The Lush and the Barren: Nature in William Bartram’s Travels and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

“The Lush and the Barren: Nature in William Bartram’s Travels and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” seeks to understand the connections between these two seemingly disparate texts. The works exist on binaries of the environmental paradigm – Travels presents a fecund landscape; The Road envisions a scorched one. “The Lush and the Barren” considers these works as being two faces on the same coin of the southern American terrain. Positioned between each text, haunts the environmental destruction of a small town in East Tennessee called Copperhill. Destroyed by copper smelting in the early twentieth century, the land surrounding Copperhill for many years resembled a moonscape. The desolate ground of Ducktown Basin looms and has become more than a razed corner of Tennessee; it possesses symbolic resonance and serves as crossroads between two moments in the history of America: Travels looks back beyond the age of written memory to a time when the land was flocked in so-called virgin wilderness, and The Road that points ahead to an apocalyptic future, where the countryside is completely destroyed and burned to cinder. If Copperhill provides a glimpse into two worlds, an echo stone from which the imagined and the unimaginable commingle, then two literary works, William Bartram’s Travels and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, function as mythical road maps from out of the garden and into the desert of our own destruction. “The Lush and The Barren” holds up these three landscapes and muses on the possible destiny of America.