Cormac McCarthy: style, allegory and the problem of affect

The problem to which this thesis responds originates in the (apparently) contradictory responses in the secondary scholarship to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with regard to the aesthetic category of affect. On the one hand, where Steven Shaviro identifies in the novel a baroque opulence “attended with a frighteningly complicitous joy,” Georg Guillemin finds on the other a “melancholy subtext” permeating “a baroque mode of narration grounded in weltschmertz.” This tension provides the thesis with a critical platform on which to consider the grounds of literary affect itself, taken to a broader survey of McCarthy’s novels (principally, Suttree, Blood Meridian, and The Road) and drawing upon the theoretical resources found both in recent ‘affect theory’ and in the literary criticism of prominent McCarthy scholars. In particular, with regard to literary affect, there is the broadly Spinozist context covered in Alex Houen’s recent collection Affect and Literature (2020), but also crucial is the work of Walter Benjamin on allegory, engaged in parallel with Deleuze in Timothy Flanagan’s Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze (2021).

In terms of critical method, a basic premise of the thesis regards any global evaluation of affective register (Saturnian melancholia or Dionysian joy) in McCarthy’s novels as too general to adequately interpret the singularity of his imagery and storytelling, rendering his narrative voice arbitrary and whimsical (why these images, and why in this sequence?). Instead, what is required, and what this thesis carries out, is a close reading of style and syntax that is sensitive to the author’s singular rhetorical and semantic procedures and the precise manner in which McCarthy foregrounds the reciprocity of form and content.