Ecomonstrous - DOJP - Promises of Monsters conference 28-29 April 2016

Cowboys and Indians… and Cthulhu!

Ecomonstrous Encounters in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, PhD candidate, University of Glasgow

Promises of Monsters conference, 28-29 April, 2016, Stavanger, Norway1

This paper aims to provide an overview of the project of my doctoral thesis. It is therefore
necessarily an outline and has the limitations of an outline. But, as I think the research I’m
offering up is charting some new territory, it seems to me that an effort to map it out to some
degree is more appropriate at this point than depth-diving and mining, which will certainly be
provided at a later point in any case.
The ‘ecomonstrous’ is a term I’ve coined to describe the study of literature as it
represents the environment by means of monstrous imagery. It takes the literary discipline of
Ecocriticism, which studies literature’s relationship to the environment,2 and combines it with
Monster Studies, which explores the image of the monster in culture.3 This interdisciplinary
approach interrogates how literary works depict and narrate land, flora, fauna, climate, and so
on through the poetics of monstrosity. The ecomonstrous analyses how modes like the
uncanny, grotesque, hybrid, or liminal evoke nonhuman alterity and thereby portray the
environment ​as the Other.
The most surprising result of an ecomonstrous reading is that such monstrous
evocations of ‘nature’ in fiction do not necessarily elicit merely horror or what some call
‘ecophobia’.4 The ecomonstrous is first and foremost an ​encounter​ with the environment as
aesthetically evoked in fiction through such monstrous modes. Thus it brings about human
proximation to the nonhuman, which is an opportunity for contact. As often as not, then, the
ecomonstrous encounter induces wonder, curiosity, and even reverence in addition to more
chilling or revolting sensations. As monster theorists such as Timothy Beal note, monsters
do generate desire as well as loathing, they attract as well as repel.5 An ecomonstrous

1
With many thanks to the organisers for an excellent conference and for accepting my paper, and to the other
participants for their stimulating research and discussion. I also delivered this paper at the Difference:
Fascination, Fear and Foreignness conference, 24-25 May 2016, University of Glasgow.
2
See, for example, Garrard, Greg. 2012. ​Ecocriticism​. 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge).
3
See, for example, Mittman, Asa Simon and Dendle, Peter J., eds. 2013. ​The Ashgate Research Companion to
Monsters and the Monstrous​ (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited).
4
Cf. Estok in Iovino, Serenella and Oppermann, Serpil, eds., 2014. ​Material Ecocriticism​ (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press).
5
Beal, Timothy K., 2002. ​Religion and Its Monsters​ (New York: Routledge): 7, 111, 117.
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reading evinces this duality and tension in that it tends to rather frighteningly mangle and
devour anthropocentrism while at the same time opening up unsettling but exciting
possibilities of collaboration and even love between the human and the nonhuman as they are
re-enmeshed in a unified ecology of ‘strange strangers’ (to use Timothy Morton’s phrase).
In particular, my thesis performs this ecomonstrous reading on the Southwestern
region of the United States as it is lavishly and often bizarrely evoked in the fiction of
Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty. The thesis will try to keep an eye on the McCarthy’s
entire corpus, but to anyone familiar with his work the most obvious and rich resource for an
ecomonstrous reading is his 1986 novel ​Blood Meridian​, a horrific yet majestic scalp-hunting
odyssey through the Texas-Mexico borderland in the 1840s. McCarthy’s Southwest as
rendered in this novel is an alien world full of de-anthropocentrising monstrosity, with desert
and wilderness imagery as cosmically awesome and woeful as anything found in Lovecraft,
and frankly much more so. In a somewhat similar fashion, Lafferty’s native Oklahoma,
through a number of his novels and short stories, is evoked as a topography of weird
encounters with the nonhuman, albeit in a more comic, though no less grotesque, mode than
McCarthy’s. In Lafferty’s fiction, regional animals, such as bison and kit foxes and bears, as
well as various features of the regional landscape, such as mountains and valleys and muddy
clay areas known as ‘bottoms’ and ‘flats’, constantly resist easy access by the human
characters of the tales, yet always incite wonder and awe at the agency and deep properties of
the nonhuman.6
I confess the title of this paper is something of a tease, for I can only nod briefly in the
direction of Lovecraft in this outline. But the nod is sincere as Lovecraft’s take on
monstrosity has several connections to my thesis that I will work out more fully in time.
Here it suffices to say that Cthulhu is conveniently emblematic of monsters in general and
especially of cosmic or what could be called ontological monstrosity, which is relevant to the
deeply metaphysical notion of ecology that the ecomonstrous incorporates from the likes of
Timothy Morton and Graham Harman. (Incidentally, Harman wrote a book published in
2012 entitled ​Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy​, which is a work I draw on in my

6
As the title of my paper indicates, McCarthy and Lafferty could be considered at least tangential purveyors of
that belovedly whacky subgenre the ‘weird western’, which I have sometimes characterised as being something
like Lovecraft meets L’amour or Cowboys and Cthulhu. I added ‘Indians’ to my title because Native Americans
feature frequently in the fiction of McCarthy and Lafferty and are themselves another case of monstrous alterity
to the prevailing culture, in addition to the monstrously evoked ecology.
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 Ecomonstrous - DOJP - Promises of Monsters conference 28-29 April 2016

thesis. So there’s another connection.) And indeed, Cthulhu is himself an ecomonstrous

image, being as he is a ‘freakish compilation’ of incompatible parts (to use Jeffrey Cohen’s
memorable phrase),7 specifically an amalgamation of frog, octopus, lizard, bat, and
human--albeit not literally, but, as Harman himself points out, only in the narrator’s grasping
attempt to describe the indescribable in Lovecraft’s short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. (This
raises the question of how much Lovecraft was really engaging the biota here and in other
descriptions of his monsters that reference the environment. But that discussion is for another
time.)
Now, before moving on into brief accounts of the work of Morton and Harman as
related to the ecomonstrous, I’d like to take a moment to remark on something very relevant
to this conference dedicated wholly to Monster Studies. It’s simply that it seems to me that
the appearance of the monster in ecocriticism and object-oriented ontology is reasonably
frequent and even central to a certain degree in their rhetoric and terminology. On the other
hand, the appearance of the environment in Monster Studies is still comparatively scarce and
marginal. Morton, Harman, and Bruno Latour, for example, all employ monstrous
terminology such as the strange, the alien, the uncanny, and the hybrid (as well as the word
‘monster’ itself) to explicate their ecological and metaphysical systems.8 In Monster Studies,
however, this cross-pollination between the language of the monstrous and the environmental
is not so obviously reciprocated. For example, in the seminal 1996 volume ​Monster Theory​,
edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, there are no chapter titles that explicitly indicate an
exploration of environmental issues, nor do words like ‘ecology’ or ‘environment’ or even
‘animal’ show up in the index. Nearly two decades later, in the recent ​Ashgate Research
Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous​ (2013), co-editor Asa Mittman in his introductory
chapter outlines the territory covered in the rest of the chapters of this large volume, from
‘geo-historical essays’ exploring the monsters of myth and culture in many parts of the world
to essays covering contemporary cultural developments (Mittman and Dendle 2013: 2-3,
9-10). Yet not one of these essays is an explicit, sustained engagement with environmental
themes or ecocriticism. Some of them do indeed touch on ecological concerns, and while

7
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 1996. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’ in ​Monster Theory: Reading Culture​ ed. by
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 7.
8
For an example of the monster in ecocriticism, see Lioi, A., 2007. ‘Of Swamp Dragons: Mud, Megalopolis,
and a Future for Ecocriticism’. ​Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice​,
pp.17-38.
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again words like ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’ are conspicuously missing in the index, there
are at least a number references listed for the word ‘animal’. Nevertheless, the ecological in
Monster Studies remains somewhat marginal at best. Even as I perused the list of paper titles
at this very conference, I noticed only two others besides my own that ​might​ be of
specifically and explicitly ecological or ecocritical interest.
This observation is not meant as an indictment, but I am trying to show that my theory
of the ecomonstrous seeks to fill what appears to be a genuine gap in the literature. Please
feel free, of course, to enlighten me as to environmentally themed Monster Studies of which I
am ignorant. (Indeed, I myself would note Timothy Beal’s 2002 book ​Religion and Its
Monsters​ as a notable exception, since it deals more explicitly with ecology from time to time
in its chapters.) At any rate, what a theory of the ecomonstrous does is to tie ecocritical and
monster discourses more closely together into a consistent (albeit duly provisional and
radically open) system, a conceptual aesthetic practice that centres on the monstrous in the
environment and the environmental in the monstrous.
Part of this conceptual framework, then, is the object-oriented ontology (frequently
abbreviated as OOO) pioneered by Graham Harman, which, very roughly and very briefly,
argues that each and every discrete object in the universe withdraws or recedes from the
foreground of any of its uses or encounters into the background ‘darkness’ of its own
inexhaustible being. You might sum it up by saying that OOO argues that objects have a
fathomless life of their own quite apart from human cognisance or function. You can’t get to
the bottom of any particular object. (This ‘dark interior’ of objects is, at least in part, where
Tim Morton derives the name of his project ‘dark ecology’.) In Harman’s own words:

The sun isn’t effective because I use it. Rather, it can only be used because it is
capable of an effect, of inflicting some sort of blow upon reality. The sun isn’t
“used”; it ​is​. The same is equally true of table and floor and bed. It is not my
enjoyment of these objects that first conjures them into being. Instead, I always find
myself deployed amidst a specific geography of objects, each of them withdrawing
from view into a dark primal integrity that neither our theories nor our practices can
ever fully exhaust.9

9
Harman, G., 2010. ​Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures​. John Hunt Publishing: 51.
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On this ontology, objects don’t orbit around or gravitate toward human use and cognition, but
rather are busy with their own projects, most of which we are never privy to or capable of
witnessing. In this framework, then, the human is of necessity rather bewildered. So it calls
for humility and curiosity, which are surely virtues of ecological thinking.
This ontology in turn troubles some environmental writing’s tendency to depict
immediate mimetic access to nonhumans (or ecomimesis). Tim Morton in particular urges an
‘antiecomimesis’ as an antidote to this tendency.10 That is, in order to imagine the
environment in its genuine alterity rather than a mirror of our desires, to think ‘the ecological
thought’ (in Morton’s phrase),11 we must not pretend that there’s no difficulty or gap between
ourselves and our nonhuman neighbours. Instead, antiecomimetic writing honours and
magnifies what he calls the ecology’s ‘strange strangeness’ (2011: 166). In Morton’s own
words:

Strange stranger names an uncanny, radically unpredictable quality of life-forms.

Life-forms recede into strangeness the more we think about them, and whenever they
encounter one another—the strangeness is irreducible. Ecological philosophy that
does not attend to this strangeness is not thinking coexistence deeply enough. (2011:
165)

And, as we’ve seen, this applies to non-lifeforms as well.

Now the point of antiecomimetic thinking and writing is not to make us to flee in
ecophobic terror from the environment, but rather to put us into spine-tingling ​contact ​with
the strange ecology in which we’re deeply enfolded.12
Morton argues that this contact is achieved by dislocation rather than environmental
writing’s more familiar trope of location (2011: 169). You might say that it emphasises the
‘dislocal’ over the local. Antiecomimesis is a form of the sublime, Morton tell us, that
evokes ‘intimacy with an alien presence: the sublime is what evokes this proximity of the
alien’ (171). This theme of xenoproximity, of getting into close quarters with what is

10
Morton, T., 2011. ‘Here comes everything: The promise of object-oriented ontology’. ​Qui Parle: Critical
Humanities and Social Sciences​, 19(2):169.
11
Cf. Morton, T., 2010. ​The Ecological Thought​. Harvard University Press.
12
On the ‘spine tingle’ as an indication of the ​bodily​ nature of ecological encounter, see Rachel Greenwald
Smith’s compelling reading of Ado Leopold’s famous ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ essay in Smith, R.G., 2011.
‘Materialism, Ecology, Aesthetics’. ​Mediations​ 25(2): 69.
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radically Other, the alien, is the natural connection from Morton’s Dark Ecology to Monster
Studies.
Following Harman and Morton, then, the ecomonstrous seeks to attend to this
ecological strangeness by playing up the ontological gap between humans and nonhumans in
order to provisionally bridge it through uncanny contact. The ecomonstrous eschews mere
mimesis and instead embraces such modes as grotesquery, hybridity, liminality, ‘freakish
compilation’, transgression, gigantism, and apocalypse in its description of the environment,
thereby acknowledging that the more we know of it, the more it recedes into its dark interior,
into some side of it that we have not accessed. Contrast this monstrous approach to how you
may have seen the environment evoked through ‘pretty’ or ‘inspiring’ imagery that aims to
produce immediate and uncomplicated access to ‘nature’. In response to the ‘withdrawnness’
in all things (Morton 2011: 165, 167), an ecomonstrous poetics self-consciously evokes a
sense of the uncanny (​unheimlich​) and the alien in order to provoke fresh and freakish
encounters with ecology, to produce in readers the conviction that something ‘unhomely’ is
in the ecological house with us, eliciting both dread and curiosity about the nonhuman. The
ecomonstrous is thus seen to be a rhetorical strategy, but we do well to heed Morton’s
clarification on this: ‘Rhetoric,’ he writes, ‘is not simply ear candy for humans: indeed, a
thorough reading of Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus suggests that rhetoric is a technique for
contacting the strange stranger’ (167). All of the rhetorical strategies of the ecomonstrous are
thus (again in Morton’s words) ‘techniques for summoning the alien’ and for ‘lifting us out of
anthropocentrism’ (171).
These contours of the ecomonstrous also show how it is both Lovecraftian and
counter-Lovecraftian. On the one hand it acknowledges the inhospitable universe that
Lovecraft tirelessly championed, at least insofar as the ecomonstrous depicts an ecology
inhospitable to anthropocentrism. On the other hand, the ecomonstrous eschews Lovecraft’s
xenophobic loathing for at least the possibility of an awed and curious xenophilia.
Now I can only very briefly indicate further how the ecomonstrous reads the works of
Lafferty and McCarthy. Perhaps the swiftest way is to simply quote a passage from each. In
McCarthy’s ​Blood Meridian​, a wounded soldier has an ecomonstrous encounter as he sleeps
in the middle of the desert night, a scene that one of McCarthy’s chapter headings tellingly
sums up as ‘Attacked by a vampire’:

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 Ecomonstrous - DOJP - Promises of Monsters conference 28-29 April 2016

[...] something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on Sproule’s
chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it walked
upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a horrible
smile and teeth pale blue in the star-light. It leaned to him. It crafted in his neck two
narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood. Not soft
enough. He woke, put up a hand. He shrieked and the bloodbat flailed and sat back
upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth.13

This, of course, draws on the gothic vampire, but in a freshly ecomonstrous iteration as we
are given a very naturalistically described bat that is yet narrated as a vividly weird
bloodsucking creature of the night in the ekphrastic detail of its starlit ‘horrible smile’ and
gruesome fang-craft.14 The antiecomimesis of this passage heightens our emotional encounter
with the regional biota at a more visceral level than would plain ecomimesis. We contact the
bat as a strange stranger. We experience Morton’s ‘intimacy with an alien presence’ in this
passage.
As to Lafferty, sometimes he took his Oklahoma region to the stars in his folkloric
‘tall tale’ science fiction stories.15 One example is his 1976 short story ‘Smoe and the Implicit
Clay’ in which astronauts explore a planet full of Indians and buffalo and horses and, of all
things, cars emerging from the clay of the planet. At one point the leader of the astronauts,
‘Colonel Crazelton’ (Lafferty’s known for his endless array of unusual and amusing character
names) is enraptured by an ecomonstrous vision of Southwestern possibilia:

Colonel Crazelton was suffering impressions of world after world after world of
implicit clay that was almost being called into animation. These worlds bucked and
buckled like drunken water. They were seas, and Colonel Crazelton was seasick. The
worlds were clay-colored oceans, and they heaved with billions upon billions of
half-animated Indians. Indians making up the heaving world-waves, with their buffalo
and their small game! What else was roiling and boiling in that clay-sea? There were
the fast and snazzy cars waiting for the archangel of cars to come and evoke them into

13
McCarthy, Cormac, 1985. ​Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West​ (London: Picador): 66.
14
On ekphrasis, or ‘ultra-vivid description’, as yet another rhetorical technique of antiecomimesis, see Morton
2011: 170-171.
15
​The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms​ (3rd Edition) describes the ‘tall tale’ mode thus: ‘A humorously
exaggerated story of impossible feats. Several tall stories attributed to the German Baron Münchhausen
appeared in the 1780s, but the form flourished in the​ ​oral tradition of the American frontier in the 19th century,
several tall tales being published by Mark Twain, George Washington Harris, and others.’ (2008, Oxford
University Press.) Accessed on 3/04/16 here:
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-1127?r
skey=WiCmWF&result=1132​.
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metallic animation. There were the later horses, clay-maned, snorting out of that
underfootness. There was the crowding, churning multitudinousness of it all.16

This plenitudinous rhapsody actually reads not unlike some passages from Graham Harman’s
works in which he similarly evokes a universe roiling with an infinite multitude of objects
(cf. Morton 2011: 169-170). Lafferty’s approach here also echoes McCarthy’s above. Rather
than, say, a more pastoral depiction of Native Americans and buffalo and horses (and ‘snazzy
cars’!), this modal, possible worlds evocation of a regional ecology shakes things up, causing
the reader not to have a mimetic moment of inspiration but, like the character in the story, to
‘suffer’ a sort of ecomonstrous vertigo, piquing curiosity as to just what could be meant by
such a scene. The rest of the story gives some clue to this, and involves the priority of first
peoples as well as what might be called first landscapes. At any rate, this passage
communicates, in its strange way, something of the actual fecundity of our real-world
ecology and ‘naturecultures’ (to use Donna Haraway’s now widely used term for the
entanglement of the human and the nonhuman).
In closing, all I want to say is that, of course, the ecomonstrous is not limited to my
present Southwestern United States application. In fact, I plan to write concluding chapters
in my thesis on the works of the Scottish author George Mackay Brown (who wrote of his
native Orkney Isles actually, once a part of Norway) and the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola
to show how the ecomonstrous might read those literarily evoked regions as well. Of
contemporary, even ‘bestselling’ authors, I note that Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Area X trilogy
(the first book of which, ​Annihilation​, is being adapted to film by Alex Garland, the director
of ​Ex Machina​) is a rather shining specimen of the ecomonstrous in popular fiction. And
speaking of cinema,of recent films I would note Gareth Edwards’s 2014 ​Godzilla​, which was
a rather beautifully ecomonstrous film, especially the way the initial camera work on the
giant monsters treated them almost like hyperobjects that could only be seen in
bioluminescent glimpses. Also, the very recent horror movie sensation ​The Witch​ has strong
ecomonstrous elements as both the darkly numinous goat and the forest are stars of the film,
their nonhuman ontological depths being mythopoeically evoked through a sort of occult
realism. So while the ecomonstrous may still be embryonic as an academic discipline, it does
seem to show signs of emerging in culture more generally.

16
Lafferty, R. A., 1976. ‘Smoe and the Implicit Clay’ in ​Future Power: A Science Fiction Anthology​ ed. By
Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (New York: Random House): 69.
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