Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature by Julius Greve (review)

In this study of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, Julius Greve attempts to unite the novels through a common concept of nature that recurs throughout the works and reappears in different forms as the works shift from the South to the West, and as they shift genres. Greve asserts that “the kernel of [McCarthy’s] concept of nature does not change in the course of his career; only the geographical and historical settings of his novels do” (20). He examines McCarthy’s approach through the nineteenth-century nature philosophies of Friedrich Schelling and Lorenz Oken. I believe that a chapter explaining those philosophies in some detail (especially since American readers may be unfamiliar with them) and introducing the other principle philosophers that he is drawing from would help clarify his readings. Greve’s methodology depends upon adducing McCarthy’s approach to nature as “word and world are to be placed on one and the same footing” and that “McCarthy remaps transnational cultures of literary and philosophical expression in terms of nature’s complexity” (25). As such, these philosophies are crucial, but they are not truly explained in detail. Even for someone familiar with the philosophies and very familiar with McCarthy’s work, the dizzying array of connection between the texts and the various philosophers that Greve quotes and uses to ground his arguments can be overwhelming and difficult to follow.

Greve’s description of how he divides the study into chapters is illustrative of the issue:

[T]he narrative continuity that is the hallmark of his fiction is most effectively rendered intelligible by the structure employed in chapter 1–6 and their thematic groupings: the conceptual supervenience of ethics upon ontology; the narrative construction of a physiocentric, rather than an ecocentric, perspective; the literary and ontological exploration of decay and decomposition; the relation between notions of indifference and identity; and the mythographical traditions of Orphism and Prometheanism.

(20)

Each of these subjects is deep and rich, and each could have easily been a book of its own. Because Greve sees the narrative continuity (and I agree that the books are intertextual, using the same themes, similar characters, and even the same phraseology over and over), he tries to encompass too much. What seems so apparent to him and his long study is not so clear to the reader when shifting from one idea to another.

Chapter 4, titled “‘Another Kind of Clay’: Physiophilosophy and War”, is the best of the chapters. The discussion of the void, the Okenian language of nature, and McCarthy’s concept of God work well to show a Cormackian approach to purpose and God, as well as to narrative and nature. Greve’s argument is that in Blood Meridian “the question of fate versus agency—which is also that of determination versus freedom, or (nonhuman) nature versus (human) reason—is central to any understanding of the novel” (156). Greve rejects both a biocentric reading and a strictly “language-based perspective” for a reading that inter-weaves “bios and logos—the immanence of living nature and the transcendence of human reason” (158). He calls this a “physiocentric, rather than biocentric, stance with respect to nature’s identity” (158). Through Oken’s philosophy, particularly his ur-schleim or protoplasma, and the appearance of similar thought in McCarthy’s “favorite book” Moby Dick, Greve shows that Blood Meridian is “a novelistic expression of a speculative kind of Romanticism that navigates between science and philosophy” and that includes the sacred through “mathematics, philosophy, and (above all) war” that are sacred to and reveal the nature of man (174).

The second part of the chapter moves beyond Blood Meridian to The Crossing and an exploration of the void, or what Greve calls “originary nothingness” (175). He focuses on the tales in The Crossing, although a good part of this section is given over to she-wolf as a representation of the void as witnessing and also being necessary...