The Evolution of Cormac McCarthy's "Prophet of Destruction"

196 Pages·2016·1.55 MB·English

by  Erica Steakley

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
“What Rough Beast”:
The Evolution of Cormac McCarthy’s “Prophet of Destruction”

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Department of English
School of Arts and Sciences of
The Catholic University of America
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
By
Erica Brown Steakley
Washington, D.C.
2016
“What Rough Beast”:
The Evolution of Cormac McCarthy’s “Prophet of Destruction”

Erica Brown Steakley, Ph.D.

Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., Director

The character finally named as the “prophet of destruction” in No Country for Old Men,
is present from the very beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s writing, and his malevolent presence,
in a variety of forms and strengths, recruits men to destructive acts and leads them to self-
destruction over and over again as the novels progress. McCarthy’s myth-making is on a cosmic
scale, conjuring an entire world presided over by a god of destruction for whom good is not a
concept. His ten novels each present some aspect of the prophet and the determinist universe he
represents, and tests that universe against a variety of potential heroes. In the end, for there to be
any hope at all, the prophet must be victorious and burn the world down. Only from its ashes can
a new prophet, one of creation, rise.
McCarthy is not only a member of long and richly varied literary history, but also a
singular phenomenon with his own history of ideas, a claim that both his biography and his work
thus far corroborate. Echoes of Yeats’ beast “slouching toward Bethlehem” inform the McCarthy
canon from its inception, birthing the prophet of destruction in the process and envisioning an arc
of destruction that begins with the Orchard Keeper and ends with The Road. For McCarthy,
temporality is not just a helix, but a widening gyre, a spiral rapidly losing coherence.
For McCarthy, we begin with destruction, witnessing its prophet’s slow rise, recognizing
its culmination in the superhuman giant of Judge Holden, and watching it subside again into
humanity, to eventually end in apocalypse. If there is hope in McCarthy, it is most often felt by
its marked absence, but as Steven Frye insists, it is there nonetheless, and in the final pages of
McCarthy’s tenth novel do we finally feel the ascendancy of the prophet of creation, the second
half of the cycle beginning. Hope paired with despair, a sense of human worth and dignity in the
face of nearly unimaginable depravity, all roped into a system slowly losing its integrity, is pure
McCarthy.
This dissertation by Erica Brown Steakley fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral
degree in English approved by Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., as Director, and by Glen Johnson, Ph.D.,
and Pamela Ward, Ph.D. as Readers.

_____________________________________
Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., Director

_____________________________________
Glen Johnson, Ph.D., Reader

_____________________________________
Pamela Ward, Ph.D., Reader

ii
For Clay and Dot, with gratitude and love. Thank you for your encouragement, patience, and
unflagging faith in me. I couldn’t have done it without you.

iii
Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to acknowledge my husband, Clay Steakley, and my daughter, Dot
Steakley, for their untiring support and faith in me. Thank you for helping me find the necessary
time and drive to complete this project. You are the core of my life and the source of my joy.
This achievement belongs as much to you as it does to me.

I would also like to thank my director, Dr. Ernest Suarez, and my readers, Dr. Glen Johnson, and
Dr. Pamela Ward, for their support and guidance throughout the process of writing and revising
this dissertation.

I would like to give a special thank you to Dr. David Marsh, and Dr. Maryalice Jordan-Marsh,
who provided much-needed babysitting service and moral support during the completion of this
project. Your friendship, guidance, and practical help are forever appreciated.

Lastly, I thank my entire family and all my friends for believing in me. I know how lucky I am to
have you all.

iv
Table of Contents

Introduction: The Widening Gyre 1
Chapter One: The Orchard Keeper 10
Chapter Two: Outer Dark 32
Chapter Three: Child of God and Suttree 54
Chapter Four: Blood Meridian 100
Chapter Five: The Border Trilogy 129
Chapter Six: No Country for Old Men 151
Chapter Seven: The Road 165
Conclusion: Carrying the Fire 183
Works Cited 185

v
Introduction: The Widening Gyre

Very quickly into a first reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, it becomes clear
that we have walked into something momentous. We feel the cosmological weight of the book
long before we can begin to articulate it, and perhaps that is what prompts us to keep reading
past its horrors, and figuring out just what is at work in this text that has kept scholars writing
and puzzling for more than 25 years. The book is about America, yes, and the Vietnam War, and
the myth of Manifest Destiny and its requisite injustices of appropriation and genocide, but it is
much more than even these huge ideas. It questions our beliefs about what it means to be human
and about why the universe itself is here at all, much less with us in it. It is myth-making writ
large, and bloody, across the page. As McCarthy’s first major success and most critically
acclaimed novel, it makes sense to root our investigation here, where a uniquely McCarthy
villain is at the height of his power. From this vantage point, we can look down and back to
McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, and then down and forward to his most recent
novel, The Road, and witness an evolutionary arc tracing the rise and fall of this prophet figure,
named as the “prophet of destruction” in No Country for Old Men, and with him the rise and fall
of McCarthy’s particular deterministic universe.
The prophet of destruction is present from the very beginning of McCarthy’s writing, and
his malevolent presence, in a variety of forms and strengths, recruits men to destructive acts and
leads them to self-destruction over and over again as the novels progress. McCarthy’s myth-
making is on a cosmic scale, conjuring an entire world presided over by a god for whom good is
not a concept. McCarthy’s readers watch this world evolve and consume itself as they move
through his canon. Many scholars have traced various thematic, religious, social, political and
1
2
generic threads through McCarthy’s works, but none has yet tackled the novels as a structural
whole, a grand experiment testing the merit of the human enterprise.
To build the structure of McCarthy’s universe, we turn to McCarthy’s interest in the work
of W.B. Yeats. His poem “The Second Coming” resonates throughout McCarthy’s work, the
“rough beast” “moving its slow thighs” out of a “waste of desert sand” “toward Bethlehem to be
born” an apt metaphor for the prophet of destruction (13-22). If ever such a beast took literary
form, surely it is Judge Holden of Blood Meridian, and looking back down his trail through the
desert, we see McCarthy’s prophet rising from his earliest works to the judge’s zenith. In that
“widening gyre” (1) of the same poem we can also find a shape for McCarthy’s conception of
cosmogony and eschatology. Underpinning McCarthy’s universe is an understanding of time as
neither linear nor circular, but rather a helical temporality, each circuit of which carves a version
of the universe, before cycling around again for a broader, looser historical revision.
Germanic mythology has a similar understanding of time, explained metaphorically by
Yggdrasil, the tree of the world, which soaks up life-giving water (comprised of the actions of
men and gods) through its roots and rains the water down upon all life forms to maintain the life
force of the universe. Each cycle of water to root to branch to rain is the same, and yet each time
the water is distributed in a slightly different pattern. This gives time both circular and linear
components, so that it can be imagined as a helix, or coil (Bauschatz 122-3). The only difference
between this and the concept of the gyre is that the spiral’s shape changes from cylinder to cone,
so that each revolution spreads wider, with the implication that at some critical moment internal
coherence will be compromised (see Figure 1).
3

Figure 1: Time as Gyre
Once the structure of time is compromised, “the center cannot hold,” (3) and Yggdrasil’s water
will run dry, perhaps as dry as a Western desert. When this happens, “the end of the created
worlds,” in Germanic myth called Ragnarok, begins (Bauschatz 142).
Dennis Sansom, Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Samford
University, reads Blood Meridian as critique of divine determinism, showing the folly in belief in
a God who is “absolutely sovereign over everything” and therefore the “omni-causal agent of
everything” (4). Such a view, Sansom argues, negates the possibility of moral action and renders
the concept of good and evil irrelevant, for everything that happens, including war, is the divine
will of God. In such a universe, the judge would be a holy man, a concept we recoil from
instinctively. And yet this is the world of Blood Meridian. As the judge himself says, “…war is
the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that