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

By Steven Frye

Literary naturalism at play in one of America’s most visionary novelists: Cormac McCarthy

It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, followed by major prizes, more best sellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy’s commitment to an older form of literary expression: naturalism.

It is hardly a secret that McCarthy’s work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well.

In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of McCarthy’s work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy’s concerns are deeply religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most expansive sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars but anyone studying the literature of the South or the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9780817394462

Book preview

UNGUESSED KINSHIPS

STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY

REALISM AND NATURALISM

SERIES EDITOR

Gary Scharnhorst

EDITORIAL BOARD

Donna M. Campbell

John Crowley

Robert E. Fleming

Alan Gribben

Eric Haralson

Denise D. Knight

Joseph McElrath

George Monteiro

Brenda Murphy

James Nagel

Alice Hall Petry

Donald Pizer

Tom Quirk

Jeanne Campbell Reesman

Ken Roemer

UNGUESSED KINSHIPS

NATURALISM AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE IN CORMAC MCCARTHY

STEVEN FRYE

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Plantin MT Pro

Cover image: Sunrise at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.

© Twildlife | Dreamstime.com

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2153-6 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6109-9 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9446-2

For Kristin, Melissa, and Thomas

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.

MATTHEW 10:16

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1. Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy

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

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

4. In Light and Shadow: Contingency and Kinship in Blood Meridian

5. The World Lies Waiting: Transitions and Contact Zones in the Border Trilogy

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

7. Prospects

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

1

Naturalism and Polyvalence in Cormac McCarthy

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov

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

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

Scientific work at SFI is always pushing creativity to its practical limits. We always court a high risk of failure. Above all we have more fun than should be legal.

We are absolutely relentless at hammering down boundaries created by academic disciplines and institutional structures. If you know more than anybody else about a subject we want to talk to you. We don’t care what the subject is.

We are beyond relentless in seeking out the best people in every discipline. We will get you here. No matter what. And we will give you the space and the resources that you need.

We don’t care how young you are.

We have in general avoided becoming involved in matters of policy. But if you are working on a program that involves sustainability or the environment or human welfare and you think we might have something you can use pick up the phone.

The educational opportunities that we offer—especially for young people—are simply not available elsewhere. Period.

Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we’re on the right track.

McCarthy challenges the partitioning that occurs as methodologies evolve in an academic setting. He writes about eradicating boundaries, echoing his own fascination with malleable borders more than physical but intellectual and imaginative. McCarthy rejects the popular dichotomy between heart and mind, a tension heightened by the dual legacies of the Enlightenment and romanticism. McCarthy’s operating principles suggest that rationality, intuition, empirical inquiry, and imagination merge in a strange chemistry, one that takes the human community to new territories and into realms beyond the practical and utilitarian.¹⁰ The Santa Fe Institute was founded on the notion of cross-disciplinary inquiry centering on the exploration of complex adaptive systems. It was established in 1984 by scientists George Cowan and Murray Gell-Mann (among others) and has become the most renowned institute dedicated to contemporary issues related to complexity theory. In the summer of 2019, David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, delivered the keynote address to the semiannual conference of the Cormac McCarthy Society. His talk dealt in detail with the current state of understanding in complexity science, the specific role of the Santa Fe Institute in these inquiries, and McCarthy himself as a trustee and regular interlocutor in the institute’s discussions. Krakauer emphasized both the freedom offered to fellows in his community and the scientific rigor demanded of them. His keynote led to vigorous discussion involving Krakauer himself, filmmaker Karol Jalochowski, and the literary scholars attending the conference. During the Q and A, Krakauer emphasized something that speaks powerfully to McCarthy’s work and his role at a scientific institute—aesthetics. Any understanding the human community comes to achieve in complexity science will ultimately emerge from a creative capacity similar to what has led to the greatest works of art. One might infer from Krakauer’s comments that the intuition of the scientist is not precisely the same as that of the artist. Coming from different patterns of thought, they share a disparate range of experiences, and the totality of those experiences lead to conclusions emerging from distinct vantage points. But still, each employs the raw material of deep, earnest thinking as they seek insight into realms hitherto unknown, as they venture into Melville’s ocean perishing—his vast, open, and unremembering sea. There is more shared by the scientist and the artist than is conventionally assumed since both seek truth and beauty in tandem and in essential relation. Near the end of the discussion Krakauer seemed to echo the poet John Keats, who in the last lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) wrote:

When old age shall this generation waste,

    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Academic and intellectual taxonomies have practical value in any pursuit of knowledge. But taken on face value they often lead to divisions that breed erroneous popular conceptions and a peculiar kind of false consciousness. The distinct philosophical categories of epistemology and aesthetics treated independently cloud and even obscure their essential relation. This is not to say that the artist will discover and codify the principles that govern the nature of physical reality. That of course is the role of the scientist. But the artist may in some way intuit those principles in works that can only be appreciated though the whole of the human mind. Truth will be understood not only in empirical terms but through the complementary capacities of artist, philosopher, and scientist. In 2019, Krakauer compiled a collection of essays that represent the Santa Fe Institute’s inquiries into complexity science since 1984. The volume is entitled Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019. As an epigram to the introduction, Krakauer quotes Edgar Allan Poe from The Purloined Letter:

They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it.¹¹

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

I

Cormac McCarthy’s work has elicited responses from critics that run the gamut in terms of worldview—from Gnosticism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism, to the ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Periods in literary history, such as romanticism and modernism, have all been explored in the polyvalent context of his canon.¹² Like many of these movements, literary naturalism is a contested category. First employed to denote a broad grouping of European authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term applied to Americans describes a more focused group of fiction writers, specifically Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. Developing out of a transformation in culture that swept through the Western world in the latter half of the nineteenth century, naturalism involves a layered response to both aesthetic and intellectual concerns. In literary art, naturalism was initially seen as an extension of realism, which under the influence of Europeans such as Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, and Americans such as Mark Twain and Henry James, asserted that literature should portray setting and character in rigidly mimetic terms. Stories in this vein bring to life all the grit, detail, and sordid reality that characterize human experience as it exists in the known world. The ideas and formal conventions of romanticism persisted with vigor, but realists tried to distance themselves from romantic portrayals of ideal and mythic figures, who were often noble in birth and behavior, in favor of character types who came from various social classes and strata. Naturalism enthusiastically employed this blended romantic and realist aesthetic in the context of what was called the new science, the revolutionary ideas of intellectuals such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reviewers and literary critics tended to oversimplify how these scientific precepts appeared in the fiction of naturalist writers, treating works such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), as well as Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (1904) and The Call of the Wild (1903), as unambiguous representations of Darwinian precepts. Such accounts failed to consider how ideas are refracted and reimagined in the process of artistic creation. This perspective is expressed most notably in the third volume of Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1930). Parrington concludes that American literary naturalism is a kind of pessimistic realism that places human beings in a mechanical world and understands them to be victims of an indifferent material universe.¹³ In 1963, George Becker codified this perspective, defining naturalism in American literature as no more than an emphatic and explicit position taken by some realists, showing man caught in a net from which there can be no escape and degenerating under those circumstances; that is, it is pessimistic materialist determinism.¹⁴ But running parallel with Parrington and Becker, other critics recognized in the naturalism of the literary artist a more ambiguous rendering of the new science. In 1947, Malcolm Cowley acknowledged the pessimistic tendencies of the literary naturalists, insofar as they limit the role of human agency in a deterministic universe. But Cowley argues that a rigid philosophical naturalism does not define naturalist fiction entirely.¹⁵ There is an undercurrent of optimism in the work of American literary naturalists that finds its source in the romance tradition. This optimism is observable not only in the patterns of genre but in the themes of naturalist works. Especially later in the 1950s, a new generation of critics took this more nuanced perspective. Scholars such as Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, and Lee Clark Mitchell carefully consider how artists encounter ideas and transform them through a complex process of creation and regeneration. Walcutt challenges the notion of naturalism’s debt to realism, suggesting that naturalism involves a divided stream, one branch reflecting romanticism and specifically New England transcendentalism.¹⁶ Lee Clark Mitchell pursues a new avenue by considering how naturalist determinism appears in linguistic structure and narrative itself.¹⁷ Donald Pizer explores the relationship between a purely naturalist vision and more traditional conceptions of our relationship to nature, writing that the naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions . . . the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. He continues by arguing that despite naturalism’s leveling of animals and humans, there is a compensating humanistic value that affirms the significance of the individual.¹⁸

A useful generalization can be drawn from these later inquiries. Writers are evolving human beings and artists rather than philosophers or scientists bound by strict epistemological procedures. In terms of narrative, their works will reenvision in remarkable ways the concepts that interest them. The creative process and the fundamental exigencies of narrative make ideas new, distinctive, and rife with tensions and ambiguities. These critics recognized in naturalist fiction a more complex and polyvalent treatment of scientific precepts, and as this understanding of literary naturalism emerged, an enriched sense of its intellectual and aesthetic significance came to prominence. Literary naturalism was understood not just as the straightforward and monolithic (even dogmatic) presentation of a materialism based in the biological sciences. Instead, the movement put these new ideas in play, in narratives that live initially in the consciousness of the artist and emerge with all the strangeness and uncertainty that literary art by its nature permits. Literary naturalism encourages the reader to acknowledge the reality of the Darwinian concept of natural selection: the world is blind to human suffering, and human behavior is often bestial, atavistic, and monstrous. But despite this, literary naturalism explores things distinctly human, such as brotherhood, altruistic commitment to the other, and even spiritual awareness. Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat (1897) tells the story of four men at sea in a small skiff as they struggle to find their way to shore in a storm. The narrator acknowledges their environment as brutal, harsh, destructive, and, finally, flatly indifferent. But the story emphasizes the subtle brotherhood among the men, a selflessness that cannot find easy explanation in purely materialist terms. A rigid philosophical naturalism, then, finds itself in tension with a form of humanism that sets the species apart, makes it distinctive and rare. In considering the works of late nineteenth-century writers such as Crane, Walcutt and Pizer never deny the human capacity for avarice, greed, and violence; these realities too can be understood in human terms, but in their treatment of naturalism’s leveling of the human and the animal, the human in all its moral complexity retains a palpable resonance.

Continuing in this critical tradition, Eric Carl Link works to define the contours of literary naturalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (2004), Link considers the movement from its inception forward.¹⁹ Reinforced by a reading of representative texts, Link posits a tripartite model for understanding how the new science came to fruition in various corners of our intellectual culture. He identifies three forms of naturalism: scientific naturalism, philosophical naturalism, and literary naturalism. Scientific naturalism refers to methodology. The scientific naturalist is the scientist, the individual who implements scientific methodology and depends on its epistemology to constitute objective truth in the physical world. In the same vein, the philosophical naturalist transforms that method into a worldview. For the philosophical naturalist, nothing exists beyond the tactile and material world, and no truth can be designated as such without reliance on the scientific method. In contrast to both, the literary naturalist is the writer who is attracted to Darwinian thinking but is by no means confined by a purely empirical conception of the world. As an artist rather than as a philosopher or scientist, the literary naturalist allows scientific and philosophical concepts to play freely in a narrative context centered on the human struggle. For this writer, ideas are compelling and provocative, even true, but questions of human and even the spiritual portent still deserve consideration in stories varied and polyvalent in their thematic implications.

Given this modern and contemporary perspective, a host of twentieth-century writers might be considered through a naturalist lens: Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner, as well as later authors such as Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy. Given his emphasis on the implacability of historical forces, William Faulkner might especially be considered in this vein, and his influence on McCarthy is undisputed. More broadly, the modernism that many of these authors help define bears the indelible mark of the earlier naturalism, given that both movements engage ideas unique to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They both rigorously explore philosophical determinism in all its social, biological, and historical manifestations. Beginning with The Orchard Keeper (1965) and continuing through The Road (2006), a firmly naturalistic vision works in dialectical interaction with a more humanistic and even romantic view of the human condition and the material universe. Outer Dark