Cormac McCarthy

A complexity theory of literature

Lydia R. Cooper, Sharon Monteith, Nahem Yousaf

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526148575
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.

1

Cars, trucks, and horses: man in the age of the machine

It is our view that crisis and change in the Detroit region can be situated in the context of the reorganization of capitalism on a world scale that is the central theme of this book.

(Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C. Trachte, Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan)

Through all our history the self-made man was the exception not the rule. … These are facts, but do men order their lives according to fact alone? … Belief in the self-made man requires only an act of faith, and, as every Sunday School boy knows, faith is simply the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

(Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches)¹

Images of the toxic encroachment of the ‘age of the machine’ into pristine rural landscapes litter Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965). The opening section finds a ‘mangled fragment of fence’ embedded in the flesh of a rotting tree, and the aging orchard keeper, Arthur Ownby, haunts a peach orchard now ‘gray limb[ed]’ and abandoned, abutted to a concrete insecticide pit which is being used as a crypt for a murdered body (3, 52). That crypt-pit provides one of the final, grotesque scenes in the novel, as Ownby, now in an assisted care home, imagines the ‘green cadaver grin sealed in the murky waters of the peach pit, slimegreen skull with newts coiled in the eyesockets and a wig of moss’ (224). The visceral horror and beauty of this image are the quintessential stuff of the American southern gothic tradition. Perhaps that is all it is. Some early reviewers of this debut novel certainly thought so. In a review in the New York Times on May 12, 1965, Orville Prescott claims, ‘Some novelist [sic] can write with brilliance’ about pastoral idylls lost to industrialization. ‘Others,’ he says, ‘although they are highly gifted too, are sorely handicapped by their humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy … is one of these.’² However, a closer examination of the role of the ‘age of the machine’—represented by the literal and metaphorical poison leaching into the pastoral landscape—reveals the complexity of McCarthy’s eco-critical vision, as well as capturing his critique of the role of market capitalism and the myth of the ‘self-made man’ in American culture.

In her authoritative reading of McCarthy’s earliest works, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, Dianne C. Luce pays attention to the signs and portents of an emerging ‘ecocentric vision.’ McCarthy’s first four novels depict a gothic rural past threatened by the onslaught of the industrial and economic modernization of Appalachia in the 1930s through the 1950s. ‘In its remembered healthiest state, before the opening of [The Orchard Keeper],’ Luce explains, the titular peach orchard ‘was an emblem of the fruitful collaboration between man and nature, specifically of the traditional, forest-dependent, pastoral culture of East Tennessee’s mountain people.’³ These early themes resurface in the Border Trilogy, where characters and places are haunted by memories of a wild or rural past and threatened by the tide of second-wave industrialization, modernization, and mechanized warfare. They recur in most of McCarthy’s works, and are a central theme of his post-apocalyptic The Road.

Luce frames her analysis with Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, originally published in 1964, to categorize McCarthy’s novels as participating in what Marx calls the literary tradition of complex pastoralism, as opposed to sentimental pastoralism. The spinal column of the American literary canon is formed by this latter category, in which Herman Melville’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and Mark Twain’s works fall. The defining image of this type of pastoral is the ‘machine in the garden,’ an image that poses stringent critiques of American national character. Specifically, Marx says, ‘[I]t is industrialization, represented by images of machine technology, that provides the counterforce in the American archetype of the pastoral design.’⁴ That counterforce—the threat of and resistance to encroaching industrialization—adds complexity to thematic content in American literary pastorals.

In terms of McCarthy’s use of the pastoral as cultural critique, Marx’s most helpful insight is his description of the machine as the force of disruption and instability in the American psyche—and it is a force that is always gendered. In this complex pastoral tradition, the machine functions as ‘a sudden, shocking intruder upon a fantasy of idyllic satisfaction.’ That rupture of assumed innocence or safety is ‘invariably … associated with crude, masculine aggressiveness in contrast with the tender, feminine, and submissive attitudes traditionally attached to the landscape.’⁵ That the pastoral is always a ‘virginal’ landscape is a given.⁶ Why the machine’s toxicity is masculine is less easily explained, for Marx, than the femininity of the land. In order to understand the reason for the machine’s masculine characterization, it is necessary to turn to a broader examination of the role of industrialism in the US economy, and its relationship to the false premise of American economic philosophy: the myth of the self-made man.

Irvin G. Wyllie’s The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches, originally published in 1954, provides a succinct narrative summary of that myth, its durability through the 1929 economic collapse, and its sticking power through sufficient data to turn any intelligent being away from belief in such a construct. But belief is not so easily lost. In the end, Wyllie concludes, the myth of the self-made man is not really about economic philosophy but is rather a quasi-religious system, the heart of which is a peculiarly American love of wealth. How ‘success’ is defined varies from person to person, he points out, but ‘no one of these concepts enjoys such universal favor in America as that which equates success with making money.’⁷ Wyllie’s sociological assessment of wealth as the marker of ‘making it’ in America corresponds with economists’ descriptions of the role of capital in Western nations. Ernest Mandel, for example, connects the driving force of capitalism to this fundamental belief that success can be defined best by an accumulation of wealth, particularly wealth as surplus profit (as opposed to less liquid forms of wealth, more common in hereditary land-based economies in old Europe). Technological advances are necessary processes through which capital surplus is increased. ‘In capitalism, under the whip of competition and the constant quest for surplus-profits,’ Mandel says, ‘efforts are continually made to lower the costs of production and cheapen the value of commodities by means of technical improvements.’⁸ The machine in McCarthy’s works, then, represents not only the processes by which men become wealthy but also the voracious appetite for wealth that characterizes a society that correlates the value of a man to his capacity to generate and accumulate wealth.

In this regard, the complex pastoral imagery in McCarthy’s works can be read as extended metaphors for that which is lost to human and nonhuman animal societies in the age of the machine, and the looming threat of industrialization brought by the ‘whip of competition’ that drives the production lines and the manufactured goods that feed the engines of the American consumer economy. Specifically, McCarthy’s representations of the effects of the ‘age of the machine’ on human flourishing and the flourishing of the natural world are codified in a series of metaphors. Among the most obvious and most frequently occurring are contrasting, metaphoric depictions of engine-driven vehicles such as cars and trucks, and horses. That is, McCarthy’s works code this critique of capitalism in familiar images of American industry against equally familiar images representing a pastoral or agrarian way of life: cars and trucks on the one side, and horses on the other.

This image-driven, largely implicit critique draws readers’ attention to the suppression of alternative notions of ‘success’ or human flourishing under the hegemony of America’s capitalist consumer economy. What possible alternative value system can survive, McCarthy’s novels seem to ask, given American quasi-religious devotion to the myth of the self-made man? McCarthy imagines this question through attention to the gendered implications of industrialization of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, and through those coded images poses this question: what happens to ‘man’ in an industrialized world? More importantly, what happens to humanity in an increasingly inhuman(e) world?

This chapter examines McCarthy’s depictions of the ‘machine in the garden’ in his screenplay The Gardener’s Son and in two early Appalachian novels, The Orchard Keeper and Child of God, and then traces its spore through the Border Trilogy, ending finally with a nod to the latter part of the twentieth century in No Country for Old Men, the contemporary world of The Counselor, and the apocalyptic future in The Road. First, a brief explanation for which texts are examined and which are not. In The Gardener’s Son, set during Reconstruction and before the advent of the automobile, McCarthy levels his gaze on a critical era in American capitalism driven by the second industrial revolution and sets the stage, as it were, for his persistent critique of the myth of the self-made man. Next, his early Appalachian novels set up the function of complex pastoral imagery, with its threatening machine, which continues and expands in the Border Trilogy, recurs in No Country, and undergirds the central arguments of The Counselor, before arriving at a ‘worst case’ imagined future in The Road. Blood Meridian and Outer Dark are not represented in this discussion, as both are situated in engine-less worlds, although Blood Meridian focuses on the very economic question that emerges from this chapter: what is it that drives the violent dispossession inherent in American capitalism?⁹ Because Blood Meridian traces the answer to that question back to the era of Manifest Destiny, the next chapter focuses on this novel in an historical examination of the theme of American capitalism in McCarthy’s fiction forward from the mid-nineteenth century.

The primary historical context for this chapter is, first, the second industrial revolution; then the technological boom of the early twentieth century; the collapse and rebirth of the US’s consumer-driven capitalist economy during the Great Depression and the Second World War; and finally the shift toward global capitalism in the 1980s. The Gardener’s Son, based loosely on the true crime story of Robert McEvoy, who shot and killed a textile mill owner in Graniteville, South Carolina, in 1876, contends directly with the myth of the self-made man during the height of the second industrial revolution, shortly after the completion of the transcontinental railroad (1869) and shortly before the end of the Reconstruction Era’s limited civil rights advances. The Orchard Keeper traces the collapse of rural, agrarian communities in East Tennessee during the boom era of the Tennessee Valley Authority and through Prohibition; Child of God reinforces its examination of rural collapse following the Second World War. The Border Trilogy spans the Second World War and the first decade following, with attention to the implications of nationalism and the military-industrial complex in the atomic age. No Country for Old Men revisits many of the themes of The Orchard Keeper, its nostalgia for a rural Texas homesteading past (instead of an eastern Tennessee rural past) undercut by brutal observations about the implications of market economics during the boom of the transnational marketplace in the 1980s. The Counselor picks up many of the same narrative threads from No Country, but transposes them to the first decades of the twenty-first century. And, finally, The Road offers a retrospective look at the end of human existence and the tenacity of the violence and aggression that, even at the end of civilization, dominate American masculinity.

Throughout each of these texts, the ‘machine in the garden’ and its implicit economic critique are represented by a sort of metaphoric shorthand in which trucks and cars and horses, critical forms of transportation in post-industrialized or industrialized societies on the one hand and rural or pre-industrial communities on the other, reflect larger themes about definitions of success, value, and meaningfulness. In McCarthy’s metaphoric lexicon, this notion of innate value is described as a matter of souls; yet this is not, strictly speaking, a theological argument. Wild animals are consistently described as possessing souls, but when domesticated they lose access to the universal soul that grants them a profound communal connection with each other and a place in the matrix of the natural world. By implication, human beings’ souls are damaged and fragile, quickened in the natural world but alienated, perhaps lost entirely, in the machine that cranks the engines of a market economy.¹⁰

Cars, trucks, complexity, and masculinity

Analysis of recurring motifs that speak to capitalist processes and environmental losses reflects the driving ideas of complexity economics. Complexity economics pushes against the pre-2008 dominant model, which reads market economies as systems with determinable ‘optimal’ functions and representable agents (market forces), and which accounts for irregularities by calculating in random stochastic processes (typically modeled on calculations of Brownian motion, random behaviors that are unpredictable yet measurable). Complexity theory applied to economics, however, reads markets as complex adaptive systems (CAS). It understands economic systems to be dynamic, with ‘often abrupt transitions between some temporary order and volatile disorder.’¹¹ Rongqing Dai offers a more philosophical explanation: social collaboration is always a fraught contest between ‘mutual reliance and mutual competition’ for survival.¹² What may seem random irregularities in marketplaces in fact derive from the irreducibly complex interrelationship between ‘social effects of production and distribution,’ the ‘relationship bet...