“But lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape?”: the semiotic elaboration of Cormac McCarthy’s autotextual creature in his early novels and No Country for Old Men

Abstract

“But lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape?” In the introduction to Suttree, the narrator warns the reader of the terrible events to come and indicates that the “thing’s” place is inward. The question of its shape and its representation pervades Cormac McCarthy’s works. This paper explores the signifying resurgence of apparently “empty” signifiers and their correlative signified in Cormac McCarthy’s first five novels and later works such as No Country for Old Men and The Road. The impossibility of the semiotic representation of this “creature”, combined with the author’s famed excess of signified surrounding and describing it, as well as its autotextual construction, reveal McCarthy’s most interesting and undervalued creation. It appears to function through the construction of doubles who reveal the shape of the monsters within the main characters, beginning with Kenneth Rattner and Marion Sylder and climaxing with Moss and Chigurh. The darker double always then acts as a revealer of an extreme vision of what is possible, of the worst in man. McCarthy establishes a form of dialogue between words and their meanings, toying with it, distorting and reversing it. I will show how the “creature” is its agent and represents the author’s poetics and encompasses the narrative strategies that make McCarthy’s novels such striking and unforgettable works.