Reading Cormac Mccarthy's Literary Ecologies

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The University of Utah: J. Willard Marriott Digital Library “EVERY LEAST THING”: READING CORMAC MCCARTHY’S LITERARY ECOLOGIES FOR A PRACTICE OF THINKING ETHICS by Christy Call A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Education, Culture, and Society The University of Utah December 2015 Copyright © Christy Call 2015 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Christy Call has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Frank Margonis , Chair 6-12-2015 Date Approved Robert S. Tatum , Member 6-12-2015 Date Approved Clayton Pierce , Member 6-12-2015 Date Approved Harvey Kantor , Member 6-12-2015 Date Approved Donna Deyhle , Member 6-12-2015 Date Approved and by Edward Buendia , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of Education, Culture, and Society and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing presents an ecocentric cosmology that diverges radically from the traditional anthropocentric model, which centralizes the primacy of humans. McCarthy’s vision of “joinery” reformats the place of humanity to a position of equality with “every least thing.” My focused reading of McCarthy’s three novels from the Border Trilogy articulates the ramifications of this vision for a new ecological ontology, agency, and ethics. Specifically, I argue that the vision of “joinery” revises philosophies of ontology and agency to admit the force of animals and matter as co-constituting agents in a dynamically vibrant world. The attendant ethical vision from such a revised ontological and agential view centralizes the profound dilemmas inherent in so many relations. My close reading of McCarthy’s novels explicates his ecological vision of “joinery” as coherent with theoretical visions espoused in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialisms. By weaving together an analysis of the trilogy with these frameworks, I advance a practice of reading that positions learners to think through the complexities of expansive human and non-human relations. This reading practice for thinking relational ethics ruptures many of the trends in education today that orient students in standardized and noncritical modes of learning. I argue, however, that the demands of an ecological age during a time of climate change and mass extinctions necessitates an education where students wrestle critically with the dilemmas of a world understood as interconnected. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………….…vi Chapters 1. JOINERY: “EVERY LEAST THING” .............................................................................. 1 The Contours of Joinery ........................................................................................ 29 Ontology………………………………………………………………………………………………..29 Agency ............................................................................................................... 33 Ethics ................................................................................................................. 36 Bifurcations, Borders, and Binaries ....................................................................... 38 Into the Classroom .................................................................................................. 41 Critical Turn………………………………………………………………………………………………46 A Practice of Literacy for Ecological Complexities…….……………………………………57 Organization…………………….…………………………………………………………………….….62 Chapter 2…..…………………..………………………………………………………………….…..62 Chapter 3……..…………….…………………………………………………………………….…...63 Chapter 4………………………………………………..……………………………………………. 65 Chapter 5…..……………………………….………………………………………………………… 66 2. ANIMALS ..................................................................................................................... 68 Wolves……………………………………………………………………………………………….……..72 Remnant Wolf……………….....……………………………………………………………………... 78 Arnulfo……………………………………………………………………………………………………..83 Journey……..……………………………………………………………………………………………..90 Dog………...………………………………………………………………………………………………..92 3. MATTER.…………………………………………..…………………………………………………………..98 Theory of Matter……………………………………………………………………………………...106 Border Materiality…………………………………………………………………………………….108 Ruins……………………………………………………………………………………………………….110 Body and Form…………………………………………………………………………………………114 Object Force, Corporeal Force…………………………………………………………………….116 Food………………………………………………………………………………………………………..119 Death……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 121 4. HUMANS…………………………………………………………………………………………………….129 Orphans ................................................................................................................. 138 Hand on Hand……………………………………………………………………………………….... 141 Vulnerability ……………………..…………………………………………………………………….143 5. READING LITERARY ECOLOGIES ……………..………………………………………………..151 A New Practice………………………………………………………………………………………….169 New Lens…………………………………………………………………………………………………181 Lens Contours…………………………………………………………………………..……………..190 Literary Ecologies……………………………………………………………………………………..194 Affect………………………………………………………………………………………………………204 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………….………………………………210 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The premise of this manuscript is that human life happens in a pattern of assemblages. Thinking in this way over this long project has meant that I realize my own life as indebted to the contributions of so many others, some I can name and others I cannot. This recognition of the ways my own living and thinking have been and continue to be supported means that I exist perpetually in a space of humility and gratitude, a good space for a teacher and writer to occupy. Because thinking in assemblages grounds any individual work in a collective of varied contributors, the listing here on this acknowledgements page could be very long indeed. Yet on this page in a gesture of abbreviated but sincere thanks, I will formally recognize only the members of my committee. All the others will be acknowledged in different ways. Frank Margonis has been a friend and an editor to me over these years. This is a tough mix to master, but he has always been both well. Clayton Pierce opened my mind to Bruno Latour and presented through the introduction a new way of making sense of the world. Harvey Kantor and Donna Deyhle emphasized through their teaching the first obligation to think of those hidden, oppressed, and marginalized. Stephen Tatum has been a constant support for me directly and through his scholarship. I treasure my conversations with him about McCarthy and the American West and theory and teaching. CHAPTER 1 JOINERY: “EVERY LEAST THING” The scene that expresses Cormac McCarthy’s cosmology happens in the best of his three related western novels, The Crossing. After an event of doomed enterprise where a boy named Billy Parham tries but fails to save a wolf, the boy wanders out of a mountain range in Mexico that seems “depopulate and barren,” a place seemingly void of all game and birds. From this setting he comes upon a different type of ruin in the form of a wrecked town, which, in its fallen condition, seems to slump “back into the mud from which it had been raised” (134, 137). The boy takes in the atmosphere of ruin: Most of the buildings still standing were at the farther end of the town and toward these he rode. He passed the wreckage of an ancient coach half crushed in the zaguan where the doors were fallen in. He passed a mud horno in a yard from within which the eyes of some animal watched and he passed the ruins of a huge adobe church whose roofbeams lay in the rubble. (C 137) In the doorway at the rear of a church stands a man who later admits to being the sole human occupant of the town. The boy follows the man inside his modest room, a simple space of rudimentary provisions, including a table and chairs, a stove, an iron skillet, a kettle, a pair of cups and some saucers. Cats of every color and type lounge about. In a generous offer that McCarthy will recursively highlight as an act of ethical significance for its display of generosity, the man feeds the boy despite having little food to share. While Billy eats, the man tells him a story of his life that highlights points of convergence, so that other lives are noted to intersect and alter the trajectory of his fate, and the force of his life too is seen to intersect with and alter other fates as well. The 2 narrative composes, then, in this parallax way so that an individual story situates within a larger, longer, and more expansive narrative, one that can be said to issue from human placement within a vast collective of diverse human and more-than-human lives and forms.1 In fact in the man’s telling he states, “For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet there also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them” (C 143). In this enfolded, seamed, and complex way, the man’s story meshes with the story of the collapsed town, with the lost or dispossessed people from the town, and with another man in particular, a heretic who stands out as

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