward the object; the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object, makes the facets of the image sparkle (277).
Following this metaphor, it is possible to see the any major change within the prism of the world surrounding the object as disrupting or complicating linguistic referentiality, or indeed as increasing the internal entropy in language. So that adverse actions upon the natural world affect the dialogic process of linguistic referentiality correspondingly.
1 Environmental Referentiality
In Algernon Swinburne’s famous poem “The Forsaken Garden” those that can provide meaning to the garden, human beings, have vanished from it. Ultimately even death dies since, the poet seems to argue, a concept of death is a figment of human imagination.
The reason for mentioning this poem here is that I have found Michael Joyner’s sharp critical response to it particularly productive in the following analysis. He writes:
The [inevitable] dialogue between the languages of the human and the natural, renders a world in which neither a … fittedness nor a total separation of humankind and nature is possible…It is within the dialogic relation between human language and the language of natural process that we make sense of the world as the world simultaneously shapes us, not in any type of synchronic temporality, but in a temporality that is immanently historical and social. Therefore, the relationship of the human to the phenomenal is one that is
inherently involved in dialogic language, is constantly in the act of creation, and cannot be thought in any type of binaristic opposition (104).
McCarthy’s novels deal both directly and indirectly with the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. In their philosophical ruminations, McCarthy’s characters often equate empirical objective reality with narrative. Moreover, the American author’s narratives emphasize a continuous tension between creative potential of language as opposed to its inability to render objective truths. In The Crossing, the ex-priest expresses his view that “this world …which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale” (451). Nevertheless, McCarthy also has his characters assert that the relationship between language and the world is fragile, transient and unstable. In All the Pretty Horses the narrator describes how John Grady’s feet “left cold wet tracks on the polished stones that sucked up and
vanished like the tale of the world itself” (209). A similar yet more direct statement can be found in “Whales and Men” an unpublished manuscript by McCarthy. In this text, the protagonist sums up this sentiment that is recurrent throughout the novelist’s fiction
“Everything that is named is set at one remove from itself. Nomenclature is the very soul of secondhandedness. [T]he name is not the thing and we experience nothing” (qtd. in Luce
209). Likewise, Alan Noble points out in “Narrative, Being, and the Dialogic Novel: The Problem of Discourse and Language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing” that in The Crossing McCarthy underlines the problematic instability and arbitrariness of the linguistic sign in (re)creating the story of the world through narratives of the past. He writes that:
the truth found in speaking is shown to be constrained and undermined by the frailty and temporality of existence. The history out of which we craft our stories, the world we make out of our past, is comprised of “wreckage,” “bones,” and “words of the dead,” all of which imply that whatever truth there is to be found in speaking, it cannot communicate the past (252).
Thus, through both asserting that narrative constitutes our reality, as well as through
underlining the inherent mimetic inaccuracy of the linguistic sign, McCarthy’s writing directs our attention to a process of interpretation and the perception of a meaningful reality. This process operates on the level of language since it is ultimately a reading and writing of the material world.
1.1 Before Nomenclature
In the narrative of Blood Meridian, the narrator imitates the Judge in his “ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings” (Blood Meridian 123) and engages with a time before language. He metaphorically describes the scalp-hunters as “beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own
loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all” (182). It should be noted here that this pre-linguistic phase is described as inhuman. McCarthy’s choice of words
leaves little to the reader’s imagination as to the alien and uncivilized world that comprised the earth ‘before nomenclature’. Thus, Gondwanaland is depicted not as some kind of mythical pre-linguistic paradise, but instead as an indifferent, violent and brutal place.
Nomenclature, despite of having resulted in the entropy that is inherent in the dialogic process of language, has made us human. Indeed, Noam Chomsky wrote “when we study human language, we are approaching what some might call ‘the human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man” (qtd. in Stibbe 4).
Likewise, in McCarthy’s borderland novels, characters and narrators repeatedly deal with this essence or spirit while often asserting it to be a knowing rather than a telling. It is pre-linguistic prerequisite of human language that, as I shall point out below, depends upon a complete material world that, in McCarthy’s fiction, comprises a holistic, natural and god-made matrix. For example, during the dream allegory in the epilogue Cities of the Plain the traveller speaks to Billy about his attempts, albeit in vain, to find this spirit. He says “I had hoped for a sort of calculus that would sum the convergence of map and life when life was done” and that “within their limitations there must be a common shape or shared domain between the telling and the told” (1019). He continues by saying that “the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core there are no idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out. Before the first man spoke and after the last is silenced forever” (1026-1027). This assertion speaks of something older and intransient, a divine spirit out which all other things arise. Although this spirit is pre- or extra-linguistic, it is a source of understanding and language nonetheless. Indeed, in The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram writes that “even boulders and rocks seem to speak their own uncanny
1.2 Nature as language
At the start of part II of Cities of the Plain the narrator remarks about Billy who is standing behind a window that “Anyone who would have looked up to see him there behind the untrue panes of dusty glass could have told his story” (826). The narrator argues for the ability to read a meaningful narrative into the material, while again underlining that this narrative will be a distortion of reality since the material can only be accessed via the untrue. Literature is able to foreground and emphasize this conversion from materiality to interpreted
representation. A scene in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner who is one of the literary predecessors that McCarthy is said to have been influenced by illustrates this productively The lines describe the moment in which the mother of the family of protagonists passes away. After her final breath the narrator zooms in on the appearance of her hands that still possess “any semblance of life” (21). The narrator interprets these hands and turns them into a linguistically mediated source of knowledge about the mother’s history. Her hands show:
a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail has not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last (Ibid.).
Whereas prior to this act of linguistically conditioned interpretation the reader knew very little of the mother’s history, these lines give rise to a distinct personality; her attitude towards a life of hardship. Thus Faulkner transforms an image of nature via language into a narrative. On the final page of Cities of The Plain a similar scene presents itself when the narrator describes Billy’s now elderly hands as “gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it” (1037). Likewise a history of their owner presents itself through language.
McCarthy, like Faulkner, paints a picture with linguistic signs. ‘Gnarled’ carries a certain onomatopoeic quality – its knotted articulation combines with the mental image of an elderly ropescarred hand. Moreover, the narrator comments upon the operationalization of the act of interpretation as well as on the linguistic act of creation. He writes that in Billy’s hands “was map enough to read” and that “There [was] God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world” (Ibid). Thus the narrator reflects upon the notion that the raw and god-made materiality is non-linguistic. Like “a shape [that] was forced in the void at the onset” (1030). These lines speak of a relationship between material reality, nature, and its linguistic embodiment. They do not claim that a truly mimetic relationship between the signified and the signifier is possible but do insist upon the idea that knowledge is conveyed through language. Through the limitless creative possibilities of language, the possible interpretations of a natural object are infinite. Although such linguistically mediated
interpretation would be strictly subjective and arbitrary it comprises one of the ways in which human beings may express their relation to the material world. In the epilogue preceding the aforementioned scene, the old-traveller’s dream allegory proclaims a similar vision. The traveller says that:
the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution…this life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship (1032).
1.3 Animal archetypes in The Border Trilogy
In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind, influential biologist and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman writes that “we must incorporate biology into our theories of knowledge and
language – an account for how we know and how we are aware in the light of the facts of evolution and developmental biology” (qtd. in Murphy 8). In McCarthy’s borderland novels, one of the ways through which knowledge is acquired, converted into language and
subsequently communicated is by the consideration of the animal archetype. In these narratives, both secondary characters and narrators often display a keen interest in animals. They confer their understanding of animals to the protagonists and, by way of natural affiliation, prompt them to think about the human soul. An example of this can be found in The Crossing one of the many wise old men that people McCarthy’s borderland narratives gives Billy and Boyd his opinion on the ox “The old man said that the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought” (546). Within this discourse, it is not the individual soul of an animal that is contemplated but a common soul or archetype. In the Border Trilogy, the narrators’ and characters’ considerations of various archetypical animals are able to shed light on the natural world as a source of knowledge about existence. Furthermore, in contemplating the archetype, McCarthy directs the reader’s gaze from the phenomenal to the metaphysical in positing that natural world comprises an interconnected matrix that is crucial to a linguistically mediated narrative of human existence.
One of the key examples of the archetype in relation to human history presents itself in All the Pretty Horses when Luis, the old servant who accompanies John Grady and Rawlins into the mountains, in a fashion typical of McCarthy´s narratives, enlightens them on the workings of the world or more specifically, of men, horses and war. In contrast to other often confoundingly difficult allegories and metaphysically engaged monologues or dialogues in McCarthy´s fiction, the philosophical implications of this Socratic dialogue are relatively straightforward. However, Luis’ view of the natural world in its conflation of animal and human life alludes to a complex philosophy that takes its key concepts from naturalism,
cyclicality, violence yet also speaks of a soul or a spirit of the world. The philosophical width of Luis’ knowledge of the world makes for a productive starting point for the discussion of the way in which the language of the natural world conditions our knowledge of it. In his lecture Luis employs the notion of the animal archetype in order to broach deeper ontological and epistemological concerns Luis’ claim that “no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold” holds that each individual animal’s heart or spirit is a realization of a delimitated archetypal spirit. However, Luis is not simply concerned with the spirit of the animal. Instead, he speaks of both differences and the resemblances between the spirit of the animal and the spirit of man that in turn are able to shed light on war in human history.
Through associative reasoning, Luis thus constructs an idea of war as inherent to men’s nature, as something that is sought out and loved. First, Luis explains war by a concept of the eternal return, ”He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite” (113). Then, Luis asserts that “the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war” a remark that achieves its full effect when aligned with his statement that “he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see” Thus this allegory argues that the violence of war is part of the psyche of both man and horse. In the light of naturalism we may see in this a reference to Darwinian concept of coevolution. However, subsequent to alluding to the psyche or spirit of the horse, Luis constructs an image of the archetype of the horse. This is further emphasized by the statement that “the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal” and finally by Luis’ claim that “if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were” (Ibid.). Luis’ meditations on the horse reflects the narrator’s description of John Grady’s affinity with horses when he writes “were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found
them anyway” and that he “Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it” (23).This scene speaks of more than just a communion between man and beast, it speaks of the archetype of the animal in men’s imagination or, the soul of the animal within the soul of men. Thus the archetype is linked to creative agency and to the way in which human beings make sense of their world. Another example of this can be found in The Crossing where the wolf’s imagined dreams offer readers a dark vision of their own kind. According to the narrator, the wolf has dreamt of man for over a hundred thousand years: “[the wolf] Dreams of that malignant lesser god come alien and pale to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house”(323). There is no way of knowing the soul of the wolf, yet in the attempt to do so, the human soul and its connection to the world is explored. Later on in the narrative, an old man shares his thoughts about animals with the protagonist. The wolf-trapper speaks about the soul of the wolf who he calls copo de nieve or, snowflake. The simile works on the premise that what is essential to the wolf – his soul– cannot be caught. So that if someone would catch ‘a wolf’ they would only catch a wolf shaped shell of bones and fur. In analogy to the snowflake the old man claims that “if you catch it, you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back” (353). These words give rise to a complex concept of the interconnectedness of natural phenomena of the material world and language. In relation to a modern conception of ecocriticism, Clarke writes that “Modern ecology, the science that studies the complex interrelationships of living things to each other and to their environments could be read as a retrospective endorsement of Romantic conceptions of nature as a holistic living agent or spirit in which all participate and interact” (16). In McCarthy’s narratives, entities that are lost from this matrix are lost forever – which, as I shall argue in section three can have far
reaching effects for a linguistically mediated understanding of life. Later in the narrative, the gypsy delivers a worldview that is thematically aligned with this statement:
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 (451).
The fictive natural world as depicted by McCarthy is asserted to constitute of a holistic web of interconnected beings in which every entity is a crucial part of the whole. In “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing” Diane Luce provides a number of quotes from “Whales and Men”, an unpublished and unfinished film-script by McCarthy. These references also allude to an interconnected matrix, “a matrix, a mother field, existing outside of time”, signified in McCarthy’s script by “the whale who strings the world together” and “the living web of whales” (qtd. in Luce 207) in which Luce argues both whales and men are caught up.
1.4 Language as divine creation; imitating the weaver God
In McCarthy’s meta-fictional engagement with the way in which narrative comprises world or vice-versa, we may also read an invitation to view narration as a divine act of creation.
Although McCarthy’s borderland novels deliver an ambiguous and incredibly multifaceted metaphysics they leave no doubt over who has created the world: God. According to Link, McCarthy shares his vision of the weaver-God with Melville (159). Within the embedded narrative of the heretic in The Crossing this God is described as:
[indifferently] Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties” (456).
Seen in this light, every individual tale comprises one thread within God’s tapestry. Indeed, literary critic Steven Frye points out that McCarthy’s narratives work toward an
understanding of how the tales of individual lives “converge in a kind of mystical synthesis in the matrix, the one tale, from which individuals find meaning both existentially in a given moment and in history broadly conceived” (53). Subsequently, Steven Frye defines the weaver-God in The Crossing as “resemble[ing] Hegel’s World-Spirit operating through the creative activities of individual human beings” (55). This deity thus operates through representation which, although other semiotic representation is not excluded from it, is primarily expressed through dialogic language. Indeed, in McCarthy’s narratives each character is part of the divine world through partaking in its narrative. Much in the same spirit, Alan Noble writes that “meaning and being are created through the act of telling stories, and the matrix of tales which make up history and humanity’s knowledge of the world are all smaller tales within the larger tale of existence or God’s tapestry” (248). Finally, Diane Luce in “The Road as Matrix”, argues that McCarthy delivers the argument that “to construct tales of others and of ourselves, not as still artefacts but moving images of the living world that embody the value that is in our hearts, is to connect with life: it is, perhaps, to fulfil that aspect of human nature that is in God’s image—to imitate Him in His weaving of the matrix” (206).
In an illuminating article on the linguistic interpretation of the objective natural world in the works of English novelist Thomas Hardy, Terry Eagleton, argues that in Hardy’s work “the objective world is a kind of language, demanding sympathetic interpretation” (157).
However, Eagleton stresses that “[the objective world] may symbolize human meanings transparently, or ambiguously, or deny them altogether” (160). Moreover, he goes on to argue that the interpretation of the empirical world differs according to type and poignancy of narrative events. Likewise, in McCarthy’s borderland novels, the author inscribes the natural world with a distinct and often malign mood that corresponds with the bleak and violent events that occur in his narratives. An example of this can be found in the second to last chapter of Blood Meridian. The narrator describes the shoreline in a lyrical fashion that can be seen as typical of McCarthy’s style:
Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline…the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight… The tidepools bright as
smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back (320).
The natural setting is narrated in with a sense of detail and precision. Subsequently it is imbued with meaning and a malign mood through its animation and through the choice of words. McCarthy’s use of the word ‘wrack’ despite its denotation of vegetation that is washed up ashore also carries the connotation of wreckage and even of the rack as the medieval torture device. Furthermore, the animation of the sea into some giant beast with a heaving black hide works towards the interpretation of nature as a malign agent in the affairs of man. Finally, this description of the natural world speaks of an almost unnatural illumination of the tidal pools as hellish smelterpots and of the phosphorescent crabs. This is but one of the many darkly romantic landscapes that can be found in McCarthy’s fiction. It is exemplary of
McCarthy’s attention to reading into and interpreting the natural world and consequently writing meaning into it textually, through his lyrical and metaphorical language use. Yet, although asserting the power of language, McCarthy’s narrator, an expert in describing how
the natural world may be perceived, also alludes to the ultimate unknowability of that same material world. Shortly after the aforementioned description, the narrator describes a horse that is standing alongside the same shoreline and that gazes “out … past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea” (Ibid.). In such a reality, Eagleton postulates “a pattern of imagery which portrays material reality as the pliable medium of deeply subjective impulse has clear significance: it acts, even if only in local ways, as a paradigm of creative and possible relations between the spirit and the flesh, in a universe where those relations are continually disturbed or disrupted” (162). One of the most notable ways with which McCarthy’s narratives underline the infinite creative potential in the conversion of materiality into language, is through the author’s incessant use of simile.
1.5 The double referentiality of the simile
The American author readily employs ‘like’ and ‘as if’ in his descriptions of narrative objects and events. In Cities of the Plain the narrator describes the road that constitutes the Juarez – El Paso border crossing “The tracks shining in the wet lamplight ran on toward the gateshack and beyond to where they lay embedded in the bridge like great surgical clamps binding those disparate and fragile worlds” (749). In imagining the author visualizing the scene, the double referentiality becomes apparent. First the author must render in language a vision of the object, in this case the tracks on a bridge. Secondly, the bridge and the tracks become a synecdoche for the relationship between the two different worlds of America and Mexico. He then interprets and complicates this description through metaphorically referring to a second object the surgical clamps, that carry an intended interpretation and thus constitute and imaginative turn away from the material to the metaphysical. In this case, the interpretation serves to underscore the disparity and fragility of the connection between America and
Mexico – that is likened to surgical clamps. Such binding - compared to, for example, surgical stitching- is temporary, born out of the necessity of the open wound. What this example has sought to show is that the simile often complicates the relationship between text and metaphysical reality. Indeed, in McCarthy’s borderland fiction to often allude to a parallel world behind the fictional world that the text represents. An example of this can be found in Blood Meridian where the narrator informs that “The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun white hot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning” (91). In his review of The Crossing Sven Birkerts writes that “McCarthy displaces our focus from the outer evens to the primal archetypes that underlie them. The novels shifts us constantly from the physical to the metaphysical, creating a recursiveness of action in which we suddenly catch the ozone whiff of human souls eking their way forward under an indifferent sky” (40).
In Blood Meridian the boys eyes are described as “redrimmed as if locked in their cages with hot wires” (17). A simile such as this adds a great deal of semantic substance to what might have been described as ‘bloodshot eyes’. There are connotations of the danger of inflicted pain through ‘hot wires’ as well as the more obvious motif of imprisonment.
Subsequently the simile provides the reader semantic direction for the interpretation of the fictional world. Literary critic Nancy Kreml writes that “McCarthy…sets up an unmarked style for the uninterpreted transmission of observations” and continues “He then introduces a marked style that leads the reader to question the simplicity of the unmarked; indeed it constrains or forces us to interpret” (43). Compared to other forms of non-metaphoric modification such as adjectives and adverbs similes such as the above are less conclusive in their expressive force. As such they ask more of the imaginative faculty of the reader in
aligning the reader’s interpretative gaze with that of the narrator. It is important to note that “similes … are directional comparisons characterized … by a preference to map more accessible (salient, typical, concrete) concepts into less accessible ones rather than the other way around” (Gibbs 297). Yet this does not necessarily mean that they are employed in order to complicate a concrete object or event. Instead, through McCarthy’s richly metaphorical rhetoric the reader is directed away from the text towards the interiority of a narrator who is profoundly invested in the semantic interpretation of narrative objects and events. Indeed, Charles Altieri writes that “The metaphoric register consists in the work’s interest in overwriting the details presented so that they will carry an intended interpretation” (“Exemplification and Expression 503).
In one of the many pointless acts of cruelty in Blood Meridian a dancing bear is shot. The narrator describes the scene and adds to it a distinct perspective through a simile “The candles sputtered and the great hairy mound of the bear dead in its crinoline lay like some monster slain in the commission of unnatural acts” (345). Through this simile the cadaver of the bear signifies something else. It directs the reader to consider as unnatural the act of dressing up an animal and making it act as if it were human being. Another example which shows the attitude of the narrator can be found in a description of John Grady Cole’s father in All the Pretty Horses. The father is “Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere” (Border Trilogy 23). This simile speaks of an imprint of the father’s presumed experience on the landscape. The use of a simile in this scene shows that the narrator does not know what goes on inside the mind of John Grady’s father. Instead the reader is offered the narrator’s
interpretation of what those sunken eyes might signify. This interpretation could be argued to constitute an attitude of the narrator toward the transience of cultural values and traditions in a modernizing world. Another example of this can be found in The Crossing. At a waterhole
Billy and Boyd are offered food by a group of Indians called the Tarahumara. The narrator asserts that these Indians have visited the locality for a thousand years and had seen “a great deal of what could be seen in the world” (502). In a sentence in which the seemingly endless conjunctions emphasize the relative equality of the things the Tarahumara have seen, the narrator specifies them as “Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and their fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying” (Ibid.). A little later in this scene the narrator then interprets through simile the way the Indians compose themselves as reflecting the inevitability of conflict in human history:
…their reticence and their silence bespoke a view of a world provisional, contingent, deeply suspect. They had about them a wary absorption, as if they observed some hazardous truce. They seemed in a state of improvident and hopeless vigilance. Like men committed upon uncertain ice (Ibid.).
In one of the scenes of The Road that describes the journey of the father and son, the narrator states that “they set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep” (133). The imagery in this simile, like in so many others in McCarthy’s fiction, points towards the archaic; in this case an older order of the world to which wandering pilgrims would belong. Similar similes direct the reader’s attention to a parallel realm that is situated behind the narrative present. Despite the fact that McCarthy’s borderland novels engage with different historical temporalities ranging from the mid-19th century to the unspecified future, there is an overarching mood to this parallel realm that is characterized by an intransient and often terrifying other-worldliness.
As we have seen simile might complicate semantics on the level of representation. On the other hand it is possible to view them as constituting an overarching narrative mood that
carries over from one novel to the next through motif repetition. Moreover, it can be argued to comprise an attitude towards language in relation to the world. Or indeed, in a double move, direct the reader’s attention away from a direct referentiality of the text to the world as a source of language. In “The World, the Text, and the Ecocritic” professor of English
Lawrence Buell provides a brief summary of Paul Ricoeurs theory of the metaphor. He writes that “[in] Ricoeur’s theory [a] metaphor [constitutes] a double move of turning away from the denotative in order to enrich the perceiver’s return to the world” (39).
2 Linguistic Embodiment of A crisis of the Natural
The previous section has sought to show that aspects of McCarthy’s rhetoric in the borderland novels underline a reciprocal relationship between language and the environment. This
section will argue that in these novels the way in which human behavior negatively impacts the natural environment is reflected linguistically. Moreover, it will deal with the possibility that this stylistic representation of the unnatural could comprise the author’s attitude. Indeed, in “Exemplification and Expression” Charles Altieri posits an author’s style as “a
demonstrative speech act” in that it might consist “in specifying an attitude by offering a linguistic embodiment of it” (503). The following analysis will establish this attitude as one that specifies that modernity, in negatively impacting a natural order, has alienating effects on both on the material world itself and on the language with which it is represented.
2.1 From natural to unnatural in The Border Trilogy
The narratives of The Border Trilogy deal with society in transition as well as with the alienation that this might result in for its denizens. In All the Pretty Horses the two main protagonists John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins leave their rural home for the unknown in Mexico. They leave as children and become men rapidly through being exposed to the harsh
reality of a wandering life. Mexico signifies older ways of living, meaningful yet dangerously transformative. On his return John Grady is unable to continue living in a modernizing nation in which the traditions of his childhood are rapidly disappearing. Standing at the grave of his abuela, he ponders on life’s transience and, “for a moment … held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she” (305). Moments later the novel ends with the young man riding out in the sunset in a passage that is disheartening and yet revels in its depiction of the natural world:
He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come (306).
In The Crossing modernity likewise remains at a remove from the protagonists. However, there are a number of crucial themes that link the narrative reality of Billy Parham to the history of the nation state. Like John Grady in All the Pretty Horses Billy’s wanderings through Mexico transform him from child into a man. Furthermore, his journeys into Mexico take him further away from a modernizing nation into a nation in which older ways of life dominate and one can still find Native Americans similar to those populating the historical time in which Blood Meridian is set. On his return he finds that the traditional pastoral world in which he grew up does no longer exist. It is possible to see the complete eradication of his family by violence as a metaphor for this transformation. On his first return Billy finds his father, mother and sister murdered. He then decides to take with him on his next journey into
Mexico, the only survivor; his younger brother Boyd. During their journey in search of their father’s stolen horses, Boyd dies. Eventually Billy returns tragically with only his brother’s bones which he buries illegally in their hometown’s cemetery. The sheriff comments upon this by saying “you caint just travel around the country burying people…I aint even sure whose property that is your digging in” (737) underline the transition of Billy from a law-abiding citizen to an alienated subject. After his return from Mexico, Billy decides to join the army of his nation which is on the verge of fighting their second global war. After all the accounts of war and bloody revolution that Billy has either been told of or experienced first-hand it is strikingly difficult for him to enlist in the army on account of a missing parental consent (649-650) and an “irregularity of [his] heartbeat” (750). After his unsuccessful attempts to join the army Billy starts his wanderings, working here and there in search of a traditional way of life that would offer him some sense of a home. At the start of part II the narrator had already predetermined the transformative outcome of Billy’s wanderings in writing that “doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now” (437).
Further on in the same section the narrator continues by writing that Billy “thought to become again the child he never was” (Ibid.) in which one could read the inevitability of change. The novel ends with Billy witnessing a strange light at night to which the natural world reacts as if it is the onset of dawn. Yet Billy quickly finds out that “there was no sun and there was no dawn” (740). Alex Hunt has pointed out that there are temporal and spatial indications that Billy was witnessing the Trinity Test in Alamogordo (qtd. in Busby 243). In a response to this, Busby writes that “the dawning of the nuclear age is the ultimate symbol for human alienation from nature” (Ibid.) and that it stands in stark contrast to Billy’s failed attempts to return the wolf that has become alien in her former habitat to a more natural locality where she may still belong. When in the final sentence of the novel the real sun does rise, it is the “godmade sun” rising “for all and without distinction” (741). Another false sun presents itself
in the form of the headlights of a car in one of the opening scenes in Cities of the Plain. The unsettled deer respond to this “unreckoned sun” by leaping away into the night. One small doe loses her footing literally and “scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others” (761).
Cities of the Plain sees the two main protagonists of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing come together on a traditional cattle ranch that is barely keeping afloat in a quickly modernizing economy. One of Billy’s colleagues at the ranch asks him about his reasons for staying on in a dying trade to which Billy responds with “You need to find you a hole at some point” (761). Around this hole, the world has changed dramatically during the lifetimes of the characters. The world they grew up in has changed in such a way that they do not longer consider it their home. Whereas horses took on an almost mythical role in preceding novels, in Cities of the Plain horses have become one commodity among others which alters the denotation of the signifier. This becomes apparent during a horse auction where those employed by the ranch and who buy and sell horses for their intrinsic value are out of place. Mac, one of the ranch elders comments upon the buying of a “flashy palomino gelding that brought thirteen hundred dollars” with “where the hell do people get that kind of money?” (851) Indeed, the whole auction scene is concerned with money and outbidding the other rather than with the use value of the horses. John Grady provides his opinion on this in saying that only those who are not buying to sell ought to be able to acquire the horse of their choice. Although John Grady and Billy do venture out on the occasional journey they are based at the ranch in which locality much of the narrative takes place. The comparative stasis of the
narrative corresponds with their position in society. They live on the ever receding outskirts of modern society as fugitives that have come from another world entire. When they do venture out into the cities; El Paso in Texas and Juarez in Mexico, they find an alienating modern consumer society. Within the borderland novels, this is the first time in which McCarthy
provides a modern and alienating rendering of the unnecessary consumption of modern capitalist society. For example, the narrative sees the first mention of tourists as travellers with consuming as a destination. Furthermore, McCarthy almost humorously depicts the contrast between the old style cowboys and modern consumer society which is illustrated by the following scene in the brothel when Billy looks at “the neon deer hanging on the wall behind them and the garish tapestries of plush, of foil and braid” (797) and by some offhand remarks with regard to senseless consumerism when Billy waits on his meal in a restaurant “A man tried to sell him a Madonna made of painted celluloid” and again “A man with a strange device with dials and levers asked him if he wished to electrocute himself” (779-780). Despite a sense of irony, the overall effect of scenes like these is that they are a literary expression of a sense of alienation that is experienced by the protagonists. The Border Trilogy ends with this alienation being near complete. The epilogue to Cities of The Plain provides the reader with a concise report on the last decades of Billy’s life. No longer is he the tragic yet romanticized traveller cowboy, instead he has become a homeless vagabond surviving on whatever is at hand. The stark contrast between the alienation of a modernizing society and the largely pastoral life that Billy has sought all his life is especially poignant in one of the last scenes of the novel.
He sat beneath a concrete overpass and watched the gusts of rain blowing across the fields. The overland truck passed shrouded in rain with the clearance lights burning and the big wheels spinning like turbines. The east-west traffic passed overhead with a muted rumble. He wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep on the cold concrete but sleep was a long time coming (1010).
2.2.1 Commodification of Nature in Blood Meridian
McCarthy’s engagement with his vision of a transition of the natural to the unnatural can be read as a process that underlines the linguistic entropy of a disrupted dialogic field. The historic time-frame in which the narrative of Blood Meridian takes place enables the author to criticize a view of progress that revolves around mankind’s triumphing over nature. Within its narrative, the mindless blood thirst that is present in some of the characters functions to distinguish human beings from the rest of the natural world. Moreover it is the antithesis to the divine within nature and textually expresses the greed with which human beings seek to overpower nature in the pursuit of capital gains. One of the ways in which this greed is express in Blood Meridian is through the concept cluster of hunting which is one of the dominating themes within the novel’s narrative. The main evens comprise of a large hunt, the desolate deserts of Mexico and the American South-West are the hunting grounds. Human beings hunt other human beings; Glanton’s band of scalp hunters track down, kill and mutilate the Native American Comanche who reciprocate these murderous gesture with perhaps even more abject acts of violence. McCarthy indeed makes it difficult to pick sides as both parties seem to be projected from within the darkest depths of human nature. In a style typical of McCarthy, the narrator and characters seem wholly detached and indifferent with regard to the degeneracy in human nature. An example of this can be identified in perhaps one of the most disturbing scenes in the novel as:
…one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew (164-165).
The Judge, the most important character in the novel’s complex epistemology, condones the moral degeneracy of intra-species hunting and explains it in social Darwinian terms: “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?” (157). Following this line of reasoning war and death are vital to the world since by its culling it mitigates a discord between mankind and the way of the natural world which is “to bloom and to flower and die” whereas “in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night” (Ibid.). Yet, regardless of the Judge’s often strangely comforting, logical and persuasive explications – the violence itself is not as calculated and does require the judge’s sanctioning. On the contrary it springs from the socially and biologically conditioned entropy within human nature. This determinism is asserted by the narrator when he introduces the protagonist known only as the kid. The narrator speaks of his unfortunate childhood and writes that “in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man” (3). In a grim reference to Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”, the circumstances of the kid
predetermine his course in life. Contrary to Wordsworth’s poem however, the child does not father a man concerned with aspiration towards individual spiritual growth. Instead he will play his part in a history in which violence is a goal in itself. Indeed, the kid has within him a taste for blood and for a violence that is mindless and purely sensory. According to the hermit in Blood Meridian man’s heart:
ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to
make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it (20).
More than a foreshadowing of the computer-age within a framework of capitalism, this vatic scene speaks of human nature and natural order being irreconcilable. Its argument seems to be that human nature has built within it a drive that seeks to dominate the natural world and thus works towards the destruction of nature and ultimately its own species.
In The Crossing an old man shares his thoughts on the position of oxen in the world. He says “that in any case the ox knew enough to work so as to keep from being killed and eaten and that was a useful thing to know” (546). Thus the domesticated animal somehow senses that within the modern world it is valued solely on the basis of its exchange value. It either serves mankind to produce or will end up butchered. The narrator interposes this scene with a description of nature that it value onto itself “A kingfisher flew up the river and veered and chattered and then swung back above the river again and continued upstream” yet dryly noting that “No one looked at it” (Ibid.). This underlines a notion that for modern man use value is the principle value in the natural world. The oxen however, have understood that to serve means to live and thus accept a fate that is determined by their use value. Although McCarthy’s narrators and characters assert that greed and violence, war and death have forever been part of the human psyche, modernity is an intensifier of these tendencies.
In subjugating the natural world on an industrial scale and it its application of a new kind of reason that Charles Taylor describes as “the most economical application of means to a given end” (qtd. in Mullins 1) modernity drains the world of its natural and divine imprint. It is beyond the scope of this project to delineate and define precisely what the natural and unnatural entail according to McCarthy’s perspective. However, as shall become clear from the following analysis, broadly speaking the transition from natural to unnatural in
McCarthy’s borderland fiction corresponds with the historical transition of a largely pastoral society into a modern and industrialized nation that is driven by the forces of capital. From an ecocritical perspective this correspondence is important since it reinstates a sense of
referentiality not only between language and the world but as well as between literature and present reality. Indeed, in his introduction to Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and
Cultural Studies, Patrick Murphy states that “literature can only affect the minds of its readers if it has the ability to orient their thinking not only toward the world in the text but also the world in which the text materially and ideationally exist at the moment of reading” (4).
2.2.2 Hunting capital
In Blood Meridian’s historic descriptions of how American buffalo were hunted, a distinction is made between hunting based on need and hunting based on greed. This contrast shows that modernity in pitting human beings against nature in the search of profit results in a
declination of the divine spirit of nature. Participants of the former manner of hunting are contrasted with the latter primarily by their archaic methods, “other than the few arms among them they were innocent of civilized device as the rawest savage of that land” (128). Their innocence lies in the fact that their ways do not conflict with the divine spirit of nature. Thus, these Native Americans hunt in much the same way as the wolf in The Crossing whose methods are in line with the spirit of divine nature. This is textually underlined and
emphasized by the natural imagery with which the narrator describes the wolf and her game in The Crossing “Deer and bare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from” (436). In one of McCarthy’s more romantic visions of nature the natural hunt warrants language with a distinctly positive mood. In contrast, the unnatural hunt of the buffalo in Blood Meridian, is a realization of the greed within human nature. It signifies
disorder rather than order and is textually described with purgatorial imagery. The following scene depicts the buffalo hunt as exchange based slaughter of epic proportions:
the animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow (334).
Only the bones and hides are profitable while hundreds of tons of buffalo meat are left to rot in the desert. This is the ultimate symbol for the greed of capitalism. The result, historically accurate, is that the buffalo are hunted to extinction which story is told by one of the
participants in the industrially scaled hunt: “Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all” (Ibid.). Again, McCarthy has his character assert a belief in the god-made aspect of nature. With the buffalo extinct, another crucial part of the divine natural matrix has been destroyed. McCarthy’s narrator then emphasizes and dramatizes the effects that such events have on the natural order within the world with imagery that is profoundly reminiscent of modernist poems by poets such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. The poetic imagery in the scene following the extinction history of the buffalo is characterized by the natural being out of order and depicts the resulting madness: “the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion” (Ibid.). The description of the natural world fits the scene as human nature is imprinted upon it. Lighting constitutes “a broken lyre upon the world’s dark rim” (335). Even the oxen, whose silent souls are described in The Crossing as
echoing some deeper Godly truth, are “galled and madlooking” (Ibid.) The narrator in The Crossing in a scene that follows the she-wolf through the mountains whilst contemplating her ancestry provides a similar view that contrasts an older order with the new “The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked kin them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old Protocols” (331). Again the assertion is that the unnatural transition from a god-made to a man-made world results in results in pointless violence. This transition is textually reflected by McCarthy’s often unnerving animism and detached and sometimes even rhetorically playful descriptions of violent scenes. This shows the way in which the natural world of events in McCarthy’s fictional universe impacts his rhetoric representation of it. Or more profoundly, in this example this may point to how these aspects of McCarthy’s style could be analysed as entailing a linguistic embodiment of his attitude towards mankind’s role in nature and how this affects natural harmony.
2.3 Blood Meridian as poetic resistance
McCarthy’s often unnerving and unnatural rhetoric in Blood Meridian can be read as resisting man’s wilful destruction of the environment through the commodification of nature by
denaturalizing such a narrative. Literary critic David Holloway writes that “Although
McCarthy’s fiction can offer no alternative to [an] analysis of society and identity trapped in the exchange function, McCarthy’s protagonists, his novels, and their language all register resistance through forms of alienation” In Holloways view, this resistance comprises a reversal of postmodern alienation in a world of global capital “in the existential gaze of the protagonists, and in the arcane phrasing of the narration that frames it, the commodity world is robbed of its ‘naturalness’, its inevitability and permanence in the fictive world” (qtd. in Jarrett 46). As such McCarthy’s poetic voice, his arcane phrasing could be argued to resist
the naturalness anthropocentric language of capitalism that leads to the destruction of the divine natural spirit.
In chapter II and XIV of Blood Meridian two of the many lyrical descriptions of the landscape that echo W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” can be identified. The first example alludes to the apocalypse in combination with the rising and circling motion of birds of prey: “to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end (23) The second example employs similar imagery as well as the linguistic echo to Yeats’ blood dimmed tide, “and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like
tidepools of primal blood (197). Yet, whereas this linguistic correspondence between
McCarthy’s novel and Yeats’ poem might be strained, the correspondence in motif and theme is not. Indeed, the last lines of the first stanza of Yeats’ poem could be read as the synopsis of Blood Meridian’s narrative.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity (5-8)
Daniel Katz, in writing on the relationship between poetry and fiction in the work of another American author, Ben Lerner, finds in what Lerner calls the poetic flickering between fiction and history a “strikingly new paradigm” and continues so write that this paradigm suggests “that in addition to reading poetic sequences or serial poems as verse ‘novels’, as we’ve been doing for fifty years or more, we should also learn to read certain novels as long lyrics, as it
