A Flood of Imitation: Intertextual aesthetics of ecological crisis in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Talk by George Wink (ENGEROM) on the innovation of nature writing by Cristina Rivera Garza, and work-in-progress session by Martyn Bone (ENGEROM).

Abstracts

Martyn Bone

In this work-in-progress presentation, I will consider how Cormac McCarthy, in Jay Watson’s words, “writes within and against the literary legacy of [William] Faulkner” by re-reading McCarthy’s third novel Child of God (1973) concerning Faulkner’s fiction, and through an environmental as well as intertextual lens.  I do so in part by adapting to Child of God Susan Scott Parrish’s approach to “the modern aesthetics of ecological crisis” in Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930). I also consider how McCarthy “recycles” Faulkner in the sense that Sineád Moynihan has discussed: moving beyond familiar notions of “literary worth and value” associated with “‘recycling’ a canonical text” to foreground “all that is framed as ‘waste,” including waste land and human beings.  I take seriously, and somewhat literally, reviewer Orville Prescott’s early charge that McCarthy’s fiction is “submerge[d]” in a neo-Faulknerian “flood of imitation.” For in As I Lay Dying and Child of God alike, it is a disastrous flood – and relatedly, devastating deforestation--that lays waste to rural southern landscapes and their marginal populations. The catastrophe that “begins to engulf the world” of Faulkner’s fiction and (a generation later) McCarthy’s is one that we now recognize all too well: environmental and anthropogenic, its apocalyptic tenor registers on the regional and planetary scales of the Anthropocene.

Georg Wink

Abstract to come!