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THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Cormac McCarthy and the Cities of God, Man and the Plain being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Robert William McInroy B.A., M.A. September 2013 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................. iii ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE MAIN TEXT .............................................................. iv ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................. v INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................... 2 CHAPTER ONE In Search Of Modernity ....................................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER TWO Symbolisation, Mythology And The Time Of The Tale...................................................... 61 CHAPTER THREE Religion, Mysticism And The State Of Being ................................................................... 118 CHAPTER FOUR Free Will, Determinism And Fatalism ............................................................................... 161 CHAPTER FIVE The Nature Of Evil And The Cities Of The Plain ............................................................. 205 CHAPTER SIX Suttree And The Pursuit Of Love In The City Of Man ..................................................... 240 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 289 i ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to record my sincere thanks to Dr John Osborne of the University of Hull for his patience, dedication and sound advice during the production of this thesis. The best teachers seldom give the impression they are actually teaching. I would like to express my gratitude to the European Assocation of American Studies for providing me with a study grant to visit the Cormac McCarthy Society Archives in 2011, without which this thesis would have been greatly impoverished. I would like to thank Katie Salzmann and her team at the Cormac McCarthy Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas for their support and friendly advice during my study period at the Archives. I would like to thank the good people of the Cormac McCarthy Society, whose unfailing generosity and willingness to help fellow researchers is exemplary. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Jackie for her patience and support during all those long, quiet evenings when I was poring over the minutiae of Cormac McCarthy studies instead of talking to her. iii ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE MAIN TEXT Cormac McCarthy: ATPH All the Pretty Horses BM Blood Meridian COG Child of God COTP Cities of the Plain NCFOM No Country for Old Men OD Outer Dark S Suttree TC The Crossing TGS The Gardener’s Son TOK The Orchard Keeper TR The Road TS The Stonemason TSL The Sunset Limited “WAM” Whales and Men In addition, drafts from the McCarthy Archive are identified by the relevant box and file number. Occasionally, page numbers may be underlined, double-underlined or triple-underlined. Eric Voegelin: A Anamnesis CW5 Collected Works Volume 5: Modernity Without Restraint CW11 Collected Works Volume 11: Published Essays 1953-1965 CW12 Collected Works Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985 CW28 Collected Works Volume 28: What is History? CW29 Collected Works Volume 29: Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949 CW30 Collected Works Volume 30: Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984 CW33 Collected Works Volume 33 Drama of Humanity CW34 Collected Works Volume 34: Autobiographical Reflections FETR From Enlightenment to Revolution NSP The New Science of Politics: An Introduction “OT” The Origins of Totalitarianism. In The Review of Politics OH1 Order and History Volume 1: Israel and Revelation OH3 Order and History Volume 3: Plato and Aristotle OH4 Order and History Volume 4: The Ecumenic Age OH5 Order and History Volume 5: In Search of Order PR Political Religions SPG Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays iv ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy seeks to understand human community, the bonds of love which mark humanity, and the impact when those bonds are broken. Throughout his career, however, his work has increasingly focused on a quest for some spiritual core to existence, unfolding against a backdrop of modernity in crisis. These preoccupations can be read in the context of St Augustine’s City of Man and the search for passage into the City of God: there is the dualistic nature of man, with his ability to love and his capacity for destructiveness, driven by the promise of salvation beyond the material realm. I examine what appears to be a sustained sense of hostility in McCarthy’s fiction to modernity. I use the philosophy of Eric Voegelin to demonstrate that McCarthy’s fiction synthesises elements of what Voegelin describes as modern gnosticism, a sense that modern humanity has usurped God and seeks to establish an immanent heaven-on- earth. These preoccupations begin to dominate McCarthy’s writing and, in his continual search for passage to the City of God, he begins to lose those notions of community which informed his earlier work. McCarthy’s understanding of human community is acute and challenging. Suttree is a search for love, meaning and redemption in a hostile world. However, when his preoccupation with spiritual understanding is at its fullest, notably in Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy, it runs the risk of overwhelming the narrative. There is, in the relentless malignancy of judge Holden or the failed prophets of the Trilogy, a tendency towards didacticism which ultimately compromises the fiction. Therefore, despite the consensus among most McCarthy scholars that Blood Meridian is his masterpiece, I argue that it is flawed. Moreover, it marks a development in his writing which means that, in subsequent fiction, he fails to reach the heights achieved in Suttree. v INTRODUCTION The World I’ve Seen Has Not Made Me A Spiritual Person The worlds created by Cormac McCarthy present a crisis in modernity, in which a hubristic humanity has sought to usurp God and establish an immanent heaven-on- earth, and in which a loss of connection with its spiritual core has left humanity dangerously disposed to evil. McCarthy’s entire oeuvre can be read as a palimpsestic metaphysical search for the truth of what it is to be human. In prosecuting this analysis, he begins to explore deeply uncomfortable provinces of the human experience. He examines life and death, love and fear, good and evil, tradition and modernity, science and nature, rational and supernatural, an understanding of the before and the beyond, the ultimate questions. He appears to do so, simultaneously, as a scientist, a philosopher and a pilgrim. He evinces a profound love of but ambivalence towards the idea of a God. Everywhere in McCarthy one sees apparent contradictions, an exploration of the same questions from different standpoints, always seemingly seeking the same thing, some Rosetta Stone through which to interpret what human beings are. These contradictions make McCarthy a difficult read: he appears to be a rationalist mystic, a pessimistic optimist, a spiritual scientist, a heretical believer. They also, ultimately, compromise the quality of his fiction as his metaphysical preoccupations and scepticism about the nature of modernity come to overwhelm his narrative. Of all the unsettling prophets who inhabit his fiction, it may be Cormac McCarthy himself who is the most unsettling. His earliest works are studies in community, or rather a particular sense of community often highlighted through its lack, such as the tale of the feral Uncle Ather in The Orchard Keeper, the descent of the psychotic Lester Ballard in Child of God, the social outcasts Rinthy and Culla in Outer Dark, and Buddy Suttree and his gang of Introduction 2 reprobates in Suttree. These novels, southern in setting and feel, are rooted in the human realm, the City of Man. With McCarthy’s southwestern turn, starting with Blood Meridian and concluding with the Border Trilogy, one begins to see a different focus. If the southern works are stories from the City of Man, then Blood Meridian undoubtedly resides in a city of the plain, a hell on Earth in which all conception of humanity or community or goodness or decency has been obliterated.1 The Border Trilogy picks up this troubled story of the west one hundred years later and, while the inhumanity has undoubtedly dissipated, it is clear that a capacity for violence remains. The Trilogy represents a sustained search for access from the travails of the City of Man, that in-between state, towards the City of God. While goodness is unrealisable in Blood Meridian, it remains a tantalising possibility in the Trilogy. With McCarthy’s subsequent fiction, No Country for Old Men and The Road, there is a further exploration of the possibility of goodness, of the viability of ascent to the City of God. The prognosis, however, is not optimistic. As Sheriff Bell says in No Country, “The world I’ve seen has not made me a spiritual person [his italics]” (303).2 In this thesis I wish to explore the preoccupations of one of America’s leading literary figures. McCarthy is a deeply spiritual writer whose fiction can be read as a systematic exploration of a series of interlinked questions: to what extent can humans be said to exercise free will?