the ultimate road trip
by Douglas Messerli
Cormac McCarthy The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006)
At one time in American culture such synchronicity of reading might not have
been worth mentioning. I still recall in 1960 when everyone seemed to be
reading To Kill a Mockingbird; my
mother, generally a reader of the literary guild titles—the pop fiction of the
day—even held a meeting of a reading group in her home to discuss the book. But
in today’s world of a superabundance of new book publications, it is
rare—particularly among my well-read and literary friends, many of whom teach
and, accordingly, spend a great deal of time reading and rereading classics—to
find any shared reading experiences among new works of fiction or poetry. We
may share with each other our enthusiasm for new movies, but when it comes to
fiction we often speak of writers like Beckett or Borges or….numerous other
established—and often dead—writers.
As a publisher, of course, I am always reading new works, and I attempt
to share those with as many of my friends as I can, but the daily demands upon
their time preclude any immediate reaction. I sometimes receive their responses
to books I published years after my initial enthusiasm.
Accordingly, I was quite delighted to find common ground, to have read a
new literary work which I could immediately share. Given the dark subject
matter of McCarthy’s novel, it might have been predicted. Many of us feel,
while recognizing the greater horrors of both World Wars, the Korean War and
Viet Nam, nonetheless, that we are living in the darkest of times, as we face
our own ongoing war abroad—in which young soldiers and often innocent Iraqi
citizens are daily beheaded and bombed—and the potential development of nuclear
bombs by nations that seem to have paranoid perspectives of the rest of the
world, while recognizing in our own country a frightening constriction and loss
of human rights and individual freedoms for which generations of Americans have
struggled throughout the last century.
McCarthy’s powerful fiction is not directly about any of these issues.
As the narrator makes clear, however, in the post-apocalyptic world we witness
in this book, the cry of any Isaiah in the wilderness, indeed the doom sayings
of all previous prophets have become reality. Accordingly, McCarthy proves all
of our fears—those from the left, middle and right—to be justified.
We are never told what happened to create this ash-covered landscape in
which all living matter—with the exception of a few straggling and struggling
human beings—has been destroyed. All we know is that at 1:17 all the clocks
stopped, “A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” Trying
the light switch the hero finds the power already gone, “a dull rose glow in
the windowglass.” Is it a nuclear explosion, a series of nuclear bombs, or a
huge meteor crashing into Earth, which might explain the ever darkening sky
years later, as the father and son search for warmer climes? Does it matter?
The world as we know it (as the characters knew it) has been destroyed.*
From the beginning, the central character of this book shows himself to
be a survivor: soon after the electricity goes off, his wife asks, “Why are you
taking a bath?” His answer, “I’m not,” speaks volumes, for suddenly we know
that he has had enough foresight to give them several days’ drinking water.
Soon there will be no more water, and, eventually, no food.
Before going any further in this review, following the lead of today’s
newscasters, I should perhaps warn the reader that what I am about to describe
is going to be unpleasant; moreover, for those who love plot, I will detract
from that pleasure by sharing the story. Frankly, I find the reading experience
itself so different from the description of a fiction that such revelations
seldom bother me. But I know there are many who prefer to journey through
fiction and film in virgin territory; those readers should put down my essay at
this juncture.
McCarthy’s fiction, however, is not really about its story. For the plot
is as simple as it can be: years after the original explosion, millions of
individuals have died, some, as the central character’s wife, by suicide, most
others presumably by starvation and illnesses such as cholera, pneumonia,
rickets—all those horrific diseases which would inevitably follow upon such a
holocaust. The few who live are not only survivors, but, in most cases, humans
in name only, beings who have become animals, many of them existing only
through cannibalism. The father and son at the center of this book are on a
seemingly endless journey to move south in search of a warmer climate, but also
out of the necessity to rummage for any scraps of canned or bottled food that
might not have already been looted. Accordingly, they have no choice but to "hit
the road.” Unlike Sal’s joyfully pagan journey in Kerouac’s On the Road or even Johnny’s pleasure in
just “going” in The Wild One, the
father and son of The Road embark
upon a kind of road trip, the ultimate road trip, growing out of desperation.
While it may be safer to hide away, without food and with only two bullets left
in their gun, this father and son have no choice but to move on; “to go” and
“to discover” have no longer any place in their vocabulary.
Certainly, there are discoveries to be made—of the most horrific kind.
It is through the young boy that we most clearly see just what has been lost of
humanity and the horrors any survivor must face. The father describes himself
and his son as the “bearers of light,” as “the good guys.” And, at first, we
recognize the rightness and necessity for such self-adulation. Around them are
people who, as the wife and mother had observed before her death, would first rape
the boy and then eat him. Recognizing this, the boy is nonetheless appalled by
the fact that when they encounter another boy his age, there is nothing they
can do to help; they cannot, as he would wish, take him with them; he may be
one of them, and besides, they
haven’t food to share.
Although they often suffer from near starvation, they also occasionally
have the good fortune to discover hidden troves of canned goods (one in a
hidden bunker clearly constructed by a survivalist-thinking family); but even
with their newfound supplies, the father will not/cannot allow them to make
contact with others they encounter along the road. It is too dangerous, as the
most terrifying scene in the novel reveals. In a beautifully furnished house
they discover a locked cellar wherein, when they break the padlock, they
discover maimed but living humans, who are obviously being cut up and eaten by
the tenants night after night. What might have been a black-comic moment in the
hands of a postmodern writer like Steve Katz, presents itself as a grim nightmare
in the hands of a realist such as McCarthy. I admit I did not sleep easy while
reading this book.
After their small store of goods is stolen and they track down the
thief, the father forces him to undress in retaliation for his act. The boy, in
turn, begins to understand that, despite their representation of themselves as
“good,” they necessarily are agents, in their struggle for survival, of evil.
They made a dry camp with no fire.
He sorted out cans for their
supper and warmed them over the gas
burner and they ate and the
boy said nothing. The man tried to
see his face in the blue light
from the burner. I wasn’t gong to
kill him, he said. But the boy
didn’t answer. They rolled
themselves in the blankets and lay there
in the dark. He thought he could
hear the sea but perhaps it was just
the wind. He could tell by his
breathing that they boy was awake and
after a while the boy said: But we
did kill him.
It is this gradual recognition of
their own involvement with events that gives the greatest moral dimension to The Road.
Yet, we also recognize that the father has no other choices; through his
selfishly determined actions he expresses such a deep love of his son—a love
that must be recognized also as sexual (body to body contact is necessary as an
altruistic protection from the elements as well as a physical expression of the
father-son love)—that it encompasses McCarthy’s entire picaresque, explaining
the central character’s mad determination to stay alive and move on. Without this
love, the father would long ago have died or, at the very least, become
something akin to the old prophet they meet along the way, a blind Oedipus-like
figure who survives only because he presents himself as worthless of any human
contact. Appropriately, he is the only one with whom the boy convinces his
father to share their food.
The father’s determined survival, however, also reveals the great flaw
of McCarthy’s The Road—and perhaps
his other fictions as well. For however much we might admire this “carrier of
the fire,” he is, like the figures from other fantastically epic adventures
such as Lord of the Rings, not an
entirely credible human being. And we are reminded in his actions that McCarthy
is still writing a kind of Western, with all its heroic possibilities. I know
that I, who cannot shoot a gun, who would be unable to light a campfire from
flint, who would be unable to determine even what tools I needed to survive the
ordeals this man and his son encounter, would have long before died. Most of
us—not of the survivalist ilk—would never have had a chance.
Oddly enough, McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Western involves very few
weapons. As one of my brunch companions, film writer Chris Hauty, mentioned, he
didn’t find the book entirely believable on that account. In reality, he
argued, everyone who was still living would have had guns. A quick visit to
several sites on the internet revealed, for example, that it is estimated that
there are enough guns in the US for every man, woman, and child. If such a holocaust
were to occur—presuming that individuals would also loot weapons from gun
stores and police stations throughout the country, adding immense quantities of
arms to their cache—most armed Americans, particularly the survivalists, would
have killed one another; those who remained would be so thoroughly armed that
it is doubtful that a father and son, with only two bullets in their gun, would
have been able to endure the trip.
Even heroes have to die, moreover, and with the death of the boy’s
father, his son is released to embrace human encounters his father had
previously denied him. In a world where women bear children only to roast them
upon the spit soon thereafter we realize that the boy can never be certain in
his trust.
Fortunately, it appears his first such encounter is with a family of
“bearers of the fire,” of enlightened beings who will bring him from the road
into the arms of a survivalist and, evidently, religious community. But as
readers of this book, we are left with haunting questions, questions which the
boy must continue to ask if human morality is to be sustained. How have they survived, this group of survivors?
How will they continue to survive?
Will they remain “good guys?” Can he?
*Actually I think it very much does matter. If the world has been
destroyed by natural forces, the near-extinction of the human race—the novel
even positing the possibility of its total extinction—is simply a matter of
fate, and, in that sense, the father and son’s desperate struggle to hold on to
any moral values is quite insignificant within the context of the forces of the
cosmos. That does not mean the values have no meaning for the individuals still
struggling to survive, but simply that they would ultimately no longer mean
anything. Can we not admit that with the death of all human beings, God (and
whatever values the concept of God encompasses) no longer exists, or, at least,
no longer has any significance?
If, however, this apocalypse has been created by human beings, then any
remnant of human guilt and retribution expressed in the love and hope of this
intrepid couple is crucial—particularly if the species were incredibly to
survive. Without survival, obviously, it again makes no difference, but—as
Derrida might have argued—to the living that is the difference. To those who eat flesh and those who don’t, for the
carriers of the light as opposed to the forces of the dark, this is no slight
semantic slip of tongue, but an existential chasm of belief and act.
Los Angeles, November 13, 2006
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).
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