CORMAC MCCARTHY AND THE ETHICS OF READING by MATTHEW RUSH HORTON (Under the Direction of Carl Rapp) ABSTRACT To demonstrate his interest in the ethical dimension of fiction and reading, this study examines the narrative strategies of Cormac McCarthy in three of his novels: Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian. Each novel dramatizes a dilemma related to the act of reading; accordingly, “the ethics of reading” is treated as an element of his fiction, not as a theoretical category. Instead of prescribing an approach to reading, this study focuses on how these novels raise ethical questions about the act of reading. As ethical criticism, it addresses the central concern of all ethical inquiry (“what is the good?”) by exploring how his narrative form and storytelling methods complement the theme of accountability. Although the reader of these novels might grow as a reader, he is under no moral obligation to reflect on how he should read them. Scholars have shown an interest in the ethical and formalist dimensions of McCarthy’s work for some time, but few have considered how he addresses ethical questions through his formal technique. Comprising a stylistic and thematic trilogy, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian demonstrate how story and narration intersect and interact in his fiction. Implications for scholarship and teaching are discussed in the final chapter. INDEX WORDS: Ethics of reading, Ethical criticism, Narrative structure, Ethics of fiction, Cormac McCarthy CORMAC MCCARTHY AND THE ETHICS OF READING by MATTHEW RUSH HORTON B.A., University of Georgia, 1996 M.A., University of Georgia, 1998 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2008 © 2008 Matthew Rush Horton All Rights Reserved CORMAC MCCARTHY AND THE ETHICS OF READING by MATTHEW RUSH HORTON Major Professor: Carl Rapp Committee: Jonathan Evans James Kibler Kris Boudreau Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2008 DEDICATION For Eric Bryan chi ha finito nel miglior modo iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To Carl Rapp, my director and tireless advocate: I am deeply thankful for your mind and for your interest in my work. You were my first college professor, and you remain my ultimate mentor. I look forward to more years of friendship and intellectual cooperation. To Mom and Dad, my parents and tireless champions of my education: You are the foundation of my identity as a husband, father, and teacher. May your life be blessed now and in the hereafter. To Rachel, my wife and tireless mother of two baby boys: You have the love of God inside of you, strong and patient and giving. Your prayers must have worked. I look forward to wine and cheer in front of the fire with you forever. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 2 DEFINITIONS AND PROBLEMS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ETHICS OF READING ...........................................................................22 3 THE READER AS FUGITIVE: THE ART OF PURSUIT IN OUTER DARK ...................................................................................................55 4 THE READER AS WITNESS: THE ART OF TESTIMONY IN CHILD OF GOD .............................................................................................110 5 THE READER AS PILGRIM: THE “TERRIBLE COVENANT” OF BLOOD MERIDIAN ........................................................................................171 6 IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS ...........................................................242 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................253 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION But today we have reinspected that premise and rejected it by saying that if beauty is truth and since we cannot get along without truth, then beauty is a useless term and one to be dispensed with. Here is a location for our attack; we have discarded beauty; at its best it seems truth incompletely realized. Styles can no longer be described as beautiful. it would not be stretching the point to describe all modern styles in their grand limits as ways through a staleness of beauty to tell the truth anew. (Williams 75) In his 1927 essay about the “priestly style” of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams argued that we have much to gain from an artist who can break up words to “let the staleness out” of them. “Joyce is himself a priest” because his style looks “through the clothes” to “the naked soul” (77-78). To recognize the meaning of this style, as an “unabridged commentary on the human soul” (76), we must read with eyes that look for the truth told anew, setting aside old habits of equating beauty with truth, or truth with beauty. Perhaps because of Joyce, we would be remiss to describe any style now, especially an ugly one, without appreciating its unique linguistic behavior, not simply as a curious phenomenon but as a signifying force. To discard the concept of beauty, in this way, is to experience a style as language pressed 1 into a “truthful and accurate” representation of an artist’s way of understanding the world (77). A few years earlier, in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” T. S. Eliot grappled with this mimetic problem in a similar way: “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (65). By the time Williams proclaimed the severed connection between “truth” and “beauty,” Eliot had already set the latter aside in his pursuit of a more precise and inclusive set of terms to measure the representational capacity of a style. But their statements point to the same consequence: the critical act of describing a work of literature mirrors the artist’s critical act of seeing the world; verbal patterns created by the vision of a writer comprise the reader’s world to see: the shape of a style. Like his modernist forerunners, post-war American novelist Cormac McCarthy writes novels whose “styles can no longer be described as beautiful.” At the same time, he does not merely press his visions of the world into a linguistic mold. Eliot and Williams explored this mimetic potential in their poetry, but the aesthetic terrain beyond it was charted by the early 20th-century novel, where experimentation with narrative form subsumed experimentation with style. McCarthy published his first novel in 1965, but his fiction demonstrates the same two-fold interest that occupied novelists like Joyce and Hemingway: forging a more “truthful and accurate” use of words to befit a more “truthful and accurate” way of shaping a narrative. His grand orchestrations in novels such as Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian are not simply representational; rather, his styles demonstrate ways of looking at the world that make representation possible. This function complements what his stories often dramatize: 2 what it means to see and what is at stake in looking. Moreover, the conceptual line between story and storytelling is clearly drawn by his narrators. Using narrative tactics to interrupt an otherwise continuous stream of action, McCarthy often suspends the act of telling in order to call attention to his method of telling, to the fact of narration. Filled with distended passages of graphic detail, momentary asides to the reader, disguised metaphors of narration, and other self-conscious formulations, his narratives draw attention to a style that is both reflexive and rhetorical. These suspensions, accompanied by unanticipated shifts in tone and register, disrupt the surrounding story and the illusion that storytellers traditionally try to maintain; as a result, we are invited to reflect on the fact that we are reading, on our method of reading, and on the expectations we bring to a text. In effect, McCarthy turns the act of reading into an occasion to think about what it means to read his work. The following example from Blood Meridian (1985) illustrates how quickly the narrator can shift our attention away from the sequence of events toward his own interest in a particular mode of seeing and interpreting: The leader of these jackal warriors was a small dark man in cast-off Mexican military attire and he carried a sword and he carried in a torn and gaudy baldric one of the Whitneyville Colts that had belonged to the scouts. He sat his horse before Glanton and assessed the position of the other riders and then asked in good spanish where were they bound. He’d no sooner spoken than Glanton’s horse leaned its jaw forward and seized the man’s horse by the ear. Blood flew. The horse screamed and reared and the Apache struggled to keep his seat and drew his sword and found himself staring into the black leminscate that was the paired bores of Glanton’s doublerifle. Glanton slapped the muzzle of his horse twice hard and it tossed its head 3 with one eye blinking and blood dripping from its mouth. The Apache wrenched his pony’s head around and when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with