Lydia Cooper is certainly one of the best literary critics at work today among McCarthy scholars; she knows his works intimately and is expert at drawing connections between them to deliver larger insights, with an especially fine-tuned sense of their ethical dimensions. She excels at bringing together disparate commentators and writing about them eloquently—for example, in her latest book, Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature, as she canvasses topics such as Thomas Piketty's capital versus wages problem and brings readers closer to the heart of a complex, contemporary economic dilemma. Accordingly, Dianne Luce's blurb hails Cooper's book for its “confident perception of the overarching values that unify McCarthy's body of work.”After reading Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature, though, this reader was left with more questions than answers, including whether a complexity theory of literature successfully surfaces a set of overarching values in McCarthy's work. The complexity theory of literature, it turns out, is the notion that narrative helps us to make sense of complex systems because “narrative is a complex system” (12). So, for example, the nexus between McCarthy's writings on capitalism and a “complexity theory of literature” is ultimately that narrative engages with economy, which is a complex system (18). And while economics are a main point of focus in the study, so it goes with related “ecosystems, forms of production, legislation, national identity, and psychology” (7). The next step in the syllogism is that McCarthy's residency at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) expanded his interest in evolutionary economics “and in complexity theory more broadly” (8). Cooper discovers other applications with occasional resort to the structuralist analysis that characterizes much of her earlier work, creating a converse form/function formula: simplistic semiotics indicate complex notions, and so on.She seems to share the reluctance of complexity theorists to define complexity. The reasons for this are at once scientific and personal, as explained on the SFI website: “The science of complexity and its many tributary fields and concepts pioneered at Santa Fe,” writes SFI President David Krakauer, “may provide new methods, or minimally metaphors, by which to capture what SFI co-founder Murray Gell-Mann has called ‘a crude look at the whole.’” More specifically, “how apparently complex histories and patterns can sometimes be organized using simple models of growth and scaling.” Humanists (including myself) show a sportive willingness to tour other fields with a kind of portmanteau intellectualism, bringing back souvenirs (or, um, lenses, like cheap sunglasses) to “apply,” whereas the beauty of any purportedly scientific enquiry is the relentless cross-examination of experimentation and observation. The latter intellectual endeavors are free-standing in a different way. If we take the proposition that “narrative (and especially McCarthy's narrative) helps us to make sense of complex systems,” what's the null hypothesis? In the book's framing, there is no experiment to be conducted or alternative hypothesis, only a case to be made by observation. It is not difficult to make a case for the general, but the work is in the specific.This is not Cooper's problem, per se, but one of humanities and its increasingly professionalized conventions, sometimes conceived in the spirit of science-envy, leading down a trackless path to the irrelevance that drives defense-of-humanities essays, delivered from the proscenium, while a career extinction event plays out behind the curtains. (Hiring reflects portmanteau intellectualism, too; in the current job cycle we find an English department advertisement calling for an “Assistant Professor in Environmental or Medical Humanities, Disability Studies, and/or Literature Science and Technology.”) Moreover, in the arid field of our labor, where only certain conclusions are allowed, the ascendancy of grievance studies has led to formulaic critiques which in many cases are old formulas given a veneer of the new. If we conceive of this in complexity terms, scholarship is a fractal enterprise that creates illusions of new forms (and complexity) from the same initial simplicities. The traces of certain well-trod paths are based on the idea that literary enquiry demands a pseudoscientific “critical methodology,” so as to produce “verifiable” results. Well, even if they are not verifiable, they are certainly replicable. Those consigned to the critical saltmines of contemporary English departments, compelled to signify with terms like imbricate, hegemonic, excoriating neoliberalism, appelated, and a non-anthropocentric embodied ethics of care, strike me as needlessly ornamental, bearing a salt that has long since lost its savor.Yet such signifiers have become the required snaffle of the Animal laborans of our profession, as we patiently extract new knowledge for academic quality control. It all demonstrates the Arendtian distinction between labor and work that Cooper references in her introduction (for more on this, see Terkel, Working, or my Polish American forebears who spent their days pressing toxic shoe polish into cans before receiving a pinchbeck watch upon their retirement). Their lives do not prove the rightness of a “Marxist critical paradigm” or verifiable insights into exploitive capitalism; instead, as humanists, we wonder how their narratives imbued their lives with meaning, or failed to, and take a renewed interest in the Crossing's priest who tells Billy that God is a man bent at his work, “[w]eaving the world” (149), a passage that Cooper cites in her interesting discussion of nomadic and pre- and anti-capitalist forms of work.Indeed, many of the best moments of Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature occur when complex ideas are explained in plain language, or when Cooper showcases her impressive familiarity with primary sources in the Wittliff Collections to offer a more complete contextual image of McCarthy's work. Whatever we do in academe these days, it isn't so much work but labor of our own making. What does it mean to say that “literature is aesthetically realized”? (17). Does McCarthy have a “Kekuléan literary style,” which seems like a post hoc fallacy? (17). (Perhaps, in his chemistry experiments, Kekulé had a McCarthyian style.) But it is promising to investigate why scientists made more satisfying intellectual company for McCarthy, and to explain how elements of McCarthy's cosmology acknowledge essential tenets of chaos theory, which Cooper does with great aplomb. And then we might begin to know if complexity science is a bicycle to McCarthy's fish—or the water in which it lives.To provide an example, I'll focus on The Counselor and economics, to which Cooper devotes a good bit of ink. She joins majority opinion in observing that at the heart of The Counselor is a capitalist critique; the question is, in what ways is the critique novel, and how does it reveal more about his other works? Cooper's answer, only partly articulated, is that economic complexity theory is baked into McCarthy's thinking. She couches his critique specifically through the phrase “late capitalism,” which, as was pointed out in The Atlantic a few years ago, is a term suddenly everywhere—first used by German economist Werner Sombart around the turn of the twentieth century, dusted off by a Belgian Trotskyite popularizer named Ernest Mandel in the 1970s, reheated in our academic epoch by Eric Jameson of Duke's famously troublesome English department, before going viral in the 2010s via Twitter (Lowrey). It's a trendy catchphrase of contemporary Russian meme propagandists and anti-globalist conspiracy theory feeders, and not, to my mind, particularly useful in the history of ideas, but more properly the stuff of late-night dorm room discussion. (Toto, or Tonto, has there ever been a compassionate capitalism, or did early capitalism look a lot like late capitalism?)Welcome to the Americas, Counselor. Cooper quotes Mandel's work a number of times without asking much about its merits, bringing to mind the pipe-chuffing Marxist professors of my undergraduate days who, after a hard day of gamesmanship on their academic field of dreams, pointed their Volvos to their ranch houses and well-appointed liquor cabinets. Mandel gifted us with—wait for it—“late bourgeois” as well, a caste in which many late capitalism critics are likely comfortable residents. Late capitalism has a knowing air, a hegemonic quality, as Cooper says, that portends catastrophe, making it a sort of comet speeding toward Western culture and its colonies, speeding the day of a Road-style reset. Perhaps we will become the late human race and this position will be vindicated by cascading environmental catastrophes, set off by climate change, arising from a capitalism that swells to the point of collapse.But it's important to understand that late capitalism is a term fraught with the moral and social problems that McCarthy is exploring, without really signifying anything at all. As Mike Konczal, one of the interviewees in Annie Lowrey's Atlantic piece quips, ‘Late capitalism’ often seems more like ‘the latest in capitalism.’ If we are to explore late capitalism, first convince me that it can be meaningfully distinguished from its forbears, and then help me to understand where it stands with respect to say, chattel slavery or the Gilded Age or contemporary work visas and other sorts of come lately flattened-earth capitalism. Is the rise of the global super-corporation really a late development (Plymouth and Virginia London Companies, Dutch East Indies Company, etc.)? It's an argument that Mandel had a hard time selling in his own time. And what does it have to do with The Counselor, which sets sail for Judea in search of the economic ethics of the original monotheism?1Cooper's answers are interesting and typical of her well-crafted prose, if not altogether convincing. Again, the English department formula here: find a theoretical paradigm, apply it, and then draw the conclusion that something is wrong with modernity, which also happens to be what the subject of the study is urging albeit in gilt-edged prose. In any case, this economic Strait of Magellan was elegantly traversed by Eugene Genovese, a card-carrying communist-turned-Marxist-historian who later became a conservative. Why turn to Genovese over Mandel? Because he's interested in the same things as McCarthy (and for that matter, Herman Melville): Catholic versus Protestant models for empire, the trafficking of goods and people, “real” conservatism (even the feudal ideals of the white plantation South) as a check on capitalism, the strata of social orders in societies that were part of slave economies (including Mexico and the Americas), the place (per horseshoe theory) where liberal and conservative critiques of neoliberalism become strange bedfellows. You can follow these crosscurrents to all points of the compass in McCarthy's oeuvre.It's not clear that McCarthy knows what he thinks about capitalism, either. As Cooper observes, for a long time he largely avoided compensation for his art, preferring to “work at not working” as Oprah Winfrey suggested (5). But as Dianne Luce pointed out, and as Cooper documents in her introduction, he has not been indifferent to patronage, sponsorship, or Hollywood revenue (Luce). McCarthy straddles the gap the Silent Generation occupies between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, and his work reflects elements of both—his G.I. generation stint in the Air Force and his Age of Aquarius, the lost years in Ibiza and around Knoxville. Ultimately, I would mark him a late bloomer (or early boomer), sympathetic to the counterculture of a generation fleeing Allen Ginsberg's all-consuming Moloch, going back to the earth and away from phony consumerism, before ultimately trading the cause for a BMW, refusing, with collective confidence, to relinquish either the world stage or their accumulated wealth.At times McCarthy seems to want to have it both ways in The Counselor, too. It's a mistake born of longing, especially in single-author studies and guilds, to think a writer is consistent in their philosophy or confident of their answers, steadied by the godhead of genius. Viewed with any detachment, criticism often insists on extending superhuman properties and consistency to canonical writers, and superhuman perception to critics. Does “the doctrine of economic competition” (extended to “every aspect of individual action”) naturally ally capitalism with murder, as Cooper asserts, or does nature's proclivity for murder naturally align with capitalism (19)? Does McCarthy know? Certainly, his fiction has never quite delivered him from the dangers of social Darwinism (see his nuanced understanding of Lamarckianism in the Kekulé essays). McCarthy wants to point out that Christianity, a stolen religion from a stolen culture, has so far departed from orthodoxy as to deaden the rule of law and blur the lines between what is licit and what is right, and the rule of law is compromised by every complicity, including in apparently “victimless” crimes. Notice that this is essentially a profoundly conservative view, religiously and socially, an investigation of what, if anything, restrains the invisible hand of market morality.Personally, I would cast aside “late capitalism” in preference to bougie, an empty Marxist term (emptied of meaning) slyly repurposed in the slang of American underclasses, a word that is rather more nuanced, since it implies pretentious class- and/or race-traitorism—a climber who has shape-shifted, not altogether successfully, hardened by the pursuit of something chimerically better. Is not Ovidio Guzmán López, in his self-representation, the smirking, bougie face of capitalism? Narcocultura is a study in bougie culture, sometimes more honest in its self-presentation (and in the conspicuousness of the missing/vanished) than its American counterpart. It attaches to the metaphysical border riddle that has had McCarthy tugging on his chin for decades—are things really different there, and if so, is it in their presentation or their essence? Are the roots of the “mystery” of American violence traceable there? My intuition is that his fascination owes something to the tension, broadly, between indigenous/Catholic and Protestant worldviews that can be characterized, interestingly, as global south versus Anglo-American northern worldviews. Why bother with Mandel's microwaved Marxism when you might ask instead, who, in The Counselor, is bougie, and where do these tensions in McCarthy's thinking erupt on the page?Cooper draws nearer this question when she suggests that Malkina “represents both the possibilities and the failures of disruptive digital technologies” and “physically represents the disruptive global south” (122–23). But how do we square that global south with Malkina's elite colonial (pura Porteña, as she says) origins? And what about the messenger who pulls the dogfood diet story on the credulous woman in the shop, and then rather inconsiderately makes his dog eat dogfood while he eats microwaved lasagna (which might be a form of dogfood)? We are back to dorm room philosophy and Marxism lite: Why do people and animals use, consume, and oppress other people and animals—practice “thingification,” as Cooper says? Because they can and it's only natural, McCarthy suggests with a dark twinkle in his eye, aligning himself with Melville in a view of humankind that insists whoever has the upper hand has the upper foot, the better to rest it on another's neck. Would we not all say that dogfood is for the birds, or worse, man's best friend?Cooper's Marxist lenses seem to color her conclusion when she deems Malkina “a willing participant in the rampant consumerism of late capitalism” (123). Let's just call it capitalism, and talk about people, rich and poor, and their love of power, occasionally captured in other forms—diamonds, genitals, cheetahs, cryptocurrency—and if we must, we can resort to critical shorthand long ago developed in “the fetish.” When Cooper writes of Blood Meridian, “a necklace made of human ears is not an obvious or easily interpretable referent for meaningful human relationships” (84), she goes on to explain that it is rather obviously a symbol of their absence, of currency and commodification in rapacious empire.In their eschatological dimensions, The Counselor and Cooper are pinned in a classic intellectual dilemma, like the rolling scroll of theologians and doomsayers who had to explain why the second coming wasn't imminent after all—some said it had already happened, except that few noticed, and some said it had been postponed, etc. In Marxist terms, the same arguments have traditionally buttered the bread of endless splinter sects (including, say, Stalinism) and those who study them in the wild, academic Marxist critics, whether ortho-, hetero-, or zir-dox, who have continually asked, why hasn't capitalism suffered its inevitable, self-consuming death spasm? (Mandel sided with those economic millenarians who believed said that capitalism was nearly dead, but not dead yet, but likely dead in a very short indeterminate while.) Per this line of argument, aren't we perfecting a system nicely evolved for its own extinction?On the contrary, The Counselor suggests that capitalism, like death and our love of the destructive element, is eternal. This could be a consummate Marxist critique—or equally, a strange defense of the inevitability and durability even of destructive capitalism as a system finely attuned to a fallen view of human nature, a position characterized in Westray with Renaissance humor and self-awareness. The proletariat, like the American South, or the messiah of your choice, seems to have postponed rising for another year, and if that's the case, risk tolerance up to and including the wager of life itself will be rewarded, and it's time to keep getting out of Dodge. We ride on.There is a genuine connection to complexity theory here, in terms of unsustainable economic scaling and black swan events. As Geoffrey West does in Scale, this could be said simply, translationally, and in the language of complexity theory, not literary complexity theory, which would be helpful to many literary theorists who have little acquaintance with this fascinating area of enquiry. Instead, the book offers the standard lit-crit formula: pick critical “intervention,” apply to text, and then find connective tissue via a concept from another discipline (“complexity”)—but specifically, a literary version thereof. The same approach in the past led to a series of risible, scientifically unhinged literary-critical studies that not only misunderstood chaos theory but misapplied it. Thankfully, Cooper brings real lucidity to this area, perhaps for the first time.Still, there are many places where arguments might be couched more carefully, as when the text confidently proclaims that “God,” in McCarthy's lexicon, “does not reflect a concrete, Catholic, or even monotheistic notion of deity so much as the idea of the maker as a creative force” (23). McCarthy is familiar with the crosscurrents of anti-clericalism, piety, and even various Papal anti-capitalist stances that gave rise to later liberation theology. He recognizes as well the part of racism in both abetting and obstructing capitalism, and that complicates his relationship to it. Several of McCarthy's siblings have confirmed to this author that “we don't need no Irish schoolteacher,” a phrase eventually removed from Blood Meridian, is steeped in family lore and the struggle to be, well, bougie. Had the kid lived, his descendants might be involved in some new American sharpsterism, peddling legal services in Arizona like Saul Goodman (formerly James “Jimmy” Morgan McGill, of Better Call Saul fame), eating their microwave lasagna.How do we get back to the pleasure of enquiry for the sake of argument and a crude look at the whole? If one looks at complexity science, per se, the questions being raised in the halls of the Santa Fe Institute are scintillating, as the current landing page slate shows: What happens to inequality as cities grow? Can human “social sensors” help predict trends? What happens to a democracy with too many “followers”? These have a significant bearing on the world we live in, people care about them, and at times it seems literary criticism can only carry illustrative water to them.It's no accident that McCarthy's searching mind drew him to SFI, and that he perceived it as a center of real intellectual action; he has suggested that he avoided literary salons in like degree. McCarthy says in the Kekulé essays that Nietzsche was right, that all human knowledge is simply our way of telling our own stories. Narrative theorists and scientists have formed strange alliances in their understanding of the arrow of time, something that even scientists cannot describe without resort to narrative. Perhaps McCarthy needed complexity theory because literature didn't. But here we have arrived at another moonglow conversation: can narrative merely illustrate complexity theory, or complexity theory merely illustrate narrative? The answer is a transdisciplinary neither, both, and, and much of the translational work remains to be done someplace beyond the reward systems of humanities departments as they are currently constituted.Or perhaps it's already happening in the halls of the Santa Fe Institute.