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"The Problematical Destruction of Darkness":

The conflicts that have arisen within culture since the advent of the scientific method are complex. Understanding human reactions to new scientific or empirically derived knowledge is becoming increasingly important as each advance is made. This essay examines John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as two important respondents to the cultural struggles to integrate science into a psyche that has so long resided in myth. East of Eden, I will argue, fights human reliance on myth to describe the natural world because it commits us to a nonexistent Promised Land, which can only lead to failure and disappointment. Steinbeck's novel is ostensibly consumed with the myth of Cain and Abel, and he does finally hold it up as myth made valid by its concern with choice. But he also incorporates the myths of human divinity, the fall of man, and Manifest Destiny as myths to be quelled if we are to cope with the new knowledge revealed by science. Cormac McCarthy uses these same myths to go beyond Steinbeck, eliminating choice and free-will, and suggesting instead that, whether we like it or not, we are now committed to the quest for scientific knowledge, which may ultimately lead us to a calamitous end.

        Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), The Gay Science, section 381

The history of Western science is an history of struggle against established myths. Most historians would begin this history in the sixteenth century with Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous philosopher who balked on the publication of his revolutionary heliocentric theory of the solar system. The work of Charles Darwin so radically secularized humans that not only did he and his colleagues have to fight during his lifetime for its acceptance, but scientists must continue the battle today in the United States' public school system. In point of contrast, Isaac Newton was championed in his own lifetime for his descriptions of motion, gravity, and optics, and the development of a mathematics (calculus) to explain them – advances that, while of supreme importance to our understanding of the universe, did not in any way contradict established dogma. Societal response to empirical knowledge that challenges widely believed myths historically has been divided, with one school accepting it with fascination, another accepting it with provisions, and a significant remaining portion lashing back with derision and outright refusal.

Literary critics, when studying this divide in modern American culture, generally fall into one of two camps: those who choose to study writers like Philip K. Dick who deal directly with science, and those who study Charles Darwin and his effects, for example, the rise of naturalism. But this struggle to assimilate new knowledge affects writers who are not ostensibly concerned with science, and there has certainly been a great deal of scientific progress since Darwin. I hope to complicate this already complex drama and expound upon this struggle through an exploration of John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. These authors and their respective works are important respondents to this societal conflict for several reasons. Their placement in history is recent and provides insight into the current state of America's battle with science. Both works concern themselves with American westering – a migration and geography each uses to its own ends in terms of the science/myth conflict. And finally, each offers a very specific statement on how society must conceptualize and deal with the accession of scientific knowledge. Though these authors are often considered regionalists, it is my argument that they are using the regions to comment on the science/myth battle, and an examination of the interactions between the landscapes, characters, and myths present in each work will reveal specific suggestions for determining the human place in nature and the eventual outcome of our quest for a posteriori knowledge. By using Steinbeck as a launching pad into broader discussion of McCarthy, their differences are highlighted and the evolution of the literary response to science is illuminated.

John Steinbeck was a naturalist in the zoological sense, though not the literary sense. He held a fascination with nature and had attended zoology classes beforehand, but his relationship beginning in 1930 with Ed Ricketts was crucial in forming the scientific frame of mind with which Steinbeck created East of Eden (Astro 45). Ricketts had attended classes at the University of Chicago where he was exposed “to the person and ideas of W.C. Allee, the brilliant ecological theorist whose [most influential ideas concern] the universality of social behavior and . . . social transition in which any given animal behaves differently in a group than as an individual” (Astro 5). This is an holistic conception of nature as a constructed system, generally referred to as the organismal conception of life, in which every individual piece depends upon all the other pieces. The organismal concept informed both Ricketts's and ultimately Steinbeck's placement of man in nature. Susan Beegel points to such a world view when she says that “Steinbeck rejects the notion of a man-centered universe and describes commensal relationships in an interconnected whole” (Beegel 9). While most critics have pointed to The Log of the Sea of Cortez as the best evidence of this thought in Steinbeck, there are no doubt signs of it in East of Eden.

The main setting for East of Eden was, of course, dear to Steinbeck who grew up in the town of Salinas. Steinbeck, however, chose to follow Adam Trask's migration to and settlement in this region not out of loyalty to the area in a regionalist fashion, but as part of a larger statement on science and myth in culture. In this paper, I use myth as any traditional and commonly repeated tale that people use to define the unknown in the universe. In modern America, the majority of such myths are either overtly Christian or have Christian roots. Manifest Destiny, a myth endemic to the United States, is very much founded upon Christian ideas of divine right and province. Adam's migration to the Salinas Valley, where he hopes to establish his “Eden,” is emblematic of Manifest Destiny, of America's search for the Promised Land in California, a search that Steinbeck “repeatedly rejects” as wrongheaded (Owens Re-Vision 5, 141). In John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America, Louis Owens makes the argument that the principle thing Steinbeck is fighting is something within the American psyche, the “myth” that Americans – at least European-Americans – are “new men in a new world” (141). But by calling for an end to faith in Manifest Destiny, Steinbeck is calling for an end to blind faith in any myth that is out of connection to the empirically observable natural world, and a comparison of Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask will demonstrate this point.

Samuel Hamilton is the character most in touch with the natural world about him and he is consequently the only character comfortable with his position in life, despite its seemingly pitiable condition. Louis Owens cogently describes Samuel's relationship with the land saying: “he embodies the life-force of the eastern hills. . . . He has been forced to accept the harsh reality of his land and he respects and loves the land. . . . Samuel is committed to place and to man and free of illusion” (Re-Vision 143). The harsh reality of his land can easily be read as any harsh reality, and I would argue that it is the harsh reality offered by empiricism. He tries everything to make a go of his land, but at last accepts it for the inhospitable place it is and gets comfortable. As what Owens calls a “true Steinbeck hero,” Samuel must be the type of person that can accept the nature of the universe as it is and commit to loving it and the humanity found therein. He cannot settle for an unbacked myth, or a myth which has been proved false. His pious wife Liza refers to him as being “the most contentious man this world has ever seen” because he is “never satisfied with the Testament...forever picking at it and questioning it” (255). For Samuel there is a danger in accepting anything blindly because repercussions are bound to arise when one mistakes a false myth for reality.

Adam Trask stands in counter-example to Samuel. Adam repeatedly refuses to believe in anything but his ideal myths. Even though he does not love him, Adam refuses to believe his father may have stolen money and the best explanation he can give a diversion to another myth: “The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that he does” (69). When he gets to California, Adam continues to cling to his comfortable myths, wishing “to make a garden of [his] land” because “so far [he has] had no Eden” (Steinbeck 167). Samuel Hamilton feels a need to quell this notion in Adam, saying, “it is my duty to take this thing of yours and kick it in the face. . . . I should hold it up to you muck-covered and show you its dirt and danger” (169). Owens says that this is a sign of Samuel's recognition that “Adam's desire to believe in an unfallen garden is a dangerous and deadly state in a fallen world.” For Steinbeck, to live shrouded in myth is to set one's self up for failure or catastrophe. Adam undoubtedly fails in his attempt at an Edenic life, and his failure is the result of his refusal to see the evil in the character of Cathy.

This is where Steinbeck draws a line between man and the rest of the world. He moralizes choice and gives humans free-will, the ability to sin, timshel. As Richard Hart says in “Steinbeck On Man and Nature,” “While it may well be that, from the scientist's perspective, that the natural universe as a whole operates according to neutral, indifferent forces of cause and effect, nature nonetheless contains within it unique value-bearing, value-creating, value-acting sorts of entities, namely, humans” (Beegel 47). I will not belabor Steinbeck's well-worn conception of choice within the novel, other than to state that it is of supreme importance to both him and to McCarthy, though the two could not disagree more on the subject.

In Cormac McCarthy, man becomes profane in every sense of the word, and the land turns heartless. There has been considerable effort to categorize McCarthy as a regionalist author. His early novels, which focus on the area surrounding his home in Tennessee lend themselves to his placement as a “Southern writer in the regionalist tradition of William Faulkner,” to whom he is most often compared, “or Flannery O'Connor” (Eaton 155). A comparison to O'Connor, in my opinion, could not be more erroneous. O'Connor's writing is consumed with Christian mythos, where I will show McCarthy's writing to take issue with, and even denounce such tradition. Blood Meridian and his later writings are viewed as Western writing. McCarthy was living mainly in El Paso while writing Blood, and his settings followed him there. Mark Eaton points out that these “are not so much Westerns as anti-Westerns. . . . [They] are very different kinds of Westerns, for they actually make visible those violent episodes that accompanied the fight over land” (156-157). Eaton goes on to make the argument that McCarthy is using the political disaster of the mid-nineteenth century borderlands region to correct the American myth of Manifest Destiny – that the Europeans moved across this land in a peaceful fashion, civilizing the barbaric natives, and killing only in self defense – the migration oft-represented in the dime Western. Eaton does not, however, follow the narrative beyond the massacre of Captain White's crew, or examine the character of Judge Holden, and in so doing misses a major reason McCarthy uses this region. Critic Stacey Peebles recognizes that “most often, scholarly readers choose to understand this novel and its ubiquitous violence as a demythologizing of the American West. . . . These critics strive to show how McCarthy subtracts myth from the American West and replaces it with a more realistic . . . perspective” (231-232). Peebles then resists this argument by making room for myth in the Yuma Indians present in the work, especially during the last portion of the novel. I want to go in the other direction and suggest that Blood Meridian is not merely a “demythologizing of the American West” but a demythologizing of the universe through science.

McCarthy was raised a Roman Catholic and is doubtless familiar with all the trappings of Christian ideology and myth. Both Blood Meridian and East of Eden use a conflation of the myths of Genesis and the American myth of Manifest Destiny and point to the flaws in each to say something about science. While Steinbeck uses it to resist the notion that man can find a Promised Land or heaven on Earth, and therefore must become comfortable with his place in nature, McCarthy uses this combination more directly as an allegory for the progress of man in his journey toward secularism and empirical knowledge.

The kid begins his journey as an animal, a reflection of human evolutionary origins. The narrator refers to him a “creature . . . [that] can neither read nor write and [in which] broods already a taste for mindless violence” (3). At the same time he is also the biblical Adam. When the narrator, echoing a famous Wordsworth line, says of the kid that “all history [is] present in that visage, the child the father of the man,” the suggestion is that it is from this child that mankind will arise (3). Furthermore, and like Adam, he has only a father (the kid's god), the mother having died in labor, whose name the father “never speaks” and the “child does not know” (3). The kid's father, however, is disinterested in him and all the kid can do is crouch “by the fire and watch him” (3). All that is given of the father is over in three paragraphs and there is no suggestion in the rest of the novel of a relationship between humans and any god, so at most the novel's religion is an impersonal deism.

The kid remains an animal after running away, fighting with “men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes” (4). This is “merely the first time,” writes Christopher Douglas, “that McCarthy applies the term 'apes' to us who are supposed to be above them, intellectually and spiritually” (6). This repeated comparison of man to ape has led to many critics presenting similar readings. John Rothfork sums up the core of them when he writes: “The novel presents an argument between the view that human behavior is instinctively driven by violence to gain power and the recognition that such a theoretical belief is pragmatically indefensible” (23). The obvious reference is to Darwinian evolution and evidence for this interpretation abounds. When he is shot in a tavern he does not seek medical assistance, but reacts as an injured animal, first resting on the bar and then “after a while he sits on the floor” (4). But there is more going on here than a strictly biological evolution; there is also an evolution of scientific thought. Remember, he is also still the early Adam and the first words he speaks are “I just got here” (5). Here the kid has acquired language and two sentences later Judge Holden is introduced. McCarthy is hailed most often for his attention to language, and the simultaneous appearance of the kid's voice and the judge is not a coincidence.

Judge Holden, among other things, is empirical knowledge. John Rothfork reminds us that “we do not discover the truth about our world, we narrate it in myth and science” (26). The act of narration, which obviously requires language, is therefore essential before anything can be known. The first major speaker in the novel, after the kid's father, is the reverend in the “nomadic house of God” in Nacogdoches, and his speech is one of common Christian myths (McCarthy 6). The entrance of the judge is the entrance of empirical knowledge into a world of myth, which has arisen from the kid's acquisition of language. Holden's first action is to turn the entire congregation against the reverend (6). That he does so by lying about the reverend – a man whom he “never laid eyes on . . . never even heard of” before that day – may at first seem problematic. If he is supposed to be knowledge taking the place of myth, then he is most assuredly false knowledge, as bad as or worse than the myth he is replacing. What must be remembered is that this is early in the novel, and therefore early in human secularization. The confusion of myth and science, of lies and truth, is characteristic of humans' first encounter with the epistemological question of whether anything can be known. In Vereen Bell's words, this is “some more primal epistemology . . . a knowledge of origins before a bicameral brain compelled us to begin to sort things out” (Eddins 27). The eruption in the tent is a sample of the drama that is to play out between science and myth through the rest of the novel as the kid moves westward.

The kid begins chapter three “naked under the trees” in Bexar county Texas (28). During the interim he has spent a night with a hermit and all but killed a barkeep. As naked as the biblical Adam, the kid is recruited by a minion of Captain White, who is looking for soldiers to do battle against the borderland natives. White wraps his proposition in the language of Manifest Destiny, seeking to civilize “a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves,” and promising that the soldiers “will be the ones who will divide the spoils. There will be a section of land for every man in my company” (34). Here the kid finally really begins the parallel voyages of westering in the name of Manifest Destiny, of evolution, and of the development of scientific thought. Of these voyages, the first two come rapidly to an end, but scientific thought and the acquisition of a posteriori knowledge that accompanies it carry on to the end of the novel.

Manifest Destiny is the first myth McCarthy annihilates. Captain White's band of soldiers, ensconced in the mythic beliefs of the white man’s burden, encounters a group of Comanche Indians several days out of town. Nearly all of White's men are brutally slaughtered in very short order. In all the description of the massacre only three words are given voice: the sergeant of the company say “Oh my god” (53). Both the myths of Manifest Destiny in which he is shrouded and appeal to his god are reminiscent of Adam Trask in East of Eden. Myth leads both to failure because it is a misconception of the natural world. McCarthy continues to “pull the rug squarely out from under the traditional myth of the West” through the escalation of violence that the kid witnesses and takes part in after joining Glanton's gang (Peebles 232).

The kid joins Glanton after being freed from prison by the judge. From this point on “much of the novel is an unequal dialog between the kid . . . and Judge Holden” (Rothfork 24). The kid is Adam, or man, learning while the judge (knowledge and experience) reveals truth. The revelation of truth – in this case scientific knowledge – is a complicating process rather than a simplifying one. No character is more conscious of this than the judge himself. A man who “seeks to totalize all existence within himself,” Holden is well aware that no human mind is able to encompass all knowledge(Rothfork Dance 27). But he does not create a divine mind for this; instead he eliminates the need for any mind to know all. In an early scene, the judge is serving as translator between the party and a Mexican sergeant. Consternation arises on both sides at a refusal to shake hands and each side appeals to Holden to learn what the other party means by its affronts. The judge quells the escalating tension saying: “It is not necessary that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding” (85). While the judge who, again, is collective knowledge, has all the facts, each side only knows half the story. But this is not a problem, for the continual addition of new knowledge does not require first the mastery of all knowledge previously gained. The judge goes on to say of each man “The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning” (85). This statement goes directly against the grain of postmodern thought, which would argue that there is no way anything can be known or have some kind of fixed meaning. For McCarthy, there is truth, and whether one cannot understand it, or chooses not to understand it is of very little importance, and it continues to exist outside that individual. If the origins of the universe are beyond present understanding, the truth of its origins and its final destination exists somewhere outside us. Myth allows for the narration of those origins while leaving truth alone.

The final destination of the human pursuit of a posteriori knowledge is revealed much later, in one of the most important paragraphs in the novel:

McCarthy, it seems, intended to embody this incomprehensibility within the novel itself. Nearly every critic writing about Blood Meridian describes it as difficult to interpret or even categorize. The strongest evidence for this is the final scene of the novel, after Holden has apparently crushed the kid to death, he reenters the brothel. McCarthy's language here takes on a rolling, run-on feel. The judge is dancing amid a crowd and McCarthy repeats this many times, insisting on its importance. Both in message and spirit this ending is strongly reminiscent of the Nietzsche quote that prefaces this paper. This quote is pulled from a section of The Gay Science titled “The Question of Intelligibility,” in which Nietzsche writes “One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also – quite as certainly – not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible . . . perhaps [the author] did not want to be understood by 'anyone.'” He then goes on to say “Science is growing, the most learned of us are on the point of discovering that we know too little. But it would be worse still if it were otherwise, -- if we knew too much” (348-350). Further linking these writings is McCarthy's epigraphical chapter heading, “Sie müssen schlafen aber Ich muss tanzen” (316). McCarthy's passage parallels Nietzsche's on so many points that one may use the latter as a map for understanding the former, even if, ironically, it only leads to the understanding that there is to be no understanding. In Holden's words, “The mystery is that there is no mystery” (252).

The epilogue to the novel has received much attention. I have reprinted it in its entirety, not because it is necessary for an understanding of my argument, but so that one may read it and read into it with my argument fresh in mind.

Nothing causes so much anxiety and confusion as the acquisition of scientific knowledge, especially where it refutes myth and rebuffs the human ego. People fell further from heaven at each scientific advance – when the universe stopped revolving around the Earth, when humans became primates, and when we were characterized by a sequence of DNA that shares 88% of its structure with rats. The chief goal among theoretical physicists, now, is to define the entire universe within a single simple equation, and many fully believe they can do it. Further, as the knowledge base grows, people find themselves overwhelmed with information, facts, and contradictions. Medical science tells us to drink eight glasses of water every day, to take aspirin for headaches and heart attacks, to ingest the right amount of omega-3 fatty acids, to get prostate, breast, and colon exams at the appropriate ages, tells us where our cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure and triglyceride levels need to be, and numerous other facts and figures that represent but a small portion of those with which people are presented daily. And the rate at which the scientific community is churning out new knowledge is not slowing.

Understanding that human reactions to new empirical knowledge are most violent where established myths are challenged is becoming increasingly important as science pushes ever harder against the human ego. American culture is known internationally for snubbing the other cultures and schools of thought it finds distasteful, but scientific pursuit will continue despite any predilection for comfortable myths. Developing strategies to cope with the amounts of new information bombarding us may become essential to survival as the saying, “what we don't know can't hurt us” continues to lose credence. Our modern Judge Holden is science: “He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (McCarthy 335).

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