Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds by Bryan Giemza (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds by Bryan Giemza
• William Brannon

Bryan Giemza, Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 175 pp. Hardcover, $100; e-book, $90.

Bryan Giemza's Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds examines how McCarthy's canon reflects his engagement with the sciences. Giemza suggests that a better understanding of McCarthy's involvement with disciplines outside the humanities offers insight into recurring ideas in McCarthy's texts and a glimpse into his process of composing. Giemza seeks to provide examples of how McCarthy's work may be placed "within contemporary scientific discourse and literary criticism" and asserts that his intention in this critical endeavor despite resting in "contextual and translational work between humanities and conventionally understood STEM disciplines, has no theory of everything to offer readers, just case-specific insights from seeing McCarthy's work translationally" (8–9). As Giemza notes, his book joins other recent McCarthy criticism seeking to examine the links between McCarthy's oeuvre and disciplines outside the humanities, and he mentions as an example Lydia Cooper's Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature (2021).

Giemza devotes the first chapter to an overview of the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and draws upon conversations with Mc-Carthy's brother, Dennis, a Santa Fe resident, as well as scholars at SFI to present a portrayal of Cormac McCarthy's intellectual engagement at the institute that is opposite in many ways to the popular perception of McCarthy as an isolated author frequently shunning publicity in favor of solitude. Giemza suggests that among the other residents at SFI, the majority of whom are notable for work in the sciences, McCarthy often occupied the role of facilitator, helping bridge academic discussions between those working at the institute. For Giemza, McCarthy's overt engagement with the sciences at SFI manifests in his last two published novels, The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022), and represents "not so much a new departure as reaching a long-sought waypoint, not for disembarkation, but for a life spent in continual wonder of expanding universes" (28).

Subsequent chapters in Giemza's book focus on extended examples from McCarthy's canon, particularly Suttree, to establish the [End Page 194] connections between McCarthy's work and contemporary scientific discourse. Chapter two considers chirality and handedness in McCarthy's fictional universe, using as a case study the presence of twins and doubling in Suttree. Suttree remains the primary focus in the third and fourth chapters, too, with Giemza suggesting in chapter three that Harrogate's ill-advised plans to access the bank vault via detonating dynamite function as representative examples of the implications of technology misuse. In chapter four Giemza argues that the autobiographical elements of McCarthy present in Suttree parallel the historical development of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a human attempt via engineering to control and regulate the natural world. Giemza begins chapter five with a discussion of McCarthy's correspondence with Guy Davenport and Davenport's influence on McCarthy. Giemza switches his focus later in the chapter to an overview of the 2022 duology and concludes the chapter with a thought experiment that seeks to illustrate what Giemza identifies as recurring epistemological questions in McCarthy's works.

The strengths of Bryan Giemza's book include offering a compelling starting point for further criticism into McCarthy's writing process and resultant texts. Due to the nature of its endeavor in exploring how McCarthy was influenced by the sciences, Giemza's volume may pose initial challenges for readers not familiar with contemporary scientific discourse. In addition, readers interested primarily in McCarthy's southwestern phase may be disappointed in Giemza's reliance on examples from Suttree in many chapters. However, Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds offers an engaging perspective on McCarthy's work and provides a critical framework applicable to the entire span of McCarthy's canon.

William Brannon Collin College Copyright © 2024 Western Literature Association ...