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Masculinity, Myth, and Social Systemic Communication in Cormac Mccarthy's Novels

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Masculinity, Myth, and Social Systemic Communication in Cormac Mccarthy's Novels Them Boys Just Ain't Right: Masculinity, Myth, and Social Systemic Communication in Cormac McCarthy's Novels by Dorothy Maria O’Connell, B.A, M.A. A Dissertation In ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved Sara Spurgeon, Ph.D. Committee Chair Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Ph.D. Mario G. Beruvides, Ph.D Bruce Clarke, Ph.D Dominick Casadonte Interim Dean of the Graduate School December 2012 Copyright 2012, Dorothy Maria O’Connell Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks to so many people for their assistance and inspiration during the dissertation process. It has been a long journey, but my committee has been very patient, encouraging me and mentoring me as I developed my ideas and figured out how to write about them. Each of them, Sara Spurgeon, my chair, Bruce Clarke, Priscilla Ybarra, and Mario Beruvides, provided me with encouragement, challenges, questions, and laughter. They are exemplars of teaching excellence, and I want to be like them when I grow up. Of course, I must acknowledge the extraordinary group of colleagues I have studied and worked with in the English Department, Industrial Engineering, and the Classics, Modern Languages, and Literature department, all of whom were generous with ideas, critiques and their own reservoirs of learning. In particular, I thank Christopher Witmore, whose Material Cultures class was revelatory and is still providing new ideas. Finally, I must thank my husband Pat, and my children, Liz, Will, Mike, John, and Bridgit for their patience, love, encouragement. I could not have done this without them. ii Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. ii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. iii Abstract............................................................................................................................. iv List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ v Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Theoretically, All Stories are one Story: Reading the novels of Cormac McCarthy through a Luhmannian Lens....................................................................... 12 Chapter 2: Contingent Men: Villainous Heroes, Heroic Villains, and Social Subsystems ....................................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 3: What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate: (Mis) Communication and Men out of Step ........................................................................... 89 Chapter 4: The End of Myth: The Road And the Limits of Language ................... 138 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 175 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 181 iii Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines how Cormac McCarthy’s novels can be observed as stories about societal expectations for masculinity and how those expectations are communicated to men through the use of story and myth. I use Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory as a lens to read these novels, Luhmann defines communication as a threefold process of selections: for utterance, information, and (mis)understanding. Because a communicative offering has to be accepted as an utterance, evaluated as information, and finally interpreted for understanding (or misunderstanding), the process becomes highly complex. The theory explains why, although the masculine myth is often seen as a ‘monomyth’ with one story and one expected outcome, the results can be diverse. McCarthy’s novels offer an ideal source of observation as they are very diverse in their time and place settings, they are all about men, and they refer to stories and contain characters who act as storytellers. They offer a narrative mimesis of the world that allows the reader to observe the process of communicative selection and how each selection affects outcomes. In the end, the novels break down to stories about the contingency of good vs. evil, stories about the inability of some men to fulfill masculine expectations and, finally, how development of a social system depends up contingency. If the myth were truly a monomyth, with no possibility of other outcomes, there would be no social system, because the limits of choice would limit any possibility of change. iv Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Works by Niklas Luhmann: SS-Social Systems ToD-Theories of Distinction Art-Art as a Social System Works by Cormac McCarthy TOC- The Orchard Keeper OD- Outer Dark CoG-Child of God BM-Blood Meridian AtPH-All the Pretty Horses TC-The Crossing CotP-Cities of the Plain (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain are known as the “Border Trilogy”) TR-The Road v Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 INTRODUCTION This study is the result of a convergence of interests, some of which have been with me as long as I’ve been able to read, and some that are more recent discoveries. First, I am interested in masculinity and how men are socialized as men. I have always been fascinated with what used to be called ‘boys’ fiction,’ the stories of Kipling and Twain, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack London, among others. In addition to simply loving the stories, I love what they have to say about the ‘right’ way to be a man. Cormac McCarthy’s novels, while much darker and more ambiguous that these other stories, were a natural extension of that interest, because his novels are also almost exclusively focused on the lives of men. Second, I am deeply interested in language and communication in society, especially in social communication, the role of language in communication, and the use of myth and stories to set social boundaries. This interest led me to Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems which elucidates and develops a theory of self-organizing social systems. I will explain more about Social Systems Theory in the next chapter, but I found its focus on observation and communication to be fascinating. For Luhmann, communication is a set of three different selections that a system makes; utterance, information, and (mis)understanding. Each of the steps must take place for communication to happen. This model of communication is helpful for understanding how socialization of individuals occurs through myth and story, but also how contingent the results of that socialization are upon the results of each stage of communication. Such contingency explains the wide 1 Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 variations of outcomes among social systems and subsystems. Communication gets complex very quickly, and it is impossible to observe all the selections from any one point of view, nor is it possible to view all the relationships and possibilities opened up by the choice. However, according to Luhmann, there is way to observe the communications that go on in the social system. It is through framing the complexity into a smaller system through art, including narrative art. And that is my third interest, the purpose of literature and art in the social systems. Myth and stories are not simply entertainment. Literary art both simplifies the world by framing the possibilities in one story, but it also allows readers to observe and reflect on the selections made within that world, in a way that is not available to them in their day to day communications. As Luhmann points out, in Art as a Social System, we must look at the “selective arrangement of artwork [including literary artwork] to be a condition for perceptible objects to become available to communication” (10). As such, the communication of art, as with all communication, is a unity of the three-fold selection. It is part of “ascertaining a ‘reality’ … based on the experience of a resistance in the system against itself—for example, in perception against perception, or in language against language—and not on a comprehensive impression of the world” (Art 10). Literature becomes a perfect form for that resistance. Through the framing and arrangement of the literary offering, the reader is able to observe the threefold selections made within the system and connect them to the events and results which follow. As Ira Livingston notes, a fictional narrative is as faithful a representation of the world as an 2 Texas Tech University, Dorothy Maria O’Connell, December 2012 empirical or factual narrative (Livingston 43). As such, literary works can help engage ideas and explore them through what Livingston terms “an ongoing sea change in the relations among ways of knowing and engaging the world, in the discursive ecology” (Livingston 1). The literary universe not only plays out a social system within its boundaries, but also brings in the reader as an observer in relationship with the text. In relationship the reader can enter the narrative world,
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