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ii Abstract This thesis explores how subjectivity is negotiated in the interplay between ideology, material objects, use, and the spaces these objects construct, in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree. McCarthy constructs a powerful and Naturalist wasteland comprised of an American materiality. The thesis employs the close connections between ideological class marginalization and spaces, to reframe the denizens of Knoxville as waste, rather than commodities. Exploring the tension of McCarthy’s insistent materiality, by employing New Materialist approaches, this thesis reveals the novel’s underlying potential to not only negotiate recentering and dehumanization of the marginalized, but to negotiate anthropocentrism, as it reframes the subject-object relationships between the animate and inanimate, and thus serves to question agency. I argue that Suttree must shed his material possessions in order to gain autonomy and real agency, because these objects form compelling networks that enmesh and incapacitate his mobility. By drawing attention to this insistent materiality, McCarthy reveals the opaque constraints of human autonomy, and thus serves to illuminate and access these fascinating limits. In conjunction with McCarthy’s materiality, I examine how his superabundant object world both maintains and resists ideological constructs. Positing object misuse as a potential instrument of such resistance, I expose how this resistance is interrogated, as misuse is appropriated by representatives of that which it is supposed to resist. iii Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................ iv Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Theorizing Things, Ideology, Subjectivity, and Waste........................................ 7 Actants ..................................................................................................................... 8 Thing Theory ......................................................................................................... 11 Ideology and Subjectivity ...................................................................................... 16 Material and Social Waste ..................................................................................... 20 Chapter 2. “I am what I am”: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Mobility in Suttree ................... 23 Suttree’s Fragmented Familial Subject Position ................................................... 23 Suttree’s Communal and Ideological Subjectivity ................................................ 32 Systems of Ideology .............................................................................................. 38 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................... 44 Chapter 3. “I caint make it be if it aint”: Things, Agency, and Misuse in Suttree .............. 47 Fishermen and Talismans ...................................................................................... 49 Disengaging with Actants ..................................................................................... 55 Misuse and Rugged Consumerism ........................................................................ 59 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................... 67 Chapter 4. “I’m just puttin him in the river”: Violent Waste and Materiality in Suttree .... 70 Modernist or Realist Urban Spaces ....................................................................... 72 Violent Landscapes ............................................................................................... 73 Staged Violence: Spaces as Perpetuators of Violence in Cormac McCarthy ....... 75 Actant Waste: Or, The Merging of Landscape and its Inhabitants ....................... 78 Death Mediates Waste ........................................................................................... 82 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................... 87 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 89 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................... 93 iv List of Abbreviations BM – Blood Meridian CoG – Child of God NCFOM – No Country for Old Men TR – The Road ISA – Ideological State Apparatus RSA – Repressive State Apparatus 1 Introduction Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree (1979) constructs a superabundant object space that insists on dominating subjectivity. This space incorporates a negotiation of ideologies, and frames its inhabitants in a waste dynamic that ultimately questions potential autonomy and agency. Central for discussing the constraints of agency, is addressing the foundations for subjectivity. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer claim, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that subjectivity is largely a product of mass-culture, while Louis Althusser states that ideological representatives (states and institutions) form individual and collective subjectivity. According to these perspectives, our selves are thus products of what is communicated in culture and media, and shaped by institutions such as schools and religion, laws and police. This thesis seeks to answer how subjectivity is negotiated in the interplay between ideology, material objects, the use and misuse of these objects, and the spaces they construct, in Suttree. I argue that Suttree’s privileged subject position causes his agency to be interrupted by McCarthy’s insistent materiality, where objects form compelling networks that enmesh and incapacitate his mobility, which ultimately results in his need to shed his material possessions in order to gain autonomy and real agency. When Suttree fails to appropriate his self-marginalized subjectivity, in his condemnation of object misuse, he defends the dominant class ideology. In contrast, the marginalized in the novel consistently employ object misuse, and thus resist ideological constructs. However, this thesis exposes how this resistance is interrogated, as misuse is appropriated by representatives of that which it is supposed to resist. New Materialism’s framing of quotidian objects as meaningful artifacts that mediate subjectivity contributes to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Althusser’s ideas on how subjectivity is constructed. According to New Materialism, objects can function as crucibles that construct and negotiate subjectivity. This extends to a power-relationship between objects and human autonomy, or free will. In this agency that objects exert, in that they repeatedly expose our lack of agency and mastery, they challenge our anthropocentric models. Discussing how subjectivity is negotiated in Suttree, I will address the exchange that exists between ideology, material objects, and spaces. Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore argue, in regard to McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, that it is the overarching economic framework and ideology of the modern world that shapes and constrains agency. Katja Rebmann, however, suggests that the ultimate arbiter of agency is that of the physical landscape itself. Raymond Malewitz, in turn, posits that actors can effectuate agency and domination over objects through misuse, and thus achieve a sense of real autonomy. Specifically, I will examine how 2 Suttree in fact demonstrates the incorrigible allure of things either as attention-demanding objects, or waste objects that dominate the spaces of the dispossessed and marginalized, and how this compels subject positions. This is an important topic because it acknowledges the opaque constraints of human autonomy, and thus serves to illuminate and access these fascinating limits. Considered one of the seminal American authors of the late 20th and early 21st century, his works are generally situated within the Late Modernist tradition (see especially David Holloway’s treatise here), often with recurring Naturalist elements. McCarthy is important because he manages to dissect what seems to be the core of Americanism, while simultaneously challenging that core with his grand focus on, what ultimately seems to be, illusory ontological, identity, and spatial borders. Matters of philosophical nature abound in McCarthy’s works, inspiring entire studies on his philosophy. Rick Wallach, in his foreword to David Holloway’s The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, places McCarthy on equal footing with Faulkner, as well as with Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey, as a writer in the southern tradition (xi). Rick Wallach claims McCarthy’s novels “anticipate the exhaustion and failure of culture at every turn”, and posits that, “If it is indeed the civilization of late capitalism that is going to supplant or encompass this desolation, we don’t even get to see what the future will look like unless we can read such a projection in the ruins” (xiii). McCarthy’s works are vital, then, because they mediate the breakdown of –isms, monolithic cultures and unified cultural expressions in postmodernity, globalization, and late capitalism. At the same time, both McCarthy, and Wallach’s interpretation here, present quite pessimistic perspectives on the future, and thus simultaneously valorize a historical past. Taking this into account, it is no wonder then that McCarthy’s