The Multispecies City in McCarthy’s Suttree and Duiker’s Thirteen Cents

Dan Wylie

doi:10.25159/1753-5387/12927

Authors

Dan Wylie Rhodes University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0148-8525

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/12927

Keywords:

Sello Duiker, Cormac McCarthy, multispecies, urban ecocriticism

Abstract

“First-wave” ecocriticism focused on “nature writing” attuned to supposedly human-free wildness and its healing beauty. The presence of non-human life in cities was largely ignored. Now, numerous branches of interdisciplinary thought endeavour to transcend the culture/nature dichotomy, to recognise non-human agency, and to call for a more equitable formulation of urban “communities of conviviality.” Though cross-species interdependencies necessarily occur, attitudes vary according to multiple variables of class and education, socialisation and economic opportunity. Is such beneficent conviviality not a luxury permitted only to the cushioned and the safe? What happens to human-nature relations in urban areas or strata of poverty and precarity? The article compares two novels concerned with impoverished urban communities: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979) set in 1950s Knoxville, Tennessee, and K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents (2000), set in Cape Town. It attempts a reading sensitive to the intimate interfusion of material and imaginative manifestations of multiple species simultaneously.

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Author Biography

Dan Wylie, Rhodes University

Dan Wylie teaches English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He has published two books on the Zulu leader Shaka (Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka and Myth of Iron: Shaka in History, both UKZN Press); a memoir; Dead Leaves: Two Years in the Rhodesian War (UKZN Press); and several volumes of poetry. Most recently, he has concentrated on Zimbabwean literature and on ecological and animal concerns in literature. He founded the annual Literature & Ecology Colloquium in 2004, and edited the collection of essays, Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa (Cambridge Scholars Press). Related publications are Elephant and Crocodile, both in the Reaktion Books Animals Series, and Slow Fires (poems with etchings by Roxandra Britz; Fourthwall Books). Most recently published are his collection Raven Games: New and Collected Poems”; a study of another South African poet, Intimate Lighting: Sydney Clouts, poet (UNISA Press); and Death & Compassion: The elephant in southern African literature (Wits UP). He writes a blog at http//danwyliecriticaldiaries.blogspot.co.za

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