Mary McCarthy’s “Irrelevant” Fiction: Arendt, Vietnam, and the Late Novel of Ideas

What is biting me here in Paris is something different: being who I am at this juncture in history. I see myself as irrelevant to practically everything: this room, this street, this city, this world, this universe.

- Mary McCarthy, Birds of America1

In October 1970, Mary McCarthy traveled to Rome to "take another look at the Sistine Chapel for [the] next-to-last chapter" of her novel Birds of America.2 Shortly before leaving on the trip, she wrote a letter to her close friend, Hannah Arendt. McCarthy had just reread Arendt's essay "Civil Disobedience," published in The New Yorker that September, and wrote her friend to say — with something approaching tact — that "it's not the piece of yours I like the best" (BF 263). Arendt's essay had sought to sever civil disobedience from its association with personal conscience. Critiquing Thoreau, Arendt argued that law-breaking could not be justified with an appeal to one's own conscience. Instead, it should be justified within and by the American legal tradition as a form of participation that reaffirmed the validity of Constitutional democracy.3 For McCarthy, this was exactly wrong. For her, "civil disobedience remain[ed] a matter of conscience and the inner light" — an expression of freedom that did not "fit . . . in the American legal fabric" and shouldn't "be disciplined into doing so" (BF 263-264).4

After a lengthy critique, McCarthy ended her letter with deference to Arendt's genius. "Of course none of these hasty comments of mine do justice to the complexity of your argument," she wrote, perhaps fearing a harsh rebuke from her notoriously "tough" friend (BF 264).5 But the reply McCarthy got two weeks later was worse than any counterargument could possibly have been; she received a simple telegraph from Arendt announcing her husband's death: "HEINRICH DIED SATURDAY OF A HEART ATTACK" (BF 265). McCarthy's biographer, Carol Brightman, relates that McCarthy flew to New York from Paris the next day to support Arendt in her grief (BF 266). We are left to wonder whether McCarthy's critique of "Civil Disobedience" came up during that visit — or ever again.

Yet even without a reply from Arendt, this disagreement does much to illuminate the two women's famous friendship, recently examined in Deborah Nelson's book Tough Enough. According to Nelson, Arendt and McCarthy shared an aversion to politics organized around "bonds of feeling and group identification," preferring an unsentimental critical and affective posture.6 Yet as Fran Nudelman points out, this characterization does not adequately capture McCarthy's politics during the Vietnam War, when she "was powerfully, even obsessively, drawn" to "political protest [and] group solidarity."7 In an essay on McCarthy's Vietnam journalism, Nudelman shows that her fierce opposition to the War also prompted her to adopt a voice very different from Arendt's. In her "[w]riting from Saigon," she "mounts a fierce critique of detachment" and "reportorial omniscience," substituting both for "disorienting immersion."8 Indeed, it is perhaps the omniscient voice that McCarthy dislikes most about Arendt's essay in The New Yorker. Echoing Ralph Ellison's critique of Arendt's "Olympian authority" in her earlier "Reflections on Little Rock" essay, McCarthy observes that "the tone is somehow too imperative for the matter."9 In particular, McCarthy critiques Arendt's use of the word "we" throughout her essay. Arendt uses the pronoun to speak from a generalized, unspecified vantage, writing for example: "Perhaps an emergency was needed before we could find a home for civil disobedience" ("CD" 101). In response, McCarthy asks:

when you talk about "we," who do you mean? Society, presumably, but sometimes, it would appear, the lawmakers, or society-as-its-own-lawmaker. In the context, I find this "we" disturbing; as far as I'm concerned, if there's a "We" in the civil disobedience vis-à-vis the law equation, the "we" is the lawbreakers. That is, I identify myself with them and their conscience, whether they are Dwight or Dr. Spock or whoever . . . it strikes me that you have seized the problem by the wrong end, and your "we" sums this up (BF 263-264).

While Arendt seeks to examine civil disobedience from the bird's-eye view of political philosophy, McCarthy believes it must be seen from the ground-up, where the "inner light" of one disobedient illuminates that of another (BF 263).

This question of perspective is one that McCarthy had also considered at length in her literary criticism, where she argued that the best novels combined the abstract vantage of ideas or ideology with the quotidian world of fact. How then, are we to understand her resistance to Arendt's own bird's-eye view vantage? This essay will read McCarthy's Birds of America (the novel she was finishing when she sat down to write Arendt in October 1970) as a critique of omniscience: in politics, in philosophy, and in literature. The book follows a draft-age American student named Peter Levi as he wrestles (weakly) with the political and ethical dilemmas of the late 1960s. And, as I will argue below, it ultimately critiques both Arendt's theory of civil disobedience and McCarthy's own literary project. Itself a novel of ideas, Birds of America, stages the irrelevance of that form — and so, its own belatedness. In its concluding chapters, it gives way to postmodern pastiche and to a kind of incantatory politics that McCarthy associated with the New Left and that sharply diverged from Arendt's understanding of democratic action.

McCarthy's novels are not widely read today and Birds of America is even more neglected than the rest. While The Group was a bestseller, Birds of America was not well-received in its own era.10 Meanwhile, contemporary critical attention has often focused on her memoirs (i.e. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood) and romans à clef (i.e. The Oasis). For scholars like Kelly Marsh, Laurie F. Leach, and Michael Trask, these works prompt questions about the relation between life writing and the novel, confession and performance.11 They even lead Jeffrey Clapp to the persuasive argument that McCarthy should be read as an early exemplar of the autofiction tradition now popularized by the likes of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Cusk.12 But the relation between Birds of America and McCarthy's own life is more complex: while some see similarities between McCarthy and Peter Levi's mother, Rosamund Brown, the novel is not autobiographical in nature.13 Birds of America also falls outside the direct purview of Nelson's Tough Enough. In her chapter on McCarthy, Nelson argues that her novels are "too overdetermined by her ideas," but only offers readings of her autobiographical writings and her short stories.14

Birds of America certainly looks like a novel overdetermined by ideas, and so it might seem to fit Nelson's critique. The protagonist is an Immanuel Kant fanatic who tries to apply Kantian morality to even the most trivial situations (whether to clean the communal toilet in his hostel, for instance). In the novel's final paragraph, Kant even appears at his hospital bedside to tell him that "Nature is dead" (BoA 332). Sarah Daw focuses on this final moment, arguing that the novel is primarily concerned with "Cold War America's increasing alienation and detachment from a potent historico-cultural 'idea of Nature.'"15 Other critics — Stephen Schryer, Fran Nudelman, and Merve Emre — have highlighted the novel's ambiguous relationship to its own form. Stephen Schryer argues that Birds of America stages a conflict between the forces of modernization and preservation. Yet he also observes the book's self-conscious twist: while McCarthy's own politics aligned neatly with the ethos of preservation, she recognized the novel form as a technology of modernization.16 For her part, Fran Nudelman reads the book alongside McCarthy's contemporaneous Vietnam journalism, arguing that McCarthy turned to reporting in part due to her growing pessimism about the novel form.17 Indeed, while writing Birds of America, McCarthy lamented (in a letter to Arendt) that "the traditional novel, which this is, is so undermined that one feels as if one were working in a house marked for demolition" (BF 174)18 Finally, Merve Emre reads Birds of America as an expatriate novel — a form established by Henry James but later popularized by women's study-abroad novels.19 Emre argues that the book's "formal unevenness" is the result of McCarthy's increasing reservations about the genre, which began to develop "about halfway through writing Birds of America."20

My interpretation will also focus on the novel's pervasive self-doubt — its internalized critique of its own formal modes — but with a particular attention to the novel of ideas, a form McCarthy explored at length in her literary criticism. I will show that if McCarthy's novel is indeed "overdetermined by ideas," as Nelson argues, this is a self-conscious strategy intended to foreground the irrelevance of the novel of ideas to Vietnam-era politics. Yet unlike Schryer, Nudelman, and Emre, I will also explore the alternative posited within the novel — the place where McCarthy sees a way out of her formal and political morass. My reading will show that Peter Levi is only able to meet the ethical challenges of the Vietnam era when he trades the omniscient perspective of Kantian philosophy for the instinctive voice of conscience and when he replaces the omniscient view of novelistic narration with a kind of incantation. In this way, I will show that McCarthy's strange, unpopular, half-demolished novel also exposes an unacknowledged rift between herself and Arendt — a moment when their very different views of conscience and dissent push McCarthy's aesthetic practice in a surprisingly postmodern direction. Below, I will begin by outlining the legal and political context of Arendt and McCarthy's exchange, before returning to a reading of the novel informed by McCarthy's literary criticism.

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Arendt's reputation in America was made on her writings about Nazi law and those who obeyed it — most notably Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. For many dissenters in the late 1960s and early 70s, it was this example of catastrophic law-following that best justified their own law-breaking.21 In a 1969 anthology on civil disobedience, for example, author after author draws a direct line to Nazi violence and to the postwar Nuremberg trials.22 In his contribution, "Confessions of a Two-Time Draft Card Burner," Tom Jarrell writes: "moral courage is where it's at. That's what Nuremberg is all about; the willingness to act in public on what your conscience tells you in your private-most hours."23 In another entry, Noam Chomsky argues: "After the lesson of Dachau and Auschwitz, no person of conscience can believe that authority must always be obeyed. A line must be drawn somewhere. Beyond that line lies civil disobedience."24 James Baldwin draws similar parallels in his 1972 essay, "To Be Baptized," which asks whether the law is "seriously. . . to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?"25 In considering this question from the perspective of "any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person," Baldwin repeatedly aligns the United States and Nazi Germany.26 He writes, for example: "It is not at all accidental that the jails and the army and the needle claim so many [young black men] . . . Americans will, of course, deny, with horror, that they are dreaming of anything like 'the final solution'. . . what goes on in the great, vast, private hinterland of the American heart can only be guessed at by the way the country goes these days."27 In these works, Jarrell, Chomsky, and Baldwin participate in widespread efforts to analogize American law and military aggression to Nazism and, in turn, to align civil disobedience and other forms of resistance with the anti-fascist actions celebrated by Arendt, among many others.

But if Chomsky insists that "a line must be drawn somewhere" between legitimate and illegitimate authority, then another complex question arises: how should the "person of conscience" determine where that line falls and when resistance becomes necessary? Should one rely on philosophical or religious principles? On political or economic analysis? On the actions of a collective or, as Jarrell puts it, on the quiet voice of "your private-most hours"? Much of the discourse about conscientious objection and civil disobedience in the late 1960s and early 70s was concerned with elaborating "the line" and its drawing. While some, like Baldwin, had little desire to redeem any aspect of American law (which, he argues, has no "love for justice, [nor] any concept of it"), others sought to recognize resistance without challenging the basic legal order.28 The Supreme Court's rulings on conscientious objection and Arendt's essay on "Civil Disobedience" were two notable attempts to thread that needle.

The category of conscientious objection, for its part, was widely expanded during the Vietnam War, particularly through two decisions US v. Seeger (1965) and Welsh v. US (1970). The Seeger case saw three men (Jakobson, Peter, and Seeger) receive official recognition as conscientious objectors to the draft despite their non-traditional religious beliefs. As Justice Tom C. Clark outlines in his decision, the Selective Service Act had previously declared that objection could be based in "religious training and belief" — defined as "an individual's belief in a relation to a Supreme Being" — but not in "political, sociological, or philosophical views or a merely personal code."29 Clark's decision in US v. Seeger maintained the ban on philosophical objections in name, but it construed religion broadly enough to include what might normally be considered philosophy. For his part, Seeger claimed a "belief in and devotion to goodness and virtue for their own sakes and a religious belief in a purely ethical creed," citing as evidence "Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza."30 Jakobson, meanwhile, stated that his "'most important religious law' was that 'no man ought ever to willfully sacrifice another man's life as a means to any other end'" — a phrase that resonates very closely with the Kant quote that McCarthy's Peter Levi carries in his wallet: "The Other is always an End; Thy Maxim" (BoA 6). In its decision, the court ruled that beliefs like these had "a similar position in that person's life to the belief in God," and thus qualified them for conscientious objection.31 

By acknowledging Seeger's and Jakobson's interpretations of philosophy as a kind of religion, the US v. Seeger ruling granted an unprecedented legal standing to individual moral belief — often known as conscience. As Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II describe in their book, The New Conscientious Objection, the Welsh v. US decision would take this one step further, ruling that "even atheists could qualify for objector status if they demonstrated a deep moral aversion to war."32 The result of this liberalization was that "more young men were being exempted as conscientious objectors by the end of the Vietnam War than were being inducted into the army."33 The expansion met its limit, however, with the 1971 case Gillette v. US; there, the Court barred selective Conscientious Objection (C.O.) status, which would include those who opposed not war in general but the specific war in question (in this case, Vietnam).34 Thus, while elevating conscience, the court also ensured that the law could only be disobeyed by those citing a systematic moral or religious commitment to pacifism, rather than by the many Americans who objected to the Vietnam War on primarily political grounds. 

But if conscientious objection tended to depoliticize draft resistance, then Arendt saw civil disobedience as a way to bring politics back to the forefront. Her essay on the topic begins by critiquing Thoreau's well-known abolitionist essay, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." She argues that Thoreau's mode of resistance is fundamentally "unpolitical" — he follows his own conscience, and so avoids complicity in moral wrongs ("CD" 60). He does not seek to galvanize broader support for a movement that would actually change "the world where the wrong is committed" ("CD" 60). For Arendt, conscientious objectors fall into a similar trap; their individual, "subjectiv[e]" resistance registers only as "an opinion, indistinguishable from other opinions" ("CD" 98, 68). By contrast, civil disobedients act in concert and, in doing so, transform themselves from a group of opinionated individuals into an organized minority ("CD" 98). For Arendt, that transformation is key because it aligns their resistance with American democratic traditions and with "the spirit of American laws," which she casts in idealistic, revolutionary terms despite her acknowledgment of the country's foundational racial exclusions ("CD" 99; italics hers). Indeed, as Kathryn T. Gines argues in her damning and persuasive book, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, Arendt could even be said to praise the American Revolution for its racial exclusions; she classifies slavery as a strictly social (as opposed to political) problem and then praises the founding fathers for "focusing on political rather than social issues."35

In further elaborating the transformation from individuals to "organized minorities," Arendt cites Tocqueville's description, which notably relies on a shift to an omniscient vantage ("CD" 98):

As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or a feeling which they wish to promote in the world . . . they look for mutual assistance, and as soon as they have found one another out, they combine. From that moment, they are no longer isolated men but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve for an example and whose language is listened to.36

Unlike the lone conscientious objector, this "power seen from afar" can be incorporated into American law. Arendt argues that the Supreme Court's "political question" ruling on the Vietnam War demonstrated the enduring influence of an extralegal "sovereignty principle" and she suggests that institutionalized civil disobedience could serve as a kind of counterbalance — a more democratic form of extra-legality ("CD" 100-101). It is in this sense, she argues, that "we could find a home for civil disobedience . . . in our political system" ("CD" 101). A first step, she suggests, would be to treat civil disobedients more like the representatives of "pressure groups . . . that is, registered lobbyists" ("CD" 101).

In her reply, McCarthy critiques Arendt's essay on several fronts. First, she disputes her friend's emphasis on group action and reasserts the centrality of individual belief to both conscientious objection and civil disobedience. She writes, "To me, civil disobedience remains a matter of conscience and the inner light, whether it's practiced by one person or a group" (BF 263). She also adds what may be a subtle attempt to push back on Arendt's critique of abolitionist figures (a critique that is itself interrogated in Ayça Çubukçu's essay, "Of Rebels and Disobedients: Reflections on Arendt, Race, and Lawbreaking").37 McCarthy writes, "what stands out in draft resistance or tax refusal (or abolitionist activity) is not the collective but the separate individual souls who are saying no"(BF 263). Next, McCarthy bristles at the notion that civil disobedience could be smoothly incorporated into American law. She argues that the Supreme Court, in recognizing conscientious objectors, "deprived [their] dissent of its force and validity" (BF 264). Arendt's proposal to incorporate civil disobedience into existing political institutions would take this violence one step further: "If there were a place" for civil disobedience under American law, McCarthy argues, "their activities would have no purpose, since their real purpose is to run counter to society, to collide with the law" (BF 264). Arendt's effort to avoid such a collision, to smoothly reconcile law, conscience, and democracy, strikes McCarthy as particularly "evasive" (BF 263). But while these political critiques go to the heart of Arendt's argument, McCarthy seems equally disturbed by the tone of the essay. As mentioned above, she resents Arendt's "imperative" voice in particular (BF 263). While Arendt's essay had disparaged the believing objector, in contrast to the rational philosopher — "single-minded fanaticism is usually the hallmark of a crackpot and, in any case, makes impossible a rational discussion of the issues at stake," Arendt writes — McCarthy appears to take the side of the "crackpot" ("CD" 67). She warns Arendt that this "question simply will not yield to rational analysis" (BF 263).

Before launching into this rather scathing critique, McCarthy's letter begins with a brief aside about a portrait of Kant "with powdered hair . . . with a bow in back" (BF 262). As Carol Brightman explains, McCarthy had asked for Arendt's help in finding a likeness of Kant, as part of her research for the final scene of Birds of America (BF 262). But if the novel seems overwhelmed by philosophy — and by Kant in particular — then it is notable that McCarthy's critique of "Civil Disobedience" also displays misgivings about philosophy as such. McCarthy observes that Arendt's imperious, omniscient "we" is "normal for the discourse of political philosophy" yet "sound[s] . . . so dubious in this context" (BF 264). In the remaining sections of this essay, I will argue that, in articulating McCarthy's own view of civil disobedience, Birds of America also demonstrates the irrelevance of "rational analysis" and of any generalizable philosophy to the moral and political crises of the 1960s and early 70s.

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Birds of America follows Peter Levi as he struggles to live up to his Kantian ethical philosophy and his commitment to social egalitarianism.38 The first portion of the book is set in the seaside community of "Rocky Port," where Peter's mother Rosalind takes him for a summer vacation. In the second portion of the novel, Peter travels to Paris where he takes classes at the Sorbonne and mulls over the ethical conflicts that arise in his day-to-day life (for example, whether Kant would oblige him to help a homeless woman he sees on the street). Near the book's conclusion, he hears that the US has bombed North Vietnam and tells his friend Silvanus Platt (nicknamed Silly) that, if drafted, he "won't go . . . that's all" (BoA 323)

When McCarthy first conceived of Birds of America in 1964, she told Arendt: "the present idea has to do with equality. I've long thought that this is the spectre that has been haunting the world since the eighteenth century. Or at least it has been haunting me all my life" (BF 163). In the novel, she appears most interested in how a political commitment to equality comes into conflict with intellectual, cultural, and social elitism. Peter himself embodies this conflict — attracted to his mother's more bourgeois sensibility, he is also compelled by a philosophical egalitarianism (grounded in his reading of Kant). He holds that Kantian philosophy is universal "like a theorem in geometry," and so adverse to all individual "whim or prejudice" (BoA 138, 139). Kant "was trying . . . to take the taste out of ethics," Peter explains, "to base ethics on a universal agreement that would spring from a common recognition of what is evident"(BoA 138) Across the novel, Peter insists that a shared perception of the world (the natural world, in particular) can serve as the basis for a democratic political philosophy; in this, McCarthy draws on Arendt's understanding of Kantian common sense, which depends on our sensual perception of a common world.39 Yet while committed to democratic perception and action, Peter also expresses a cultural elitism grounded in his suspicion that some perceptions are better than others. Frustrated by noisy crowds at the Sistine Chapel, who, he assumes, lack his capacity for informed appreciation, Peter toys with the idea of intellectual screening procedures for museums and galleries (BoA 270). By probing such inner conflicts, McCarthy's novel points to the various ways in which liberals might fail to practice their own doctrines of egalitarianism.

Read in these terms, Birds of America seems to fit McCarthy's own literary theory rather neatly. In her 1980 book, Ideas and the Novel, she argues that the novel traditionally articulated an intimate connection between "Ideas and facts," between "the lofty and the very small," "the garret and the basement."40 The novel of ideas, McCarthy argues, works through abstract philosophical questions but also grounds these discussions in an attention to concrete factuality. In this way, her definition of the novel of ideas resonates with Irving Howe's analysis in his book Politics and the Novel. Howe argues that the political novel is centrally concerned with the conflict between the abstraction of ideology and the "flux of experience."41 In her recent book Bleak Liberalism, Amanda Anderson suggests that the liberal political novel is especially concerned with depicting "the complexity and difficulty of trying to live or enact or promote the political ideals [the novel itself] engages."42 Birds of America works with the tension between political or philosophical abstraction and lived experience identified by all three critics. Across the book, Peter's effort to live his entire life in accordance with a single ethical system collides with his attachment to the details of bourgeois, domestic life. As Stephen Schryer explains, "the novel's continual movement is from Rosamund and Peter's abstract ideas to [their] banal realization," thus demonstrating — as Anderson would put it — the "difficulty of trying to live" up to Peter's stated beliefs.43

Yet if Birds of America closely follows McCarthy's prescriptions for the novel of ideas, this also marks it — in her own mind, at least — as fundamentally belated. In Ideas in the Novel, she writes: "being of my place and time I cannot philosophize in a novel in the good old way, any more than I can write 'We mortals.' A novel that has ideas in it stamps itself as dated."44 McCarthy further elaborates this view in her earlier essay, "The Fact in Fiction." There, she argues that, in the wake of "Hiroshima," "Buchenwald and Auschwitz," the world has taken on a quality of "irreality" that sets it at odds with novelistic realism:

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. Putting two and two together, then, it would seem that the novel, with its common sense, is of all forms the least adapted to encompass the modern world, whose leading characteristic is irreality. And that, as far as I can understand, is why the novel is dying. The souped-up novels that are being written today, with injections of myth and symbols to heighten or "deepen" the material, are simply evasions and forms of self-flattery.45

McCarthy worries that the "worldwide scandal[s]" of "nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets" are simply too vast and incomprehensible for the novel of ideas.46 They "have dwarfed the finite scandals of the village and the province" — the traditional terrain of fiction.47 McCarthy recalls her own shock at learning that the United States had dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan: "I remember reading the news of Hiroshima in a little general store on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and saying to myself as I moved up to the counter, 'What am I doing buying a loaf of bread?' The coexistence of the great world and us, when contemplated, appears impossible."48 The novel of ideas, she suggests, cannot capture the enormity of nuclear violence, but in the wake of such violence, it also cannot sustain or justify its attention to little general stores and loaves of bread. If the novel of ideas was built off an interplay between the abstraction of philosophy and the minutiae of realism, then McCarthy suggests that both these modes have become unrepresentable.

Biographer Carol Brightman explains McCarthy's later shock at learning of the bombing of North Vietnam — the first event in the war that significantly "aroused her conscience": "[McCarthy] passed a Left Bank kiosk on her way to a bakery and saw the headline announcing the first raids of the 17th parallel . . . she was reminded of another morning, twenty years before when she saw the Hiroshima headline while a buying a loaf of Portuguese bread . . ."49 In the last chapter of Birds of America, McCarthy recreates her own moment of disorientation at hearing the news from Hiroshima, and later, from Hanoi. In the midst of his Parisian morning routine, Peter is bombarded by headlines in "giant black letters": "U.S. PLANES BOMB NORTH VIETNAMESE BASE," "49 AVIONS U.S. . . . BOMBARDENT DES INSTALLATIONS AU NORD . . . " (BoA 322) After hearing the news, he is struck by a deep feeling of guilt and complicity ("Our country! And we're part of it. I'd said I'd kill myself if we did this and I'm still alive") and insists to his friend, "I won't go . . . that's all" (BoA 323).

Notably, the news also appears to disrupt Peter's close affinity with the natural world that had grounded his ethical system. In "Periodizing the 60s," Fredric Jameson describes the advent of late capitalism in the decade as a moment when the "last vestiges of Nature which survived on into classical capitalism are at length eliminated," through the industrialization of daily life and through the "neocolonialist transformation of the Third World."50 While Sarah Daw rightly critiques McCarthy's Vietnam reporting for its "conflat[ion]" of "Vietnamese culture with a romanticized pre-industrial biocentrism," McCarthy's opposition to the War shares some of Jameson's insights about the connections between advancing industrialization at home and abroad.51 As Schryer explains, "By the mid-1960s, McCarthy viewed the United States as an over-technologized country that had destroyed its native traditions and replaced them with a debased mass culture, which it was in the process of exporting abroad," most violently, to Vietnam.52

Birds of America takes up this problem mostly through local and trivial examples — chiefly, Rosamund's effort to defend "traditional culinary practices of the American East Coast" from what Sarah Daw terms the onslaught of "consumer capitalism," embodied by the presence of Coca-Cola branded concession stands at the town fair (BoA 72).53 But the book also implies that processes of commercialization and industrialization threaten to destroy nature itself (as foreshadowed in the opening line: "In the wild life sanctuary, the Great Horned Owl had died") (BoA 5). Not coincidentally, this theme reaches its apex in the wake of the bombing of North Vietnam. When Peter and his friend Silly visit the zoo near the novel's close, hoping to distract themselves from the news, they come into conflict with its inhabitants. Silly mocks the animals and pelts them with peanuts, prompting one to attack Peter. Even the plants are overwhelmed by death: "To his horror, the botanical garden had a derelict, desolate appearance and the rows on rows of denuded plants with their pale-green identifying markers reminded him of a cemetery" (BoA 324-325). Because Peter sees his Kantian ethical system as grounded in a shared perception of the natural world, the advancing death of nature also obliterates his prior moral commitments. While wandering through the grim botanical garden, Peter wonders: "if it could happen that one morning he might wake up and find that trees, plants, and flowers did not seem beautiful to him anymore. That would have to be the end of ethics. It might be starting to happen now" (BoA 324).

The bombing of North Vietnam and the ensuing death of nature does not only produce a sense of dislocation for Peter, however; it also marks the end-point of the novel's effort to masquerade as a traditional novel of ideas about the conflict between egalitarianism and elitism. When McCarthy argues that it may no longer be possible to write novels, she clarifies that she means "real novels — not fairy tales or fables or romances or contes philosophiques"54 While the entirety of Birds of America is riven with overt philosophizing, the book's final pages pair the conte philosophique with figures of fable and myth. Peter and Silly visit a brown bear and Peter notes that "Aristotle talks about him" (BoA 323). Next, they wander through a labyrinth and observe a black swan battling a white one. When one of the swans bites Peter, he is sent to the hospital, where his mother, looking like a "Delphic Sybil," comes to comfort him (BoA 328). "You've had quite an adventure," she tells Peter, "you were bitten by a black swan. Just like a person in a myth" (BoA 328). Finally (in what Helen Vendler terms an "embarrassing last scene"), Kant appears in a vision to warn Peter of the death of nature.55 This appearance is all the more striking because the novel begins with an epigraph — from Kant himself! — warning against such incarnation: "to attempt to embody the Idea in an example, as one might the wise man in a novel, is unseemly" (BoA 3). It would appear that by the novel's close, in the wake of the bombing of North Vietnam, McCarthy abandons her commitment to the traditional novel of ideas and embraces irony, pastiche, and self-satire instead.

In his essay on Beethoven's "late style," Adorno argues that the composer's late music does not seek to transcend clichés and conventions but, instead, allows them to appear "bald, undisguised, and untransformed."56 Rather than disguising these conventions as the product of subjective artistic expression, he allows them to "cast off the appearance of art."57 I think we can read the conclusion of Birds of America as a similar moment of "late style" — one that self-consciously draws attention to the ideas and conventions it can no longer integrate into an organic whole. In "The Fact in Fiction," McCarthy writes:

We are all in flight from the novel and yet drawn back to it, as to some unfinished and problematic relationship. The novel seems to be dissolving into its component parts: the essay, the travel book, reporting, on the one hand, and the "pure" fiction of the tale, on the other. The center will not hold.58

It is this kind of centrifugal force that shapes the final pages of Birds of America. The tightly-controlled traditional novel addressing the limitations of social egalitarianism is blasted open by the bombing of North Vietnam and the component pieces of fable, myth, dream, and philosophical prophecy spin outward, turning the concluding chapter into an unexpectedly postmodern constellation.

This remarkable formal shift, initiated by the attack on North Vietnam, goes hand-in-hand with the death of nature and with a turn away from the Kantian ethical system. Yet despite all these dark premonitions, it is only after the bombing that Peter, for the first time, adopts an ethical stance that might pose some actual risk to his comfortable life: he refuses, without qualification, to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Why does the "end of ethics" seem to leave Peter better prepared to exercise his political and ethical judgment? In the next section of this essay, I will suggest that the novel's conclusion allows us to see much of the preceding narrative as a kind of ethical red herring: Peter's studious ethical self-examination only serves to distract him from opportunities for meaningful resistance (civil disobedience, in particular). In her critique of Arendt, McCarthy suggested that the discourse of political philosophy could not capture the urgency of conscience. Below, I will show that McCarthy aligns the fate of philosophical reflection with the fate of the novel of ideas; neither, she suggests, is adequate to the historical moment.

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If, in 1964, McCarthy conceived a book about social equality, the novel she published in 1971 sometimes treats that topic as a mere distraction from the most pressing battles of her own and Peter's time — battles against racial oppression in the United States and against the war in Vietnam. Indeed, both locations of the novel (Rocky Port and Paris) serve as literal substitutes for a more meaningful confrontation with the history of the 1960s. Peter's mother Rosamund takes him to Rocky Port to "ma[k]e up to him for the fact that she and his divorced father had agreed that he could not go to Mississippi with the Students for Civil Rights Group" (BoA 5-6) Meanwhile, his studies at the Sorbonne help him secure a college exemption from the draft. In short, all of Peter's elaborate ethical conundrums present themselves precisely because he has kept himself at bay from the larger challenges facing his generation. Read from this perspective, Kantian philosophy serves not as an aid to political engagement but as an intellectual distraction from its more urgent, even instinctive, demands.

McCarthy's satirical ambitions are most visible in the early portion of the novel, set in a quaint New England town called "Rocky Port." Although Peter is vacationing in lieu of traveling to Mississippi to protest segregation, he and his mother end up enacting a kind of play version of the confrontation planned by the civil rights group. Across the section, we witness Rosamund's losing effort to resist the commercialization of American traditions — a conflict that reaches its apex when she removes a placard stating the historical significance of the house she is renting (she views the placard as a kind of commodification of the past). When a police officer demands that Rosamund restore the sign, Peter pushes back:

"Is that a town ordinance, officer?" Peter heard his own voice croak. Mindful of his civil rights training, he was making a simple request for information; that was what you did when met by a sheriff and his deputies at a county line (BoA 82).

Things soon escalate — Peter swings at the officer while his mother dumps a watering-can over his head — and the two are put in jail overnight.

While imprisoned, Peter reflects on whether it was right of his mother to use her status as a well-known musician to demand preferential treatment. Yet although those meditations are consistent with the novel's more surface-level interest in the conflict between cultural elitism and social equality, the sequence more powerfully demonstrates Peter's ethical narcissism. He lectures a young woman working at the jail about the nature of civil disobedience and reflects, "he was happy too. He and his mother were jailbirds, like Thoreau. . . . He felt safe, with his mother, in this clapboard jail; it had a cosy, small-town Yankee atmosphere" (BoA 90).59 In short, Peter persuades himself that he has performed an ethical action akin to civil rights resistance or Thoreauvian abolitionism, all without leaving the comfort of his small town or disrupting his and his mother's nostalgic relationship to the American past. Although the question about preferential treatment is presented as the central ethical dilemma of the chapter, it functions largely as a red herring for the ethical dilemma that does not even enter Peter's mind: whether it is morally acceptable to remain in Rocky Port (and protest imaginary outrages) in place of protesting segregation in Mississippi. The larger portion of the novel, set in Paris and other parts of Western Europe, functions in a similar way, although McCarthy's satirical intent is less explicit there than it is in the Rocky Port chapters. During his time in Europe, Peter expresses ambivalence about the war ("Peter was not sure exactly where he stood on [it]") and remains just to one side of any direct political action (BoA 218). He comes across a protest while taking his plant for a walk to absorb the sunshine, for example. Turning a corner, he "realize[s] that he [is] witnessing a demonstration, such as he had read about in history" (BoA 167).

Yet while standing on the sidelines of draft resistance, Peter is actively engaged in draft evasion; McCarthy writes, "if it had not been for his draft status, Peter would have quit the Sorbonne" (BoA 214). In Confronting the War Machine, historian Michael Foley explains that many antiwar protestors passionately insisted on a distinction between draft resisters and draft dodgers.60 While many dodgers evaded the draft through college deferments, resisters protested the system of the draft, which swept up men of color and poor men much more often than their privileged counterparts: "At its heart, draft resistance turned on this question:" Foley explains, "What could a man do when his country expected him to participate in a system of conscription that sent some of his fellow citizens to fight in a war he regarded as immoral and illegal yet protected him?"61 This is a dynamic that Peter Levi acknowledges but swiftly dismisses:

Though sorry for anybody who had to die in Vietnam, he faced with equanimity the idea that some unknown draftee — maybe even a Negro — should bite the dust instead of him. He could see in principle that student deferment was a bad form of discrimination, that Selective Service — page Darwin — showed middle class society red in tooth and claw, but just the same he had his education to finish. Would a nut like his mother want him to volunteer or go to jail as a C.O. or what? (BoA 217)

Peter, whose conscience seems to prick at the most minor injustice, faces "with equanimity" the prospect that he is sending another man to die in his place. Usually committed to abstract principles — and indeed, to the principle of abstract principles — he easily skips over his own acknowledgment that student deferment is classist and racist "in principle." To counter that correct ethical judgment, he draws on the supposed self-evidence of bourgeois social convention: he has his education to finish, and he shouldn't have to act like a nut.

Having passed over his own ethical responsibility to resist the draft, Peter goes on to contemplate it as a pragmatic social policy. This approach violates both the content and the method of the Kantian ethical philosophy he advocates elsewhere, a discrepancy Peter appears not to notice:

If he were in Johnson's place, he would abolish the draft and finance military training for qualified recruits by taxing people like his parents who could afford it and had children between eighteen and twenty-seven. Anybody over a certain income level who wanted to keep his offspring out of the Army — and ball players and prize fighters and movie stars and Pop singers — would have to pay the price, so that the guys who volunteered to do the fighting would earn, say, what an automobile worker brought home on Friday night. . . If he had the energy, he would send his plan to Johnson. . . (BoA 219)

It is difficult to imagine a more obvious violation of the Kantian maxim Peter literally carries in his wallet: "the Other is always an End" and not a means. In passages like this, Peter's Kantianism begins to look more like an intellectual vanity than an ethical system. He is able to evade and ignore his more pressing ethical obligations without too much guilt precisely because he holds himself so rigorously accountable in minor matters. Seen this way, the novel articulates a fundamental conflict between ethical reasoning and ethical action.

In "Civil Disobedience," Arendt critiques the "crackpot" disobedient for his inability to engage in "rational discussion of the issues at stake" ("CD" 67). Meanwhile, in Bleak Liberalism, Anderson describes "character-character argument" as a key feature of what she calls "liberal aesthetics."62 For both, although in rather different contexts, discussion and debate are key features of liberal democracy. For this reason, it is notable that argument fails spectacularly in Birds of America. When Peter tries to argue for the civil liberties of French protestors, he is treated as too naïve to understand the premises of the debate: "Of course the flics are sadists," his interlocutor replies, ". . .The French take that for granted" (BoA 172). Later, when he argues against the Vietnam War — "partly to curry favor" with a pretty vegetarian at a Thanksgiving dinner — he is reduced to tears and a bout of hiccups (BoA 208). These embarrassments aside, most of Peter's "debates" are one-sided. He wrestles with questions internally, imagines writing to heads-of-state, and subjects his mother to lengthy, haranguing letters, while never sharing her replies. In short, ethical and political debate is notably absent from Birds of America; there seems to be no space for, in Arendt's terms, a "rational discussion" that might lead to ethical action.

Even more intriguing perhaps, is the way that even ethical self-reflection fails in the novel. Although she championed public, democratic contestation, Arendt argued that "when the chips are down" even dialogue with oneself might produce meaningful ethical response.63 "If I disagree with other people, I can walk away;" Arendt writes in her 1965-66 essay "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," "but I cannot walk away from myself . . . if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy."64 While Arendt believed that "the wind of thought" could make subjects accountable to themselves, McCarthy suggests that this kind of inner dialogue can only produce appeasement and self-justification (notably, Gines critiques Arendt's account of judgment on similar grounds).65 Indeed, in one letter that Peter writes to Rosamund, McCarthy directly subverts Arendt's account of ethical dialogue with the self: "maybe any action becomes cowardly when you stop to think about it. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh, mamma mia? If you start an argument with yourself, that makes two people at least, and when you have two people, one of them starts appeasing the other" (BoA 127).66

In her journalistic report on the trial of Ernest Medina, one of the officers charged in the Mỹ Lai massacre, McCarthy makes a similar argument to Peter:

one of the revelations that transpired from My Lai 4 was that the average American had a new conception of conscience. It was no longer the still small voice speaking up in the night or the gnawing of remorse. . . . For the men of Charlie Company as heard at the Medina trial, conscience seemed to be chiefly an organ of self-justification. It did not tell you to refrain from an action but helped you explain what you did, afterward, when questioned.67 

Here, in her own version of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, McCarthy characterizes the superior model of conscience as a pre-rational or non-rational instinct, a voice "speaking up" or a "gnawing" feeling.68 By contrast, the perverse view of conscience on display at the Medina trial is rationalizing if not exactly rational; it provides clever arguments and explications for those called to the bar of moral judgment. We can therefore see that although McCarthy's letter critiquing "Civil Disobedience" emphasized individual conscience over group action, the matter goes deeper than that simple opposition. McCarthy is also unsatisfied with the model of conscience that Arendt would turn to "when the chips are down."69 While the Arendtian model of moral reflection seeks to bring pluralist debate inward, through dialogue with an imagined other, McCarthy prefers a mode of conscience that is intuitive, inexplicable, and unrepresentable.

Throughout most of Birds of America, Peter seems to share the "new conception of conscience" McCarthy witnessed at the Medina trial. Armed with some of the most sophisticated tools of ethical self-justification, Peter remains impassive in the face of his most dramatic moral failings. Nevertheless, as I have already suggested, much of that changes in the final chapter of the novel, when Peter becomes alienated from nature, his ethical system, his nation, and himself, following first from, his failure to help a homeless woman, and more significantly, the bombing of North Vietnam.70 Notably, this shift will also be accompanied by a shift away from omniscient narration.

Most of the novel is written in a third-person voice that gives us access to Peter's elaborate philosophizing. The occasional letters from Peter to his mother, obviously written in the first-person, further deepen our insight into his self-justifications. When Peter learns about North Vietnam, however, the narrative voice briefly pulls back to occupy a position just outside Peter's consciousness. Relying much more on short descriptive sentences and reported speech, this passage does not grant the reader any access to the reasoning process that leads to Peter's final statement of resistance.

It was in the Times of London too. There was no escaping it . . . On top of everything, the dentist found a cavity. "Blue Monday" he said waggishly in his Berlitz English. When Peter got out of the chair, Silly was waiting for him. He had been reading the papers Peter had left and looked pale. "It's bad," he agreed. "But maybe it's just a one-shot thing. They say it's a reprisal." Peter shook his head. "Why would Johnson order American families home then? Your 'poker game'!" "Well, yes, Johnson betrayed us." "Our country! And we're part of it! I'd said I'd kill myself if we did this and I'm still alive." . . . . [Silly:] "Because we can speak French, they won't send us into combat. Even if they draft students like in World War II. They'll keep us back of the front lines, in Saigon, doing liaison with the high-up Vietnamese. I added that up last summer, when Goldwater was making his pitch." "I won't go," said Peter. "But how? Unless you're a Quaker or join the Peace Corps or something?" "I don't know, but I won't, that's all." They watched Silly's brown bear for a while, but he was not raking any leaves (BoA 322-323).

Subsequent passages will return to the narrative vantage typical of the rest of the novel, but this one stands out for its stark alienation from Peter's consciousness. It seems to be told more from the perspective of a "fly on the wall" — or, perhaps, a journalist — than an omniscient narrator.

Peter's statement of refusal, "I won't go. . . I don't know, but I won't, that's all," is already notable for its lack of elaboration and self-justification, and it is especially notable in the context of this shift in narrative perspective. In Ideas and the Novel, McCarthy points out that as a narrator, Victor Hugo generally remains just outside the mind of Jean Valjean, and only "twice . . . lets us see a process of reasoning that is going on is his head."71 In these moments of moral crisis, she explains, "the inner argument is long" and "it ends in a decision."72 In Birds of America, McCarthy pulls precisely the opposite maneuver. The reader is usually party to the full line of (overlong) reasoning that leads to Peter's most minor decisions. But now, during his most acute moral crisis, all the emphasis is placed on the simple, unexplained gesture of refusal — Peter's own version of Bartleby's "I would prefer not to."73 Rather than following Silly in seeking a special status or exemption, Peter is suddenly committed to resisting cooperation with the draft system itself. Unfortunately, McCarthy does not indicate how this moral transformation might affect Peter's complacency and hypocrisy about the other major issue of his time: civil rights and widespread racist violence at home. But the scene does at least make possible a more radical form of ethical and political engagement for Peter, rupturing his intellectual vanities and prompting a starker confrontation with the reality of his complicity. When contemplating the draft earlier in the novel, Peter had listed his options as "volunteer or go to jail as a C.O. or what?" (BoA 217). Now, it seems he is prepared to either go to jail or to embark on the unspecified form of resistance represented by "or what?" In this, McCarthy establishes Peter as representative of a larger class of bourgeois, white liberals who — when faced with the prospect of mass military mobilization — would be pressed to either accept a prowar establishment liberalism or break from it, perhaps to join with the growing New Left.

For all its elaborate Kantian conundrums, Birds of America ultimately militates against philosophy. It sunders Peter's most courageous ethical and political choice from any explicable form of intellectual reasoning or self-reflection. The bombing of North Vietnam represents both the end of the traditional novel within Birds of America and the end of Peter's reliance on the Kantian ethical system. Indeed, those two fates seem deeply interconnected for McCarthy. In her book, The Age of the World Target, Rey Chow connects post-WWII knowledge production, particularly in Area Studies departments, to the "panoramic vision" afforded by aerial bombing and by "the militaristic conception of the world as target."74 Drawing on Chow's work, Nudelman explains some of McCarthy's own misgivings about the omniscient perspective. McCarthy — who surveyed the Vietnamese landscape from a military transport helicopter during one of her reporting trips — critiques the aerial perspective for producing, in Nudelman's terms, "indifference," "self-delusion," "detachment," and "disproportionate violence."75 As Nudelman explains, these misgivings would lead her to "relinquis[h] the aerial view altogether and assum[e] the perspective of the earthbound victim" in her subsequent reporting on the war.76 McCarthy's 1971 novel enacts a similar maneuver: with planes flying over North Vietnam, the narrative perspective of Birds of America returns to the ground — and brings with it the philosophical system that Peter had called "universal" "like a theorem in geometry" (BoA 138). In this key moment of the novel, which McCarthy refuses to narrate omnisciently, Peter refuses to go to Vietnam but also refuses to justify that choice through any generalizable moral principle or even intelligible explanation.

Other critics have noted the way that McCarthy's misgivings about the novel form intertwine with her misgivings about liberal politics and the liberal subject: Nudelman describes Peter's "hypocrisy, shallowness, [and] cowardice"; Emre notes McCarthy's ambiguous relationship to the expatriate novel and its role in American cultural diplomacy, or what she calls "national-institutional representation"; Stephen Schryer argues that the novel critiques its own proximity to the thinking of pro-war modernization theorists.77 Yet none of these critics discuss this brief but crucial moment of resistance near the novel's close, which seems to open onto a new literary and political strategy for McCarthy. Uninterested in the "rational analysis" of Arendtian civil disobedience and disillusioned by the process of moral self-reflection, McCarthy now seeks to represent — in the most minimal way possible — a kind of pre-rational surge of conscience, the "individual sou[l] . . . saying no" (BF 263).

In a 1969 letter to Arendt, McCarthy complains that she is irritated by the pronouncements of young radicals and by the admonishments of their parents' generation. Herself a veteran of the postwar anti-Stalinist left but also a supporter of the late-1960s antiwar movement, McCarthy found herself caught between the liberalism of her own generation and the radicalism of the younger one:

I was reading in Time today from the parent of some "militant": "There is a proper way to express dissent: through the spoken and written word." That man no doubt supposes he is being thoughtful. On the part of older people there is a sudden enormous production of clichés, which is how you know that what's being said is false. And what is strange — and that I've not yet arrived at understanding — is that in this situation truths of political philosophy turned overnight into clichés too, e.g., the ends-means "law." Which perhaps means they are irrelevant. As for the language of the young, it resembles incantation. But the incantation may work, as incantations probably did quite often in the days of "superstition" (BF 263; italics in original).

Schryer explains that, "to many contemporary readers," Birds of America seemed like a "naïve attemp[t] to apply the culture criticism of the cold war era to the political problems of the 1960s."78 McCarthy would seem to agree. She has chosen to write in a genre, the novel of ideas, that she calls "marked for demolition" and to focus it on an idea, the ends-means law, that is likely "irrelevant" (BF 174). It is no wonder that her protagonist — whose Oedipal nostalgia keeps him cloistered in the intellectual world of his mother's (and McCarthy's) generation — declares himself "irrelevant to practically everything" (BoA 147).79 Indeed, there is just one moment, between the bombing of North Vietnam and the novel's disintegration into postmodern pastiche, that Peter seems prepared to take on the political challenges of his historical moment. His repetitive refusal, "I won't go. . . . I don't know, but I won't, that's all," may bring him closer to "the language of the young [which] resembles incantation" (BF 236). In this climactic scene, McCarthy seems to reach for a form of expression that is less propositional and more performative.

This was a desire shared by many of the writers of the Beat and New Left generations, although generally not by McCarthy's own clique of New York Intellectuals. In Postmodern Belief, Amy Hungerford argues that authors like Salinger, Ginsberg, and DeLillo responded to crises of religious and political belief in mid-century America by shifting from propositional language to a kind of incantatory literature that emphasized the experience of a word over its content or meaning. She explains that "at a time when the impossibility of reconciling opposing visions of reality on the Left and the Right was shaking American politics to the core . . . Ginsberg's poetic vision . . . became a technology through which political critique could trade argument for incantation."80 Following the decline of religious authority and the rupture of liberal political consensus, writers like Ginsberg turned away from the effort to argue, persuade, or even produce propositional content, and instead sought out literary forms that would act directly upon the reader. There are significant differences between McCarthy's approach and this one; Peter's statement of refusal still expresses a propositional content even if it is divorced from the philosophical argumentation and explication that take up most of the novel. But I would suggest that McCarthy and Ginsberg are reacting to a similar crisis: the death of God and nature announced at the novel's close and the inadequacy of traditional ethical arguments in the face of global violence and radical political destabilization. While Ginsberg is part of a new response to that crisis, McCarthy offers what she sees as a kind of last novel of ideas, one that announces its own belatedness without entirely transcending it.

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In Tough Enough, Nelson argues that Arendt's conception of "common sense" provides the "philosophical foundation" for McCarthy's fiction.81 Arendt's view, Nelson explains, is grounded in "Kantian common sense, which is not the rational being's possession of self-evident and natural truths but an active and complex sharing of a necessarily partial view of the world."82 As Arendt would explain to McCarthy in a 1954 letter, this kind of common sense possesses a fundamentally "sensual quality"; it is a "sixth sense through which all particular sense data, given by the five senses, are fitted into a common world, a world which we can share with others."83 Nelson suggests that this emphasis on sense data resonated with McCarthy's understanding of "the fact" as an aesthetic category, evidenced in essays like "The Fact in Fiction." Yet in at least two essays, McCarthy links the demise of the novel precisely to the demise of common sense. In "Novel, Tale, Romance," she argues that "the novel in its governing common sense" is "unequipped to cope" with modern events — from WWI trench warfare onward.84 Meanwhile, in "The Fact in Fiction," she observes that "if the world today has become inaccessible to common sense, common sense in terms of broad experience simultaneously has become inaccessible to the writer."85 Based on these conditions, McCarthy answers the question "Is it still possible to write novels?" with "certainly not yes and, perhaps, tentatively, no."86

For her part, Nelson interprets that equivocation ("perhaps, tentatively,") in favor of Arendtian common sense, arguing that, for McCarthy, "cognition of reality through the senses would prove nearly impossible, and therefore exceptionally urgent."87 My own reading would place less emphasis on the implied urgency and more on the near impossibility.88 Indeed, it seems that by the time McCarthy writes Birds of America, she has dropped any qualification and answered her own question with a firmer "no." Granted, there is no doubt that the novel is influenced by Arendtian common sense: Peter's fear that the death of nature means the end of ethics is rooted in the belief that moral philosophy depends on our sensual perception of a common world.89 But the fact that McCarthy's novel is primarily concerned with announcing the death of this relation should be a clue that she is not so much a "practitioner of Arendt's ideas about common sense," as Nelson calls her, but an interlocutor, even a critic.90 Nelson claims that for McCarthy, "the painfulness of ordinary reality in the novel prepares the citizen to enter the public world of common sense — that is, of moral and political judgment."91 In fact, in Birds of America, it is precisely the opposite: faced with global-scale violence, Peter finds himself unable to meaningfully engage in any pluralist or public discussion of the Vietnam War. Instead, he is only able to choose between the solipsistic self-justification that McCarthy saw on display at the Medina trial and the mute, enigmatic refusal that closes the book. 

When we consider that she was putting the final touches on Birds of America when she sat down to reread Arendt's "Civil Disobedience," it is no surprise that McCarthy objected to the essay's account of political judgment. While Arendt examines resistance from the generalizable perspective of the omniscient "we," McCarthy is more concerned with an "inner light," that cannot be explained, let alone generalized (BF 263). In this way, her critique of civil disobedience exposes a larger rift between the two thinkers and friends, especially when read in the context of Birds of America. McCarthy would, of course, retain her admiration for Arendt, evidenced both in their continuing friendship and in McCarthy's effort to bring Arendt's posthumous The Life of the Mind to print.92 But the letter and the novel I have interpreted here suggest a moment when McCarthy — passionately immersed in efforts to end the Vietnam War — found herself working through a set of aesthetic and political problems that would take her quite far from Arendtian common sense, from her account of self-reflection, and from her vision of democratic action. As McCarthy became increasingly skeptical of the omniscient perspective and "lofty" abstractions of the traditional novel, she writes a work that, instead, embodies the politics of "the separate individual souls who are saying no."93 Rather than engaging in any "rational discussion of the issues at stake," Birds of America stages the political power of quiet, even private, refusal ("CD" 67). This turn to the pre-rational does not do much, perhaps, to answer a question I posed earlier: how should the person of conscience determine where the line falls? Yet this too is in keeping with McCarthy's understanding of dissent. She does not offer a philosophical justification for Peter's final act of refusal because she does not want to rule on the subject of when and why others should resist. As she tells Arendt, "the matter . . . has to do with freedom, which maybe one can't be too legislative about" (BF 263).

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Katie Fitzpatrick is a lecturer in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship has previously appeared in Post45 and in Twentieth-Century Literature. She has also written for The Nation, Public Books, Aeon, The Point Magazine, and Chronicle Review.

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Banner Image by Washington Area Spark licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

References

For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I would like to thank the peer reviewers and editors at Post45, as well as my PhD committee — Amanda Anderson, Deak Nabers, and Tamar Katz. I would also like to thank those who attended Spring 2018 talks based on this article at Muhlenberg College and at Amherst College.