This, Too, Shall Pass: Distant Reading a Future in the Ruins of Cormac McCarthy’s Postsouthern Novels

Abstract

Using Franco Moretti’s concept of distant readings, this article frames the novels published after Suttree (1979) as a journey through the ruins of a postsouthern space. As a wide-ranging cluster, the ruins scattered across this space clarify a pattern established in his first four novels and completed in The Road (2006), a pattern that predicts the future end of Western exceptionalist ideologies such as Western Christianity and global capitalism, as well as affirms the universal law: “this, too, shall pass.”