The Multispecies City in McCarthy’s Suttree and Duiker’s Thirteen Cents

Abstract

“First-wave” ecocriticism focused on “nature writing” attuned to supposedly human-free wildness and its healing beauty. The presence of non-human life in cities was largely ignored. Now, numerous branches of interdisciplinary thought endeavour to transcend the culture/nature dichotomy, to recognise non-human agency, and to call for a more equitable formulation of urban “communities of conviviality.” Though cross-species interdependencies necessarily occur, attitudes vary according to multiple variables of class and education, socialisation and economic opportunity. Is such beneficent conviviality not a luxury permitted only to the cushioned and the safe? What happens to human-nature relations in urban areas or strata of poverty and precarity? The article compares two novels concerned with impoverished urban communities: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979) set in 1950s Knoxville, Tennessee, and K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents (2000), set in Cape Town. It attempts a reading sensitive to the intimate interfusion of material and imaginative manifestations of multiple species simultaneously.