AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO THE SOUTHERN NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY by PAUL SANDERS QUICK (Under the Direction of Hugh Ruppersburg) ABSTRACT Using the three streams of radical environmental philosophy—deep ecology, ecofeminism, and social ecology—this study highlights the subtle and complex environmental ethic in Cormac McCarthy’s southern novels. It also reassesses the critical consensus that these works are expressions of existentialist or nihilistic philosophy. By delineating the different relationships that McCarthy’s heroes and anti- heroes have with nonhuman nature, an ecocritical analysis views their alienation as the effect of their separation from nonhuman nature. At the root of this alienation is an anthropocentric and mechanistic mode of thinking that is dominant in Western philosophy and that this study defines as Cartesian. While McCarthy’s environmentalist heroes are persecuted by Cartesian institutions and displaced from the land on which they have defined themselves and made meaning, his Cartesian anti-heroes represent extreme manifestations of Cartesian thinking. McCarthy’s environmentalism is as much a critique and indictment of Cartesian thinking as it is a portrayal of the value of a life lived in close contact with nonhuman nature. INDEX WORDS: Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, ecocriticism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, Cartesian thinking, environmental literature AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO THE SOUTHERN NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY by PAUL SANDERS QUICK B.A., Duke University, 1990 M.A.T., Duke University, 1991 M.A., The University of Georgia, 1996 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 2004 © 2004 Paul Sanders Quick All Rights Reserved AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO THE SOUTHERN NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY by PAUL SANDERS QUICK Major Professor: Hugh Ruppersburg Committee: Betty Jean Craige Hubert McAlexander Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2004 DEDICATION For Erica and Zachary iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My most immediate thanks go to my committee. Hugh Ruppersburg patiently read and reread various drafts of both the dissertation and the prospectus. His careful eye and insightful criticism have made this a much better project. Hubert McAlexander has supported me throughout my graduate career, and Betty Jean Craige gave me the confidence to write on ecocriticism. I also would like to acknowledge people who read portions of the dissertation and delivered excellent advice with delicate and loving care. Eric Whiteside introduced me to the work of Cormac McCarthy in the first place. My wife, Erica, and my friend (and mother-in- law), Jane Prater, supported me in many ways. Carla Buss at UGA’s Main Library acted as my personal reference librarian. Among the graduate students who boosted my confidence and encouraged my efforts were Molly Crumpton, Monica Smith, and Billie Bennett. At the Office of Instructional Support and Development, Katie Smith provided friendship, guidance, wisdom, and perspective when I have needed it. My parents are responsible for my love of literature. Thank you for a house filled with books, summers dedicated to reading, and exceptional educational opportunities. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v PREFACE..................................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 Approaching an Ecocritical Reading of Cormac McCarthy..........................................1 2 The Orchard Keeper and Child of God as Environmentalist Critiques of Cartesian Thinking ..................................................................................................................51 3 Ecofeminism, Child of God, and Outer Dark ............................................................105 4 Social Ecology, Urban Ecocriticism, and the Landscapes of Suttree........................158 5 Conclusion: McCarthy’s Growing Environmental Sensibility in His Southwestern Novels....................................................................................................................205 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................233 NOTES.........................................................................................................................................248 vi Preface While describing Cormac McCarthy’s “hostility to the literary world” in his 1992 New York Times article, Richard Woodward also reveals McCarthy’s personal interest in the natural world: At the MacArthur [Foundation] reunions [McCarthy] spends his time with scientists, like physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few [writers] he acknowledges having known at all was novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey’s death in 1989, they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona. (Woodward 30) Such facts only confirm what any reader of McCarthy’s fiction knows—that nature matters. Nature is as much a character in his books as any human. William Schafer argues, “One of McCarthy’s astonishing talents is the intensely evocative quality of his landscapes and dramas of animal life. Fully as important as the human actions in the story are animals which emerge as more than symbolic—they are an analogical extension of the story of man in the landscape” (108). Closer to naturalism than Romanticism, McCarthy’s novels include exacting descriptions not only of animals but also of forests, caves, rivers, swamps, and deserts. In addition to his knowledge of the natural world, however, is an environmental ethic suggested by his conversation with Edward Abbey. Given the story of Billy Parham and she-wolf in The Crossing (1994), one can assume that McCarthy would favor the reintroduction of wolves to an ecosystem altered by humans for anthropocentric purposes. The value of such an operation, as vii Abbey certainly would have known, goes far beyond restoring an ancient predator to its hunting ground. The goal would be to rebalance a number of aspects of the Arizona landscape. Wolves would thin the overpopulation of herbivores, thereby protecting native vegetation from overgrazing, thereby minimizing soil erosion caused by wind and rain. While holistically beneficial to the environment, such a program has negative economic and public safety implications as well; wolves will kill domesticated livestock and endanger human lives. The difference between advocates of predator reintroduction and those against such a program is a difference between what this dissertation defines as environmental thinking and Cartesian thinking. Whereas the environmentalists consider the health of the whole ecosystem, the Cartesian is interested in how nature benefits humankind. It is precisely this conflict between environmentalist and Cartesian, holism and atomism, ecocentrism and anthropocentrism that characterizes my ecocritical approach to the southern novels of Cormac McCarthy. That McCarthy would share Abbey’s desire to reintroduce the wolf is also supported by another fact—his unpublished screenplay entitled “Whales and Men.” James Lilley describes it as overtly environmental.1 It tells the story of an Irish aristocrat, Peter Gregory, who “takes his seat in the House of Lords in order to save the whales” (Lilley 150): Peter and the crew of his friend’s ship, the Farfetched, have their lives “changed forever” when they watch a group of whales swim to their slaughter—an event that leads them to question their own relationship to the environment and that eventually propels Peter into environmental activism and causes John Western, a wealthy doctor, to give up his practice in the United States and volunteer his services to a war-torn “third world country.” (Lilley 155) viii Probably written between Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), “Whales and Men” is an antidote to the anthropocentrism of Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden. The screenplay attacks “the inherent destructiveness of the judge’s mode of vision, his method of writing history, and his grotesque anthropocentrism and instead celebrates the heterogeneity and autonomy of the natural world” (Lilly 155-56). Of course, it is impossible to escape anthropocentrism completely because our conceptions of nature and the language that we use to describe it are human constructs. Still, as Lawrence Buell argues, the attempt to “relinquish” the ego moves humans nearer to “feeling the environment to be at least as worthy of attention as oneself and of experiencing oneself as situated among many interacting presences” (178). What Buell describes and what McCarthy portrays is an expansion of an individual’s sense of self to include the wider world. In McCarthy’s attempts to shift from egocentrism to ecocentrism, he shows that the interaction between humans and nature is a relationship between “fluid, coterminous, coextensive systems” (Lilley 152). While Lilley and Buell focus on the role of language in this relationship between humans and nonhuman nature, I apply deep ecology, ecofeminism, and social ecology—the three streams of radical environmental philosophy—to investigate