"Every least thing": reading Cormac McCarthy's literary ecologies for a practice of thinking ethics

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Crossing presents an ecocentric cosmology that diverges radically from the traditional anthropocentric model, which centralizes the primacy of humans. McCarthy's vision of "joinery" reformats the place of humanity to a position of equality with "every least thing." My focused reading of McCarthy's three novels from the Border Trilogy articulates the ramifications of this vision for a new ecological ontology, agency, and ethics. Specifically, I argue that the vision of "joinery" revises philosophies of ontology and agency to admit the force of animals and matter as co-constituting agents in a dynamically vibrant world. The attendant ethical vision from such a revised ontological and agential view centralizes the profound dilemmas inherent in so many relations. My close reading of McCarthy's novels explicates his ecological vision of "joinery" as coherent with theoretical visions espoused in Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory and Jane Bennett's vibrant materialisms. By weaving together an analysis of the trilogy with these frameworks, I advance a practice of reading that positions learners to think through the complexities of expansive human and non-human relations. This reading practice for thinking relational ethics ruptures many of the trends in education today that orient students in standardized and noncritical modes of learning. I argue, however, that the demands of an ecological age during a time of climate change and mass extinctions necessitates an education where students wrestle critically with the dilemmas of a world understood as interconnected.