Thursday, February 04, 2010

The Road (or, my response to one of the bleakest books ever)

The idea of this endurance at the heart of all things – that we have to find our own meaning in life to make it bearable, because otherwise, otherwise if all we are is just survival and all we can do is survive there is no meaning to life. We must define this on our own terms – in The Road, the father finds meaning in his son, and through this meaning he is able to give his son the gift that he is unable to possess himself – the gift of goodness, purity and goodness for its own sake. By passing on beliefs to his son that he does not fully hold himself, he is able to find goodness and possess these qualities by means of their relationship.

We see this meaning throughout the text, or rather, we witness how rare and precious it is – and the horrific results of its absence. We see how, via means of faith, the female character at the conclusion of the story has been able to find a reason, and a means, of endurance – and we see how, deprived of it, other humans have descended to the level of something worse and lower than beast. We see how the values of consumption, greed and self preservation combine to result in cannibalism, of the need to survive untapered by any human compassion, with no reason for goodness. Therefore although the philosophy suggested by the book may be broadly viewed as existential it is in the more positive sense of the word, as we see that the fact that the only meaning of life is to be found in existence itself as a call to find this meaning rather than a rejection of its necessity.

I think it is interesting to consider whether the apocalyptic “society” portrayed by McCarthy as being, rather than an entirely Hobbesian state of nature, rather as an eventuality of the current path American society is taking. If we consider the actions of those individuals who display an absence of any existential meaning as being simply the final product of a society which has encouraged increased secularisation and detachment and alienation in the individual as necessary components of its means of function, then we can clearly see McCarthy´s text as critical of the direction he perceives American society to be headed in. Right wing hysteria surrounding the “death of the family” embodies similar concerns – the fear that, outside the traditional structure of American life, the external decivilising forces will prevail – a fear that can be traced back to the frontier, where close familiaral units were a necessity to combat the constant fear and threat of the unknown close at hand. However the difference is of course that America at present is no longer a land of “Cowboys and Indians” – the threat is no longer external and immediate but vague and intangible, a strange and mystic force that can be caressed by those with power into the shape of fantastic and nightmarish beasts. This fear can take the form of a conflicting ideology or theological belief; it can be other ways of life, other dreams – it can be as big as the world or as small as the homestead, the mythic space whose protection can be justified at any cost. And it is this fear which McCarthy traces to a conclusion, a conclusion almost entirely devoid of hope, and where the American society that so prides itself on individualism and the right to pursue ones dreams results in a world wholly devoid of mutual identification, consumed by a nightmare. “Welcome to the land of comestibles, where the mouth is God.” And so it is in a sense poetic, that a land built on insatiable hunger should eventually come to eat itself alive.

As the reader, we feel the despair of this man and his son. We despair for them, our hope dies as theirs, and it is from this identification that we are able to glean some form of consolation from the text. For of course, it is this very compassion - or rather the potential for this compassion, however small, the potential to identify with another and to feel their pain as our own, in which the ultimate saving grace of the human experience is found. By feeling the pain of the man and his son we too embody the force which enables this small endurance to exist – we feel compassion, and empathy, and sadness at witnessing the pain of another – all these qualities which are ultimately suppressed in a state of decivilisation, in order to survive. We see that these are all necessary in order to raise the quality of human life from mere survival, and that without these, there is little hope. Parallels can be drawn with the purpose faith fulfils for many individuals, and I think this is a parallel McCarthy draws. After all, what is faith if not the ultimate rejection of individualistic need? In Christianity, individuals experience empathy as they accept that Jesus Christ was crucified for the sins of humanity. Without empathy, without the sense that a human life is worthwhile even when it is not their own, what value could this symbolic sacrifice have for anyone?


Is The Road a depressing book? For most of the text, I found it deeply, deeply so. Frankly if the conclusion hadn´t included some suggestion of hope, however small, I think my heart would have broken. It starts out bleak and slowly becomes more and more hopeless as we realise, like the characters, that there is no hope of salvation. There is no hope of direction or purpose – no tomorrow, when tomorrow as a concept has ceased to have meaning, and the linear progressive notion of time as a cumulative sequence of events has been reduced to nothing more than the eternal, cyclical, succession of days in a world with no future. However, this is not an inevitably empty concept, devoid of any potential meaning. McCarthy´s core characters define their existence elsewhere, outside the realms of “long term goals” and the constant striving onwards and upwards that our present human existence considers the only valuable means of growth. They find meaning in each other, or when necessary in God – in the only places they can find, as they need to. There is hurt, there is pain. There is so much sometimes it seems unbearable, and it is never justified and it is never resolved, no deus-ex-machina to make it all go away. What we witness is that even when faced with such despair, there is always hope. That it is necessary to find hope and this can be found in love, and in other people – through compassion and goodness even when one begins to question the merit of such qualities, or even their very meaning outside of the moralising structure of society. Some ethical schools question whether there is such a thing as “natural law” – whether there can be any right or wrong outside of the context of societal norms. I do not think McCarthy´s text is ambiguous in this respect; although we witness a horrific “state of nature” scenario, where there are individuals operating without a moral code as a result of their non-societal status, we also see the boy and his father – the embodiment, even the last bastion of, natural law – they take a non-consequentialist ethical stance and ultimately show that there is merit in goodness simply for the sake of goodness. In fact, in this dystopian world, perhaps this is the only merit it is possible to find.
McCarthy´s closing paragraph acknowledges that there is horror, and horror unimaginable, and yet it does not admit defeat – but suggests that beyond this horror is something deeper, something that will endure. However he does not paint this as rendering the suffering and atrocity of the novel ultimately irrelevant. Things will never be the same. The damage has been done, irrevocably so, to the extent that the only meaning it is possible to find is of the rawest and most primal form.

It reminded me of a passage in Doris Lessing´s “The Golden Notebook” – a scene towards the climax of the novel, where the ethical and existential dilemmas of the main character are addressed in a dream sequence, about the end of the word – she witnesses a nuclear mushroom cloud, “unfolding like white petals”, and is reminded of a conversation she had with her psychiatrist, a “Witch Doctor”, who spoke of endurance – of that need to hold on to that tiny spark when all else fails. That even when all else is ashes and there is only skeletal ruins of everything mankind once held high, so long as there is life there is something that matters. Anna observes baldly that perhaps that isn´t enough. The response of her “witch doctor” is that it has to be.

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