Between Nostalgia and Pragmatism: Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy.'
| Název práce v češtině: | Mezi Nostalgií a Pragmatismem: 'Hraniční Trilogie' Cormaca McCarthyho. |
|---|---|
| Název v anglickém jazyce: | Between Nostalgia and Pragmatism: Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy.' |
| Klíčová slova: | Cormac McCarthy|Giles Deleuze|Hraniční trilogie|Hranice|Města na planině|Všichni krásní koně|hranice|americký západ|rizom|Zjevný úděl |
| Klíčová slova anglicky: | Cormac McCarthy|Giles Deleuze|Border Trilogy|The Crossing|Cities of the Plain|All the Pretty Horses|frontier|American West|rhizome|Manifest Destiny |
| Akademický rok vypsání: | 2016/2017 |
| Typ práce: | diplomová práce |
| Jazyk práce: | angličtina |
| Ústav: | Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur (21-UALK) |
| Vedoucí / školitel: | prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc. |
| Řešitel: | skrytý - zadáno a potvrzeno stud. odd. |
| Datum přihlášení: | 15.02.2017 |
| Datum zadání: | 15.02.2017 |
| Schválení administrátorem: | zatím neschvalováno |
| Datum potvrzení stud. oddělením: | 16.02.2017 |
| Datum a čas obhajoby: | 10.09.2019 00:00 |
| Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: | 21.08.2019 |
| Datum proběhlé obhajoby: | 10.09.2019 |
| Odevzdaná/finalizovaná: | odevzdaná studentem a finalizovaná |
| Oponenti: | doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil. |
| Zásady pro vypracování |
| This thesis will focus on the crisis of American identity following the effective disintegration of the concept of the American frontier as depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s late work, namely in Blood Meridian (1985), and the ‘Border Trilogy’ consisting of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). The thesis will begin by summarizing the critical reception and development of the frontier concept starting with F.J. Turner’s 1893 seminal formulation of the so called ‘frontier thesis’ that would become the leading historical interpretation of the American experience, and closing with the criticism recently proposed by Richard Slotkin (and others) that investigates the dynamics behind the propagation of the mythic narrative and provides a critique of its ideological misuse. Expanding on the recent criticism, the proposed reading will accentuate the fact that simultaneously with McCarthy’s shifting focus to the problematics of American frontier and its 20th century legacy in his later work, his approach shows remarkable affinity with another uniquely American invention, sometimes incorrectly associated with the frontier, the American pragmatism. In a pragmatist manner, McCarthy conceptualizes the frontier as a species of regulative fiction adapted to justify the territorialization of the open spaces by the ascending nation-state. The question McCarthy’s novels ask is whether thinking about the historical experience in terms of the frontier still endows the individual with any survival-positive teleology at the time when the idea of endless tracts of open land is replaced by the reality of urban, industrial and military spaces and national borders. McCarthy’s characters find themselves immobilized in a conflict between the desire to actualize the nostalgic vision of the mythic past on the frontier, and the disruptive intrusion of complex series of events associated with modernity that resist assimilation into this vision in any productive manner.
The present thesis will claim that McCarthy challenges the deeply engrained belief that the future transformations and solutions to the present crises of the American project lie in continuously expanding the frontier line, an assumption promoted and valorized by Turner’s thesis. Contrary to this, McCarthy seems to argue for a historical vision of America based on a succession of transitory regulative fictions (seen in text such as Walt Whitman’s “A Passage to India” in the 19th century, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon in the 20th) that foreground the process of experimentation, reinvention and ideological vagueness over the nostalgic, mythologized accounts. McCarthy’s answer to the crisis of the American identity will be sought in the literary style that he employs which emphasizes the need for abandoning the nostalgic and largely mythologized modes of relating to the present, and the necessity to valorize the processes of fiction-making and counter-factuality that help de-territorialize his protagonists and reinvigorate their capacity for pragmatic solutions facing the massive spatial and technological events of the 20th century. The introductory section of the thesis will deal with McCarty’s conception of the frontier depicted in Blood Meridian. With the onset of technological modernity, the frontier trope in McCarthy ceases to describe the mechanisms of westward expansion and settlement and becomes a narrative explaining and legitimizing civilizational supremacy over nature. Judge Holden, the central character of Blood Meridian, symbolically inaugurates the frontier as a province of deeply anthropocentric law valorizing an individual’s supremacy over the open spaces of the American West. McCarthy subsequently depicts a crisis of American individualism where the frontiersmen ethos is transformed into an erroneous conception of the Nietzschean will to power manifested as an all-encompassing state of war. McCarthy’s individual finally asserts his dominion only by forcing the metaphor of absolute warfare on others, and by projecting it onto nature. In consequence, the factual existence of the modern frontier in McCarthy can be described by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of perpetual warfare, as described in A Thousand Plateaus. In their terminology, McCarthy’s later work depicts the moment when the frontier war-machine takes war itself as its main object in the form of the emerging American empire that wages war on the extraneous territory. The ‘Border Trilogy’ consequently depicts the transition from the limited warfare typical of the settlement of the West accompanied by an excessive physical violence seen in Blood Meridian, to the all-out war led by consolidated state power and based on less openly violent, yet potentially more effective urban, military and economic control. The penultimate part of the thesis will focus on McCarthy’s protagonists and their relation to this new reality in the ‘Border Trilogy.’ Unable to cope with the momentum of the war-machine, yet still invested in the lasting validity of the frontier experience, McCarthy’s protagonists are forced to the liminal space of the US-Mexican borderline. Their conception of both American and Mexican spaces is much indebted to the vision of America as the ‘Virgin Land’ and the tendency to reduce the complexity of the modern political, economic and demographic developments into a pastoral conflict between technology and nature (problems commented upon by H.N. Smith and Leo Marx respectively). It is only in this borderland that the nostalgic promise of the frontier experience can maintain the illusion of existing as if before the inauguration of the law associated with the modern state. At the same time, it is on the periphery that the self-perfecting machine of war is constantly made present in such places as the White Sands Missile Range which represent the modern territorialization of space by a nuclear power so acutely felt throughout the trilogy. For McCarthy, this conflict is finally unbridgeable and the attempts to seek recourse to the values of American mythic past inevitably result in a tragic disintegration of the protagonists’ identity. In the last section, the thesis will examine the ways McCarthy uses the medium of fiction to productively address this crisis. Framing the protagonists’ tragedy as a species of fatal nostalgia, the Nietzschean ‘ressentiment,’ the novels develop the pragmatist quandary between the life-affirming and life-negating metaphorical usage of language and show that the frontier discussion is vitally connected with the pragmatic attitude to fictions. Specifically, it is the lack of the ability to ‘trope’ and adapt their outlook that curtails the protagonists’ capacity to imagine life-affirming ways of relating to the momentous spatial and technological events they encounter. McCarthy’s response is establishing a style that allows him to explore the American historical experience not as a constellation of immutable propositions such as the frontier, but as a multiplicity of personal and impersonal stories, historical reminiscences and recondite moral parables whose common denominator is that they ceaselessly foreground the limited validity and mutability of their claims. Rather than predicating the historical development on a totalizing trope, the American experience that McCarthy puts forward is a series of transitional fictions shaped by a language that expresses the events on the side of becoming and that deteritorializes the ressentiment which inhibits his protagonists. |
| Seznam odborné literatury |
| Bibliography
Primary sources: McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. London: Picador Publishing, 2011. McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing . New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Secondary sources: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Brechin, Grey A. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. London: University of California Press, 1999. Deleuze, Giles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith, Michael A. Green. London: Verso, 1998. Edwin T. Arnold. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1999. Fussell, Edwin. Frontier: American literature and the American West. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Iser,Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Balltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Josyph, Peter. Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010. Marx, Leo. Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Parish, T. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Potton, Paul, ed. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Poirier, Richard. Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Radford, Rosemary. Religion and Violence : America, Amerikkka : Elect Nation and Imperial Violence. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2007. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth. University of Virginia Hypertext. Turner J. Frederick. The Frontier in American History. Project Gutenberg. |