Violence, Language, and the Natural World: Finding ‘Nature’ in Faulkner and McCarthy

William Faulkner’s “The Bear” has often been cast as a lamentation of the loss of wilderness and the natural world. Indeed, the story and the novel Go Down, Moses as a whole, portray a wilderness that is giving way to the demands of civilization. But this view accords a privilege to the natural world, assuming that it is of some higher order than civilization, that it ought to be preserved on account of its more impressive credentials. The critical works on Cormac McCarthy do not present the same issue; he is not cast as a preserver of much of anything other than some forms of modernism. Still, his work very much focuses on the relationship between man and land. Child of God, in particular, seems to brim with the struggles between man and wild. Nonetheless, an argument could be made that McCarthy privileges the natural world by virtue of his lush depictions, the pauses in the text to marvel at a ribbon of frost among weeds or the mating of hawks. This paper moves past such arguments, hypothetical or otherwise, and presents the argument that the texts privilege neither the natural world nor civilization, instead according privilege only to the ever-present violence. If the texts hold open a sort of mystical space for a pure essence of something beyond the grasp of the noumenal world, it is not a space for the majesty of the wilderness, it is a space for a type of truth that promises only a brutal existence for both civilization and the natural world