Chapter 21 - Modernity

Summary

A critique of modernity and the European Enlightenment is persistent in Cormac McCarthy’s work. In the Appalachian novels, the ancient and the pre-industrial are yet to be swamped by the hegemony of modernity, though its depredations are clearly visible. A shift arrives with Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Informed by his anthropocentric notion of “suzerainty,” Holden embodies the notion that violence and progress are inseparable. The development of modernity is dependent on this rational, instrumental, and necessary relationship. The Enlightenment has liberated man from the spiritual and physical constraints of previous arrangements. This strain of thinking reaches its apotheosis in the wasteland of The Road in which modernity and its technologies have facilitated planetary apocalypse. There is, however, resistance. The behavior and consciousness of animals, and landscape and the non-animate world, are imbued with it, and there is an elusive spirituality connected to these phenomena that defies modernity’s disenchantment of the world. We are dared by McCarthy to call from the depths of our imagination a different kind of world, in which humanity recognizes the proximity of its kinship to all that which is in some way alive on our planet.