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American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy
This chapter explores the ecological foundations of the literary imaginations of two writers of the Americas – the early twentieth-century Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha and contemporary US novelist Cormac McCarthy – in order to underscore how ecology puts national boundaries into comparative relief and renders even the very ideas of history, human memory, and the specialness of human experience and expression perpetually contingent and renegotiable. I also aim to demonstrate that no serious consideration of the literatures of the Americas can avoid addressing the ways in which national literatures emerged from and were influenced by the region’s environmental history and by changing scientific conceptions of natural systems in modern experience. Ecocriticism has asked us to reread literature in the interest of cultivating an imagination more attuned to ecological realities, but ecology also asks us to cultivate a more relational, comparative, and interdependent awareness of nationalism and national literatures. In other words, ecosystems are not merely thematically important but also provide a theoretical imperative. As such, they help us to see, as Euclides and McCarthy thematize with regard to borders in the Americas, that literature functions like an ecosystem; it imagines a series of interdependent and complex relations that destabilize our understanding of geopolitical boundaries in the Americas as well as the boundaries between nature and culture. Euclides, considered to be “the first ecological engineer of Brazil,” and McCarthy, a devotee to science and complexity theory at the Santa Fe Institute, propose that the literary imagination is a contingent response to and an extension of the open and complex ecosystems that sustain humanity. Purposefully, then, this chapter offers a comparison between two seemingly disparate examples in the Americas in order to model the kind of contingent and open systems we find in ecology.
The Natural Sciences and Ecosystems
Because the natural sciences are so important to the cultural history of the Americas and to both authors, I first provide a brief gloss of how the natural sciences initially developed in the Americas and how they have enabled our contemporary understanding of natural systems. Although the term “natural science” today refers to earth sciences such as geology, geography, oceanography, and hydrology, and various biological sciences, including botany, zoology, ecology, and atmospheric sciences, at least until the nineteenth century in the Americas, the natural sciences were not yet specialized. Instead, “natural science” was a broad holistic response to the crisis of epistemology that the empirical realities of the New World posed to the Old. In their nascent state, the natural sciences attempted to identify the spiritual and/or natural laws that structured the universe and upheld a Western cosmos in the context of an earth rendered more complex and interdependent than had been previously imagined (Cañizares-Esguerra, 3; see also Barrera-Osorio 8). The new epistemology of empirical observation that emerged to manage rapid environmental change in the early modern period represented a fundamental shift away from dependence on classical tradition and the academic wisdom of Europe and placed new emphasis on the observable differences of the New World. Colonial empiricism also exposed a new interdependence among American and European cultures and between humanity and the natural world, revealing a sometimes chaotic and unknowable “circle of interdependence and mutuality” at the root of our biological existence (Worster, Rivers 22).
As colonial powers gathered and rationalized data from the Americas in imperial botanical gardens in Europe, for example, the Americas were undergoing an unprecedented and widespread ecological transformation of flora and fauna – particularly wherever plantation economies emerged – resulting in unanticipated loss of soil fertility and biodiversity. Attempts to understand and use the resources of the Americas resulted directly in indelible change among the very systems scientists sought to understand. This was a mutual transformation and blurring of the boundaries between culture and nature that the natural sciences relied on. As Schiebinger and Swan put it, “[T]he story of colonial botany is as much a story of transplanting nature as it is one of transforming knowledge” (16). In other words, despite their beginnings in the colonial context, the natural sciences began to tell a story of empirical realities that traversed and even belied fixed national boundaries and undermined the exceptionalism of human history itself. Richard Grove reminds us, moreover, that we owe contemporary environmental ethics paradoxically to the development of the natural sciences in the colonial context of the Pacific and Caribbean islands.
For this reason, it is significant that even though the natural sciences depended on and nurtured colonial expansion and then national consolidation in turn, writers such as Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy demonstrate how the knowledge these sciences produced also serves to undermine imperial and neocolonial enterprises and render porous, if not increasingly irrelevant, the discrete national boundaries that continue to inform the hemisphere’s politics and literary cultures. We might say that the natural sciences, on the one hand, have been used to manage and control nature much like literary criticism has served to manage and narrate the varieties of literary expression within discrete national boundaries. On the other hand, in the search for a totalizing system under which to subsume an increasing variety of observable phenomena, the natural sciences have exposed the mutually transformative interactions between species and environments and their unpredictable and often unmanageable complexity. This has created a heightened sense of the contingent and sometimes rhetorical frames that are used to produce scientific knowledge, just as literary criticism has discovered the complex interactions between readers and texts, and the contingent and rhetorical boundaries used to denote the literary object of study – be it an author’s oeuvre, a regional or national literary history, or even comparative studies of discrete boundaries. In short, we have entered a phase of understanding in both fields that must recognize the limits of systems and that accommodates unpredictability, contingency, and chaos.
For much of Western history, scientific discoveries have seemed to justify confidence that we will inevitably understand the workings of the world with always increasing reliability. This positivism remains the predominant ethos of scientific research and discovery, and is one reason why Eugene Odum’s mid-twentieth-century popularization of the concept of an ecosystem posited a relatively closed system – a balanced, stable, and manageable whole. An ecosystem, in the words of Daniel Botkin, is “a network of living and nonliving parts that can maintain the flow of energy and the cycling of chemical elements that, in turn, support life” (7). Daniel Worster notes, however, that whereas ecology was “basically a study of equilibrium, harmony, and order” in its mid-twentieth-century beginnings, “it has become a study of disturbance, disharmony, and chaos” (“Nature” 3). In the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed that an ecosystem was a kind of “superorganism” and its laws of operation were only a matter of discovery in order to find the path to sustainability. But the deeper we have ventured into the operations of complexly interconnected and open systems, we are learning that “change is without any determinable direction and goes on forever, never reaching a point of stability” (8). For Worster, this means that an ecological ethic doesn’t dictate belief in nature’s independent order or balance, but rather requires humanity to understand itself as part of a whole that includes chance and chaos.
As a consequence of positivism and the considerable advances of technology and capitalism over the past century, however, nature came to be seen as an interconnected, knowable, and manageable machine. This persistent view has had two important implications. First, it suggests that ecosystems move directionally and predictably, as Odum suggested in 1969 (Botkin 54). It has also implied that nature has “the capacity to keep operating, [with] replaceable parts, and the ability to maintain a steady-state and thus to be in balance” (105). As quantum and chaos theory developed, it became apparent, however, that nature was subject to chance and that it was not discernable as discrete systems but as a set of overlapping systems whose predictability resembled not a machine but a “set of probabilities” (124). As Botkin explains, “[A]t the level at which organisms respond to and affect their environment, the world is one of risk, predictable only to probabilities. Nature as perceived by living things is a nature of chance” (124).
Of course, any observation of the politics of culture tends to reveal a persistent impatience with complexity and interdependence. The unpredictability and complexity of such problems as climate change have often produced an ethics of retrenchment and fear and a violent simplification of science for the sake of political convenience. In other words, culture and politics have not always kept pace with the more nuanced understandings of science, thus explaining why positivism continues to pervade scientific discourse. Positivistic simplifications fly in the face of science’s more radical political and cultural implications (see Sarewitz; Serres). The most ambitious globalizing claims evident in climatology, for example, might seem to suggest that we can manage the planet with perfect reliability even though climatology points to the need for a contingent sense of community and a poetics of relation that would help inspire a collective ethics. According to Michel Serres, science is an indicative rather than an imperative epistemology. This means that science cannot adequately speak to the ethical and moral principles that are relevant to the conditions it describes. Science has, in other words, encountered its own limits because it has been unable to deny the increasing evidence of complexity that blurs the Enlightenment and positivist distinctions between subject and object and between subjective and objective knowledge on which scientific knowledge has historically relied.
Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy offer two examples that science’s newfound need for a kind of contingent cosmology and collective ethics is something that literature can provide. If the categories of subject and object are no longer reliable, distinctions between culture and nature, between nations, and between science and literature are fruitfully confused. In the readings that follow, I mean to push the theoretical implications of ecological complexity and use this confusion to challenge how we understand American literature. Aaron Sachs has already provided an important example of the direct relevance of natural science to the literary imagination by tracing the influence of the important naturalist, Alexander Von Humboldt, and his successors on the literary imagination of such figures as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe. But because Euclides and McCarthy pay particular attention to the important question of ecological complexity, their writings help us to imagine a more contingent and broad inter-American community than ecocritics have treated.
Euclides da Cunha and the Law of Extraterritoriality
Euclides da Cunha published only one poem and never ventured into fiction, but he is nevertheless a monumental figure in Brazilian letters because of his compelling account of the rebellion of a religious community against the Brazilian military in 1902, entitled Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands). Employed as a journalist and trained in engineering and in the military, he was widely read in science and literature. According to Leandro Tocantins, Euclides’s understanding of science was strongly influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Ernst Haeckel, as well as by the Americans Frederick Hartt and Henry Walter Bates (28). But the prose of Os Sertões and of his essays on the Amazon, Á marjem da historia (Land without History), which will be my focus here, is never merely scientific; it blends anthropology, sociology, and natural science with high literary expression, the literary qualities emerging precisely at those moments when the complexity of the empirical world begins to break down the objectivity and control he strives to maintain over his subject.
In 1905, at the age of 38 and just three years after publishing Os Sertões, Euclides da Cunha traveled to the Amazon as the head of a national delegation to participate in a joint effort to delineate the Amazonian borders between Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. His essays about the region, most specifically about the Purus River, were gathered and published posthumously in 1909, in the collection Á marjem da historia, after his tragic death in a duel. As a journalist and scientist, he writes about the venture with a fascinating, and sometimes contradictory, dual commitment to empirical observation and positivistic management of nature and to figural language and the need for environmental restraint. The essays cover the ecology of the river, observations about the indigenous and creole cultures of the region, and the challenges the region poses to settlement. What is important for my purposes is that his ambition to understand the ecology of rivers produces hybrid essays that, precisely in their fidelity to the complexity he observes, end up compromising his nationalist objective to map rivers as geopolitical borders. On ecological grounds, then, his posthumous Amazonian essays provoke doubts about the utility of national frames and motivate a dialectical and comparative understanding of literature itself as a kind of complex ecosystem that integrates and confuses epistemologies.
Rivers, of course, are central to just about every major national and imperial project in history, which is perhaps why rivers are today some of the most endangered ecologies in the world (over 70 dams are currently planned for the Amazon; Worster, Rivers 5). Despite the more narrow political purposes they have been asked to serve, rivers nourish broad systems of life that transcend national and geopolitical interests and are hardly discrete objects or even ecosystems with definable boundaries. As Euclides discovers, it is virtually impossible to know where a river ends and some other nonriver entity begins. Rivers depend on topography, climate, soil, and the endless transformations of the water cycle; they nurture life beneath the ground, on banks, on floodplains, in the air, and, of course, in the water itself. For Euclides, a river is entirely at odds with the kind of mission he engages in 1904, counter not only to the very project of drawing national borders but also to the positivist impulse to bring under control the wild and defiant shape, form, and dynamism of watersheds.
Euclides’s dependence on scientific positivism is hard to miss, but what has fascinated critics and what has contributed to his importance to Brazilian literature and national culture is his perplexing willingness to deconstruct the structures of knowledge he uses to build his accounts of Brazilian reality. The scientific and philosophical culture of positivism came from late nineteenth-century France and dominated thought in the Americas at the time. Its influence on Brazil was particularly strong, as evident in its national motto of “Ordem e progresso” (Order and progress), adopted after independence in 1889. Euclides’s influence, then, has cut both ways: on one hand, it has inspired literature that explores the complex relationships between the metropole and the Brazilian interior in a style that is often self-reflexive and even ironic about the objectivity of science; but, on the other, it has led to a tendency within Brazilian letters for a kind of scientific description of Brazilian reality that borders on self-exoticism. One critic, Luiz Costa Lima, for example, argues that Euclides and Brazilian culture of the time could not achieve desired autonomy from Europe because of a mistaken assumption that mimesis of local landscapes would suffice to achieve independence. The result was a perpetually unimaginative thrust to literature, always bowing to the positivist and scientistic impulse to name, mimetically represent, and control the diversity within its national boundaries (Costa Lima 163). I wish to highlight, however, the ways in which Euclides’s mimesis produces difference and marks his own subjectivity, despite his intentions or pretensions to objectivity.
This is a vital strategy of reading because it helps to blur the often stereotypical differences between the objectivity of science and the imaginative force of literature. Empirical study of ecological process might not begin with literary intentions, but in Euclides (and in many other writers from the Americas), the openness to experience and to the dynamism of change establishes the grounds for cultural and political independence. More importantly, this emergent sense of independence gives way to a growing awareness of ecological complexity and interdependence. Thus, instead of drily naming and mapping the land, Euclides’s prose indulges in the excesses of metaphor so as to insist finally on the limits of representation. This ecological transformation of the literary imagination is not a new phenomenon. The mimetic impulse – stimulated by the achievements of scientific explorations of New World lands – informs Euclides’s literary precursors throughout the nineteenth century, including Andrés Bello, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, José de Alencar, João Manoel Pereira da Silva, and José Martí, all of whom sought cultural independence through mimetic representation of local conditions. It is important, however, to note how such efforts to delineate and map new spaces of originality were also, inadvertently or not, compromised by a growing awareness of the complexity and interdependencies that ecology exposes (see Handley, New World Poetics). Euclides is anxious to provide a guide for the nationalization of an unruly and outlying territory and yet willing to allow ecology to transform his neocolonial mimetic ambition into something more literary and poetic. In other words, because he ultimately acknowledges that the ecology of the river stands in direct tension with Brazilian national ambition, his positivist enterprise to map objectively moves from being a mere empirical reckoning with the Purus River to an imaginative expression of profound wonder and contingency.
Euclides writes that the river “contains everything and at the same time lacks everything, because it lacks the linking-together of phenomena developed within a rigorous process that produces the well-defined truths of art and science – and which bespeaks the grand unconscious logic of things” (5). In its artless state, outside the bounds of a rationalizing epistemology, the river functions as a kind of ecological unconscious current beneath the surface of modernity. To the extent that he yearns to bring this chaotic substrate of the Amazon into the order of Brazilian modernity, his is a modest desire for ecological management, replete with caveats and warnings. He strives to be an instrument of modernization, to be sure, but not unlike the way in which John Wesley Powell similarly urged a modest, ecologically sensitive development of the US West on a scale that would respect the West’s aridity. For this reason, perhaps, Tocantins calls Euclides the “first ecological engineer of Brazil” (85). To correct the haphazard and violent methods of settlement in the interior, he writes,
What comes definitively to the fore is the urgent need for measures to rescue this hidden, abandoned culture: a work law that ennobles human effort; an austere justice that curbs excesses, and some form of homestead provision that definitively links man and land. (27)
He sees a need to “preserve the Purus” because of the likelihood of human abuse and excess and, more importantly, because he has come to understand how the ecology of the river already supplies its own mechanisms for mitigation and storage. He suggests a “modest but consistent program of improvements, to be passed down from federal government to federal government in a continuous, unbreakable commitment of honor with the future … in order to save the majestic river” (30). Euclides here cannot escape his positivism, but to see this as merely “straightforward imperialism,” as Lucia Sá puts it, seems to miss this vital call for restraint and balance, flawed and insufficient though it may be, and its provocative cross-cultural implications (Sá xiv).
The cross-cultural poetics of these essays emerges most clearly in this attempt to respect the river’s tropical ecology. The sheer size and power of the Purus and the complexity of the tributaries suggest that rivers and land stand in a dynamic and dialectical relationship: the river combines “constructive and destructive processes in such a manner that landscapes, in their slow, constant transfiguration, manifest the effects of a prodigious sculpting process” (7). Such riverine forces render the very meaning and identity of land ironic: “dissolved continents are contained in their silty waters. Countries are transformed. Lands are remade” (7). His description of the river’s ecology models contemporary understandings of river ecology, noting the “vital” and “dramatic” struggle and exchange “among plant species” along the banks of the river and the edges of these islands (9). Riparian zones, where we see the interface between land and river water relegate land to constant movement and make the very notion of solidity uncertain. The upshot of this ecological violence is a perpetual ambiguity of form, which as a result of his mimetic intention to describe it accurately becomes an ambiguity of literary form. At once science, poetry, and anthropology, the essays are both nationalistic and defiantly cross-cultural. The wish to simplify their complexity is symptomatic of an impatience with ecology itself.
Whether intentionally or not, Euclides’s ecology performs a challenge to the social knowledge he hopes to produce for Brazilian nationality: “this river that more than any other defies our lyrical patriotism is in fact the least Brazilian of our watercourses. It is a strange adversary, given over day and night to the task of wearing away its own land” (8). The river is an emigrant, carrying away the land in the natural course of erosion and the fluctuations of climate and flow and dumping it into the currents of the Atlantic Ocean. This means that the soil may arrive at
the coastal regions of Georgia and the Carolinas in North America. … In such places, the Brazilian, albeit a foreigner, would be treading Brazilian land. Which leads to an astounding perplexity: to the fiction of extraterritorial law [extraterritorialidade] – country without land [a patria sem a terra] – is counterposed another basic physical concept – land without country [a terra sem a patria]. Such is the marvelous effect of this other kind of telluric migration. Land abandons man. (9)
The lyrical chiasmus in these passages is the result of a mimetic response to the biological intertwining he observes: liquid as solid, solid as liquid; land without country, country without land; the Brazilian citizen who stands in the “least Brazilian” territory in his own land, only to tread Brazilian land elsewhere. Ostensibly an expression of unique Brazilian character, this encounter with the Amazon basin is also a description that undermines the very idea of Brazilianness. Euclides’s ecological law of extraterritoriality requires a tolerance for the contingency of nationality within the relational context of complex transnational ecosystems in deep time.
In the Amazonian interior, Euclides insists that the river’s “monstrous” and “scandalously profligate” tropicality threatens to defy rationalization (10, 28). For this reason, Tocantins argues that Euclides came to understand that his positivism would not be enough to gain control; the climate was “not as sovereign as the determinists had thought,” and “the social environment” also “imposed itself on the cosmic environment” (91). What emerges is an understanding of the complexity of a system of “interrelationality in which the environment acts on man and man on the environment” (91–2). The perpetually mutual transformations of cultural and natural forms in the tropics mean that mimetic language will always miss its mark, and his language marks this miss deferentially in its self-reflexive lyrical excess. Precisely when the scientist is supposed to be the most restrained in empirical observation, “the great river … evokes the marvelous so powerfully that it catches up the unpresuming chronicler, the romantic adventurer, and the careful scholar alike” (5–6). The ecological reality of the tropics makes all alike guilty of a “flight of fancy” or of a “daring ‘rush’ of imagination and fantasy,” and is therefore the reason for blurring the distinctions between historical, literary, and scientific prose (5, 19). It is for this reason that Euclides’s prose can be described as simultaneously “expressionistic” and “impressionistic,” both poetic and mimetic (Tocantins 92). The point here is that to the extent that ecology brings political and genre boundaries into question, it makes a comparative frame necessary – between genres, epistemologies, and geopolitical borders – in order to approach its extensity and complexity.
Of course, broad comparative frames run their risks, just as narrow nationalist ones do. To argue that the Amazon is not an entity that fits within any one nation’s borders, of course, is meant to highlight the dangers of monolithic and static definitions of nature and the contingency of nationalism itself. But it is not enough in turn to insist rigidly on the oppositional idea that the Amazon belongs to all of the Americas or to the entire world. Candace Slater’s work on representations of the Amazon has exposed the attendant problems of contemporary environmentalism in its desire to globalize and thus save the rainforest from the locals. The mono-mythic and cosmopolitan view of the Amazon as the endangered Eden, as the lung of the world, has been a vital catalyst for environmental thought and action. Indeed, ecologically speaking it is one of the more cross-cultural and vital ecologies in the world. If climate change persists unabated, however, we can expect to see signs of the collapse of the Amazon basin and its rainforest by 2040, resulting in a release of carbon stored in its vegetation and soils that equals 8% of the world’s stored carbon (Flannery 198). However, the idea of the rainforest as an ecosystem tends to elide the rich overlay of stories, myths, and histories that emerge from local and transnational experience within the watershed. Slater’s exposé of that overlay makes a strong case for what she calls a “meeting of the waters,” or a comparative and dialectic criticism that moves from within and from without a given geographical space. I endorse this dialectical and comparative approach, but I wish to suggest further that it is made necessary by the very ecology of this watershed. Ecological understanding may serve not only to balance the social and cultural concerns she raises but also to aid us in the formation of a dialectic between the global and the local that is adequate to contemporary environmental problems.
The implication here is that criticism that seeks to organize the chaos of literature into meaningful and discrete systems of knowledge must, like the prose that attends to the intertwining ambiguities of form in the tropics, remain decentered, interdisciplinary, and, we might even say, baroque in its methodology. The baroque form has been widely recognized as a vital strategy for American and Latin American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes, José Lezama Lima, and others who have sought to represent the complex overlay of histories in the Americas. As I have argued elsewhere, the aesthetics of the New World Baroque is a productive response to ecology; it stipulates the priority of the land, the almost moral obligation of mimesis, and the inevitability of self-reflexive excess in which ecology decenters the human self (Handley “New World Baroque”). Euclides places front and center the complexity, interdependency, and unpredictability of the river as ecosystem; as a result, his literature is similarly resistant to reductive or isolated readings. It demands a recognition of the mutually constitutive forces of nature and culture and the need for shifting and comparative geographical and literary contexts in order to tease out its fullest range of meanings. Criticism, in other words, should not seek to reduce literature, like a dam to a river, to an ideologically fixed point. In his description of Thoreau’s attempt at biocentric prose, Aaron Sachs pinpoints the reasons why such a decentered response is necessary to respond to the empirical realities of ecology. He describes how Thoreau allows ecology to deconstruct his human-centered view only to “then buil[d] the whole back up into something even more complex, rich, overwhelming. To be slightly off balance oneself was the only way to make a cosmos of the chaos” (97). Euclides’s inability to rationalize the river’s ecology and to even control the rationality of his own prose is symptomatic of the ecological grounding of the literary imagination and an argument for literature itself as an ecosystem.
McCarthy, Biocentrism, and Literature as Ecosystem
Cormac McCarthy is a contemporary writer with a similarly keen interest in the scientific understanding of his time and with an oeuvre that also imagines the interplay of ecosystems. Author of several plays and 10 novels, his fiction explores the cultures of the South and of Mexico and the existential dimensions of our human relationship to the physical world. I wish to focus on his 1994 novel, The Crossing, which is the second of a border trilogy of three novels that all take place across the geopolitical borders and cultures of the United States and Mexico and across the borders between the human and natural realms. The Crossing’s teenage protagonist from southern Texas, Billy Parham, engages in three crossings over into Mexico – once to protect the life of a wolf who has ventured into his father’s cattle ranch; the second time with his brother Boyd, after they have been orphaned, to rescue stolen horses; and the final time in a failed attempt to bring back his brother’s remains after he is killed in Mexico. The boy’s sufferings provide McCarthy an opportunity to reflect philosophically on the human place within the broad systems of life and to thereby understand the meaning of suffering. It is most significant that the novel does so by representing ecology as a complex system that blurs and destabilizes the boundaries between nations, between human individuals, and between humans and animals.
For the past two decades, McCarthy has been affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, an unusual scientific think tank that is devoted to tackling questions that pertain to complex systems and that houses some of the brightest minds in science, social science, and mathematics. McCarthy himself views physics as one of the twentieth century’s most important “universal human flowerings” (Lincoln 9; see also Kushner; Woodward). In mimicry of the kind of ecosystems discussed earlier, McCarthy’s treatment of the interconnections of human and animal life deconstructs fixed borders even while it generates an imagined and contingent system. His literary representation of a life-centered, or biocentric, cosmos contains the probabilities of complexity, loss, and risk while suggesting the reasons for continued hope and ethics in the face of the fragility of the earth’s and our own ecology. As such, the novel renders even more complex Euclides’s inter-American ecological imaginary as it seeks to be adequate to what contemporary empirical observation tells us about the biological basis of all cultures.
Some ecocritics have suggested that biocentrism, as opposed to the arrogant and ecologically indifferent position of anthropocentrism or a human-centered cosmos, provides the cosmological view required to redeem us from the problem of our own environmental sins. However, if foregrounding more-than-human life in this way merely implies finding a more sensitive form of ecological management, as it sometimes did for Euclides, McCarthy’s novel suggests that for biocentrism to be ethically valuable, we must confront its troubling implication of senseless suffering (see Arnold 221). If we don’t insist on our human difference, why should suffering and death, whether human or not, bother us at all? In other words, for McCarthy, a biocentric universe is not a harmonious and manageable whole but is subject to chaos and unpredictability, and the only ethics it allows is one that accounts for unforeseeable probabilities.
The discovery of these profound implications of biocentrism is facilitated by Billy Parham’s ventures across the boundaries of family, community, language, and nation. Billy is not alone in his crossings, as he encounters various communities that also remain outside of the claims of national histories and the demarcations of territories: Mexican vagrants, Native American peoples wandering between nations and languages, Mennonites, Mormons. While in Mexico, he meets a series of mentors who tutor him in the meaning of human existence in a biologically contingent world. One mentor is a man blinded in the Mexican Revolution who describes for Billy a cosmos in which blindness is paradigmatic:
To move is to abut against the world. Sit quietly and it vanishes. En mis primeros años de la obscuridad pensé que la ceguera fue una forma de la muerte. Estuve equivocado. Al perder la vista es como un sueño de caída. Se piensa que no hay ningun fondo en este abismo. Se cae y cae. La luz retrocede. La memoria de la luz. La memoria del mundo. De su propia cara. De la carantoña.
He said that if this falling were a falling to death then it was death itself that was different than men supposed. Where is the world in this falling? It is also receding away with the light and the memory of the light? Or does it not fall also? He said that in his blindness he had indeed lost himself and all memory of himself yet he had found the deepest dark of that loss that there also was a ground and there one must begin. (McCarthy 291–2)
The text’s frequent dialectical movement between Spanish and English creates an ambiguity of “doubleness” (Soto 58), of course, but what is most telling here is the Whitman echo in the phrase “different than men supposed.” Whitman wrote of what he called the “strange chemistry” of natural regeneration – that is, nature’s capacity to renew itself from the vestiges of dead bodies – because he felt that it implied something democratic and cross-cultural. Because of the radical equality and perpetuity of all life, he famously wrote that “to die is different than anyone supposed, and luckier.” This last phrase, “and luckier,” was central to the optimistic tone of his romantic theodicy. Despite his rather advanced understanding of ecological process in his time, however, he was never able to reconcile himself to the more existentially frightening and ethically complicated implications of nature’s indifference toward human suffering. If natural law makes no distinctions between life forms and their various stages of decay and regeneration, he struggled to explain why we should continue to insist on or believe in the value of human difference (see Handley, New World Poetics). In other words, romanticism and even positivism recoiled from the possibility that the radical equality of ecological process implies that democracy might be messier than imagined, that nations are in dialectical relationships to each other, and moreover that ecology threatens us with unpredictability, unknowability, and nihilism.
What initiates Billy’s geopolitical crossing is an attempt to kill a wolf that has attacked his father’s cattle. After following the wolf along the meandering trajectory of its ecosystem, Billy captures but can’t bring himself to kill it. One famous articulation of a biocentric ethic was Aldo Leopold’s charge to consider the value of a wolf to a mountain’s ecosystem and thus to learn to “think like a mountain.” To think ecologically, in other words, requires a renunciation of the specialness of human life and a reconsideration of human life in biological context, not unlike the ways in which Euclides is learning to think, as it were, like a river. Indeed, Billy becomes compelled to follow the ecosystem further, which necessitates crossing the Mexican border so as to return the wolf to his Mexican mountain home. In his fidelity to the logic of an ecosystem, he strives to see the world through the eyes of the wolf. However, what he learns is not so reassuring. He begins to understand that the wolf “knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there” (McCarthy 45). To imagine otherwise is to imagine “the unspeakable” (148). To retain faith in the probability that “something knows of [Billy’s] existence[,] [s]omething knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from” (148), however, McCarthy insists that we must be willing to imagine “terrible things of Him.” McCarthy’s biocentric cosmos offers a theodicy that reconciles trust in order and meaning with the terrible facts of biology. Faith in the face of chaos, in other words, requires that “the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments” (202).
While McCarthy’s border trilogy offers a potent inter-American imaginary, the connections that link these different geopolitical spaces are represented both metaphorically and ecologically. Moreover, these open spaces between boundaries threaten to obliterate human meaning altogether. McCarthy’s blind man suggests, however, that this confrontation with the nihilism at the heart of biology can become the starting point for rebuilding faith in order and in community. Although he acknowledges that a biocentric view makes death different than we might have supposed, he does not declare it “luckier.” Whitman’s optimism took him so far as to suggest that perhaps evil doesn’t exist, but we can hear McCarthy walking a finer line. The man tells Billy, with regard to the world, that “nothing had changed and all was different. The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less” (277–8). McCarthy’s ecosystem, then, is not a facile reassuring promise of regeneration and balance but is instead a process of exchange and transformation that perpetually renders us answerable for our own acts of evil.
Another mentor teaches Billy that key to understanding this metaphysical meaning of biological regeneration is recognizing that life stands in a dialectical relation to death. As he explains, “[D]eath was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof” (379). As if to reject the facile notion of an ecosystem as a balanced, closed, and manageable system of life, Billy carries the wolf across national, linguistic, and ethnic borders and thereby sees in the wolf’s eyes a “reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart” (105). The wolf, in other words, presents that “always problematic and tenuous relationship between the text and the world, as well as between human and non-human animals” (Powici 1). McCarthy repeatedly insists that this relationship is problematic because it is “reckonless” and, in Spanish, “inconoscible,” implying that the animate world of our biology is both necessary to our self-understanding and a secret that remains beyond our grasp.
This mentor tells Billy that “the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought” (McCarthy 235). In a sacramental act to get himself closer to this deeper thought, Billy tastes the wolf’s blood. Instead of bringing redemption or knowledge, however, this act of communion with the biological cosmos brings Billy to a state of unknowing. The dead wolf becomes now “what blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war” (127). With these persistent metaphysical musings in the novel, McCarthy suggests that biology signifies the world’s indifference to human significance. Only after Billy is willing to face this abyss does he become aware of a “perfect cohesion” that underlies this space of unknowing, a cohesion that bespeaks a world “sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men’s imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen” (283).
Throughout the novel, there are those who, unlike the various migrants he encounters, try to police the various boundaries of this multicultural and transnational south, as if to wrest the threatening chaos of these unknowable and open systems into a stable and ordered whole. These are judges, property owners, and the military, all representatives of civic and political power. But the various errant wanderers whom Billy befriends instead emerge as alternative voices for a more contingent kind of order. McCarthy implies that in the same way that geopolitical boundaries, religious creeds, ethnic certainties, and linguistic differences are used to fix and stabilize the dynamic self (as well as national literatures), so too do conceptions of fixed borders between the human and the more-than-human world prove inadequate to account for the perpetually contingent and unknowable nature of existence.
McCarthy does not disavow Whitman’s widely shared nineteenth-century notion that literature shapes imagined communities and that, if literature is responsive to the local qualities of the natural world, it can inspire a particularly democratic and independent community. However, he suggests that the order that must emerge from empirical observation and mimesis of the natural world should be informed by biology’s brute terrors and unpredictable complexity. Billy’s perceptions of stars, his ruminations on the contours of rivers, or his questions about the subjectivity of the wolf are all cause for him to reflect on the facts of his common biological substance as dust. McCarthy’s positing of this radical equality of all material and biological existence is not cause for a romantic celebration of transcendent meaning, as it was for Whitman, nor reason for positivistic hope in manageability, as it was for Euclides, but it at least is cause for wonder and compassion. As the blind man explains to Billy, the fact that all we can touch and see will ultimately become dust is paradoxically “la evidencia mas profunda de la justicia, de la misericordia. En esto vemos la bendición mas grande de Dios” (293).
McCarthy’s is Janus-faced theology because for every trace of meaning Billy builds from the ashes and dust of his physical existence, he still must face the abyss again. When Billy’s father appears to him in a dream, his father “seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him” (112; see Canfield). McCarthy here represents death, like the spaces between nations and peoples, not as a space of knowledge but of being. Arrival at this state of being appears to require the renunciation of knowledge and of naming. But, as indicated earlier, the blind man tells Billy that if death is a space of uncertainty, it remains a probability that it can become a space of hope because, as he further notes, “Si el mundo es ilusión la pérdida del mundo es ilusión también” (283).
McCarthy’s novel portrays an ecological imbalance in human civilization that emerges from a fear of the probability of the meaninglessness of human suffering. This fear manifests itself by turning ecosystems into so many territories, parts of a geopolitical machine that vigorously polices borders and exchanges identities as so many of its constituent parts. He implies that nature as a stable and alternative category to human history, then, is not the antidote to civilization gone awry. The antidote is a human consciousness of the biosphere, a gift that comes from listening to and gathering stories of errant crossings, as the novel itself does.
Even though literature begins with the aim of apprehending the secrets of biology, in the end it is a form of hyperreality, as Kenneth Lincoln argues, a linguistic flourish over and above an empirical reality that defies facile summary or denotation (19). Literature is always in this sense metaphysical even when it is modeled after the world, since it is in baroque excess of an empirical reality. As one mentor to Billy puts it, “[T]here is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale” (143). Unlike direct experience with the world, stories require a suspension of disbelief and a contingent imagination of wholeness that sees all parts linked by necessity. In other words, although it derives its energy from places, literature here makes words more vital than flesh, culture more vital than nature, and imagination more vital than the determinisms of geography. McCarthy’s insistence that in the end we are left with words recalls the literary and baroque style that we saw emerging in Euclides’s prose, and it emphasizes our responsibility for our own ethical orientation to the world. Environmental ethics are not determined by what science tells us but by our capacity to imagine the reasons for our belonging in a life-centered universe. As McCarthy makes clear, stories are contingent methods for rendering “everything necessary” and for providing the “joinery’ that makes wholeness possible to imagine (143). As such, they remind us that ecosystems are our stories, our constructions; they express our hope that despite the risks of loss and of disorder, we can accept the constraints that our interdependency requires and live sustainably within them.
The novel ends with Billy sitting in silence, and “after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction” (426). The day is evidence of natural regeneration, the perpetual newness of the world, and hence perhaps a sign of hope and redemption. But although “godmade,” the sun rises for all, including the many evildoers whom Billy has encountered, thus confirming the blind man’s theodicy that the world is new and yet old, made of the same evil and good as always. The sun, then, is both providential and biological, evidence of love and possibility as well as of dissolution and nothingness. Biology alone does not provide the reasons for hope; our hope lies in our capacity to take up the materials of chaos, the detritus of time, and to organize systems and worlds, to make stories out of blood and bones. As the gypsy tells Billy, this is “the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?” (411).
In their own ways, Euclides and McCarthy encounter and represent a fact that should be obvious by now: a biocentric cosmos renders national borders and national literatures endlessly porous and contingent. Nevertheless, this analysis suggests that the fact that literary criticism remains relatively wedded to nationalist paradigms, even when it attempts to interrogate such frames, is perhaps a symptom of an impoverished ecological imagination. American literatures circulate within complex and open systems of mutual exchange and transformation, both among books and between the word and the world. But the links that bring these literatures together, like the untraceable links of biology’s secret matrix, cannot be understood or described without some investment of our own hopeful imagination to make meaning of relation. Euclides and McCarthy remind us that we can choose contingent frames to be able to speak of an “American literature,” but we cannot fix its meaning or close its histories. As Euclides and McCarthy’s imaginations make evident, the best we can do is to tell the story of literature as a set of probabilities, of overlapping and complex systems that remain open to other systems and to the world itself. Literary criticism, like the primary literature it attends to, becomes a rhetorical and imagined attempt to organize the chaotic material of life, an attempt best facilitated by crossing geopolitical borders. The result is not an imagined community that requires the wall building of geopolitical power or the hedge trimming of cultural criticism. Rather, reading dialectically and cross-culturally provides a method for imagining human belonging in the physical world. The sense of belonging that emerges, unlike identities fostered by nationalist contexts that want to marry identity to land or fix literature by region, reveals subjects as much shaped by the environment as by their own poetic desire. Ecology perpetually creates this ambiguity between nature and culture, which is a paradox since it means we can no longer be sure what the distinction is between the world of things and the world of words, between object and subject. We can imagine that literature is an ecosystem because it asks us to construct the reasons to hope that our words will finally reach their target of making sense of our physical life, that they will finally be made flesh, of literal bones and dust.
References and Further Reading
Arnold, Edwin T. “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing.” In Edwin T. Arnold, Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (pp. 215–38). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Barrera-Osorio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
Botkin, Daniel. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Canfield, J. Douglas. “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” In Edwin T. Arnold, A McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (pp. 256–69). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Costa Lima, Luiz. Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times. Trans. Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Cunha, Euclides da. Á marjem da historia. Porto, Brazil: Livraria Chardron, 1926.
Flannery, Timothy. The History and Future Impact of Climate Change. London: Allen Lane, 2006.
Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Handley, George B. “New World Baroque as Postcolonial Ecology.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (pp. 117–135). Ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Handley, George B. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Kushner, David. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse.” Rolling Stone, December 27, 2007, 1–8.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Powici, Chris. “Witnessing the Wolf: The Human and the Lupine in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English 1 (2000): 1–8.
Sá, Lucia. “Introduction: Voicing Brazilian Imperialism: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon.” In Euclides da Cunha, The Amazon: Land without History (pp. xi–xxiii). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Sachs, Aaron. The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Sarewitz, Daniel. “Science and Environmental Policy: An Excess of Objectivity.” In Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community (pp. 79–98). Ed. Robert Frodeman. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan. Eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Slater, Candace. Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Soto, Isabel. “The Border Paradigm in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” In Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (pp. 51–61). Eds. Jesus Benito and Ana Maria Manzanas. New York: Rodopi, 2002.
Tocantins, Leonardo. Euclides da Cunha e o paraíso perdido. Manaus, Brazil: Edições Governo de Estado do Amazonas, 1966.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac Country.” Vanity Fair, August 2005, 98.
Worster, Daniel. “Nature and the Disorder of History.” Environmental History Review 18 (Summer 1994): 1–15.
Worster, Daniel. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.