University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 7-2015 Architectures for a Future South: Posthumanism and Ruin in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy Joshua Ryan Jackson University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Jackson, Joshua Ryan, "Architectures for a Future South: Posthumanism and Ruin in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy" (2015). Theses and Dissertations.edu/etd/1220 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact scholar@uark.edu, ccmiddle@uark.
Architectures for a Future South Posthumanism and Ruin in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Joshua Ryan Jackson Sewanee: The University of the South Bachelor of Arts in English, May 2013 July 2015 University of Arkansas This thesis is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. Lisa Hinrichsen Thesis Director _________________________________ __________________________________ Dr. Keith Booker Dr. Robert Cochran Committee Member Committee Member Abstract In this thesis, I read the novels of Cormac McCarthy as posthuman southern literature to explain why literature from the South after World War II could no longer convey a sense of place during postmodernity: that is, because its culture and economy were transitioning from predominantly humanistic thinking (i., believing that humans [and especially southern humans] are supreme beings) to predominantly posthumanistic thinking (i., believing that humans are not as supreme as they think they are).
I argue that we can trace this ideological change over time via structural shifts in the South’s architectural record, which I see in the ruins of McCarthy’s novels. I conclude that applying posthuman theory to southern literature affords us an alternative (and non-supremacist, non-exceptionalist) way to read southern literature, as well as a way to understand the American South as a space that is constantly undergoing a broader, transideological movement away from humanism (read: human exceptionalism) and toward posthumanism (read: non-, anti-, or after human exceptionalism). ©2015 by Joshua Ryan Jackson All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements It has been a privilege to work with such compassionate academic mentors as Dr. Lisa Hinrichsen and Dr.
I am also full of gratitude for the guidance of my extracurricular mentors, Neil G. I am indebted to all of these wonderful people for their time, encouragement, persistence, and willingness to listen to my questions, ideas, and odd thoughts. For all of the above plus undying patience, unconditional love, and supportive listening during early descriptions of my work, my obsessive ramblings, as well as superfluous grammar lessons, I thank my parents, Rick and Katrina Jackson, and the beautiful, confident, and sassy Megan Vallowe—the only one I call exceptional. Dedication For Pap.
Table of Contents I. Introduction: An Archaeology of Southern Letters…………………………………………1 II. Chapter 1 | This Too, Shall Pass: The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism in Cormac McCarthy’s “Southern” Novels……………………………………………………………. Chapter 2 | And This, Too: The Myth of Western Exceptionalism in Cormac McCarthy’s “Western” Novels………………………………………………………………………….
Chapter 3 | And This, And This, And This: The Road as Cormac McCarthy’s Posthuman South………………………………………………………………………………………. Coda: Futures for the Posthuman South……………………………………………………. Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………86 1 Introduction: An Archaeology of Southern Letters The twentieth century southerner found a stubborn sense of comfort in calling himself a person with a “sense of place”—someone who did not wander, but put down roots. In 1930, this stubborn comfort was made manifest with the publication of I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a foundational set of essays written by twelve southerners who defined themselves and the ideal southerner as self-sufficient farmers.
Their essays reinforced the South’s exceptional sense of place in relation to the rest of the United States, i., within a region haunted by the burden of its troubled history, in rural communities built on fertile soil, and on plots of land where they could “labour in the earth,” as the type of farmers they thought Thomas Jefferson might proudly call “the chosen people of God” (Jefferson).1 With this utopian vision put forward during the Great Depression, the Agrarians saw southern culture and grassroots economics as a last holdout against and potential solution to the failing industrial economies of the North. Their essays thus defined the U. South in terms that would promote economic and moral cultivation of its citizenry through subsistence farming rather than manufacturing and the stock market. Such ideas, however, were met with progressive resistance for what many southern liberals saw in the manifesto’s socially conservative, if not regressive agenda, which, to several of the Agrarians’ contemporaries, bordered on fascism.2 1 None of the Agrarians directly cites Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), but their pastoral vision for the southern farmer certainly aligns with Thomas Jefferson’s pastoral vision for the Virginian farmer.
Thanks to Dr. Tam Carlson at Sewanee for drawing this connection during the first class I took in Literature of the U. 2 See Robert Brinkmeyer’s The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism (2005) for public figures who claimed the group was ideologically fascistic. Brinkmeyer notes multiple instances of Western European racism and classism among the Southern Agrarians, whose “strict opposition between the rural innocence of traditional culture and the urban evil of modernity […] unwittingly promoted a traditional way of life that was structured by ideology mirroring that of the modern states they railed against” (Brinkmeyer 97, emphasis added).
2 Such resistance was accompanied by increased urbanization in the South, which John Egerton would later coin as the “Americanization of Dixie” (Egerton); America’s involvement in The Second World War, which James Cobb would later note as a major hinge point when the “New South” became more like a “No South” (Cobb 244); as well as the civil rights movement, which, according to southern historians Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (2009), signaled the end of another era in southern history (Crispino and Lassiter 14). All of this rapid change during the middle of the twentieth century would lead to the Agrarian movement dying out before the second half of the twentieth century. What remained for the twelve southerners who started it was a refuge in the ruins of southern fiction, which, after the death of William Faulkner and literary modernism, they found in a state of decay and mourning—much like its “Lost Cause” literary ancestor after the Civil War—still telling stories about a South wrestling with the death of an older southern culture. Fast forward to the turn of the twenty-first century: South to the Future (2002).
Fred Hobson, a southernist who continues the work of the Twelve Southerners (albeit to tell about a newer south) refers to what’s left of older “southern culture” as “almost always plural”: i., in terms of multiple “southern cultures” (3). Meanwhile, Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith broke new ground for southern scholars after publishing a collection of essays titled Look Away!: The U. South in New World Studies (2004), fashioning a literary critical zeitgeist for global southern studies by examining transnational cultural affinities between the “two Souths” of the United States and Latin America. Such plurality, hybridity, and proliferation of Souths examined by contemporary southernists indicates not only a literary critical sea change (i., a “look away” from the monolith of the “American South” and a look toward the shibboleths of “southern 3 cultures”), but also mirrors the generational multiplicity of the U.
South in the southern imagination—a space where it always seems to be getting replaced by newer southern cultures. The rise and fall of southern cultures seems to have captured the imaginations of many southern writers at the end of the twentieth century, especially Cormac McCarthy, an author who has distanced himself from the South over the years, but who also lived through, witnessed, and bridged the transition from modernism to postmodernism in literature of the U. My purpose in this thesis is to investigate how Cormac McCarthy’s ten novels have made that transition, and whether or not in so doing, they have helped us enter a period in contemporary southern literature where writers of the South can abandon their concern for the past and adopt a concern for the future. To answer these questions, “Architectures for a Future South” contends that McCarthy’s novels illustrate the architectural ruination of several souths—i., the Old South of the antebellum era, the New South of the postbellum era, and the postmodern South of the post-WWII era—so as to trace the South’s transformation from a humanist region that believed in supremacist myths about southern, western, and human exceptionalism into a posthumanist region that can recognize itself as no more supreme than the rubble it has been reduced to, time and time again.
In tracing this change over time in terms of a cultural history, I seek to expand Martyn Bone’s theory of a postsouthern sense of place in contemporary southern fiction. I do so by positing the “posthuman south”3 as a way of explaining why southern literature after World War II possesses what Bone calls a “sense of ‘place(lessness)’” (45). That is, I put forward a reason for why postmodern southern literature could no longer convey a sense of place after the advent 3 I do not capitalize the term “posthuman south” throughout this thesis. I intend the lower-case “s” (at least in my conception of a future South) to represent the idea of a South that no longer senses itself as exceptional in any way that would have us capitalize a cardinal direction to denote its speciality.
4 of postmodernity, which is to say because its culture and economy were transitioning from predominantly humanist thinking (i., believing that humans [and especially southern, white, male humans] are superior to all life on earth) to predominantly posthumanist thinking (i., believing that humans [and especially southern, white, male humans] are not as superior as they think they are). I argue that we can trace this ideological change over time via structural shifts in the South’s architectural record. My approach in the way of southern architecture is inspired by the scholarly work of southern fiction writer, Doris Betts, who, in her contribution to The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-First Century (1991) excavates the contemporary South’s recent history in what she calls “our archaeology of southern letters” (179). The fruits of her excavation are worth quoting at length: The satellite dish stands where the outhouse used to lean; after the tobacco curing barn gave way to the sharecropper’s cabin, that was replaced by a rusting trailer, and now by an elaborate furnished mobile home that cost $35,000.
(178) The erasure of older structures (such as the outhouse, barn, and sharecropper’s cabin) and their replacement by newer structures (such as the satellite dish, rusting trailer, and mobile home) signals the movement from one South to another. These movements appear especially pronounced in Cormac McCarthy’s ten novels, where the focus often seems less on character and more on surrounding landscapes, all of which appear resplendent with what K. Wesley Berry observes in the author’s prominent “archaeological references” (Berry 61).