Scholars attuned to the mystical content in Cormac McCarthy’s novels focus primarily on what potential religious conclusions might be drawn from them. This dissertation argues that McCarthy’s prose, approached as stylized performances of linguistic failure, performs something quite different than what the scholarly assessments claim. Rather than mining McCarthy’s novels for indirect forms of religious affirmation, this project proposes a distinctive approach to McCarthy’s work: a narrative apophatic mysticism. Attention to the non-assertive character of apophasis or “un-saying” reveals that McCarthy’s philosophical and religious allusions perform their own collapse. In the tradition of apophatic mysticism, the novels represent an ordered failure of representation that indicates toward transcendence without rendering it explicitly. The result is the fictional production of indicative signs that keep assertions and information in suspense while gesturing toward the ineffable.
Adapting interpretive approaches from Michael Sells and Charles Peirce, this dissertation approaches McCarthy’s novels by means of five rhetorical categories based on mystical traditions represented by Pseudo-Dionysius, Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, as well as work by Elaine Scarry and Bernard McGinn. These interpretive rhetorical categories are 1) the broken references of names; 2) the logic of ontological grounds; 3) the collapse of conceptual space; 4) potential infinite capacity of bodily pain; and finally, 5) the explicit argumentative tension within the novels generated by the other four categories. Through the repetitive use of apophatic themes over several texts, McCarthy’s novels simultaneously erode assertions about the nature of fate, justice, and being, indicating that the final truth of these important concepts is not reduceable to linguistic expression or artifice. By adapting apophatic literary techniques of religious and philosophical traditions referenced in his texts, McCarthy incubates within fiction an ancient mode of rhetoric meant to orient the reader toward ineffable truths, offering narrative apophasis as a form of imaginative spiritual exercise.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/38791 |
| Date | 12 November 2019 |
| Creators | Hasler, Joshua Norman |
| Contributors | Rambo, Shelly, Neville, Robert C. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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