Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2016"
TL;DR: In Bleeding Edge Pynchon uses again a female unconventional detective, as he did in The Crying of Lot 49, with the ultimate aim of evaluating the condition of America as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In Bleeding Edge Pynchon uses again a female unconventional detective, as he did in The Crying of Lot 49, with the ultimate aim of evaluating the condition of America However, whereas Oedipa had to deal with an understanding of American society in terms of science and religion, in Bleeding Edge Maxine is at pains to understand a society ruled by the new paradigms of posthumanity and trauma By focusing on the binary life/death, the article evaluates Pynchon’s portrayal of current society as posthuman and disrupted by a new type of social stagnation related to the control of information flow, a situation that demands the role of an active protagonist, in line with later theories in the field of trauma studies The textual analysis points to information, terrorism, and web addiction as the new dangers that Maxine has to cope with if she wants to pull society back to motion
32 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the subtle differences between two of Pynchon's detective novels, The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice, and found that post-postmodernist notions of interconnectedness carried a negative valance, manifested as conspiracies often leading to death.
Abstract: Postmodernism has been declared dead and gone many times over the last forty years, but you would not necessarily be able to see it if you flipped through many contemporary novels. Although many of these books still look postmodernist on the page, there has been a change in attitude. In order to examine this change, this essay looks at the subtle differences between two of Pynchon’s detective novels: The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice. While postmodernist notions of interconnectedness carried a negative valance—manifested as conspiracies often leading to death—post-postmodernism views interconnection in a positive and hopeful way. Ultimately, the key distinction is in the way that each novel handles the idea that narrative can convey knowledge.
24 citations
TL;DR: The authors unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013).
Abstract: This article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013). It suggests that the concerns of postmodern writers and theorists came to dominate interpretations of 9/11 (practiced most successfully by Don DeLillo in Falling Man) and, in doing so, severed its connection to deeper historical trajectories. At the heart of the postmodernist fallacy is the same privileging of discourse over materiality typified by utopian conceptions of the Internet. In Bleeding Edge, this utopia takes the form of DeepArcher: a “Deep Web” paradise infiltrated by suspicious forces during the 9/11 attacks. The intermingling of espionage, the tech industry, and the response to 9/11 in Pynchon’s novel foregrounds the ambiguities of digital modernity in a way yet to be recognized by most writers and theorists of the contemporary.
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the metaphysics of the fictional multiverse proposed by Thomas Pynchon in his 2006 novel Against the Day is elucidated, and the structure of this multiverse underpins the novel's many themes and plots.
Abstract: This article elucidates the metaphysics of the fictional multiverse proposed by Thomas Pynchon in his 2006 novel Against the Day. The structure of this multiverse underpins the novel’s many themes and plots, and the analytic reading given here will open a space for further exploration of Pynchon’s longest and largest work, given that current analysis has thus far been abstracted by the imposition of external theoretical frameworks.
14 citations
TL;DR: DeLillo and Negarestani as discussed by the authors argue that Point Omega (2010) and Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) make strong cases for the novel's continuing ability to complicate and illuminate contemporaneity.
Abstract: The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered in the light of emerging discussions about deep time. This essay argues that Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) make strong cases for the novel’s continuing ability to complicate and illuminate contemporaneity. Written in the midst of the long and disastrous U.S. incursions in the Middle East, DeLillo and Negarestani raise important political questions about the ecological realities of the War on Terror. Each novel acknowledges that though the catastrophic present cannot be divorced from the inevitable doom at the end of the world, we still desperately need to imagine something ...
10 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reveal the centrality of manipulation to David Foster Wallace's fiction and explore how Wallace uses manipulation to dramatize the complex tension between sincerity and its antithesis.
Abstract: This article reveals the centrality of manipulation to David Foster Wallace’s fiction. After surveying a range of recent philosophical work on manipulation, it shows how this particular field of inquiry can be used to illuminate Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest. The article proceeds to outline four main expressions of what I label “literary manipulation” within Infinite Jest, addressing strategic forms of manipulation concerning argumentation, thematic repetition, the anticipation of criticism, and metafictional directives. By analyzing such diverse manipulative strategies, I explore both the aesthetic and the ethical implications of Wallace’s fiction. Ultimately, the article shows how Wallace uses manipulation to dramatize the complex tension between sincerity and its antithesis.
10 citations
TL;DR: The homosexual orientation of three major characters in Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy strengthens their mistrust for the prevailing rationale of the war as discussed by the authors, and the antiwar stance of the trilogy's societally alienated, sexually transgressive characters is undermined by their return to combat.
Abstract: The homosexual orientation of three major characters in Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy strengthens their mistrust for the prevailing rationale of the war. Ultimately, the antiwar stance of the trilogy’s societally alienated, sexually transgressive characters is undermined by their return to combat. The motif of a single, enucleated eyeball links to the text’s powerful theme of observation. The absolutely detached, impossible vision of an enucleated eye is required if the acknowledged futility of war is to have practical value.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzes narrative voice, personal pro- nouns, and the state of the nation, investigating a writer whose work has received much popular attention but little academic interest to date.
Abstract: In his debut novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris narrates his story of a pre-9/11 Chicago advertising agency in the first-person plural. Such narrative experimentation recurs across his fiction and is often linked to national concerns. This essay analyzes narrative voice, personal pro- nouns, and the state of the nation, investigating a writer whose work has received much popular attention but little academic interest to date.
8 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore five spheres where this modernity takes on violent dimensions: economic and political structures, narratology, ocularcentrism, exile, and literary form.
Abstract: The celerity of Roberto Bolano’s canonization as one of the avatars of world literature stems from the success of his magnum opus, 2666. This five-part novel is an impassioned indictment of the abdication of ethics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity, an era that saw the rise of both literal and structural gender-based violence. Bolano offers the city of Santa Teresa—the fictional analogue to the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez—as the paradigmatic example of a city afflicted by such violence, where a network of global factors has conspired to create a milieu in which the murders of young Mexican women have become so frequent as to be banal. 2666 stipulates that violence necessarily attends the rise of Mexican modernity in the twentieth and twenty-first century; this essay will explore five spheres where this modernity takes on violent dimensions: economic and political structures, narratology, ocularcentrism, exile, and literary form.
7 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that representations of evolution and genetics in the novels Jurassic Park (1990) by Michael Crichton and The Gold Bug Variations (1991) by Richard Powers depict a shift in American anxieties from nuclear war to genetic manipulation in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, marking an extension of Cold War rhetoric in regard to technology and scientific innovation that remains prevalent in contemporary American literature.
Abstract: This essay argues that representations of evolution and genetics in the novels Jurassic Park (1990) by Michael Crichton and The Gold Bug Variations (1991) by Richard Powers depict a shift in American anxieties from nuclear war to genetic manipulation in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, marking an extension of Cold War rhetoric in regard to technology and scientific innovation that remains prevalent in contemporary American literature.
6 citations
TL;DR: The Pale King as mentioned in this paper argues that the fiction writer finds himself or herself in a Wallaceian double bind in which any sincerity to be achieved is possible only through the artificial means of performance.
Abstract: When viewed alongside Wallace’s interviews and publicity materials, multiple texts by Wallace—The Pale King, “My Appearance,” and the annotations in his personal library—present a different and deeper understanding of authorship and authenticity in contemporary literature. Taken together, these texts by and around Wallace portray the fiction writer more as the stage actor, a figure who is always in the process of presenting a persona, whether he or she knows it or not, to the extent that his or her private self becomes conflated with the inauthentic public persona. The Pale King appears to say that the fiction writer finds himself or herself in a Wallaceian double bind in which any sincerity to be achieved is possible only through the artificial means of performance.
TL;DR: The authors consider a retelling of biblical narratives that contemplate human suffering and provide reason to doubt God: the story of man's fall and the stories of Job, and conclude that retelling and struggling with biblical narratives enables the negotiation of Jewish and post-modern identities, resolves suffering, and reveals means by which seemingly irreconcilable ideologies can intermingle, inform one another, and even unearth liminal spaces for commonali...
Abstract: This article considers religious references and biblically informed narrative strategies in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. In the novel, Roth complicates the divide between Judaism and atheism via a retelling of biblical narratives that contemplate human suffering and provide reason to doubt God: the story of man’s fall and the story of Job. In writing about his Adam- and Job-like protagonist, Seymore Levov, Roth critiques both faithlessness and faith and shows value in seeing beyond or between binaristic extremes. He also underscores biblical narrative’s capacity to relate with postmodern ways of thinking about history and religion. Hence American Pastoral represents Roth’s return to Judaism of a sort. Ultimately, for Roth, retelling and struggling with biblical narrative enables the negotiation of Jewish and postmodern identities, resolves suffering, and reveals means by which seemingly irreconcilable ideologies can intermingle, inform one another, and even unearth liminal spaces for commonali...
TL;DR: The authors argue that Junot Diaz's 2007 novel, and the author's interviews and public commentaries, engage in ideological critique of how racialized masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are produced by the disciplining discourses of U.S., Dominican, and diasporic society and culture.
Abstract: The essay argues that Junot Diaz’s 2007 novel—and, coextensively, the author’s interviews and public commentaries—engage in ideological critique of how racialized masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are produced by the disciplining discourses of U.S., Dominican, and diasporic society and culture. Departing from prevailing readings, the essay asserts that Diaz allegorizes both the repressive and the harder-to-resist, productive forms of postcolonial power, elaborating a non-emancipatory version of decolonization.
TL;DR: The authors examines David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest alongside its eponymous film, arguing that they share a common purpose, but that the former succeeds where the latter fails, by creating a conversation-like novel that uses sentimentality and endnotes to converse with a generation bombarded with easily consumable irony from television, advertisements, and even art.
Abstract: This article examines David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest alongside its eponymous film, arguing that they share a common purpose, but that the former succeeds where the latter fails. Coupled with a biographical and phenomenological analysis, the aim of this examination is to better understand Infinite Jest’s place in the cultural and literary movement away from postmodernism. Through the novel, Wallace seeks a cure for the postmodern malaise that is irony, which creates a distancing effect between author and reader. I argue that he collapses this distance by creating a conversation-like novel that uses sentimentality and endnotes to converse with a generation bombarded with easily consumable irony from television, advertisements, and even art. The results of this conversation are the curtailing of passive consumption of entertainment and the beginning of a new sincerity in literature, which allows for grand narratives without the unending cynicism of postmodernism.
TL;DR: The authors considered the epistolary mode with reference to Jacques Lacan's gaze theory and asked, as Lacan does, to whom does the letter belong? And they considered Atonement in its entirety as a letter written by Briony to her sister Cecilia and Cecilia's lover Robbie as a means of redemption.
Abstract: This article considers Ian McEwan’s Atonement as a contemporary epistolary novel. Though not in letter format, the novel is, in its entirety, a letter written by Briony to her sister Cecilia and Cecilia’s lover Robbie as a means of redemption. This article considers the epistolary mode with reference to Jacques Lacan’s gaze theory and asks, as Lacan does, to whom does the letter belong?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine Jeff Noon's cyberpunk novel Pollen and argue for its innovative treatment of spatial and species identities, including the speculative treatment of becoming plant and the location of the action in the North of England.
Abstract: This article examines Jeff Noon’s cyberpunk novel Pollen (1995), arguing for its innovative treatment of spatial and species identities. In addition to the challenging representations of gender and feminism identified by Val Gough, there are other kinds of decentering enacted, notably in the novel’s speculative treatment of “becoming plant” and the location of the action in the North of England.
TL;DR: The authors identified the seaside resort as an important space in Irish fiction of the past forty years, arguing that just as British and Irish seaside resorts were undergoing profound transformation, what John K. Walton refers to as “the traumatic changes of the 1970s and 1980s” (3), Irish fiction emerges as the backdrop for various kinds of personal and social rupture, ranging from adolescence, mental breakdown, marital breakup, spousal death, and suicide.
Abstract: This essay identifies the seaside resort as an important space in Irish fiction of the past forty years. Specifically, it argues that just as British and Irish seaside resorts were undergoing profound transformation—what John K. Walton refers to as “the traumatic changes of the 1970s and 1980s” (3)—the seaside resort emerges in Irish fiction as the backdrop for various kinds of personal and social rupture, ranging from adolescence, mental breakdown, marital breakup, spousal death, and suicide to the social transformations we associate with modernity: emigration, internal migration, suburbanization, and secularization. The essay focuses predominantly on Irish fiction’s most insistent bard of the seaside, Neil Jordan, who locates almost all of his fictional and filmic work in Irish seaside towns. After discussing Jordan’s work, the essay expands the analysis to other paeans to the Irish seaside resort in order to demonstrate the sheer range of contemporary Irish writers for whom the seaside is an im...
TL;DR: The authors investigates the representation of animal sounds in the contemporary novel and highlights the way in which these novels register and celebrate endangered sounds on one hand and hybrid, biotechnological sounds on the other, thereby unearthing an overlooked aspect of our cultural response to species extinction.
Abstract: Establishing a preliminary dialogue between sound studies and animal studies, this article investigates the representation of animal sounds in the contemporary novel. Focusing particularly on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, and Tom McCarthy’s C, it highlights the way in which these novels register and celebrate endangered sounds on the one hand and hybrid, biotechnological sounds on the other, thereby unearthing an overlooked aspect of our cultural response to species extinction and the ongoing technological mediation of the nonhuman world.
TL;DR: In this paper, a double-ended allegory that illuminates both the Holocaust and animal suffering and a simultaneous critique of the allegorical method is presented. And they situate the latter within the context of Holocaust writing, arguing that Martel's novel demands that we question both the nature of ethics and the responsibility of storytelling.
Abstract: Deemed “misconceived and offensive” by critic Michiko Kakutani, Yann Martel’s novel Beatrice and Virgil was widely criticized for its construction of an ambiguous allegory that appears to compare animal suffering to the Holocaust. In this article, I advance an alternative reading of Martel’s novel, identifying a double-ended allegory that illuminates both the Holocaust and animal suffering and a simultaneous critique of the allegorical method. I situate the latter within the context of Holocaust writing, arguing that Martel’s novel demands that we question both the nature of ethics and the responsibility of storytelling.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that Neil Gaiman's recent fictions mark a sharp pivot in contemporary fantasy discourse by reinterpreting escapism through the ethics of enchantment.
Abstract: This study argues that Neil Gaiman’s recent fictions mark a sharp pivot in contemporary fantasy discourse by reinterpreting escapism through the ethics of enchantment. While Marxist criticism has long disparaged fantasy for its anti-political aesthetics, Coraline and The Ocean at the End of the Lane subvert this notion by fusing the formal structures of the bildungsroman and the fairy tale to develop a new politics of self and society. By employing the theories of Jane Bennett, I analyze how Gaiman develops the fantasy anti-bildungsroman as the “novel of enchantment” in response to the dominant “novel of disenchantment” that is the realist bildungsroman, a generic innovation that reconsiders both humanity’s relationship with capitalist society and the role of fantasy in contemporary life. In particular, I examine Gaiman’s use of “parallel consciousness” as a formal technique operating as a new mode of materialist phenomenology.
TL;DR: The authors analyzed four representative post-9/11 fictions, namely, Brick Lane (2003), Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Amy Waldman's The Submission (2011), and found that these fictions continue to dwell on the psychological and cultural traumas derived from the 9/11 events.
Abstract: The 9/11 terrorist attacks, in their unexpectedness and cruelty, have turned into an unassimilated traumatic episode in the history of the Western world. From a literary perspective, many of the fictions that deal with 9/11 and its aftermath can be said to represent conspicuous attempts to come to terms with the trauma derived from 9/11. Drawing on trauma studies as well as on the epistemology engendered within the relatively recent framework of transculturalism, the present article seeks to analyze four representative post-9/11 fictions, namely Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011). The analysis shows that these fictions continue to dwell on the psychological and cultural traumas derived from the 9/11 events. Nevertheless, it is our contention that, more or less convincingly, the four fictions mentioned above point toward ways of learning to live with the new sociopolitical circumst...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on two contemporary novels that attempt to come to grips with this so-called hard problem of consciousness: Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules Elementaires (1998) and David Mitchell's Ghostwritten (1999).
Abstract: Does consciousness—the subjective texture of our interactions with the world—exist on a separate plane from physical matter (dualism)? Or, on the contrary, does it arise from matter (physicalism)? This article focuses on two contemporary novels that attempt to come to grips with this so-called hard problem of consciousness: Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules Elementaires (1998) and David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999). The scientific community has espoused physicalism, but dualism is remarkably difficult to eradicate from our everyday understanding of mental processes. My case studies stage this tension through two strategies: first, they use quantum physics as an interim—and largely illusory—solution to the hard problem that opens the door to a posthuman future; second, they employ a variety of metaphors and similes that blend characters’ mental life with nonhuman phenomena. In this way, Houellebecq and Mitchell highlight to the entanglement of consciousness and cosmological concerns, resonating...
TL;DR: The authors interpreted the oblique images of money in The Pale King as sites of both a materialist economics and a claim that money, seen clearly, is always relational rather than divisive, a fact this novel treats in the context of the social obligation to pay taxes.
Abstract: This article reveals David Foster Wallace’s subtle interest in U.S. currency, the various values—both civic and monetary—it embodies and inscribes, and their often visceral conflicts. The article interprets the oblique images of money in The Pale King as sites of both a materialist economics and a claim that money, seen clearly, is always relational rather than divisive—a fact this novel treats in the context of the social obligation to pay taxes.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the corporeal and social interconnectedness between women and animals and their exploration of literal and metaphorical woman-animal transcorporeal imaginings.
Abstract: Focusing on the corporeal and social interconnectedness between women and animals, this article discusses Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and its exploration of literal and metaphorical woman–animal transcorporeal imaginings. At the time of its publication, the influence of Thatcher’s family politics advocated the Victorian model of the working father/husband supporting the stay-at-home mother/wife, which also revived women’s interest in animal protection movements due to their role as moral caretakers. Nights at the Circus returns to the late nineteenth century to examine naturally and socially intertwined constructions of Victorian women to deconstruct and complicate gender ideals. By spotlighting a bird-woman as its protagonist, the novel’s scientific and fantastic experimentation with human and nonhuman intermixing stimulates vigorous interactions between the materiality of the woman’s body and her sociocultural identities to redevelop the modern woman as a dynamically interconnect...
TL;DR: The authors argue that the protagonist of the story is a bad copy of the original models of the characters in the parable of the cave, and that it is her imperfection, or bent intertextual mirroring, that opens the way for her liberation.
Abstract: I argue that Plato’s parable of the cave is one of the intertexts employed in Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love.” The protagonist, a female vampire, is likened to a prisoner condemned to live in the shadows under the obligations of her role. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s allegory, I will explore Carter’s critique of femininity as a condition associated with mimetic processes that imprison women. The protagonist mirrors several female characters that mime and ventriloquize the male desires. However, she imitates her intertextual predecessors in anamorphic ways. In Platonic terms, she can be considered a “bad copy” of the original models. Yet, as I will argue, it is her imperfection, or bent intertextual mirroring, that opens the way for her liberation.
TL;DR: The authors analyzes Salman Rushdie's fiction between categories as gradually swerving away from post-colonial postmodernism toward cosmopolitanism, with special focus on The Ground beneath Her Feet, in an attempt to address and answer the controversial question of whe...
Abstract: In the era of what Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker call “post-theory,” presenting us with theory that is exhausted due to an ever-increasing difficulty in coming up with any clear-cut categorizations, Salman Rushdie’s prolific, multifarious oeuvre epitomizes contemporary literature’s incessant tendency to evade classifications. Being in between cultures, traditions, genres, conventions and influences, Rushdie’s work, often described as hybrid and cosmopolitan, can and should be read from a variety of perspectives. In a time when we are questioning the appropriateness of terms such as “postcolonial” and wondering if more general ones, such as “transnational,” “transcultural,” or “international,” would be better suited for today’s literature, this article analyzes Rushdie’s fiction between categories as gradually swerving away from postcolonial postmodernism toward cosmopolitanism, with special focus on The Ground beneath Her Feet, in an attempt to address and answer the controversial question of whe...
TL;DR: In The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the animal is used to explore an oppositional binary that could loosely be described as the corporeal versus the otherworldly or spiritual.
Abstract: J. M. Coetzee’s fiction has variously spoken to the idea of the animal, particularly through the figure of the dog, as an object of human empathy. This empathetic engagement with the animal has implications for the relationships between human beings. However, in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), we see a conceptual shift in which the animal is used to explore an oppositional binary that could loosely be described as the corporeal versus the otherworldly or spiritual.
TL;DR: The authors argue that too undefined a spirituality can itself serve as a principle of violence, and propose a mode of cognition neither too fundamentalist/totalizing nor too mystical/subjective, situating knowledge instead in direct ontological participation in the suffering of the human Other.
Abstract: Postsecular criticism has celebrated non-dogmatic postmodern mysticism as mollifying the violence of religious fundamentalist certitudes. However, postmodern literature seems equally to suggest that too undefined a spirituality can itself serve as principle of violence. Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in response, conceptualize a mode of cognition neither too fundamentalist/totalizing nor too mystical/subjective, situating knowledge instead in direct—ontological—participation in the suffering of the human Other.
TL;DR: The authors discusses how Christine Brooke-Rose's 1984 novel Xorandor grew out of a conventional science fiction story intended for pseudonymous publication and how she decided to rewrite the draft of her novel entirely in dialogue, accepting SF characters as representative rather than individualized.
Abstract: This article discusses how Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1984 novel Xorandor grew out of a conventional science fiction story intended for pseudonymous publication. Her distinct priorities as an experimental writer—adopting grammatical and syntactical constraints—manifest themselves in her revisionary appropriation of the science fiction genre. She decided to rewrite the draft of her novel entirely in dialogue, accepting SF characters as representative rather than individualized. The book’s narrators are adolescent twins who uncover explanations for events in retrospect, when in traditional “hard SF” (stories that strictly adhere to invented scientific principles), exposition prefigures the narrative action. With this setup, Brooke-Rose crafts a narrative about a silicon creature discovered on Earth that uses English and programming language to converse with humans. The young adult narrators interacting with a living computer stages a fascinating reflection on how we humanize technology and how artifici...
TL;DR: The authors enlists John D. Caputo's notion of the weakness of God to support a hopeful interpretation of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a novel often read as nihilistic due to its relentless violence.
Abstract: This essay enlists John D. Caputo’s notion of the weakness of God to support a hopeful interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel often read as nihilistic due to its relentless violence. Although the sovereign God of traditional theism is nowhere to be found in this dark work, McCarthy’s cryptic religious imagery maintains the faint promise of the sacred. Sharing McCarthy’s distrust of metaphysical absolutes, Caputo’s weak theology centers on divine potential rather than presence. I use this postmodern reimagining of God as a weak force to illuminate the redemptive possibilities of Blood Meridian’s central conflict: the kid’s passive resistance to the tyrannical judge.