Cormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism: A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics

Neoliberalism is a diffuse term. Its extended application to Cormac McCarthy’s corpus and its reception is an important and timely venture. Doing so requires nuance and an embrace of contradictions, which Brian James Schill’s collection handles admirably. The opposing ways neoliberalism as a concept may apply to McCarthy, as well as McCarthy’s own struggle to oppose its ambiguities of his own accord, are tackled early on. “The essays in this book,” Schill explains, “argue that to gloss over neoliberal political economy specifically while reading Cormac McCarthy is to opt out of a deeper material and epistemological understanding of the author’s decades-long intellectual project: its increasingly commodified conditions of production and its reception by an increasingly capitalized, economized, and financialized reader” (28). This tension is central to what Schill and his fellow contributors articulate in nine subsequent chapters.David Holloway’s foreword is fitting due to Schill’s acknowledgment of The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy as a text that positioned McCarthy’s work in opposition to a political economy like neoliberalism more than two decades ago. In spite of the aesthetic achievement of the Border Trilogy, for example, the reader is left in no doubt at the conclusion of Cities of the Plain that the new century’s economic, cultural, social, and political life would struggle to enable or sustain the kind of aesthetic gambit McCarthy was reaching for. Holloway presented the literary strategy of “optical democracy” in Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West as one which represents the “possibility of language itself as praxis or political ‘other’” (137). The great promise of McCarthy’s project was the possibility of language and the literary aesthetic it could instantiate from within and in opposition to an increasingly commodified world. Schill’s strength in this volume is to insist on the contradictions and nuances within this very project. Different perspectives are presented which ask the reader to consider neoliberalism’s effects: the world which preceded McCarthy and its passing; the changes wrought by late capitalism on the world McCarthy tried to chronicle; neoliberalism’s effect on McCarthy’s form, vision, and audience.In spite of the author’s revered articulation of neoliberalist realisms, Schill insists on McCarthy’s own struggles to resist such status of his own accord. The volume suggests that we should at once appreciate the author’s literary achievements while asking “how should we interpret the fact that by the 1980s and thereafter McCarthy was all-in on developing his narratives for Hollywood, drafting copy with an eye to its potential on-screen appeal?” (33). Even his association with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) must be considered within this paradigm. Schill’s concluding chapter concerning the “Archeology of Neoliberalism” provides important critical distance from this late chapter in McCarthy’s life and work, in a way that is at once challenging and refreshing. The Passenger and Stella Maris—both much delayed—were written during the author’s time at the SFI. One might at surface level suggest this fits with McCarthy’s continued attempt to render something richer and beyond the commodity-laden environment of the twenty-first century. How better to do this than immersion in the bleeding edge of our collective understanding of complexity within human and nonhuman systems? Schill argues, however, that “it is difficult for the historian of neoliberalism who ruminates on McCarthy to forget that complexity, as a subject of interdisciplinary study and a mystification of political economy, was ‘founded’ in part by none other than Friedrich Hayek, who dedicated considerable time and ink to the study of complexity in global economics” (34). Schill’s intervention in this regard is likely to be contentious, but nonetheless consequential insofar as it provides scholars with a valuable angle through which to explore the ambiguities of McCarthy’s late success, status, and potential frailty.Lydia R. Cooper makes a concise point regarding McCarthy’s sustained attention to land use and misuse. Imperialistic legacies loom over the Southwestern novels, particularly through the Border Trilogy. These mid-career protagonists demonstrate, for Cooper, a recurring character trait and disposition, one of a longing which positions “the characters . . . as people who yearn for healthy and bioregionally sustainable communities; express gratitude toward ancestors, the divine, or the universe generally; or quite simply express awe, a sense of wonder that defies the capacity of human language to codify” (92). This interplay between the positivist instinct to map, quantify, and consume is juxtaposed convincingly by Cooper with the naturalism for which McCarthy is so often celebrated. It explains, for example, the foregrounding of the Mexican grey wolf in The Crossing. “Rather than reading the world as a flattened map demarcated by boundary lines, the wolf transgresses human mappings in her inhabitation of a world she reads as a matrix” (94). This concept of a matrix is developed by Cooper across later novels, including McCarthy’s final offerings of The Passenger and Stella Maris. The instinct to reduce human and nonhuman experience to a two dimensional or calculable entity—synonymous with the logic of neoliberalism—is initially challenged by the nonhuman actor, rendered futile in The Road with the man’s insistence on following a map of now dubious grounding, and dangerous by the research of Bobby’s father on S-Matrix theory in The Passenger.Another success of this volume is the refreshing and considered nature of the scholarship concerning The Counselor. Cooper notes that “the film did not perform well in the box office, but its failures as a visual narrative are not necessarily failures of theme or content” (168). This chapter provides valuable commentary on the neoliberal penal system, its absurdities, and how they fuel an economy Mark Fisher would align with “gothic capital” (15). Vernon W. Cisney builds on this with valuable application of necrocapitalism to transactions, trades, and human cost of the economy portrayed in the film. Casey Jergenson’s contribution to the volume concerning utopia and The Road develops this through-line further still, with the ultimate futility of human agency and temporality read through the framework of the limits of neoliberal logic. Christine Chollier provides much needed depth to the phenomenon of neoliberalism by employing the recent theorization of Barbara Stiegler in their analysis. The inclusion of Jonathan and Rick Elmore’s excellent 2016 Cormac McCarthy Journal article concerning neoliberal logic in No Country for Old Men provides sturdy grounding for the arguments which emerge around it.Cormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism: A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics illuminates a shared and refined focus across the author’s corpus. The contributors demonstrate neoliberalism’s centrality to McCarthy’s style and wider oeuvre as it progressed across the late twentieth century and into the contemporary environment, tracking the unfolding of neoliberalism both in terms of its effect on the author as well as his readership. Schill’s collection presents novel and insightful arguments enabling important consideration and reconsideration of McCarthy’s literary project, making it a valuable addition to scholars of the author and indeed neoliberalism’s place in literary criticism more broadly.