Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps the key word in the title of Steven Frye’s new book Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy is the word “hope.” Among other things, the book stakes a clear position in what has become a defining debate in McCarthy studies: Is McCarthy’s vision in his fictions utterly nihilistic and bereft of hope for humanity, as Vereen M. Bell and others have suggested, or does it, as Edwin T. Arnold and others have countered, offer prospects for redemption and even transcendence? What makes Frye’s case for hope in McCarthy so original is that he finds it in what might seem the least likely of sources: literary naturalism. Largely because of the influence of Vernon L. Parrington, that movement has typically been thought of as a literary expression of the “new science” introduced in the nineteenth century by Darwin and others, which, in decentering humanity and reducing it to the status of animals and the rest of nature, seemed to argue for a bleak, deterministic vision of human beings in which, conditioned entirely by their own inherent impulses and instincts, they join other animals in a bloody struggle for survival against the backdrop of an indifferent, unforgiving nature. Linking McCarthy to this tradition would not itself be such a daunting task, and his work has been associated with naturalism by other critics.But this is not the version of literary naturalism that Frye attributes to McCarthy. In his book’s introductory chapter, he argues that Parrington’s characterization of the movement was always a vast oversimplification, and he notes that subsequent critics, particularly Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, Lee Clark Mitchell, and Eric Carl Link, added nuance to our understanding of the movement by identifying “an undercurrent of optimism in the work of American literary naturalists that finds its source in the romance tradition” (7). While Frye does not deny naturalism’s avowal of the principles of the new science, he maintains that its literary expression necessarily complicates its vision of humanity because it must reflect the human response to the conditions naturalism accepts: “Literary naturalism encourages the reader to acknowledge the reality of the Darwinian conception of natural selection: the world is blind to human suffering, and human behavior is often bestial, atavistic, and monstrous. But despite this, literary naturalism explores things distinctly human, such as brotherhood, altruistic commitment to the other, and even spiritual awareness” (7). The word Frye uses to describe this newer, more multifaceted understanding of literary naturalism is “polyvalence,” a word that does a great deal of work throughout his book. It does not imply a relativistic “indeterminacy,” as it might in other theoretical hands, but rather pluralism—a sense that given a basic naturalist framework there are many possible human responses, reflecting a greater range of possibilities for the relationship between humanity and nature than Parrington’s characterization allows. The thesis of Frye’s book is that this polyvalent naturalism is central to McCarthy’s fiction, in which “a firmly naturalistic vision works in dialectical interaction with a more humanistic and even romantic view of the human condition and the material universe” (9).Frye makes this case by examining in turn each of McCarthy’s novels in the context of this polyvalent literary naturalism. The focus is on the novels, but he does include sideways glances at dramatic works like The Gardener’s Son (1977), The Stonemason (1994), The Sunset Limited (2006), McCarthy’s screenplay for the 2013 film The Counselor, and even his unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, which is only available in the McCarthy Papers held in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos. He proceeds chronologically through the novels, beginning with a chapter on three early Appalachian novels, then devoting a full chapter on each of the two important novels that mark the culmination of McCarthy’s Appalachian period and the transition to his southwestern period, Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985), tackling the Border Trilogy (1991–99) in a single chapter, and concluding with a chapter on the later works, No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). Frye’s book went to press before McCarthy’s final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022) appeared, but he even includes a discussion of what had been reported about their subject matter at the time. The discussion of each novel is framed with historical and biographical context, and without denying that their aesthetic and philosophical dimensions are influenced by the times and places in which they were produced, Frye never reduces those dimensions to social commentary. He respects what he takes to be the author’s intentions in his reading of Outer Dark (1968), in which “McCarthy seems intent on illuminating the universal in a narrative removed from historical particulars” (32). In his discussion of Child of God (1973), while Frye acknowledges that “the founding cause” of Lester Ballard’s “monstrosity among many is social class and stratification” (44), the central theme of his reading is the naturalist idea of atavism as a condition that makes Ballard “a child of God” like the rest of humanity. Frye’s resistance to the reductionist impulse is one of the great strengths of the book, and it is a consequence of his commitment to polyvalence. It is also why, unlike much contemporary criticism, Frye’s book is not beholden to a single theoretical perspective, freely alternating between historicist, biographical, philosophical, and more aesthetically minded approaches as his purposes and interests require. One happy consequence of Frye’s tendency to steer clear of overt theoretical paradigms is that his writing remains almost entirely free of jargon, and hence accessible to a wide variety of readers. And it must be remarked that the book is written beautifully, achieving an enviable economy and clarity in conveying the complexities of its nuanced argument. Indeed, the combination of accessibility and comprehensiveness Frye achieves in the book would make it nearly as good a general introduction to McCarthy’s work as his similarly structured earlier book Understanding Cormac McCarthy (2009), in addition to adding its valuable exploration of McCarthy’s relationship to literary naturalism.The close readings of particular novels themselves do not always break new ground, but they are not necessarily meant to do so; rather, they are in service of the book’s larger goal of demonstrating McCarthy’s place in the tradition of literary naturalism. Frye presents his readings, in fact, as generally consistent with critical consensus, and he precedes the discussion of each novel with a survey of prominent critical responses, another feature that makes his book useful as a general introduction to McCarthy. But his wide-ranging familiarity not only with McCarthy scholarship but also with archival materials frequently yields fresh insights into particular works, as in his observation that McCarthy’s notes on an early draft of Blood Meridian reveal that Heraclitus was the direct source of Judge Holden’s remarks on the centrality of war to human life. But the naturalist perspective Frye introduces sheds new light on familiar themes that run throughout all McCarthy’s works, most notably the problem of evil. Frye repeatedly notes that from the perspective of scientific and philosophical naturalism, evil does not really exist, since nature is merely indifferent to human purposes and morality. But readers of McCarthy are confronted with a world that offers not merely passive indifference but active malevolence, particularly as embodied by seemingly preternatural villains like the “grim triune” in Outer Dark, Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Frye’s take on these characters is that while they often present themselves as speaking for nature itself, they actually embody something anomalous in nature from the perspective of scientific and philosophical naturalism. For Frye, the grim triune shows that “McCarthy’s natural world in all its law-bound materiality is imbued with a force driven by a darkness that cannot be accounted for in strictly scientific, Darwinian, or material terms” (38). Frye compares Chigurh to representations in the work of Jack London of a “senseless violence” that goes well beyond the natural survival imperative, “a brutality that seems to challenge the boundaries of natural law” (15). In his discussion of Judge Holden, Frye suggests that this anomalous quality springs from humanity itself, suggesting that the true horror of this most horrific of McCarthy’s creations is that we find in him not merely the personification of an abstract force or idea: “We find ourselves: the wars we have fought, the territories we have conquered, and the science we have deified, expressed, and justified in our own words” (78). While humanity is itself, as naturalism asserts, purely a product of natural forces, it introduces an element into the world that can defy or at least reshape those forces.But if humanity introduces the prospect of an evil that transcends the mere Darwinian struggle for survival, it also introduces the prospect of a similarly transcendent good. In making the case for a polyvalent version of naturalism, Frye finds the prospect of this kind of goodness in his interpretation of Stephen Crane’s 1899 poem “War Is Kind”: “Perhaps humans can create a community in which indifference and violence may be kept at bay, and more humane circumstances might prevail in which the sense of obligation is borne by all” (13). He finds this same prospect even in the darkest of McCarthy’s novels, as in his reading of Culla’s encounter with the blind man at the end of Outer Dark: “The world is indifferent and harsh as it reduces two men to blindness and impoverished wandering. But it is also a world that allows them to meet, and in the deterministic spin of atoms they find a moment of rest in human connection and grace” (40). He finds another instance in John Grady Cole’s encounter with a group of farmworkers upon his release from prison in All the Pretty Horses: “What defines the human condition in this scene is the power of community, which can stand against the indifferent and seemingly malevolent laws that bind, rules that were reflected in the darkest terms in the prison in Saltillo” (91). And of course he finds it in The Road, where the need to remain “the good guys” that the man and the boy prioritize even over survival itself is rewarded in the boy’s ultimate deliverance into a new family, validating the power of “human relationships that are real and sustaining even in a universe dominated by brute indifference and apparent cruelty” (140). As Frye repeatedly points out, the human perspective, which finds morality in an indifferent universe, also finds aesthetic and spiritual value in that universe, which are equally difficult to account for in the scientific matrix of pure deterministic cause and effect. It is to a naturalism that acknowledges these realms of human experience, that suggests that “no mere description can capture the totality of the human condition” (18), that Frye ultimately traces the “geography of hope” of his book’s title. In his discussion of Blood Meridian, Frye associates that phrase with the promise of westward expansion, and while some readers might wish the geographical metaphor were more consistently elaborated throughout the book, the important point is that Frye associates it with human consciousness’s capacity to perceive the interconnections of all things, and thus to strive for moral, aesthetic, and spiritual values that transcend the mere struggle for survival. In other words, McCarthy finds the source of hope in McCarthy in a form of humanism, and specifically a form of humanism that emerges from literary naturalism itself. This makes Frye’s book an important response to the “posthumanism” that he characterizes as a “strand of late naturalism that would level the human and other aspects of the natural world and make them indistinguishable” (130), a critical paradigm that has been influential in recent McCarthy studies but that Frye persuasively argues is ultimately resisted in McCarthy’s works.Frye’s book will not resolve once and for all the question of McCarthy’s literary inheritance. Critics will continue to identify strands in McCarthy’s work that link him to other literary movements, some closely related to literary naturalism and some perhaps very far removed from it. Frye is well aware of this. In the same way that he says Judge Holden, perhaps McCarthy’s most memorable creation, cannot be confined “to one conception of reality” (72), so he denies that McCarthy “should be considered exclusively from the vantage point of a single aesthetic paradigm” (146). Like his judge, McCarthy is “polyvalent and ambiguous” (70). But Frye makes a persuasive case that one of the most prominent strands that runs through McCarthy’s works is a version of literary naturalism that highlights and clarifies the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual dimensions of his work. Unguessed Kinships is likely to become the definitive study of McCarthy’s relationship to literary naturalism, and its comprehensive scope and elegant writing make it an indispensable addition to McCarthy criticism.