Story, Act, and Sacrament in the Fiction of Cormac Mccarthy The

The Frail Agony of Grace: Story, Act, and Sacrament in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Potts, Matthew Lawrence. 2013. The Frail Agony of Grace: Story, Citation Act, and Sacrament in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Accessed April 17, 2018 4:06:59 PM EDT Citable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11125992 This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASH Terms of Use repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA (Article begins on next page) The Frail Agony of Grace: Story, Act, and Sacrament in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy A dissertation presented by Matthew L. Potts to The Committee on the Study of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of The Study of Religion Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 © 2013 Matthew L. Potts All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Professor Amy Hollywood Matthew L. Potts The Frail Agony of Grace: Story, Act, and Sacrament in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy Abstract Although scholars have widely acknowledged the prevalence of religious reference in the work of Cormac McCarthy, no studies have yet paid any adequate attention to the most pervasive religious trope in all his works: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. I contend that a thorough and appropriately informed study of sacrament in the work of Cormac McCarthy can uniquely illuminate his whole body of writing and I undertake that study in this dissertation. Two things are obvious in the work of Cormac McCarthy: that these novels attempt to establish some sort of moral system in light of metaphysical collapse, and that they are often adorned with sacramental imagery. My argument is that these two facts can and do intelligibly speak to one another, and that a particular theological understanding of sacrament demonstrates how. By reading McCarthy alongside postmodern accounts of action, identity, subjectivity, and narration, I show how he exploits Christian theology in order to locate the value of human acts and relations in a sacramentally immanent way. This is not to claim McCarthy for theology, but it is to assert that McCarthy generates an account of what goodness might look like in a death-ridden world through reference to the theological tradition of sacrament. I begin by addressing the scope and source of McCarthy’s violence. In Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men I read McCarthy as following Nietzsche in scorning an ascetic ideal that locates the value of life beyond life. The ideas of reason and fate in Nietzsche as they develop in Adorno and Arendt is then studied in these same novels. Arendtian ideas of action deeply influence my reading of Suttree next, and this lead into a study of storytelling in the three novels of the border iii trilogy which is again deeply indebted to Arendtian notions of narration. Last, I look to contemporary theology and The Road for examples of sacrament that can cohere these various themes under a single sign and establish the grounds for a postmodern morality. iv Acknowledgements I have depended upon the counsel, support, and love of several persons in the preparation of this dissertation, and these spare words of thanks seem woefully insufficient. Nonetheless: Professors Amy Hollywood, Stephanie Paulsell, and Charles Stang of Harvard University have offered insightful, wise, and careful – not to mention rapid – readings of the several drafts of this essay. Whatever here follows that proves of insight, wisdom, or care I owe to them. They have been valued mentors and teachers during my time at Harvard and I look forward to their remaining so in coming years. When I realized I could not write this dissertation without Nietzsche and Arendt, Mara Willard took time and care to guide me into their thought. Her patience, skill, and knowledge of German philosophy has made this reading possible. As I became increasingly derelict of my pastoral duties during the writing of this dissertation, St. Barnabas Memorial Church in Falmouth, Massachusetts – and its rector the Reverend Patricia Barrett – gave generously of time, understanding, and encouragement. To this church, and especially to Patti, I am most grateful. From an early age, my parents Daniel and Miyoko Potts taught me to value education and to pursue my dreams. This dissertation represents the realization of one such dream, and so it has roots in my parents. More than this, though, my mother and father have also always shown me the value of a loving and supportive family. Their love and support during this writing has reinforced those old lessons, and for this I am most thankful. If I had the patience, diligence, and grace of my wife Colette, I’d have finished this dissertation in half the time and with none of the moaning. Nonetheless, through all my groaning hours, Colette has been my surest support. She will not believe me when she reads this, but I could not have done this without her. And Millie and Sam, my children, each day teach me the joy and terror of loving deeply. They have therefore also taught me how to read Cormac McCarthy, and so I couldn’t have done this without them, either. Last, the late Professor Ronald Thiemann, who advised me throughout my Ph.D. program and who died in the early stages of this project, was a better teacher, guide, mentor, and friend than I ever could have anticipated. Though I wish he’d seen this work to its completion, I am thankful for all I received from him. I owe much of my intellectual and spiritual formation these last five years to Ron. It is to his memory therefore that I dedicate this dissertation. v Table of Contents Introduction . 1 1. Knowledge . 18 2. Fate . 55 3. Action . 95 4. Story . 146 5. Sacrament . 184 Conclusion . 222 Bibliography . 225 vi Introduction The world about which Cormac McCarthy writes is unforgivingly brutal and unrelentingly dangerous; it is also inflected by an ambivalent regard for the religious. Christian scriptural and ritual references abound in every work and force the critic to reckon with religion. How might this bleak, broken world square with the religious? Although scholars acknowledge the prevalence of the religious, there is no critical consensus around the role of the religious in these works. Readings with nihilist, gnostic, and existentialist roots have all been advanced, and not without good cause: each tradition is referenced in this fiction. Some have proposed a dark biblical morality and these readings seem at least occasionally justified. But no interpretation seems entirely adequate. Those overtly religious readings do not adequately theorize McCarthy’s clear ambivalence around religion; the anti- religious readers make an analogously reductive move, albeit in an opposite critical direction. The gnostic critics meanwhile seem too arcanely dogmatic in their readings. Surprisingly no scholarly study of Cormac McCarthy has yet paid adequate attention to the most pervasive religious trope in his work: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. This is regrettable, on the one hand because such inattention I believe impoverishes interpretation, and on the other because it also withholds from Christian theology a potentially useful reminder of the sacraments’ significance for the theological tradition. The Christian theology of sacrament, especially as read by the Reformation, insists that the holy stands in the midst of life. As Rowan Williams writes, Christian sacramental theology asserts that we do not “encounter God in the displacement of the world we live in, [in] the suspension of our bodily and historical nature.”1 God encounters us in those historical bodies, not instead of them. Theology makes this claim through an analogical reference to the divinity of the crucified, through what Luther called a theologia crucis. By this account, the broken body and the broken loaf both fully 1 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 207. 1 bear the holy. That body and that bread need not be erased or effaced to bear the divine; rather, they remain wholly present even in their brokenness while entirely presenting the holy. Based upon this understanding of sacrament, and following key philosophical themes of agency, identity, and narration in McCarthy’s fiction, I therefore intend to demonstrate that McCarthy’s routine and extensive use of sacramental imagery means to deploy precisely this “cruciform” logic towards the development of a distinct moral vision. McCarthy and his readers My interest in McCarthy concerns the role of the religious in his fiction, and the nature of this role has been of consistent significance in the critical conversation around his work. The first major critical study of Cormac McCarthy, by Vereen Bell, sets the tone and terms for much later conversation. When Bell somewhat glibly notes in his first article that McCarthy’s novels are “as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of plot,” he establishes a nihilist assumption that has colored most of the criticism around McCarthy.2 Yet strictly speaking, almost no critic – significantly and emphatically, not even Vereen Bell – reads McCarthy as absolutely nihilistic.3 Though most see little possibility for metaphysics and little foundation for morals in these fictions, nearly all understand McCarthy to be manipulating religious imagery and to be attempting to situate some stable moral system against the reality of a violently burdensome world. How critics interpret McCarthy’s manipulations of religious imagery and themes, and what moral conclusions they believe he comes to, distinguish the various schools of thought around McCarthy.

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