ABSTRACT
In Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, the presence of undeadness heightens awareness of how extensively and intensively inanimate things influence social spaces and express forms of agency within, and beyond, cultural systems. This chapter focuses on the 'object matter' of McCarthy's work, specifically how his texts expose 'the phenomenal object world through which human subjects circulate'. The interpretation of McCarthy's architectonics of undeadness is given cultural and geographic specificity by interleaving this frame with cathected issues surrounding 'southernness' vis-à-vis 'Americanness'. Undeadness, in its liminality and recrudescence, allegorises the paradoxical claims of a once-'real' South as against the cultural manufacturing and fetishisation of an exceptional regional past. All of the South, all of America, all of the world has become one vast wasteland – that signals an 'over-presence' as much as an absence. The roadscape contains a series of monuments to the dead, the landscape a kind of mass grave, with former cities now all cities of the dead.
