Cormac McCarthys _The Road_ and the Anglo-Irish Gothic.pdf

Cooper f 547 EATING AT THE EMPIRE TABLE: CORMAC MCCARTHY'S THE ROAD AND THE ANGLO-IRISH GOTHIC Lydia Cooper As they wander the ashen, postapocalyptic hellscape of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, the unnamed protagonists, a man and a boy, find an abandoned plantation house with preserved food. The man dishes up the cans of food and they eat at an elegant "Empire table" (175). The table's description implicates the long history of colonially descended centers of hegemonic, economic, and political power in the US's mid-Atlantic seaboard in a form of consumerism driven by the bodies of enslaved humans made material goods. In this scene the man thinks of the house as being haunted by ghosts; these ghosts of the fallen empire are in search of redemption. As they eat at the Empire table, the old house creaks like a "thing being called out of long hibernation" (177). The man imagines the ghosts staring at them through the windows and concludes that they "are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back." In this complex image of consumption, intergenerational guilt, and a longing for redemption, the ghosts that haunt the Empire table conjure the critical questions at the heart of the novel. What is the essential nature of those who eat at the table? Can and should their civilization be saved? In addition to this scene at the Empire table, The Road is replete with images of consumption, from evocations of a fossil fuel-driven economy to depictions of cannibalism, the form of consumption most MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 63, number 3, Fall 2017. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. 548 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic commonly employed as a shorthand for unchecked cultural depravity or the breakdown of civilized society altogether. The man's wife at one point claims that the survivors of the unnamed catastrophe are the "walking dead in a horror film," making a clear association with the rather obvious metaphor of zombies as consumers who consume constantly but without redemptive or meaningful purpose (47). Throughout the novel the man is haunted by similar images of insatiable starvation, such as when he dreams of his son laid out on a table and dressed for some other to devour. The man and boy wander through a world turned equal parts mausoleum and charnel house, at one point stumbling on a stalled-out truck full of human bodies. They later wander into an orchard whose wholesome, agrarian past has become a slaughter yard in the present. The human victims have been "field-dressed" like deer, and the wall beyond the orchard holds "a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes" (76). Marauding survivors clump into bands of violent cannibals: "bloodcults" who wear red scarves and march in a "phalanx" with their "spears or lances tasseled with ribbons" (77), evoking perhaps the Celtic mythology of bloodthirsty redcaps or the ghoulish Scottish legend of Sawney Beane and his incestuous, cannibalistic horde. Taken together, these gothic horrors expose the connections between power brokerage, a colonial ruling class, and destructive consumption. Like all gothic fiction The Road is a tale told with the intention of exposing some pervasive, contemporaneous social anxiety and to examine the "causes, qualities, and results of terror" in order to assess and, perhaps, to remedy that terror (Gross 1). This particular gothic tale's interest lies in exposing and critiquing the entrenched economic, racial, and gendered power structures that continue to haunt the US, a focus explicated by an examination of a specific yet underexplored literary debt: the influence of the Anglo-Irish gothic. Scholars have long placed McCarthy's fiction within or adjacent to the American southern gothic tradition. McCarthy sought out William Faulkner's publisher, Random House, for his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), and indeed McCarthy's first four novels—his so-called Appalachian works—bear direct and indirect marks of Faulkner's influence. In Understanding Cormac McCarthy, Steven Frye notes that the Appalachian setting in McCarthy's first novels highlights inherited regional characteristics of Scottish and AngloIrish literature: what he calls an "oblique sense of gray," a "fatalistic, mystical apprehension that distinguished many Appalachian people since their first migration from northern Britain, southern Scotland, and Ulster Plantation" (Understanding 17). That "sense of gray" is perhaps nowhere more explicit than in The Road, a novel in which, as Chris Danta points out, the word "gray" appears some 81 times (9). Cooper 549 The destruction that has grayed out the world of The Road, however, is a global loss refracted through a localized lens. That is, the man who wanders the road with his son is a man whose questions about the capacity of humanity to be redeemed are questions deriving from his own geographically, culturally, and nationally specific heritage. First, as descendants of what Orville Vernon Burton terms the "yeoman middle class" of the south (57), the man and his son wander into houses once populated by slave owners.1 They reflect cultural identification with the landowning agrarian and middle-class industrialists of the US South, a class historically forged through the possession of the bodies of the underclass. Second, the man is the product of industrialism and its disastrous environmental policies: the man has a "tattered oilcompany roadmap" that he carries with him, which provides a rather blatant reference point to the overconsumption of nonrenewable resources by the US consumer class in the early twenty-first century (McCarthy, Road 36).2 And finally, the father's conflicted relationship with domestic spaces and with the violent performance of masculinity poses a stringent critique of US economic imperialism. The suggested complicity between the man and the fatal consumption of his home's natural resources illuminates the relevance of the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition's influence in the novel, in addition to the more obvious markers of the American southern gothic. The Anglo-Irish gothic, at its height, turned critical attention on the implications of the colonial and capitalist power systems in Ireland. Julian Moynahan describes the most significant figures associated with the resurgence of the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition—W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and Oscar Wilde—as employing a "more critical, self-conscious gothic" that "acknowledge[d] the historical culpability of the settler colonial system" they at once denounced and sought to redeem (147). Terry Eagleton claims that the historical moment of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and its literary relicts depict a political state in colonial Ireland that sought to create itself while "ominously evoking the truth that whatever goes up can always come down" (33). That is, only through conjuring a ruling class already sliding into descent could the drivers of the Anglo-Irish literary tradition hermetically seal the racial and colonial sins of that class in the past while gesturing toward a nationalism informed by the fusion of that ruling class with its colonial subjects as a new Ireland. That critique informs McCarthy's gothic fable about the downward spiral of consumption in the twenty-first century US. It is also worth noting that McCarthy's critique is directed at the hegemonic system in the US generally and not toward the particulars of the country's race-based colonialism. The grotesque history of racial violence is of course a key characteristic of US southern gothic fic- 550 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic tion. In fact, Leslie Fiedler suggests that so pervasive are the themes of slavery and race-based "blood taboos" in American gothic fiction that the genre in the US bears little resemblance to its European forerunners (397). Justin D. Edwards critiques Fiedler's dismissal of the influence of British and European gothic literature as facile but agrees that American gothic literature is uniquely and "intimately tied to the history of racial conflict in the United States" (xvii). Yet race and the institution of slavery in the US appear only as spore, as ghosts haunting the framework of The Road. Its fabulistic and mythic terrain, divested of its particularity while retaining the empty signposts of its southern American landscape, reflects a more nebulous social anxiety. That anxiety takes the form of a gothic that bears some attributes characteristic of the southern US version, such as the southern gothic's preference for locating the action of the text in the "wilderness" at the borders of the home (rural or frontier America as opposed to the urban center) rather than relocating to some exotic nation such as Italy or Romania, as much European gothic fiction does (Gross 23). However, The Road is generally less interested in naming identities and more interested in conjuring systems, not to adjudicate blame but rather to expose the pervasive fear in the twenty-first century US that, because of its very nature as a global superpower driven by a voracious market economy, any ascent is only a precursor to a descent. This pervasive sense of apocalyptic loss underscores the significance of the Anglo-Irish tradition in The Road's gothic nostalgia. McCarthy paints a viciously dark picture of utter loss, but that loss has a propulsive force, calling for its contemporaneous audience to engage in questions of complicity, guilt, and hope for redemption precisely because it is only ghosts who possess the capacity to ask those questions in the novel. Seamus Deane's well-known assertion that the nascent Anglo-Irish cultural and social nationalism conjured in the nostalgic romanticism of Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke "has potency precisely because it is a lost cause" is illustrative here (3). While Deane finds the clearest evidence of this project in "pulp" travel literature of the eighteenth century (5), The Road engages in a similar method of displacement in order to construct an abstract set of universal principles of cultural and ethical engagement capable of circumventing or, perhaps, surviving cultural decimation. In short, the precondition of loss as the creator of a cultural heritage that can be assessed, mourned, repented, and reconstructed as a malleable and adaptable identity for the contemporaneous world is characteristic of the Anglo-Irish gothic and provides an apt mode for McCarthy's literary exploration of the descent of the US from the perspective of the European-descended landowning privileged class. Cooper 551 This essay will explore three specific themes that characterize Anglo-Irish gothic literature and that in The Road are explicated through images of destructive consumption. First, as members of the yeoman middle class of the South, the man and his son reflect a genetic inheritance from the class whose economic engines ran on the labor of enslaved others. Second, the man is the product of industrialism and its disastrous environmental policies, and his journey through a gothic wasteland implicates him in the destructive uses of the ecosystems he mourns. Finally, the novel's near-total erasure of women exposes the anxiety of (white) masculinity as a particular form of power brokerage not amenable to nurture or to regeneration. The novel's use of elements of Anglo-Irish gothic fiction suggests its particular interest in exposing the destructive nature of economic imperialism in the US, or at least the anxiety on the part of its consumer class that its ascendency may have already reached its zenith. Cormac McCarthy and Anglo-Irish Influence Before analyzing the influence of the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition on The Road, it will be helpful to define the genre and its characteristics. Anglo-Irish literature can be broadly defined as that body of literature produced by English-descended landowners in Ireland after the Earl of Pembroke's invasion of the country in 1167. After the Act of Union, that term also came to embrace Irish-descended authors who rejected Catholicism and took up land or seats of power in Dublin and in England. Typically, however, the Anglo-Irish literary tradition refers specifically to a body of work produced by proto-nationalist and nationalist writers of Anglo-Irish descent during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, published in 1800, is considered the first significant contribution to the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition. Castle Rackrent, a gothic drama about a landed Anglo-Irish family's decline as narrated by the illiterate household steward, displays several of the attributes that came to characterize the gothic in Ireland: a Big House in decay, the ominous threat of a disgruntled working class, and an anxiety about marriage as a troubled, gendered representation of the threat of colonial union.3 Moynahan points out that elements of the Anglo-Irish gothic clearly influenced American southern gothic writers: the "highly flavored and deeply unsettling tale of familial decline in an agrarian setting" in Castle Rackrent, he claims, was "mined by William Faulkner for The Sound and the Fury" and influenced earlier exemplars of the tradition such as Edgar Allan Poe (12). The transatlantic influence of the Anglo-Irish gothic literary tradition is well established, of course. 552 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic In addition to certain shared characteristics and themes in the literature—landed families in decline, nostalgia for an agrarian past, and deep, pervasive anxiety about the moral cost of ascendancy, particularly in its dependence on racial inheritance and economic exclusivity—this tradition was well suited to American southern writers because of its spatial and architectural aspects. The Big House tradition—that of the plantation center facing a largely hostile countryside and a rising tide of oppressed others—carried across the Atlantic in such explicit forms as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, which centers around a literally transplanted Tara. Even more critical than the spatial and architectural aspects of the US southern plantation system, however, is the hegemonic power exercised by the ruling class. Eagleton claims that the defining characteristic of Anglo-Irish literature is the problem of Anglo-Irish "ascendancy," a term that ought, he says, "to translate as 'hegemony'" in Irish writing (32). Eagleton argues that in Ireland, naturalism and the gothic were diverging traditions that split from realism (149). The gothic tradition, with its capacity to engage the mythic narratives of Celtic lore and its obsession with dread and suffering, served the Anglo-Irish gothic well. That literary mode created a rich tradition capable of articulating as well as critiquing anxieties about a hegemonic social order conscious of its own fragility. It also codified social anxieties about patriarchy, heteronormativity, the threat of the domestic, and the instability of a consumer society predicated on insatiable hunger for the products and, indeed, the bodies of the underclass. No wonder, then, that the Anglo-Irish gothic of turn-ofthe-century Ireland is mined for potential analogy to contemporaneous geopolitical entities. Moynahan underscores the possibilities of such transposition, pointing out that the "patterns" established in Anglo-Irish gothic works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer critical insight into the troubling "intransigence of sexism, homophobia, and sectarianism" in both the Republic of Ireland today and "other settler colonial societies such as the United States" (20). It is therefore not surprising that The Road may bear in its literary genetic code some trace of the Anglo-Irish gothic, if only by way of its American and Irish ancestry. Many scholars have noted the obvious influences of Anglo-Irish antecedents in McCarthy's work. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men explicitly names the influence of Yeats, and many critics have noted McCarthy's aesthetic and philosophical indebtedness to Samuel Beckett.4 In addition to the influence of such major Anglo-Irish authors, James Potts finds evidence of Cormac Mac Airt lore in Suttree; Barbara Brickman traces the spore of Celtic legends in The Orchard Keeper; and Barbara Bennett notes "Celtic influences" in McCarthy's two most recent novels, Cooper 553 No Country for Old Men and The Road (2). Bryan Giemza's study of McCarthy's Catholic and Irish identities provides the most thorough analysis to date, although he focuses primarily on Irish influences in Suttree and situates McCarthy within the category of Irish Catholic writers in the Appalachian American south. Certainly all of these points suggest that McCarthy's fiction demonstrates a clear and persistent connection with Irish identity and literature. Yet McCarthy's relationship to an Anglo-Irish literary tradition is not necessarily as obvious. He was raised Roman Catholic and his family descended from Irish Catholic stock; only his first four novels demonstrate any clear participation in the US southern agrarian tradition that most closely adapted the Anglo-Irish literary tradition. Because McCarthy is a notoriously private author, his relationship to Ireland itself has been extrapolated more from speculation than confirmed facts. However, the few illustrative details that are known gesture toward the profound locational significance of Ireland in McCarthy's own self-construction and in the birth of The Road specifically. They also indicate the author's consistent interest in the capacity of Anglo-Irish authors such as Yeats and James Joyce, who wrote at the moment of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy's perceived descent, to speak to a particular form of settler-colonial hegemony in the US. McCarthy's travels to Ireland began early in his writing career (and led to his meeting his second wife, Anne de Lisle). Since then he has apparently spent some time in Ireland, including at least six weeks in the summer of 2004 during which he produced early drafts of The Road (Luce, "Beyond" 9). McCarthy's interest in Anglo-Irish identities can be gleaned from various fragments in his unpublished works, drafts of manuscripts, and an unpublished screenplay. In early draft papers from No Country for Old Men, for instance, the novel's protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, reflects that there will not likely be "'another anglo [sic] sheriff in this country. Ever" (4). A loose-leaf page of draft sentences provides a cynical, humorous ancestry for an unnamed character, presumably also Bell, with a rural Irish ancestry: "[h]is elders bogfolk from the blighted fens of the auld country" and "[f]rom Ballybollocks or some such bloody place. Inishbugger, perhaps?" (3). While the final draft of No Country seems uninterested in directly connecting this Anglo sheriff to an Irish genetic heritage, Anglo-Irish inheritance and identity play a clearly articulated and central role in McCarthy's unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, in which a landed Anglo-Irish nobleman takes up his seat in the House of Lords in order to defend the rights of whales against the consumerist devastation of their population. It may seem surprising that McCarthy, who is Catholic educated and the author of books replete with Catholic imagery, gives 554 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic certain characters Anglo-Irish roots—and, moreover, landed gentry roots—in his sole text, Whales and Men, that takes place at least in part in Ireland. An examination of the elements of Anglo-Irish gothic imagery in The Road, however, illuminates the particular aspect of hegemonic, consumer-based, colonial settler rule that haunts the anguished literature of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In so doing, The Road is less characteristic of US southern Catholic writing—writing that, as Giemza points out, is always already from the margins, a minority religious, cultural, and ethnic literature in the American south (22). That is, it would seem that Irish ancestry is more relevant to McCarthy's projects when connected to ruling-class Anglo-Irish cultural heritage, with its ability to articulate the anxiety of complicity in colonial power brokerage, rather than the marginalized Irish Catholic tradition in the American South. It is to perhaps the most visible and most characteristic representation of colonial power brokerage in the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition—the image of the Big House in decay—that this paper now turns. The Big House, Power, and Corruption The Road subtly yet explicitly connects historical atrocity, eugenics, and economic power to the Big House tradition. Yeats's Purgatory, in which an Old Man mortally opposes his dialectic opposite, a Boy, provides one of the most memorable reference points to the image of a Big House in decay. Purgatory is Yeats's play most frequently associated with trenchant mourning—a mourning not untinged with threat—for the Anglo-Irish literary tradition and culture following the 1921 Truce and Treaty of Peace between the British government and the Irish Parliament of Sinn Féin rebels that established the free state of Ireland. In that short play, a "ruined house and a bare tree" set the stage for an apocalyptic jeremiad about the descent of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in Ireland (Yeats 259), a descent that for Yeats ominously and metonymically foreshadows the collapse of Irish literary and cultural ascendancy. McCarthy's construction of an aesthetics informed by the simultaneous embodiment and rejection of a ruling class's hegemonic ascendency and inevitable failure can be seen in recurrent evocations of the Big House: an image that appears in Suttree, recurs in The Road, and may be a slant reflection of McCarthy's own biography. In McCarthy's famous 1992 interview with Richard Woodward, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," Woodward remarks on the disparity between McCarthy's own "comfortable upbringing" in a "large white house," "staffed with maids" and with "acreage and woods nearby," and the much poorer and smaller homesteads in the surrounding Cooper 555 area. "We were considered rich," McCarthy says in the interview, "because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks." Yet, as Woodward points out, it was the life of the shacks, "Knoxville's nether world," that seems to have inspired the author's literary imagination "more than anything that happened inside his own family." The Road returns to Suttree's use of a semiautobiographical scion of the landed gentry class in Appalachia as its protagonist, although in this novel the collapse of the familial home is taken to its most extreme level.5 Shortly after the novel commences the father takes his son to his ancestral home, an old house with "chimneys and gables and a stone wall" (21). This gabled house stands in isolation in a wild countryside, and after leaving it the man and boy venture south. W. J. McCormack claims that in the Anglo-Irish tradition an idealized, fictionalized past is embodied in the "distortive" view of the Big House and its environs (10), a view of an idyllic past that exists perpetually prior to the 1920s (that is, prior to Irish independence) although never at any fixed historical point. McCormack suggests that the nostalgia, which is used to convey that idealized past in order to concretize a national ideal for the future, must always be built on shaky historical ground. It is therefore significant that The Road both employs and subverts the nostalgia associated with the image of the Big House. On the one hand, of course, the man remembers his preapocalyptic, rural childhood with expected melancholy. When the man and boy come to an abandoned gas station, the man picks up a telephone at the empty clerk's desk and dials "the number of his father's house in that long ago" (6). Later, when he takes his son on a tour of the collapsing structure of his gabled ancestral home, he fits his thumbs against holes in the mantelpiece where he hung stockings as a child. He displays a saccharine yearning for that long ago: fireplaces, holidays, and a desire for contact with the departed, exemplified by his pointless dialing of a dead number. However, the novel makes it clear that the nostalgia associated with that familial history was present even in the man's preapocalyptic childhood. At one point, the man reflects that his obsession with locating himself and his son on maps of places now extinct stems from before the event that broke the world: "He'd pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory" (153). His childhood need to identify himself, to geospatially locate himself, is rooted in a need to understand his relationship to his world through familial attachment. He identifies the names and addresses of family members in a phone book as though to verify that he exists in a world peopled by "his kind," his kin who keep him "[j]ustifed in the world" (153). 556 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic The Road, of course, depicts a world wrested from the known: maps without names, humans without names, a world of signs shorn of referents. Yet that alienation from home and from familial identity seems to have plagued the man even before the apocalypse. Nostalgia, in other words, is an affliction that has less to do with the actual loss of his culture or the people he mourns than with the privilege of the man's childhood, that ominous sense that "whatever goes up can always come down," as Eagleton puts it (33). While the man's ancestors were likely upper middle class rather than wealthy, particularly if his ancestral house is imagined in terms of McCarthy's biography, the man's association with the Big House tradition implicates him in its darker history. As they move south from his ancestral home, they seek larger and more prestigious Big Houses (the logical sources of comestibles), drawing visual attention to the implications of the history of this region and the forms of consumption that have driven its economy. For example, the man and boy find a "grand house" with a "port cochère" and a gravel drive (89). This vestige of a noble past is literally rooted in its own earth, "kilned out of the dirt it stood on" (90). That brick-based heritage is tainted with human corruption. As they walk into the house, the man reflects that "[c]hattel slaves had once trod those boards bearing food and drink on silver trays." In this grand house, of course, they find the most grotesque form of a world built on the commodification of human bodies: a cellar packed with humans in varying states of being cannibalized, "naked people" who are "all trying to hide" from them, one man with "legs gone at the hip and the stumps of them blackened" (93). The partially consumed victims plead with the man to help them, but the man flees with his son, fearing a similar fate. Later, the man explains to his child that they could not save them nor should they risk their lives to try. Shortly after they leave this shell of a plantation house, they see a group of people, a pregnant woman among them. The group "vanish[es] one by one into the waiting darkness" (164), and they later come across a campfire with a "charred human infant" (167). The logical connection between these two images seems frail: the consumption of an hours-old infant would be a less satisfying main course than a months- or years-old infant. The consumption of the young thus seems to reflect not just actual hunger in these scavenging hoards but also a desire to cut short the degenerate and degenerating remains of the race under discussion—in the case of The Road, humanity itself. In these scenes, the man attempts to articulate for himself and his child a role in a predatory world that is neither the consumer nor the consumed. And while they abstain from eating the flesh of others Cooper 557 and manage to avoid becoming food themselves, it is important to note their symbolic affiliation with the larger systems of consumption implicated by the novel. The man and boy wander this world pushing the obvious metaphor of a "grocery cart" full of their belongings (4). In another symbolic moment, the man forages a can of Coca-Cola from a supermarket and offers it to his son with a decorative solemnity that turns the soft drink's consumption into something akin to sacred ritual. The bizarre appearance of Coca-Cola—the only commercial brand named in the novel—suggests McCarthy's attention to the global economic implications of that brand. In an interview with John Jurgensen published by the Wall Street Journal, McCarthy says that he was attracted to the genre of the Western for his previous five novels because of its capacity to work metonymically, to gesture toward the US as a whole. "Besides Coca-Cola," he says, "the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they'll know about cowboys" ("Hollywood's"). McCarthy's nod to "Coca-Colonization" (Ballard 213), then, suggests the significance of the Coca-Cola that the man and boy drink.6 As symbolic consumers, the man and boy wander around and through, but never away from, their heritage of globally imperialistic economic practices. The Big Houses in The Road thus point to the specific heritage of a corrupt gentry class but also implicate the avaricious and aggressive instincts of the US as a hegemonic global power. The Anglo-Irish Big House, after all, is an image that draws attention to the countryside, to the poor and itinerant workers left out in the cold by the concentration of power in the top echelons of society. In these gothic images, the consumer class consumes and the man and boy, despite trying to remain outside of the vicious binary of the consumer class and the consumed, are nevertheless caught up as silent witnesses. Climate Change and Consumerism: The Myth of the Pastoral Past The agrarian ideal created by the man is both held up as a sort of wandering signifier—an image used to reference a past in which concepts such as humanity and heroism existed—and undermined by subtle references to its fictionality. That is, the man and boy journey on a road that summons up a fantasy of the verdant preapocalyptic natural world with every mile. While the novel is one of wandering, the attention to detail and fauna-specific knowledge exhibited by the man locates him in a bioregional home even as they travel across hundreds of miles. This wonderland now in ashes changes from 558 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic hemlock groves to coniferous mountains as they move south. Once they pass through a 5,000-foot-high mountain pass to descend on its southern side and head toward the coast, the fauna changes into a "rich southern wood that once held" trees and flowers the man identifies from memory although they are now gone (34).7 When they are approximately 200 miles from the coast, the "country went from pine to liveoak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any" (165). The man recognizes, names, and remembers a natural world that is no longer extant. The novel creates and simultaneously deconstructs a pastoral past, even if the deconstruction is subtle. The man demonstrates no such correlative knowledge of streets, shopping malls, or cityscapes. The past he imagines is a fantasy of pristine wilderness, created and hermetically sealed in nostalgic reverence. The novel's subtle stripping of realism from nostalgia gestures toward the more ominous thematic attention to what is at stake. The present world of the novel may already be lost, but like much apocalyptic fiction the novel's primary focus is on its past: the world of the contemporaneous audience. In The Road, the cause of the disaster subverts any concrete assertions about the veracity of that past, suggesting that the man's evocations of pristine wilderness are just that—fantasy. Derek Thiess's analysis of complexity theory and climate science in The Road identifies an array of ominous implications in the fictional world's disaster. Thiess draws attention to the "fractal images favored by chaos and complexity theorists" that frame the novel's main narrative (541), the single articulated snowflake the boy catches in his hand at the beginning and the memory of fish with "vermiculate patterns" on their scales at the novel's end (McCarthy, Road 241). These fractal images illuminate a novel that, Thiess says, "is structured as a complex, nonlinear model that distinctly lacks initial conditions" (that is, the cause of the apocalypse) and, therefore, any cure (544). For Thiess, the novel's complexity theory argument—the cause of the disaster being relegated to the realms of "irreducible complexity" (550)—ultimately masks human commitments to practical realities. The complex yet mathematically beautiful natural world, even postdisaster, illuminates for the father and son some sort of "apotheosis of the human experience," a refusal to reduce the world to explicable causes and effects, or human beings to biological certainties (550). For Thiess, such mystical application of theories of complex systems obfuscates the need for readers living in the real world to respond with practical actions to the complex observations of scientists on climate change. Thiess accurately identifies one of The Road's most frustrating characteristics, its fabulistic and mystical tone. Yet that tonal em- Cooper 559 phasis on mystery and the uncanny reflects a gothic sensibility, and the gothic is a genre in which practical concerns are paramount even if obliquely indicated. The precipitating disaster is not named in The Road; as McCarthy indicates in an interview published in Rolling Stone, he is ambivalent about whether the disaster is a meteor strike—as he loosely designed the novel's natural world to replicate—or manmade. The latter, he believes, is a more likely outcome for human society. While a meteoric or other natural disaster is always a possibility, McCarthy tells interviewer David Kushner, "'[w]e're going to do ourselves in first'" ("Cormac"). The novel's insistent ambiguity about the cause of the disaster evokes the same conundrum as Robert Frost's epigrammatic "Fire and Ice" proposition: whether by natural disaster or specifically human-caused disaster, the end comes anyway, and the destructive bent of humans in the twenty-first century makes that disaster not a potentiality but an inevitability. At the same time, the man's meticulous knowledge of the natural world and his ability to map his location at any juncture using a wellworn map indicates the need for readers to recognize the ominous implications at the heart of this gray, gothic tale. The world the man imagines is one filled with beauty: a pristine, innocent arcadia now victim to a pitiless and wasting disaster. Yet that world is one the man traverses through roads and other visible remnants—rusting trains, trucks, and cars—of a civilization bent on consuming the very fossil record of that planet's life. Eagleton's description of the Irish Famine, as neither calculated genocide nor the act of God that mythmakers on both sides of the aisle (isle?) make it out to be, provides a helpful if oblique analogy for the complex disaster McCarthy envisions. As Eagleton, apocryphally quoting Jean-Paul Sartre, remarks, if there is one thing the Irish Famine teaches, it is that "[t]here are no good or bad settlers, . . . only settlers" (64). Similarly, in The Road, the cause of the disaster remains mysterious. Nevertheless, the land bears the scars of generations of colonial occupation by a ruling class sustained by the consumption of nonrenewable fossil fuels and, by implication, the consumption of a nonrenewable world. It is important to note that the man's detailed knowledge of the flora and fauna of his wilderness home does not necessarily exculpate him from this consumer-driven settler class by way of an implied love for his indigenous land. David Cairns and Shaun Richards argue that the Anglo-Irish, as a ruling settler class, performed a type of indigeneity characterized by the creation of myths that hallowed the (Catholic) Irish peasant; by elevating the Irish peasant to the status of national myth, the Anglo-Irish ruling class made themselves both estranged from and closer to the heart of Ireland. "Such an act of cultural and political deracination," they argue, "is posited as 560 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic a necessity if entry into the nation of the 'other' is to be achieved" (25). Historically, settler-colonial Americans had to forge a sort of performative indigeneity, making the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas into myths and coopting the language of indigeneity for Euro-American settlers.8 In the same way, the man's performative indigeneity—naming the flora and fauna—is contrasted by his reliance on a map. The map evokes images of colonial geography: the possession, delineation, and control of space. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, whose 1986 paper "Language and Nature of the New Geopolitics" has shaped contemporary analyses of the rhetoric of geopolitics, points out that the field of geography was born from the Western "imperializing project surveying, mapping and cataloguing the earth" (260). Thus the man's performative indigeneity, set against the unmarked roads of this ashen, postapocalyptic novel, forces the metaphor: the deracinated colonial knows the signs of his world but lacks the authentic care for that world that might be practiced by actual indigenous citizens. The man moves through his world, identifying flora and fauna, but is bound almost exclusively to the settlermade roads that cut through the wilderness. Throughout US history, roads and train tracks carved through the wilderness have constituted some of the most frequently used images for representing the doctrine of manifest destiny. The man's affinity for his map and for roads thus suggests his complicity with the engines of US capitalism and nationalism. Devouring Women, Domesticated Men: Exile and Hospitality at the End of the World The anxiety about the degradation of the Big House and the fragility of a cultural identity built on a fictional agrarian past in AngloIrish gothic literature often takes on its most concrete expression in an anxiety about a sometimes latent but always deeply felt race- or gender-based fear: the threat to ascendancy embodied by the other. In Terror and Irish Modernism, Jim Hansen argues that the crafters of the Anglo-Irish tradition— specifically Wilde, Joyce, and Beckett— demonstrate a shared obsession with and anxiety over masculinity, their writings characterized by the "yok[ing]" together of an "unlikely combination of masculinity and domesticity" in which the masculine is removed from the public sphere and shackled to the private (5). The isolation and dehumanization of the masculine figure under such pressures and in such a contained space then produces the "social and structural cause for terror and violence": that is, post-Union gothic literature fixated on the Act of Union itself as the primary terror. The Cooper 561 Act of Union is represented by marriage, the colonial state by the domestic sphere, and "male gender disorientation, the anxious state of at once being and not being a masculine subject" as the inevitable consequence of union with the state. Of course, The Road's central married couple is halved by the start of the novel, the man's wife dead by suicide and seen in the narrative only in a series of fragmented flashbacks. The Road presents an extreme form of a masculine fantasy world. Here is isolation writ large. If the man's memory of a perfect day was fishing with his uncle in silence, then this wasteland represents a silence made entire. Humans have been culled. The man's wife is gone. All that remains are the men of the road and the road itself. Even more significantly, the almost pristine phallocentrism of the road is a version of masculine performance predicated on and requiring an absolute and terrible commitment to violence. And yet the man is drawn to domesticity, to the values of a world constrained by civilized behavior. The violence of the road, that quintessentially post-domesticated space, is countered by the father's recurrent attempts at (and concurrent anxieties about) domestication. When he discovers the beautiful if decaying plantation house, for instance, the boy exhibits reluctance to go inside, but the man insists that they try it. What they find, of course, are half-eaten people. The grotesque comestibles in the bowels of the plantation house illustrate the horror of domesticity. It may be possible to read this masculine focus and the gothic horror of the domestic as reinforcing that anxiety in the contemporaneous US: the civilization (and, therefore, corruption) of the masculine due to the relative decline of power of white, straight men as minority groups gain increasing recognition. Kenneth Lincoln perceives McCarthy's project to be just that: "In lineage with Hemingway's homosocial focus on male agonies," Lincoln argues, McCarthy's novels are "unapologetic canticles of masculinity" (3). Yet not all critics read McCarthy's focus on the masculine as an "unapologetic" paean to manhood. The Road presents, if not an antimasculine narrative, at least a narrative that challenges the hypermasculinity of its own construction. For Naomi Morgenstern, The Road is a male romance that unwrites not just the conflation of the domestic with the feminine and the nation but also the role of the patriarchy altogether. The novel ultimately draws into focus "a kind of political origin story" (53) in which the father and procreator is able to "contemplate his own irrelevance" (54). Masculinity—conflicted or not—dominates The Road. Yet despite her scant appearances in the novel, the figure of the mother cannot be ignored. In fact, the novel expresses its most concrete anxieties about masculinity and domesticity through its writing out of women or, more properly, through its presentation of women as little more 562 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic than ghosts. Once again, the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition explicates the mother and wife's complicated role in The Road. Patrick Keane traces the image of the "Devouring Female" through the works of Yeats and Joyce, finding that "[a]rchetypal images of the Terrible Mother resonate in the unconscious, and fantasies of the devouring, insatiable female" are particularly prevalent in social contexts in which women experience unusual or unprecedented advances in mobility or power (19). Keane explores Yeats's conflicted and complicated treatment of the devouring, androgynous "Black Pig/sow" of Ireland (86–87), the insatiable yet irresistible Mother who devours her own in order to regenerate. In this image "Mother is Ireland," and she is a mother whose "devouring womb" is "the earth hungering for her own fanatic- or stone-hearted children, those who die for love of her" (96). For Keane, who published this study in 1988, that fatal attraction to a devouring mother(land) had borne untenable consequences, a violence that had in the late 1980s become a "maelstrom from which fewer and fewer may be able . . . to swim" (102). In The Road the wife is grotesque in her few dream appearances. In the first scene in which she appears, recalled as a memory, she materializes in the form of the corpse bride of gothic literature: a "pale bride" who emerges "out of a green and leafy canopy" (15). From this halo of generative green she takes form, mummified, her "nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white." The wife literally embodies decay, and all the man's dreams of her are "uncanny" (16). To some extent little more than a Jungian archetype of the negative mother complex, the woman, like Lot's wife, looks backward to destruction and cannot look forward to the future. She inverts the positive stereotype of the genetrix: she is described instead as the Lilithlike corpse bride, and she tells her husband that the moral choice would be to murder their child rather than leaving him alive to be raped and murdered by others. At one point the wife tells her husband that women dream of danger to others and men only of danger to themselves, a reference to common twenty-first century sociocultural stereotypes about women being nurturers and men being individualistic and less connected to the domestic (to children, specifically). Yet in the novel it is the wife who is incapable of "sorrow" and who wants to kill her son while the man, of course, dreams only of danger to others, most commonly of danger to his son (48). The mother's "coldness" toward her child and her insistence on suicide (49), however, is perhaps explicated by an earlier description of the sun as a "grieving mother with a lamp" (28). The image of the sun as incapable of reaching the soil with its regenerative rays, grieving the loss of their symbiotic relationship, suggests that the wife's inversion of the generative earth mother archetype is part of Cooper 563 a larger inversion of gender archetypes in the novel. In the Western cultural tradition, from Plato's Symposium to the post-Enlightenment feminization of the planet as Mother Earth, it is rare to see the sun personified as a woman or as a mother; more typically, the sun is male and the earth female. The transposed metaphor thus suggests the symbolic inversion of gender roles and performances in the novel. The earth seems incapable of producing new life after the apocalyptic event. Women do get pregnant and bear children, but those children are most frequently turned into comestibles. The woman's refusal to grieve her child is a refusal to love, but she also refuses to consume him. In this one aspect she is not the image of the devouring mother, the maternal land that consumes her sons for her own regeneration. She is instead a masculine mother, demonstrating the will to action (suicide) that her more passive and nurturing husband cannot. This distinction from the manifold images of Ireland as woman suggests McCarthy's interest in exposing the hypermasculine nationalism of the US and subverting the nostalgia for traditional manhood associated with "canticles of masculinity" in the US literary tradition. The father in The Road represents the tension between the hypermasculine fear of domesticity and the rejection of the feminine, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need for regeneration and for feminine nurture in a world predicated on consolidating power around images of undomesticated, violent, and aggressively acquisitive masculinity. The terror of domesticity is likewise subverted: the wild road is not a place of freedom but rather of utter deracination, and that deracination results in apocalyptic self-annihilation. Civil codes may be fragile, but they possess the capacity to maintain a veneer of civilization. When that veneer is stripped, what remains is a question about essential human nature—the essential nature of male persons, in particular—and whether aggressive masculinity can be rescued through acts of nurture or compassion. In this reading, the novel's male-dominated cast seems to be performing a referendum on the relationship between a particularly hegemonic, violent form of masculinity and national identity in the US. Just as the novel subverts even as it evokes images of the Big House and the agrarian ideal of the past, so also does it conjure and obviate the very terror created by the violent, hegemonic masculinity of its landscape. In his review of the novel, Alan Warner writes that The Road's "nightmare vistas [could] reinforce those in the U.S. who are determined to manipulate its people" through fear of terrorism. Indeed, a cursory reading of the novel paints a vicious view of masculinity and power gone rogue. All others are evil and every human is other. The man attempts to murder every other he meets if he cannot flee them first. Yet a more nuanced reading of the novel 564 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic suggests that it is perhaps fear itself that is to blame for this violence, fear itself that makes of others an Other. The novel specifically warns against fear. The boy asks, "If you're on the lookout all the time, does that mean that you're scared all the time?" (127). He postulates that such an attitude of constant fear might cause them to miss finding other "good guys" on the road. After this the father dreams that strange creatures crouch by his head, coming to warn him that "he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own" (130). In this scene, the boy's warning is one the father takes to his subconscious mind if not his heart. The boy, the novel's moral center, exemplifies the capacity of compassion to triumph over fear. For example, in the first scene of any notable length narrated from the boy's point of view (the first scene longer, that is, than a single phrase or sentence), the boy conjures another child his own age and expresses a desire to rescue him. In addition to attempting to find some other who is his kin, his moral responsibility, the boy creates a world characterized by the ethics of reciprocal care and hospitality. He insists that they feed the wandering blind man, Ely, out of their meager supplies—an act that works against their own self-interest and survival, as the father points out, but that characterizes an ethic of hospitality, a generosity capable of triumphing over base hunger. In addition to giving away food even when they are on the brink of starvation, the boy also insists on a reciprocal kindness even toward others who do them wrong. When another survivor on the road steals their cart full of supplies, the man and boy hunt down the thief. In revenge, the father not only takes back their own supplies but also strips the thief of his clothes. The boy, however, protests and cajoles his father until the man returns the thief's clothes. The boy's reasoning, that the man only stole from them because he was "so scared" (218), suggests the boy's motivation: he insists on a world in which the Golden Rule is practiced through material goods. Instead of accumulating material goods at the expense of others, the boy distributes goods—food and clothes—to others as he would wish to be cared for himself and commensurate with his ability to do so. The boy's behavior thus represents the novel's antithesis to a geopolitical system characterized by hegemonic power over others and by rampant consumerism. When they find a bunker filled with food and clothes, the man tells the boy that the family who left the supplies "would have wanted" them to take and use those supplies, "[j]ust like we would want them to" (118). Because he describes the family as motivated by a reciprocal care for others, the boy assumes the family who left it were "the good guys"—and, moreover, that they were people preparing a world for salvation. And so the boy, before Cooper 565 they eat, prays to the people to thank them for the "food and stuff," creating a sacred orientation of gratitude toward those ancestors who practiced hospitality and generosity even in a wasteland characterized by violence and famine (123). The significance of the boy's equitable parsing of goods, his hospitality in the face of threat, and his efforts to make sacred the sacrifices of the dead lie in those behaviors' corrective gestures to an imperialistic economic system, a system predicated on the seizure of material goods from a citizen population considered other to the ruling class. It is in this subtle yet profound critique of the devastating consequences of consumer-driven global capitalist systems that The Road's harkening back to the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition—and not just the transplanted version in the American South—is clearest. In this novel, there are ultimately three types of people: those who consume each other, those who are consumed, and those who insist on equitably parsing out what meager goods remain. Of course, the price for this antidote offered for The Road's gothic "salt moorland" is high (215): with limited and nonrenewable resources the descent of the human species is inevitable, and those who do not horde goods or devour others will likely die first. Yet the boy accepts this fate and he goes on, an eternal exile who leaves no mark on his terrain. Deane explicates the significant role that exile plays in the nationalism of Irish writers such as Joyce and Synge. "All exceptionalism," he explains, eventually boils down to an assertion of "sameness" (168). Only the exile has the distance from the dominant nation necessary to explicate it, to challenge that enforced sameness from the perspective of an outsider-insider. Thus Joyce's Ireland, a nation forged from a history of catastrophe and betrayal, was a nightmare from which only the exile might begin to awaken. Similarly, the nightmare of the colonial and genocidal cost of manifest destiny in the United States and the consequences of its twentieth- and twentyfirst-century global economic imperialism is one from which only the dispossessed and deracinated may in part awaken in McCarthy's literary corpus. Perhaps because they embody a way of life that is nonindustrialized, nonmaterialistic, and removed from both the acquisition of power and the pursuit of power over others, itinerant wanderers seem to possess the sole capacity to find a way out of the death spiral of consumer capitalism in McCarthy's fiction. At the end of Cities of the Plain, for instance, Billy Parham has made it into his seventies, a rare enough fate for the mostly doomed protagonists in McCarthy's literary worlds. Billy in his seventies is a twentieth-century pilgrim who has covered the American southwest, from Texas through central Arizona, largely on foot. His encounters with other strangers affirm his pursuit 566 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic of the good, culminating in a housewife named Betty remarking on his scarred and aging hands in whose cracks are "God's plenty of signs and wonders. . . . To make a world" (291). The world-creating, regenerative power of homeless exile is underscored in The Road. Before he dies, the father thinks to himself that in his fruitless trek to the coast and his child's fragile future on the road, "[t]here is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today" (233). Here at the end of all things, the violent and the hungry devour themselves; but the prophets—the tale-tellers of human history—have hallowed those who live not as consumers but as wanderers. Notes 1. See chapter two, "Edgefield from the White Perspective," in Burton's seminal study of the economic history of the American south for a detailed description of the white economic classes in the south. Of particular relevance to this essay is Burton's contention that, while not monolithic or lacking friction, the distinctions between white yeoman middle-class and upper-class southerners were muted by the shared reliance on agriculture and its enslaved manual labor force. Burton quotes Thomas Green Clemson, son-in-law of John C. Calhoun, who claimed, "Slaves are the most valuable property in the South, being the basis of the whole southern fabric" (38). A key distinction should be noted here between Anglo-Irish literature, in which the threat of a rising, majority-Catholic middle class threatens the agrarian gentry class of Anglo-Irish landowners, and literature of the American South, in which the distinctions between the yeoman middle class and upper class bear class—but not racial—distinctions. That is, the yeoman middle class in the US shared with upper-class plantation owners the dubious distinction of relying on the possession of the bodies of (black) others for its existence; only the landed gentry in the Anglo-Irish tradition share that distinction. This class was defined by its actual rule of the country, yet it possessed the economic characteristics of both the yeoman middle and upper classes of the American South and defined itself over and against the (Catholic Irish) other. The father in The Road is clearly part of an affluent middleclass family; yet his complicity in the engines of consumption that drive the history of the American South is, if anything, exacerbated by his middle-class status. He is, by that token, a member of the consumer class, implicated in the US's shifts toward global economic imperialism in the latter part of the twentieth century. 2. For a succinct description of the globally disproportionate consumption of natural resources by the American middle class in the early twenty-first century, see "Use It and Lose It." McCarthy himself seems interested in the global implications of US consumption. On a page of notes for The Road (collected in a folder labeled "Old Road Cooper 567 Notes"), McCarthy has jotted what appear to be his own musings on contemporary geopolitics—an unusual enough venture, given what little seeming relationship they have with the ahistorical world of The Road. In this page of notes, McCarthy muses that the "answer to the problems with the Muslim terrorists would seem to be to halt fossil fuel consumption." McCarthy goes on to point out that even cutting off the major export of the Middle East would not work in the long run, however, as the "people of Islam" are "fighting for their lives. They are fighting for the survival of a three thousand year old culture." (McCarthy presumably refers to the erosion of tribal, nomadic groups in the Middle East, rather than referring to all Muslims in the Middle East.) Moreover, the threat to these peoples' culture and way of life, according to McCarthy's notes, lies in "Hollywood movies, McDonald hamburgers," and so on (n. pag.). This page of notes does little to illuminate the cause of the destruction in The Road, but it does much to gesture toward McCarthy's awareness of the geopolitical risks of depending on foreign oil; it also suggests his perhaps empathetic notion that fossil fuel-driven economies have supported the rampant capitalism inimical to the pace of life of a tribal nomadic culture. This notion would in fact be consistent with similar themes in McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Luce elegantly traces that novel's antipathy toward encroaching industrialization to a critique of the devastating effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on the mountain communities around Red Branch, Tennessee. Luce points out that McCarthy's father, as an attorney representing and working for the TVA, was in McCarthy's eyes complicit in the "engineering decisions" of the company that "destroyed the farmlands of hundreds of families and permanently altered the traditional culture of the region" (Reading 20). The Orchard Keeper, a nostalgic ode to the moonshiners and antigovernment hill folk, represents McCarthy's consistent thematic tendency to critique large-scale economic endeavors that increase the interests of an industrialized community over those of agrarian or otherwise nonindustrialized communities. 3. Castle Rackrent's depiction of a Big House in decay—an Anglo-Irish manor fallen into disrepair in a countryside growing increasingly wild—is one of the most iconic versions of this common trope in Irish gothic fiction. 4. Frye thoroughly traces the thematic and aesthetic traduction of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" in No Country for Old Men (see "Yeats'"), while other McCarthy scholars note that much of McCarthy's corpus bears aesthetic and thematic marks of Beckett's influence. See, for example, Ellis 290, Charles, Quirk, and Cooper. 5. In the American South, the landowning upper middle classes were the true engines of social and economic power. Thus, the distinctions between plantation owners and yeoman middle-class agrarians are less significant economically and socially and are not, for McCarthy, as significant as is the use of the yeoman middle class to represent metonymically the consumer white middle class of the US. In this way, his use of the yeoman middle-class protagonist reflects the 568 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic common use of lesser gentry in Anglo-Irish gothic literature, such as in Castle Rackrent—the use of a character who represents not the heads of state, but the ordinary and complicit members of the class that fulfills the state's interests. 6. It should be noted that it is not clear whether McCarthy would have had Ballard's essay on "Coca-Colonization," in which Ballard famously calls the beverage the "most infamous" branded product in the world (213), in mind when he wrote this scene. It is not a stretch, however, to imagine that McCarthy would at least be aware of a writer of Ballard's stature, particularly given Ballard's shared thematic literary interests and polymath tendencies. And as his interview with Jurgensen illustrates, McCarthy is keenly aware of the reach of Coca-Cola as part of the United States's geopolitical sphere of influence. 7. The pass in the novel is possibly the Newfound Gap at the TennesseeNorth Carolina border, which is 5,000 feet in elevation. In an 1874 travelogue, Edward King describes hiking through a 5,000-foot elevation gap (Newfound Gap) on his way to the North Carolina coast, a journey that is mirrored by the man and boy; see King 483. Wesley G. Morgan argues in favor of reading the man and boy as located near McCarthy's childhood home, or as passing through the Newfound Gap and then moving on to the South Carolina coast. 8. Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis of the American frontier as the forge of an authentic and unique American identity, presented at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, is the best-known articulation of this idea. Turner argues that the frontier forged "a composite [ethnic] identity" (22) in which "immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race," albeit a race "of mixed European ancestry" (23). The frontier also developed its own political identity: "democracy" through reliance on "individualism" and "antipathy to control" (30). Thus, for Turner, the space of the frontier itself is imbued with an incorporeal yet very real identity, one that can exist only in the ongoing confrontation between European American immigrants and the geography of the frontier. The notion of essential Americanness as comprised of European-descended ancestry and vehement individualism that resists centralized governmental control remains tellingly pervasive to this day. Works Cited Ballard, J. G. A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. New York: Picador, 1996. Bennett, Barbara. "Celtic Influences on Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and The Road." Notes on Contemporary Literature 38.5 (2008): 2–3. Cooper 569 Burton, Orville Vernon. In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985. Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Charles, Ron. "Apocalypse Now." Rev. of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Washington Post. Washington Post, 1 Oct. 2006. Web. 21 June 2017. Cooper, Lydia R. "'A Howling Void': Beckett's Influence in McCarthy's The Sunset Limited." Cormac McCarthy Journal 10.1 (2012): 1–15. The Cormac McCarthy Papers. The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos. Danta, Chris. "'The Cold Illucid World': The Poetics of Gray in Cormac McCarthy's The Road." Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Ed. Julian Murphet and Mark Steven. London: Continuum, 2012. 9–26. Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2003. Ellis, Jay. No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2006. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960. Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. ———. "Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium' and McCarthy's No Country for Old Men: Art and Artifice in the New Novel." Cormac McCarthy Journal 5.1 (2005): 14–20. Giemza, Bryan. Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2013. Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. Hansen, Jim. Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett. Albany: State U of New York P, 2009. Keane, Patrick J. Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland, and the Myth of the Devouring Female. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1988. King, Edward. The Southern States of North America. London: Blackie, 1874. Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Luce, Dianne C. "Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millennium." Cormac McCarthy Journal 6.1 (2008): 6–12. ———. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Vintage, 1999. ———. "Cormac McCarthy's Apocalypse." Interview by David Kushner. Rolling Stone Dec.–Jan. 2007–08: 43–53. DavidKushner.com. Web. 21 June 2017. 570 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic ———. "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction." Interview by Richard B. Woodward. New York Times. New York Times, 19 Apr. 1992. Web. 21 June 2017. ———. Early draft of No Country for Old Men. N.d. TS. Cormac McCarthy Papers box 81, folder 4. ———. "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy." Interview by John Jurgensen. Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones, 20 Nov. 2009. Web. 21 June 2017. ———. "Old Road Notes." N.d. TS. Cormac McCarthy Papers box 87, folder 5. ———. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. McCormack, W. J. From Burke to Beckett: Ascendency, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History. Cork: Cork UP, 1994. Morgan, Wesley G. "The Route and Roots of The Road." Wesley G. Morgan. U of Tennessee, Knoxville, 10 May 2007. Web. 21 June 2017. Morgenstern, Naomi. "Postapocalyptic Responsibility: Patriarchy at the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy's The Road." Differences 25.2 (2014): 33–61. Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid (Gerard Toal). "Problematizing Geopolitics: Survey, Statesmanship and Strategy." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19.3 (1994): 259–72. Quirk, William. "'Minimalist Tragedy': Nietzschean Thought in McCarthy's The Sunset Limited." Cormac McCarthy Journal 8.1 (2010): 34–54. Thiess, Derek. "On The Road to Santa Fe: Complexity in Cormac McCarthy and Climate Change." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 532–552. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. 1921. New York: Holt, 1962. "Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment." Scientific American. Nature America, 14 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 June 2017. Warner, Alan. "The Road to Hell." Rev. of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 4 Nov. 2006. Web. 21 June 2017. Yeats, William Butler. Purgatory. The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Rev. ed. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 2002. 259–66. Copyright of Modern Fiction Studies is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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