This chapter deals with McCarthy’s relationship to the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific think tank at which he has been a fellow for many years. This institute, founded by Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, is known for cutting-edge research into a variety of scientific disciplines and for cross-disciplinary interaction that leads to new possibilities in scientific discovery. McCarthy has long been interested in science, and the Santa Fe Institute’s exploration of complex systems and chaos theory have informed much of his later work, specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road. Central to this chapter is McCarthy’s engagement with the idea of “emergence,” which suggests that out of the totality of individually simple interactions between constituents of a complex system there emerge higher order phenomena which are not reducible to the original components. This provocative idea finds its way into McCarthy’s thought and work.

Nothing is more characteristic of Cormac McCarthy’s literary style than what Richard Woodward has called the “biblical gravity” of his prose. While references to the Bible abound in McCarthy’s work, it is the archaic vocabulary, powerful cadence, formal and thematic repetitions, and above all the paratactic syntax of McCarthy’s style inspired by the King James Bible that provide the closest link between his fiction and the Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter examines the convergence of religion and aesthetics in McCarthy’s work as well as the function of a biblical narrative style in the fully administered world of contemporary society. Through readings of McCarthy’s essay “The Kekulé Problem” (2017), the importance of Christian mysticism to his work, and his peculiar association with the Santa Fe Institute, the chapter shows how McCarthy’s fiction draws on the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to produce a sense of mystery in the disenchanted world of modernity. At the same time, this production of mystery entails a mystification of literature that the chapter places in the postwar literary context in which McCarthy began his writing career.