SUZERAINS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE: A POSTHUMAN READING OF CORMAC McCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN AND THE ROAD by TRAVIS ZIMPFER B.A., University of Missouri, 2013 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English 2019 ii This thesis entitled: Suzerains of the Anthropocene: A Posthumanist Reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Road written by Travis Zimpfer has been approved for the Department of English _____________________________________________________ Dr. Karen Jacobs Committee Chair ______________________________________________________ Dr. Mark Winokur Committee Member _______________________________________________________ Dr. Karim Mattar Committee Member Date: ____________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above-mentioned discipline. iii Abstract Zimpfer, Travis (M.A., English) Suzerains of the Anthropocene: A Posthumanist Reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Road Thesis directed by Professor Karen Jacobs Scholars of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction often cite the violence typically present within it as abundant in its volume and nihilistic in its meaning. However, the violence in McCarthy’s work atypically does not exist for show or snuff or to progress the plot. Instead, the author repeatedly meditates upon violence and proffers dark assertions as to the nature of violence. In Blood Meridian, the bloodlust of the antagonist, Judge Holden, emerges from a being and a philosophy of the land. From the Darwinian struggle for supremacy articulated by Holden and reified by the content of the narrative, a posthuman condition built upon inter- and intraspecies violence that decentralizes the human emerges. McCarthy does this in Blood Meridian (1985) and The Road (2006) to articulate the violence inherent in the contemporary status quo of the primary human/biological condition, via respective examinations of bloodthirst in the American Southwest in 1849- 50 and a post-apocalyptic near-future. However, this thesis will primarily argue that McCarthy tempers the violence present in these works with the emergence of a morality based in posthumanism. Drawing heavily from Elizabeth Grosz’ posthuman Darwinism as well as theory on the Anthropocene and other posthumanists, this essay will argue that central characters in Blood Meridian and The Road reject participation in the violence that unfolds around them and, in doing so, transcend the kill-or-be-killed binary posited as fundamental to life on earth in McCarthy’s two novels. Their transcendence is marked by the responsibilities of those species, namely humans, that have succeeded in a Darwinian framework, and that the steps beyond a continued cornucopianist existence valued in the Anthropocene lie in the application of posthuman theory to life and systems beyond the human. iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to give my thanks for the guidance and patience of my thesis advisor, Dr. Karen Jacobs. Her suggestions for literature and her course on posthuman and postnatural studies were instrumental in the application of these ideals, even if I failed at quickly learning those theoretical approaches. Without her hard work, intellect and dedication as my advisor and editor, this work would not have even half the quality of its current form. I would also like to thank Dr. Karim Mattar and Dr. Mark Winokur for agreeing to serve on my committee and for hosting and guiding fantastic discussions and explorations of literature and film in the classes of theirs I attended. I also wish to extend my gratitude every member of the 2018 MA cohort for their friendship and support during a trying two years of work and study, especially Leah Young, Teddy Hamstra, and Leslie Cook. I also appreciate the English Department of the University of Colorado - Boulder for accepting me into their graduate program and taking a chance on a young, but disillusioned, journalist with a questionable GPA in his undergraduate English courses. Lastly, but most importantly, I would like to thank my mother and father, Ann and Tim Zimpfer, for trusting my decision to return to academia and providing me the resources, time, and encouragement I desperately needed to fulfill my dreams. v Contents PREFACE .............................................................................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 — AZOLLA AND ALEXANDER ................................................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER 2 - THE ANTHROPOCENE ............................................................................................................................. 6 CHAPTER 3 - POSTHUMAN INTERACTION .............................................................................................................. 13 CHAPTER 4 - POLITICS.................................................................................................................................................. 17 CHAPTER 5 — POSTHUMAN DARWINISM ............................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 6 — VIOLENCE ............................................................................................................................................. 31 CHAPTER 7 - THE JUDGE .............................................................................................................................................. 50 CHAPTER 8 — PREDATION ......................................................................................................................................... 71 CHAPTER 9 — EXTINCTIONS AND APOCALYPSES ................................................................................................. 79 CHAPTER 10 — MORALITY ......................................................................................................................................... 87 CHAPTER 11 — RESPONSIBILITY .............................................................................................................................. 93 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................................................... 107 WORKS REFERENCED ................................................................................................................................................. 110 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................................................................. 111 APPENDIX 1 — “LEGION OF HORRIBLES” PASSAGE FROM BLOOD MERIDIAN .................................................................................. 111 APPENDIX 2 — JUDGE HOLDEN’S “WAR IS GOD” SPEECH FROM BLOOD MERIDIAN....................................................................... 112 APPENDIX 3 — THE “PHALANX” PASSAGE FROM THE ROAD .............................................................................................................. 113 1 Preface This essay will argue that Cormac McCarthy’s two novels Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and The Road contemplate the reality of a Darwinian “war of nature” or the Hobbesian state of nature, one which emphasizes violent natural selection, while simultaneously examining the both the role and viability of morality in such a world — primarily through the moral actions of the kid in Blood Meridian and the boy in The Road. Although moral rectitude rarely emerges victorious, the morality McCarthy articulates coincides with a combination of Grosz, Latour and Alaimo’s vision of a posthuman earth, one which extends agency, decentralizes the human from the historical narrative and considers the nonhuman actors in our earth system in the shared language, economy, politics, or paradigm of natural selection that all living things speak. However, while Grosz, Latour, Alaimo, and other posthumanists hope to enact the decentered human, McCarthy’s writing also acknowledges the necessity of centering the human, specifically its more sophisticated and abstracted forms of morality, to both pragmatically achieve and uphold the values of this posthumanism. As Clive Hamilton writes in Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene in defense of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene: We do not need to know anything more to justify the new Anthropocentrism because they place human beings inescapably at the center of the Earth System’s evolution. Such truths may mean that human agency is now more potent than ever, even if we now understand that agency not as the autonomous capacity of free beings but as a force always constrained by its embeddedness in nature. (52) McCarthy’s fiction thus articulates a humanity embedded in nature, specifically in the world of violent selection, but also one that recognize what Hamilton calls, humanity’s 2 “extraordinary power and unique responsibility” as a geological actor within the Anthropocene (152). Only the recognition of human evolutionary suzerainty and its pronounced geological impact in the Anthropocene will allow for the possibility of transformation and a reorientation of priorities to achieve a new paradigm. 3 Chapter 1 — Azolla and Alexander