stairway to heaven, we shall all meet by and by

[intertribal]

Cormac McCarthy: The Road

I know I don't read books that don't have "globalization" in the title and are written by Fellows at Ivy League schools who have quips about first ladies and presidents of various developing countries, but Cormac McCarthy is my exception, and probably always will be my only exception, as he is the only one of the writers I like who is still alive.  I don't actually like Gabriel Garcia Marquez that much.  The others are Faulkner, Forster (only Passage to India), Heller, Conrad, and some sporadic one-hit wonders like Macho Camacho's Beat, which I can't read in the original Spanish, and A Season of Migration to the North.  McCarthy is sometimes regarded one of the top four American writers of our generations, oft compared to Faulkner (indeed, his first editor at Random House, where he submitted his first work The Orchard Keeper because it was the only place he had heard of, was Faulkner's old editor).  Unfortunately, Cormac McCarthy is dying too - but he seems intent on writing down to the last flick of the wrist.  I first read The Crossing in my senior year of high school.  I hated it at first.  But then I realized that linguistically, stylistically, he's my role model. 

Passage Sample #1: Language

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside.  They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns.  The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead.  By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land.  The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.  The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea flour and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. 

I read Outer Dark the summer between high school and college, and started but I'm ashamed to say got distracted from Blood Meridian, supposed to be his best.  Decided I had to finish The Peace Chronicles before leaving for college.  The Crossing is about a teenaged cowboy who, with his little brother, catches a pregnant wolf who's been feasting on their cattle and then decides to "return it" to Mexico.   Needless to say the best laid plans of cowboys and Indians gang aft agley.  They also have to find stolen horses, avenge their parents' deaths, and finally, our protagonist Billy has to find his brother.  Hugely philosophical and beautiful.  Outer Dark is short, and very glum, about a brother and sister in the southern U.S. who have had a baby, which the brother has taken into the woods and left to die.  The sister, upon finding out, goes into the outer dark to track it down, and the brother follows to bring her "home". 

The Road is a very subtle and minimalist work, almost a stripped down version of his earlier work.  There is only "the man" and "the boy", wandering down the road after the world as we know it ended several years ago at 1:17 a.m., when the electricity died and apparently masses of people died in ways unaccounted for - victims of random fires, of poisoning maybe?  They're found dead everywhere.  Those that are left are divided by the man for the sake of his son into "the good guys", who "carry the fire", and "the bad guys" - marauding gangs of pipe-wielding men, their cart-pulling slaves, and their chattel of women; cannibals who keep a beautiful mansion looking like an enticing false-Eden and luring survivors in, where they will be chained in the basement and slowly dismembered for food.  The man's wife and the boy's mother has long since killed herself to avoid the gruesome fate of the isolated and outnumbered good guys.  The man and the boy, however, have set out on the road, aimless, at once trying to find others and at the same time avoid others at all costs.  At first they head for the ocean, for no said reason.

Passage Sample #2: Imagery

Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it.  Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shoes of a world unheard of.  Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened.  Beyond that the ocean was vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash.  He looked at the boy.  He could see the disappointment in his face.  I'm sorry it's not blue, he said.  That's okay, said the boy. (181)

There's only one "philosopher" this time, an old man who claims to be ninety-year-old Ely but is probably not whom the boy insists on feeding, at least a little.  I would like to pause here to point out that McCarthy is very fond of bringing in pseudo-religious discussions into all his writing - hence the titles Cities of the Plain, Child of God - there's many themes of the nature of God: benevolent or malevolent, and the nature of humanity, with the same question. 

Passage Sample #3: Philosophy

How would you know if you were the last man on earth? he said.
I dont guess you would know it.  You'd just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldn't make any difference.  When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.
I guess God would know it.  Is that it?
There is no God.
No?
There is no God and we are his prophets.*... (143)
You don't want to say your name.
I don't want to say it.
Why?
I couldn't trust you with it.  To do something with it.  I don't want anybody talking about me.  To say where I was or what I said when I was there.  I mean, you could talk about me maybe.  But nobody could say that it was me.  I could be anybody.  I think in times like these the less said the better.  If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we'd have something to talk about.  But we're not.  So we don't.... (144-5)
When I saw the boy I thought that I had died.
You thought he was an angel?
I didn't know what he was.  I never thought to see a child again.  I didnt know that would happen.
What if I said that he's a god?
The old man shook his head.  I'm past all that now.  Have been for years.  Where men cant live gods fare no better.  You'll see.  It's better to be alone.  So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true.  Things will be better when everybody's gone.
They will?
Sure they will.
Better for who?
Everybody.
Everybody.
Sure.  We'll all be better off.  We'll all breathe easier.
That's good to know.
Yes it is.  When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.  He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to.  He'll say: Where did everybody go?  And that's how it will be.  What's wrong with that? (145-6)

The Road actually has a fairly optimistic ending, noticeably different from the bleakness of Outer Dark and the pessimism of The Crossing.  It was a bit of a relief - I suppose in a novel so depressing, with so little goodness and so little anything besides the burning road and burning, looted houses and canned food on sinking tankers, an ending as depressing as that found in The Crossing would be overkill.  And it actually ends up a classic case of strong pessimism - even in situation Doomsday, we must keep journeying down that black road.  It's actually the same reasoning that Samwise uses in The Two Towers, because "there's some good left in the world, and it's worth fighting for".  Though this is officially not what they journey for - "the good" - as the man says that dreaming of happy memories and goodness is a sign of malaise and approaching death, and he only cries because of memories of the good - the man is only alive for the sake of his son, born on the night of the apocalypse.  The man dies, but the boy finds more "good guys" in one of the most touching conversations I've read, ever.

Passage Sample #4: Hope

Are you one of the good guys?
The man pulled back the hood from his face.  His hair was long and matted.  He looked at the sky.  As if there were anything to be seen.  He looked at the boy.  Yeah, he said.  I'm one of the good guys.  Why don't you put the pistol away?...
How do I know you're one of the good guys?
You don't.  You'll have to take a shot.
Are you carrying the fire?
Am I what?
Carrying the fire.
You're kind of weirded out, aren't you?
No.
Just a little.
Yeah.
That's okay.
So are you?
What, carrying the fire?
Yes. 
Yeah.  We are.
Do you have any kids?
We do.
Do you have a little boy?
We have a little boy and we have a little girl.
How old is he?
He's about your age.  Maybe a little older.
And you didnt eat them.
No.
You dont eat people.
No.  We dont eat people.
And I can go with you?
Yes.  You can.
Okay then.
Okay. (237-239)

I strongly disagree with B. R. Myers' assertion that Cormac McCarthy is one of the "pretentious literati" that are supposedly overtaking the American literature scene.  Not that I have any explanation or defense for my opinion.  I just think that he writes about things that are so basic and base that it's hard to call him pretentious.

*: vintage McCarthy religious atheism there.  It's kind of how I feel about God.on a personal note: yes, I am still quite upset, although for different reasons than yesterday.  The Road has actually made me feel a little better about a lot of my problems - the ones like grades and expectations.  A lot of that stuff fell away while reading The Road.  I am not sure what to do with this particular anger.  Not sure what the best outlet is.  I know if I let it go I'll regret it.  So.  Looks like my best choice is to swallow it... or go elsewhere with it.  Maybe just let it sit and leave it alone, like you do with a kid having a temper tantrum.  I don't tend to take being yelled at very well... that's why my mother doesn't do it very often.  There's also "a certain cold ascetism" to reading a book like The Road.  It makes you just want to take off and leave, and leave nothing behind.  And that's as much from me as you're going to get right now, as I'm not sure what exactly I'm thinking about.  My hunger.  As they say in The Road about things to worry about, "and food.  Always, food."  I'm down to the basics, intent on living on bare bones from now on.