Sparing Words in the Wasted Land: Garbage, Texture, and Ecriture Blanche in Auster's In the Country of Last Things and McCarthy's The Road

Abstract

In his key text The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell argues that “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (285). Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things (1987) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) share similar apocalyptic wastescapes, where lost humans struggle in a world in which nature has stopped producing resources and humans are on the verge of extinction. The last manufactured cans become the last objects to survive. Protagonists, who used to be producers of waste, are reduced to their basic materiality and become garbage collectors, a function that is fundamentally associated with the impure. As time has stopped in both dystopian worlds, only space remains but an ecologically unstable space that is haunted by time past via the debris that fill the littered streets that the unknown catastrophe has left behind. It is my contention that the apocalyptic imagination calls for not only a rehabilitated relationship with nature that is threatened by industrial feats, but also a groundbreaking relationship with waste and matter.