HEGEL, MODERNITY, AND TELOS IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S SOUTHWESTERN NOVELS: AN INQUIRY INTO MCCARTHY’S PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION

Author

Ian K. Jensen

Year of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

English (Literature)

Department or School/College

Department of English

Committee Chair

Brady A. Harrison

Publisher

University of Montana

Abstract

In this study, I examine the first four of Cormac McCarthy’s Southwestern or Western novels. I begin with Blood Meridian and continue with the three Border novels: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain, often referred to as the Border Trilogy.

McCarthy’s erudite and sometimes inflorescent prose obscures attempts to decipher his philosophical viewpoint. I examine this viewpoint herein. In order to proceed with this project, I find value in G.W.F. Hegel’s thought, as well as his philosophical architecture and preoccupations.

Following the Introduction, my first Chapter discusses Hegel’s thought and our two-fold concern with it here. That is, in McCarthy’s Western work we find a query of philosophical Euro-American modernity. In order to illustrate this, I discuss Hegel in relation to the problems of modernity. In addition to this heuristic use of Hegel’s thought, I note that McCarthy appears to borrow directly from Hegel’s ontological or metaphysical structure as the Border novels progress.

In Chapter 2, I turn to Blood Meridian and its enterprise of ordering. This section consists of a discussion of the enterprise of ordering and its relation to the subject/object problem of modernity and the idea of telos, particularly regarding McCarthy’s coin imagery and its resemblance to a passage from Hegel. Following this, an examination of Judge Holden as a Hegelian “world-historical individual” ensues, and the Chapter culminates in a discovery of McCarthy’s rejection of modem telos.

Chapter 3 first examines the Border Trilogy novels as revisions of the bildungsroman. This chapter shows the form’s relation to Euro-American modernity, and delves into McCarthy’s larger interrogation of modernity with his revision of this form. In the second section of Chapter 2, I look again to Hegel as McCarthy’s fiction finally posits an alternative to the speculative ontology of modernity in the idea of the embedded tale. In the subsequent Conclusion, the prior points will be combined into a statement of McCarthy’s philosophical worldview in these novels, and its relation to philosophical modernity.

Recommended Citation

Jensen, Ian K., "HEGEL, MODERNITY, AND TELOS IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S SOUTHWESTERN NOVELS: AN INQUIRY INTO MCCARTHY’S PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION" (2006). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12191.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12191