A Call To Create a Different Road: Cormac McCarthy's Post-Apocalyptic Warning

Suspension footbridge near Bluff, Utah, November, 2004. PHOTO: TIMOTHY K HAMILTON

Given the wide range of periodicals in which Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road was reviewed upon publication, as well as the attention it received for winning the Pulitzer Prize, and given the appearance of its generally reclusive author on the Oprah Winfrey Show, not to mention occasional news of the film now in production and slated for release in November, it seems safe to assume that many Peacework readers will be familiar with the novel and its post-apocalyptic plot.

Indeed, since the rare luxury of writing for Peacework's Summer Reading Issue is precisely that one may write of a book beyond its initial publication date, allowing one to move beyond the parameters of the usual book review, I will assume an audience who has read the novel. In other words, this essay contains passages sometimes referred to as "spoilers," as if a work of literature were a stick of butter and information regarding plot or a meditation on a work's themes could make it rancid. All this is to say that if you like your literature untainted by commentary, you'd best stop reading here.

McCarthy offers precious little information about the cause or nature of the apocalypse - but we have enough to understand it as the result of a large-scale nuclear exchange. The earth is covered in ash, the sun obscured. Plants and trees are dead. The rivers run black. It's as if the man and his son are wandering in Hades - but they have an objective. Slowly, pushing a shopping cart loaded with their belongings: food, blankets, a tarp; they make their way south, endeavoring to reach the ocean, where they hope it will be warmer and they might meet some "good guys." The year remains unspecified. We understand that the apocalypse occurred roughly ten years before the present action, which is continuous, broken only by the man's occasional memories and reveries. One of these, a childhood memory late in the novel, serves as an indictment of contemporary American society - specifically, of heedless urban sprawl and our disregard for anything sacred.

McCarthy intimates that in a culture where anything can be purchased, where the social fabric is worn thin and cultural memory is revised with every election cycle, where residential and commercial zoning is a matter of politics, where "Rest in Peace" means only until the land values reach a tipping point - where human values are this skewed, the social contract is tenuous indeed. McCarthy writes:

At night when he woke coughing he'd sit up with his hand pushed over his head against the blackness. Like a man waking in his grave. Like those disinterred dead from his childhood that had been relocated to accommodate a highway. Many had died in a cholera epidemic and they'd been buried in haste in wooden boxes and the boxes were rotting and falling open. The dead came to light lying on their sides with their legs drawn up and some lay on their stomachs. The dull green antique coppers spilled from out the tills of their eyesockets onto the stained and rotted coffin floors.

With the "tills of their eyesockets," McCarthy presents the dead as cash registers, as objects at the center of a commercial enterprise, forcing us to consider the reason cemeteries are relocated and to think about at least one of the ways human lives are routinely debased in our culture. That these people died in large numbers, in an epidemic, suggests that a later event should be read as ironic counterpoint. Two-thirds of the way through the novel, the man and his son come upon the literal remains of an attempted urban evacuation - the tableau stretches along the road for over a mile. McCarthy's point seems clear: the cholera victims were disinterred to make room for a road. In a later age, the road itself has become the locus of mass death. The victims' belongings have been taken by human scavengers. Their bodies remain unburied.

I will return to these disinterred and unburied shortly. I'd first like to consider the scavengers, the general scarcity they imply, and the novel's consequent re-ordering of the reader's values. By the time of the novel's action, nearly all of the world's munitions have been used up; shoes have become some of the most valuable material objects. The condition of one's shoes is a constant concern, and the bare feet of the dead are frequently described. (In fact, when I first read the novel, I thought I'd never look at a pair of shoes or a bottle of water in the same way again.) One characteristic of a great book is that it recalibrates our value system. Even if the effect is only temporary, ultimately eroded by the commerce of daily life, the fact that we have experienced this recalibration of values helps us to live with more awareness - or, as Thoreau would say, more "deliberately." (Who, having read Thoreau's chapter on "Economy" as an adult, is not changed in some irreversible manner?) To re-order the reader's values is no small matter, and this feat may be the enduring legacy of The Road.

McCarthy's novel is built of blocks of text, many no longer than a paragraph, few longer than a page. A few brief passages, strategically distributed throughout the novel, sufficiently outline the quick breakdown of civil society, the fall into what we might call, however paradoxically, a postmodern state of nature. Here is a text block in which the father recalls the immediate aftermath:

People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

Behind the nod to Dostoyevsky, we see a disconcerted Hobbes. The state of nature that has replaced our own social structure is worse than he theorized. It may be that where there is no law there can be no crime, but punishment proceeds apace.

Thematically, much of the novel explores the moral use of language as a necessary precondition for civilization. Not accidentally, the father experiences moral revulsion after making up new card games to play with his son and giving them "made up names. Abnormal Fescue or Catbarf." If the world is to be apprehensible, language must not be arbitrary. Neither is the father free to invent for his son in stories a world that never existed.

In this light it is useful to consider two moments in McCarthy's novel. The first is that moment when the father discovers an underground bunker furnished with a chemical toilet and stocked with provisions. It's in this "tiny paradise" that we first see the re-established connection between sign and signifier. The father has just called his son down into the bunker:

"What is all this stuff, Papa?"
"It's food. Can you read it?"
"Pears. That says pears."
"Yes. Yes it does. Oh yes it does."

Although complicated and imperfect, because "pears" is a homonym (pares, pairs), the sign and signifier in this instance are one. We might note the father's trinity of affirmations, each containing yet progressing beyond the last, as if the function of civilized language is to accrue positive meanings.

The second moment to consider in light of this theme is the novel's response to those disinterred and unburied dead who marked the erosion or lack of civilization. Following the father's death, his son stays with the body, mourning, for three days, and then provides what can only be called a ritual burial. But before the burial, McCarthy gives us the father's death or - if not the thing itself, because perhaps too mysterious and sacred for words - the moments that follow:

He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff. He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the woods to the road. When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again.

Throughout the novel, the boy has called his father "Papa." Here, at the end, I believe we are to understand that the boy repeats his father's given name. To say that name "over and over again" in the presence of his father's dead body conclusively connects signifier to signified, linguistically (and philosophically and theologically) diminishing the power of death. The idea that you are still you even after death raises the value of human life to a realm separate from and beyond that of objects.

Objects cannot create and maintain a social contract. Nor can individuals dehumanized by an economic system that concentrates power and privilege. The world of The Road is painfully solitary and brutal, yet McCarthy shows the basis of a new social contract: love, charity, and a recognition of the human. We must animate these. We must hope they are enough.