ABSTRACT
The activity of conceptualizing matter in Cormac McCarthy's works indexes an examination of both his mythographical practice of writing nature and the ways in which that writing is included in the nature thereby depicted, given that "nature is its own analyst". Instead of the environmental awareness of "nature writing", or what Lawrence Buell names "writing for an endangered world", is the writing of nature. Between the allegorical and the tautegorical, McCarthy's fiction is not just a form of contemplation about nature but an activity of it. McCarthy's narrative approach to the conception of matter—his "primate psychology" of the "Cloaca Maxima"—eventually leads to an ethics of nature, this kind of ethics would revere the disintegrating processes of forms of life as it would affirm their composition. This is because "the inchoate, the prismatic flux" is neither exclusively the realm of life nor that of death but that of their interstitial givenness, which must remain indivisible, formless, and immanent by nature.
