The Other End of "The Road": Re-Reading McCarthy in Light of Thermodynamics and Information Theory

Abstract

In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.(Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings 58)I think that truth has no temperature.(The Counselor, 21)For roughly two decades now, ever since his first interview with Richard B. Woodward, scholars have been aware of Cormac McCarthy's fascination with natural sciences. Judging by his expressed admiration of his grandfather John Francis, after whom he named his own son, and who was both an entrepreneur and a machinist interested in how worked, this fascination may well have been a part of McCarthy's life since his early youth, and possibly of his decision to study physics and engineering in college (see Kushner 2007). His preference for company of scientists over other artists is notorious, and since he assumed his position as writer-in-residence at Santa Fe Institute, best known for its inter- and multidisciplinary study of complex-adaptive systems, McCarthy has certainly been able to follow this interest. Notably, he has engaged in discourse with some of leading voices in science today, such as former SFI president and theoretical physicist and biologist Geoffrey West, paleobiologist and Extinction author Douglas Erwin, geochemist and climatologist Daniel Schrag, chaos and complexity theorist J. Doyne Farmer, and, perhaps most notably, particle physicist and string theorist Lisa Randall as well as his friend, Nobel-Prize- winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, both of whom acknowledge McCarthy's input in their respective books Warped Passages (x, xi) and The Quark and Jaguar (xv). Science, it is safe to say, plays an important role in McCarthy's intellectual life.2Given his evident investment with science, it is remarkable that little if any of it has made slightest impact on our assessment of author's oeuvre up to this point. The study of what we might call the scientific McCarthy, it seems, constitutes one of most glaring blank spots on map of McCarthy scholarship today. Part of this may be due to a shared conviction, that-despite his personal engagement-McCarthy's books show no sign of being shaped by high-flown scientific (Woodward 2005). Another reason, of course, might simply be that most of 1 us generally do not know enough about modern science. Given this state of affairs, this essay represents a first attempt to explore scientific dimension of McCarthy's writing, taking for its object one particularly important and culturally influential concept in 19th- and 20th- century science.Up to this point, McCarthy has primarily been viewed as heir of Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, an author of myth and bloodshed, a writer of apocalypses. What he has not been seen as is a writer in quite another, scientific tradition of thought initiated by formulation of Second Law of Thermodynamics, central implication of which is continuous dissipation of energy, or, increase of entropy. This oversight is particularly striking. First so because universal implications of Second Law, in particular running down and eventual heat-death of universe, seem like a natural match for overwhelming impression of human insignificance and cosmic indifference that pervades McCarthy's novels. Secondly, general theme articulated by this concept-the world's tendency towards disorder-has formed a hallmark in McCarthy's writing at very least since Lester Ballard dreamed of making things more orderly in woods and in men's souls (Child of God 136). Given McCarthy's scientific interest, as well as fact that Gell-Mann's The Quark and Jaguar includes a whole chapter on entropy (Ch. 15, Time's Arrows), it can safely be assumed that he is quite familiar with Second Law. …