True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity by Nicholas Monk (review)

On April 20, 2017, Cormac McCarthy published “The Kekulé Problem,” an essay that combines evolutionary neurobiology with philosophy of mind to speculate on the prehistoric origins of human language. The essay’s premise echoes Aristotle, for whom humankind was little more than a type of speaking animal, and its thesis is as simple as it is potentially controversial: “The unconscious is a biological operative and language is not.” Irrespective of whether or not this argument holds up to scientific scrutiny, it should nevertheless be productive for readers of the author’s literary fiction, not least because of its simultaneous harmony and dissonance with that canon of writing. Within the frame of McCarthy’s literary oeuvre, a key point of interest will be his argument that the age of the speaking animal, or what some have called the Anthropocene, is only transient before the greater arcs of planetary time. “One hundred thousand years is pretty much an eyeblink,” we are told. “But two million years is not. This is, rather loosely, the length of time in which our unconscious has been organizing and directing our lives. And without language you will note. At least for all but that recent blink.” Surely this, a statement of scientific conviction made by one whose livelihood is staked on the controlled deployment of language, will have something to teach us about the various forms into which that medium has been made to cohere. But what, then, is the content of that lesson?

We already have our answer in the form of Nicholas Monk’s book, True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity, published in May 2016 by the University of New Mexico Press. Indeed, Monk’s view on McCarthy’s fiction is one that is wholly compatible with the arguments now given credence by that author. So we learn at the outset: “The brevity of human tenure is set alongside the colossal age of the planet as McCarthy returns time and again to the inevitable and infinitely slow facility of geological time to erase all—a phenomenon that exposes all of human endeavour to the charges of futility and vanity” (xxii). For Monk, however, the interest is less in existential musings on a consciousness adrift within the enormity of deep time as it is a wholesale response to the question of modernity, an age to which McCarthy’s fiction, as Monk convincingly shows, offers some unique alternatives. To put this in the terms of McCarthy’s essay, what Monk demonstrates is that certain acts of fiction and of literary writing give voice to the unconscious of our species and its worldly dwelling—as though, through a kind of artistic parapraxis, the lives of our most distant ancestors and their seemingly extinct ways of being are paradoxically returned via a language that embodies their supersession. In Monk’s account, McCarthy has gifted us with a vision of the here and now whose very materiality, in both its lifeworld referents and the prose with which those referents are described, is ghosted by the quasi-magical revenants of some other place and some other time—with an imaginary territory that remains hauntingly incoherent with the rationality, reason, and instrumentalism of modernity as we experience it.

At the level of field, or what might be called McCarthy Studies, Monk’s book opens a channel between two sides of the hypothetical divide. On one side are those approaches indebted to political economy, critical geography, and various historical materialisms. On the other are those approaches that are more interested in the manifold of spiritualism as realized through aesthetic attainment. Monk’s book apportions its argument between these two camps of criticism as a matter of structure: the first five of its twelve chapters are dedicated to questions of modernity and to the violence that obtains therein, and the final six chapters are more obviously about aesthetics and spiritualism. While those early chapters re-tread...