The malevolent imagination and murderous art: The fiction of Charles Baxter, Steven Millhauser, and Cormac McCarthy

The Malevolent Imagination and Murderous Art: The Fiction of Charles Baxter, Steven Millhauser, and Cormac McCarthy explores these writers' reworking of a central tension in American literature: the perils of the ambitious imagination and its powers to hold sway over, and impoverish, the actual. I focus on the rhetorical means these writers utilize to impose their fictional worlds upon the reader, and outline the evolution of the imagination in texts ranging from Hawthorne, Melville, and James to Goethe, Mann, and Borges. In addition to reviews and scholarly studies, I discuss social and literary movements such as English and German Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, and the manner in which each movement features characters who fall under the spell of their own interpretations of the world and desire to inhabit the ideal and possible, rather than the probable. These three writers distrust contemporary assumptions regarding literature's truth value and powers of referentiality. Thus I discuss the way in which Baxter, Millhauser, and McCarthy construct their fictional realms and charge them with "life," while simultaneously undermining literature's hold on what they would term the actual. For these fictionists there is always a crucial difference between word and things, language and reality, the desired and the actual.