“In what direction did lost men veer?

”: Late Capitalism and Utopia in The Road

Author(s): Casey Jergenson
Source: The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2016), pp. 117-132
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: [Link]
Accessed: 27-06-2016 09:15 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
[Link]

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@[Link].

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Cormac McCarthy Journal

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 “In what direction did lost
men veer?”
Late Capitalism and Utopia
in The Road

Casey Jergenson

Abstract: This paper analyzes the material, social, and ideological composition of The
Road’s post-apocalyptic world through the lens of Benjaminian historical materialism. The
Road historicizes the post-apocalyptic condition through its framing of the relationship
between the novel’s present and its late capitalist prehistory. The ideological project of the
father and son, as they seek to convey “the fire” across the desiccated wasteland, entails the
performance of a mode of human relationality that conflicts with the late capitalist ideolo-
gies of the past and their behavioral residue in the cannibalistic practices of the apocalypse’s
other survivors. The Road transcends purely negative social criticism by offering, through
the praxis of the father and son, the outline of a utopian alternative to the social order that
produced and continues to shape the novel’s post-apocalyptic world. Keywords: Cormac
McCarthy, The Road, late capitalism, Walter Benjamin

The critical conversation surrounding Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel,

The Road, is varied and diverse, producing readings that explore the novel’s theo-
logical overtones, meditations on the nature of language, and political implica-
tions. These varied lines of inquiry speak to the novel’s richness and polyvalence,
and to its preoccupation with many of McCarthy’s characteristic themes: the
brutality of human nature, the crisis of meaning in the postmodern world, and
the destructive trajectory of human history. This article offers a reading of The
Road’s political content—a particularly divisive topic in the criticism described
above. Much of The Road’s narrative and thematic content deals with the diverse
responses of the apocalypse’s survivors to their new material conditions of exis-
tence. The novel’s understated critiques of late capitalism and consumer culture
are articulated through its staging of the dialectical relationships between past
and present, survivor and material world, and self and other. The ruins of the

The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
novel’s setting foreground and comment on the consumer culture that forms the
narrative world’s prehistory. Passages describing the survivors of the catastrophe
suggest structural and ideological homologies between the cannibalistic bands
roaming the desolated countryside and the processes of capitalistic production
and consumption. The praxis of the father and son disrupts the social organiza-
tion of this imagined future as an image of its dialectical opposite, confronting
the dominant rationalities of the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds with their
seemingly unrealizable utopian negation.
Contemporary popular culture is inundated with post-apocalyptic narra-
tives. Myriad young adult novels describe dystopian future societies, and popu-
lar films and television shows imagine apocalyptic events initiated by zombie
viruses, natural disasters, or other catastrophes. The popularization of these
texts is not an incidental feature of our historical moment. Slavoj Žižek notes
in discussion of the dangers facing twenty-first century society that “it is easy to
see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic
end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manip-
ulable machines, the total digital control over our lives” (92–93). Žižek gives
expression here to a widespread and deeply rooted sentiment in the post-9/11
Western world that some sort of massive, world-altering cataclysm is possible,
and perhaps even imminent. Insecurities over food and water shortages, cli-
mate change, over-population, nations’ continued maintenance of their nuclear
arsenals, and growing international tensions are reflected in our cultural prod-
ucts. The proliferation of narratives describing end-of-times scenarios is symp-
tomatic of modern society’s awareness of its vulnerabilities. Post-apocalyptic
narratives provide opportunities for readers to engage with the possibility of a
cataclysmic future. These texts can critique contemporary society by imagining
new worlds in which old social relations have been dissolved, allowing survivors
to construct new societies on the ruins of the old. They can serve cautionary
functions by depicting the terrible suffering that could soon engulf humanity
if nations—particularly superpowers like the United States—do not institute
radical policy changes. Additionally, they can project modern social relations
unaltered into the context of a dystopian future, allowing readers to view the
dangerous contradictions defining the present order from a critical distance.
The Road is a post-apocalyptic narrative that has been critically and com-
mercially successful, but it does not appear to be overtly political. The cause of
the apocalyptic event is never identified in the text, its depictions of human rela-
tionality seem limited to the interpersonal level rather than the socio-political,
and it does not seem to offer much hope that human society can be renewed.
Of these textual elements, the ambiguity of the apocalyptic event is particularly

118 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
controversial. Steven Frye foregrounds the significance of the issue when he
notes the tendency among critics to read the event as either a nuclear disaster
or a meteor strike: “A nuclear holocaust would be the result of human evil, and
the meteor or asteroid the outcome of natural evil” (169). A number of crit-
ics have pushed back against readings that assume that The Road depicts the
aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Dana Phillips writes that “the critical discus-
sion of The Road has been skewed by an impression, possibly erroneous, that
in it the end of the world is brought on, and not merely exacerbated by, human
agency: specifically, by all-out nuclear warfare” (176). According to this view, the
tendency to attribute the apocalypse to human agency may be a distortion of a
narrative that is simply focused on other matters. Phillips delivers a close read-
ing of the only scene in the novel that provides a description of the apocalyptic
event, arguing that the passage’s imagery seems more applicable to an asteroid
strike than to a nuclear detonation. This reading derives support from a 2007
Rolling Stone article that documents McCarthy’s interest in asteroid strikes
(Kushner 6). Writing in a somewhat different direction, John Cant accepts the
nuclear disaster hypothesis but qualifies it by noting that the world of the novel
is not wholly consistent with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. He attributes
these inconsistencies to McCarthy’s choice to privilege the novel’s allegorical
structure over its scientific accuracy, claiming that “the ‘nuclear holocaust’ is a
metaphorical explanation for the state of the world that McCarthy creates as his
wider metaphor for the condition of man in the realization of his cosmic insig-
nificance” (269). Cant focuses on the event’s formal role in the narrative, reading
the novel as an expression of humanity’s “cosmic insignificance” and taking the
nuclear event as a plot point that simply facilitates the text’s existential musings.
These readings liken the father and son to many other McCarthy protago-
nists: Job-like figures locked in hopeless struggles against a harsh and impla-
cable universe. In the Border Trilogy, it is possible to identify the antagonistic
force opposing John Grady and Billy Parham as the advance of modernity and
the technologies and ideologies associated with it. In The Road, however, only
traces of these material and conceptual processes remain, and the novel does
not offer a clear reason for their passing, leaving open the possibility that the
apocalypse had little or nothing to do with the destructive potentials of modern
civilization. There certainly are reasons to attribute the apocalypse to human
agency, particularly to the environmental toll of late capitalist production and
consumption, but the novel’s socially critical functions are not wholly predicated
on the nature of the apocalyptic event. Fredric Jameson writes in Archaeologies
of the Future that “the social totality is always unrepresentable, even for the most
numerically limited groups of people; but it can sometimes be mapped and

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 119

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
allow a small-scale model to be constructed on which the fundamental tenden-
cies and the lines of flight can more clearly be read” (14). Representing a “social
totality” through a compressed, small–scale model is arguably what The Road
does, depicting a post-apocalyptic world in which the material and ideological
residues of late capitalism linger as its microcosmic afterimage, an image cri-
tiqued by the father’s and son’s affirmation of altruistic and communal social
forms.
Walter Benjamin’s comments on the notion of historical progress, par-
ticularly as articulated in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and cer-
tain aphorisms in The Arcades Project, provide useful theoretical insights into
McCarthy’s representations of history. Indeed, Billy Parham and John Grady
Cole in the Border Trilogy and the father in The Road are all fitting literary
analogues for Benjamin’s famous “angel of history,” who gazes back into the past
as the catastrophic storm of progress “irresistibly propels him into the future
to which his back is turned” (Theses 257–58). The Arcades Project includes
Benjamin’s most comprehensive meditations on the demystifying functions of
historical artifacts, making it quite pertinent to an analysis of The Road’s set-
ting. Susan Buck-Morss describes Benjamin’s method in The Arcades Project
as a politicization of his earlier work on Baroque drama (170). Benjamin sees
in Baroque drama a melancholy lament for a chaotic and meaningless world in
ruin. He extends these notions regarding the material world’s transience and
contingency into the realm of politics in his work on the Parisian Arcades, in
the ruins of which he sees inscribed the narrative of nineteenth-century French
capitalism—its rise and its subsequent transmutation into a new form that left
the old one, embodied by the Arcades, decrepit and obsolete. Graeme Gilloch
writes of The Arcades Project that Benjamin “charts a natural history of the com-
modity . . . the inscrutable fetish and stupefying spectacle of the recent past is
demystified and rendered legible” (135). The fossilized material object, formerly
fetishized as a commodity but now demystified and reduced to its sheer mate-
riality, bears witness to the mutability of its epoch’s material and ideological
orders. The demystified past demystifies the present; it compels the subject to
historicize the present by reexamining its relation to the conditions that pro-
duced it. The Road presents readers with just such a subject—the father—who
encounters the terrifying relationship between past and present in the burnt-
out artifacts of late capitalist America.
One of the aphorisms in The Arcades Project declares that “as Proust begins
the story of his life with an awakening, so must every presentation of history
begin with an awakening” (464). The Road follows this mandate quite liter-
ally; the novel begins with the father waking in the dark woods of the fallen

120 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
world from a dream in which he and his son wandered in a primordial cave.
In this dream, a grotesque reptilian creature lurks on the bank of a subterra-
nean lake, and the father can see its bones and organs through its translucent
skin before it turns and “lope[s] soundlessly into the dark” (4). Lydia Cooper
describes this dream as “a nightmare vision of humankind’s participation in its
own destruction” (222): as a metaphor for a corrupt civilization in decline, the
decaying creature endowed with brain and heart recedes willingly into darkness.
This haunting passage is the first instantiation of the motif of awakening in
the novel. It is an apt beginning to The Road, which several times describes the
father awakening from dreams of a prosperous and idyllic past life to the night-
mare of the present. The transition from dream to waking nightmare represents
the irruption of incomprehensible catastrophe into an American upper middle
class consciousness conditioned by the same material order that produced the
catastrophic event.
The Road’s landscape is littered with the skeletal remains of this old material
order. Early in the novel, the father recalls images from the immediate aftermath
of the catastrophe: “Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like
migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and trou-
bling issues resolved into nothingness and night” (28). Human civilization lies
in smoldering ruins—the men deprived of their homes are also bereft of their
creeds, and nothing now remains but the desiccated wasteland. The father and
son navigate this wasteland by means of a “tattered oilcompany roadmap [that]
had once been taped together but now it was just sorted into leaves and num-
bered with crayons in the corner for their assembly” (42). The father tells the
boy at one point that the black lines on the map “used to belong to the states.
What used to be called the states” (42). “What happened to them?” the boy asks,
and the father responds “I dont know exactly” (43). The United States of late
capitalism is mapped here by a corporation, a representative of the economic
interests that shaped the material and ideological terrain of the vanished nation.
The map is now tattered and its leaves have separated from each other, held
together once by tape but now merely numbered so that the father and son can
fit them together at need. The map’s fragmentation is a reminder of the dissipa-
tion of the constructs it features—the state boundaries and also the neoliberal
ideologies the oil company represents—but the father and son still rely on the
remains of the past to navigate the world around them.
It is worth noting, here, the association between the fossil fuel industry
and a broad range of environmental crises ranging from oil spills to climate
change. A map of America designed and published by an oil company is a
potent symbol in the context of a novel describing a decimated natural world.

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 121

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
This is one of many textual moments contributing to the apocalyptic event’s
ambiguity. Phillips outlines the problems involved with attributing the event
to human agency, but images such as this one function as forceful reminders
of the central role played by corporations—and the extractive, profit-driven
logic of neoliberalism—in structuring contemporary America. “No fall but
preceded by a declination,” the father reflects early in the novel, reinforcing the
notion that the end of the world may have been the culmination of a process
of social and environmental decline rather than the outcome of an inexplicable
natural disaster (15).
It is notable that artifacts of modern society such as the map remain
anonymous, seldom associated with a brand name or identifying label. The
roadmap’s association with the fossil fuel industry has political resonance,
but the noun “oilcompany” remains vague and general, making it easier for
readers to scan over it uncritically than would be the case with a pointed ref-
erence to BP or ExxonMobil. The father and son pass through “the ruins of
a resort town,” but the resorts and the town remain nameless (29). They see
billboards featuring “a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no
longer existed,” but the novel does not provide a description of these goods
or any mention of the corporations that produced them (128). This absence
may be explained when McCarthy writes of “The names of things slowly fol-
lowing those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat.
Finally the names of things one believed to be true . . . The sacred idiom
shorn of its referents and so of its reality” (89). The dearth of brand names
in the text emphasizes the dissolution of the commodity form. Marx’s notion
of commodity fetishism is relevant here: the erasure of the traces of the labor
process from the material object through the imposition of quasi-mystical
monetary and cultural values. The relics of consumer culture, once luminous
repositories of monetary and cultural value whose names participated in the
“sacred idiom” the father refers to, have relapsed into their material character
as various configurations of matter, some of which are useful and some of
which are not.
The can of Coca-Cola the man and the boy find in the grocery store is a strik-
ing exception to this trend.

By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into
the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. [The
father] sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines
and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew
his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola. (23)

122 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
The man’s first impression of the object relates to its materiality: it is a “cold metal
cylinder.” Only when he looks at it is he able to associate the material object with
its brand name. This juxtaposition of the object’s identities as material entity
and as commodity underscores the distinctness of the two identities and the
significance of the moment of transition in the object’s history. Benjamin writes
that the “present determines where, in the object from the past, that object’s
fore-history and after-history diverge so as to circumscribe its nucleus” (Arcades
476). The father experienced the moment in the past when the historical object
ceased to be a commodity and became a mere material object, when the implo-
sion of late capitalism evacuated its products of their monetary and cultural
values, altering forever the texture of the material world. The coins scattered
across the ashen floor are reminders of the decommodification of objects such
as the Coca-Cola. The coins and the soft drink no longer exist in relation to
each other as exchangeable signifiers of value, a point echoed later in the novel
when the father finds a small round object in a field and cannot tell if it is a coin
or a button. In this later scene, after identifying the object as a coin, the father
“looked about at the gray county and the gray sky and he dropped [it],” discard-
ing an object that has become worthless in the context of the desolated world
(204). Brian Donnelly, in his analysis of the grocery store scene, suggests that
McCarthy chooses to label the Coca-Cola can because of the brand’s cultural
resonance, noting that “the expanding corporate machine that is Coca-Cola has
worked to forge an ideology for its customers, one that promotes the product
and its consumers as part of a global family of happy, peaceful, refreshed drink-
ers” (71). This association seems superficial and hollow in the context of the
novel’s present, which demonstrates that even if capitalist production was not
directly responsible for the demise of that happy, familial world, it was incapable
of ensuring its reproduction.
Many objects other than the Coca-Cola contribute to this element of the
text’s critical function. The father and son enter a drugstore where “The phar-
macy was looted but the store itself was oddly intact. Expensive electronic
equipment unmolested on the shelves . . . Sundries. Notions. What are these?”
(183–84). The father’s question “What are these?” foregrounds the ontological
instability of the material world in a historical period in which the relation of
humans to that world has changed irrevocably. The contingency of the normal,
of all that was taken for granted in the past, rises out of the effort to relate
the electronic devices to a changed historical context in which they have no
monetary or cultural value, or any utility in the effort to survive. The electronic
devices are, furthermore, “expensive” designating them as luxury items and fit-
ting artifacts of American consumerism. Susan Kollin offers a detailed analysis

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 123

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
of the grocery cart the father and son carry their belongings in, writing that “as a
symbol of late-capitalist consumer culture . . . the cart is a reminder of the irra-
tional exuberance that characterized the economy of contemporary America”
(161). A tension arises from the grocery cart’s insertion into a context of scarcity
and hunger, given its association with abundance and its previous function as
a tool that facilitated consumption. The image of the man and the boy dressed
in ragged clothes and pushing their belongings down the road in the cart is also
a stereotypical representation of urban homelessness, compressing in the cart
symbolic evocations of the related phenomena of extreme excess and depriva-
tion in contemporary American society (Kollin 168).
Many critics and book reviewers have described the relationship between
contemporary American society and the world of The Road as an allegorical
one. In this view, McCarthy’s wasteland functions, like T. S. Eliot’s, as a repre-
sentation of the crisis of meaning in the modern (or postmodern) world. Such
a reading collapses the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds of the novel—as well
as the “real” world of the reader—into a unitary existential condition defined by
instability and the slippage of signification. These are astute readings supported
by plenty of textual evidence, but the materiality of the novel’s world points to
the equally rewarding route of considering the novel’s setting not only in alle-
gorical or intertextual terms, but also in historical ones. Where the ineffaceable
vestiges of late capitalism linger in the narrative world, they force a dialectical
revaluation of the relationship between past and present, insisting simultane-
ously on their inassimilable difference and constant interpenetration.
Regardless of whether or not the apocalypse was the consequence of human
action, the world that ensues from it is thoroughly constituted by the conditions
that preceded it, despite its apparent difference. Jameson describes the radical
social transition often represented in futuristic texts as a process in which “cus-
tom and law are swept away, a social chaos ensuing from which a new social
order emerges only slowly and from new and unpredictable, hitherto marginal
areas” (Archaeologies 90). Bracketing and setting aside, for the time being, the
clear objection that the burnt-out world of The Road is ecologically incapable
of sustaining life, much less human civilization, the image Jameson describes
certainly resonates with McCarthy’s depiction of social collapse. The Road’s rep-
resentation of this process both affirms and complicates Jameson’s emphasis on
newness, however. The reconstruction of human civilization seems impossible
in The Road, yet humans continue to interact with and rely on each other, and
these interactions are inflected by the ideologies of the recent past. The father
functions as a sort of conduit, struggling to construct a new system of values
out of the symbolic fragments of the old while mediating their transmission

124 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
to his son. Despite the father’s rhetoric, he never succeeds in fully realizing his
moral code in practice. This is the task of the son, who receives the reconsti-
tuted altruistic traditions of the past and applies them through a form of praxis
that opposes the instrumental rationality of the majority of the apocalypse’s
survivors.
“In what direction did lost men veer?” the father wonders midway through
the novel (116). The social practices of the apocalypse’s disoriented survivors
indicate that they tend to veer in one of two directions: some toward cannibal-
ism, and some toward community. McCarthy’s corpus is very preoccupied with
the atavism and primitivism of human nature. Given this, it is reasonable—
perhaps necessary—to read the cannibalism in the text as a representation
of humanity’s reversion to its animal instincts in reaction to extremity. These
characters may demonstrate the alternative to the father’s remobilization of the
values of the past: they submit to the meaninglessness of the post-apocalyptic
condition and suspend the outmoded moralities that in this world prove to be
liabilities and obstacles to survival, such that the world is quickly “populated by
men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” (181). The value system
passed from father to son is rooted in the distinction between the animalistic
“bad guys” who engage in murder and cannibalism and the Promethean “good
guys” who carry the fire and seem imbued with spiritual energy. The son, as
embodiment of love and goodness, appears to the father as a being “from some
unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” (273), set in stark
opposition to the one cannibal that the pair encounter up close: “The reptilian
calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy
with human flesh” (75). The text supports a reading that frames the cannibals
as embodiments of humanity’s animal instincts and the son as the bearer and
representative of the spiritual energy symbolized by the fire. Essentializing the
characters in this way, however, by contrasting a brutal human nature with the
spiritual principle embodied by the son, elides the profound socio-political
implications of their practices.
The cannibalism featured in the novel may be viewed not as a regression
to some bestial state outside of ideology, but rather as a performance of ideol-
ogy, a behavioral residue of late capitalist consumer culture. Donnelly notes the
connection between the and pre- and post-apocalyptic forms of consumption
described in the novel: “the supermarket epitomizes just the sort of self-consum-
ing society McCarthy sends to its demise. . . . Cannibalism as a metaphor for
consumption is realized in this novel” (71). The hierarchical structure of the can-
nibal groups is established through power and competition—social Darwinism
at its most extreme—the reification of the subject and the consumption of the

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 125

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
weak by the strong. The tendency for certain cannibal bands to enslave other
humans and breed them to produce food indicates a clear differentiation in
social status, with those of lower status existing solely to satisfy the bodily needs
of those above them. One such group is described in the text as follows:

An army in tennis shoes, tramping . . . Behind them came wagons drawn

by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women,
perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supple-
mentary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dog-
collars and yolked each to each. (91–92)

The extreme gender imbalances here are notable. There are only about a dozen
women in a group of survivors which, though no number is given in the text,
seems to number at least several dozen, perhaps over a hundred. The women
are ranked between the “slaves in harness” and the catamites forced into sexual
service to the higher-ranking men in order to “supplement” the small number
of women.
The dearth of women speaks to humankind’s dwindling ability to reproduce
itself. A few of the women are carrying unborn children, but a later passage in
which the father and son encounter “a charred human infant headless and gut-
ted and blackening on the spit,” leaves little doubt as to the ultimate fate of any
offspring born to these women (198). The women’s role in this group is to pro-
duce food. In this sense, they are the most valuable members of the group, but
the horror and sheer physical strain of their daily existence, which is probably
limited to enduring rape and bearing one child after another, accounts for their
extremely small number. When they die, they too are consumed. These are the
productive members of this group, and they share the fate of that which they
produce—to nourish those with power. The position of the catamites is slightly
preferable insofar as they cannot bear children, but they too are sexual slaves,
and the fact that they are leashed together with “dogcollars” is simply one more
indication of the common devaluation of human life.
The image of the cannibal referenced above describes an intersection of
animal instinct and utilitarian, instrumental rationality. Particularly disturb-
ing—and also evocative of the nightmare creature of the novel’s opening—is
the reference to the “reptilian calculations” taking place in the cannibal’s brain.
Reasoning, a uniquely human operation, is presented as cold-blooded and inhu-
man in this passage, where it reduces humans to consumable objects and legiti-
mizes cannibalism as an amoral means to an end. Clearly, these small pockets
of human society are not capitalistic. There is no exchange, no paid labor, no

126 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
commodity form, and so on. Manuel Broncano, in fact, emphasizes the atavism
of these groups by describing them as a “return to the primitive hunter-gatherer
epoch” (126). His later reference, however, to “the agony of a race that tries to
survive on its own waste and whose offspring are not meant to perpetuate the
species, but to serve as fodder for the men-turned-beasts, thus eventually com-
pleting its own annihilation,” describes an unsustainable social order that has
apparently come into existence because the social order that preceded it was,
itself, unsustainable (126).
The relationship between the cannibalistic present and the capitalistic past
should be understood dialectically; the two historical moments and their cor-
responding social forms are structurally different yet joined by a shared set of
ethics and assumptions, and, arguably, a relationship of historical causality.
Understanding the cannibalism in the novel in this context reveals its continu-
ity with economic structures predicated on the unfettered consumption of com-
modities that are too often produced by exploited, disempowered people. These
structures have historically been shored up through ideological operations that
posit competition, greed, and the pursuit of self-interest as fundamental—and,
indeed, salutary—qualities of human nature. This correlation is particularly
instructive in an era in which capitalism seeks to refashion its ideology so as to
keep abreast of modern society’s burgeoning humanitarian sentiments. Žižek
criticizes the “new ethos of global responsibility” which seeks to represent capi-
talism “as the most efficient instrument of the common good . . . [while] leav-
ing these very capitalist relations intact” (35). The Road projects the ethics of late
capitalism into a post-apocalyptic context of hunger and scarcity remote from
the legitimating ideological operations of the past. It describes the brutal con-
sequences of those ethics when carried to their logical extreme, revealing their
incompatibility with the humanitarian ethos described by Žižek and referred to
also in Donnelly’s discussion of the Coca-Cola scene.
In one of the notes compiled in The Arcades Project, Benjamin briefly defines
three “basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity.
Critical moment—the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress—the first
revolutionary measure taken” (474). The catastrophe Benjamin refers to here
is not the moment when history is ruptured. Rather, it is the moment when
the window of opportunity forced open by that rupture slams shut, when the
dominant ideology is reinscribed and the status quo is reconstituted. The Road
describes two catastrophes: the disruption of history and the way humanity
responds to it, the dissolution of civilization and humanity’s subsequent failure
to replace the old order with more equitable and humane social forms. The nat-
uralization of exploitation is a basic feature of the post-apocalyptic world and of

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 127

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
the society that gave birth to it. The past has not been cleanly swept away, and
those elements of pre-apocalyptic social relations resurrected by survivors of
the catastrophe contribute to the future’s dystopian character. Any substantial
break from the antagonistic modes of relationality institutionalized before the
apocalypse and seemingly legitimated by the material conditions ensuing from
it is, indeed, revolutionary.
The father and son reject the reduction of the human subject to a con-
sumable object. Both past and present have been thoroughly demystified for
the father by the novel’s beginning; he has learned of the universal “frailty of
everything,” but he seeks to forestall this process in his son through acts of
ideological reconstruction. This process entails an imbrication of the spiri-
tual and the socio-political as the father uses Christian terms and symbols
to articulate a belief system defined by communal values. The father reflects
early in the novel that “If [the boy] is not the word of God God never spoke,”
immediately associating the son with divinity (5). This designation is elabo-
rated throughout the text: the father insists to his son that the pair are “car-
rying the fire,” and he describes the boy as a “Golden chalice, good to house
a god” (41, 75). He “evoke[s] the forms” (74), adopting Christian images and
applying them to a new spiritual being in whom he sees the wasteland’s only
instance of goodness and salvific potential: the son. These textual moments
should not be construed as an attempt by the father to maintain traditional
religious faith, nor should they be viewed as efforts to construct a wholly new
system of belief. History is a palimpsest of new orders constructed on the
foundations of the old. The father selects fragments of the traditions of the
past and remobilizes them, adapting them to the social and material realities
of the post-apocalyptic world while maintaining the values of love and good-
ness that animated them.
Love and goodness cannot be practiced in isolation, and while the father is
hesitant to interact with any other survivors, the boy understands that their
value system obligates them to relate in a certain way to those they encounter.
Late in the novel, the father asks the boy if he would like to hear a story, and
the boy declines, saying “in the stories we’re always helping people and we dont
help people” (268). This moment, Cooper notes, “suggests that [the boy] sees
the necessity of a functional correlation between fictional ideas and real-world
praxis” (232). The ideals of the father impel the boy into the risky acts of kindness
and generosity that the father remains wary of. Paul Knox discusses the central-
ity of community to the stories and lessons the father imparts to the son: “sur-
viving the wasteland requires re-creating the communities that the apocalypse
has erased—even if those communities will exist only in the imagination” (97).

128 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
The novel focuses on the relationship between the boy and his father, but their
orientation toward the rest of the world—their conviction that they are among
the “good guys”— presupposes the existence of other good guys and situates
community at the heart of their value system. “I dont know what we’re doing,”
the boy says at one point in the novel, and the father responds, “There are peo-
ple. There are people and we’ll find them. You’ll see” (244). When the boy raises
doubts about the purpose of their journey, the father’s only response, though
he may not fully believe it himself, is that they need to find other good people
and enter into community with them. This possibility gives meaning to their
continued efforts to survive.
The boy’s unyielding fidelity to his values leads him to insist on sharing
food with the few harmless survivors they encounter on the road. When the
pair meets the old man Ely midway through the novel, the son meekly suggests
“Maybe we could give him something to eat,” and after Ely eats a can of fruit
cocktail the boy asks “Can we give him something else?” before insisting “We
could cook something on the stove. He could eat with us” (163, 164, 165). The
father acquiesces reluctantly, and Ely shares a meal with them, but as the two
grow thinner and sicklier, the father’s practicality clashes with the boy’s altru-
ism. “Just help him, Papa. Just help him,” the boy pleads late in the novel when
the father leaves the thief who stole their cart naked and alone on the road (259).
The thief stole the cart in response to desperate material circumstances, and the
father’s reaction is to punish him. The boy recognizes what the father chooses
to ignore—“he was just hungry, Papa” (259). In a national context of rigidly
guarded borders, prisons brimming with inmates, and police violence applied
disproportionately to impoverished, minority populations, the boy’s insights
have clear applications beyond the world of the novel. Though the father does
not always succeed in performing his ideals to his son’s satisfaction, he is respon-
sible for instilling in the boy the values of goodness and communal sharing that
he sees as being the only antidote to life in the fallen world. These values answer
Thomas Schaub’s question regarding “the status of the ethical, as well as the
reason for being, in the absence of the social” (158). The ethics of the father and
son are predicated on their enduring faith in the possibility of the social, in the
potential for society to be, if not renewed, at least rejoined communally and on
a microcosmic scale.
It is debatable to what extent the behavior of The Road’s characters is
attributable to ideology, and to what extent it is rooted in ahistorical essences.
Animalism converges and seems compatible with capitalist ethics in the figures
of the cannibals, and the father’s and son’s ideology has a spiritual valence that
interacts with its gesture toward communal social forms. This mingling of social

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 129

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
and theological possibilities in the figure of the son is articulated in Broncano’s
argument that the son represents “a religion without gods and without demons,
based on the brotherhood and sisterhood of those who still claim themselves as
human” (139). The theological language applied to the son cannot be dissociated
from the socio-political implications of his values and practices. According to
Cooper, the novel’s application of grail imagery to the son designates him as
“both grail and grail-bearer, vessel and antidote to the world’s toxicity” (227).
The son, as grail, is an object infused with spiritual energy—perhaps some sort
of divinity, perhaps simply human compassion—and this property compels him
to perform the role of grail-bearer, propagating goodness through salvific acts of
communal sharing. The son’s praxis is a profound disruption of the social rela-
tions that preceded the apocalypse and that found continuity in the cannibalism
that ensued from it. Whether the fire is human love, divinity, or an imaginary
construct, the values and practices associated with it throughout the novel are
subversive.
The imbricated spiritual and socio-political possibilities described above
imbue the novel’s conclusion with a positive note rare in McCarthy’s corpus, a
faint utopian hope that exists in tension with the overwhelming bleakness sur-
rounding it. The closing image of brook trout, for instance, with its nostalgia
for a past “which could not be put back. Not be made right again” combines
the beauty of McCarthy’s language with, seemingly, an acknowledgment that
humanity’s progress toward extinction is irreversible (287). To grapple with
the bittersweet tone of the conclusion, it is useful to turn to Benjamin’s notion
of the messianic. Benjamin uses the figure of the Messiah not to indicate a
hypothetical future savior, but rather to describe an historical possibility. He
writes in the final aphorism of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that
“We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future . . . This
does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous,
empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the
Messiah might enter” (264). To live in messianic time is to live with an aware-
ness of the future’s radical indeterminacy, to see the future not as empty time,
nor as a homogeneous perpetuation of the status quo—because every sec-
ond brings with it the possibility of unimaginable change. Catastrophes, for
Benjamin, are moments of opportunity, unforeseeable events that arrest the
destructive trajectory of historical progress and rupture the consciousness of
the status quo, making visible the utopian potentials constellated across the
social and material worlds, such that the possibility for revolutionary change
flashes in on the historical subject “with the sobriety of dawn” (Arcades 474).
Jameson writes that

130 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 The very idea of the messianic then brings the whole feeling of dashed
hopes and impossibility along with it. . . . You would not evoke the mes-
sianic in a genuinely revolutionary period, a period in which changes
can be sensed at work all around you. . . . This is the notion of the non-
announced, the turning of a corner in which an altogether different pres-
ent happens, which was not foreseen. (Valences 176–77)

The son has often been described as a Christ figure, as a redeemer imbued
with divinity, but it is also useful to consider him as a messianic figure in the
Benjaminian sense. The son represents the historical potential for a just, equi-
table, and sustainable society, even if the conditions under which such a soci-
ety could feasibly be established have passed, and even if that society—the
“unimaginable future” the son seems to anticipate—cannot be wholly conceived
or visualized. He is the bearer of a radical consciousness, born out of catastro-
phe, that is wholly antithetical to the social conditions he is embedded in: a
consciousness in which the self/other dialectic is resolved through an utter sur-
rendering of self-interest, such that each becomes “the other’s world entire” (6).
The origin and status of good and evil are recurring concerns in McCarthy’s
novels, in which instrumental rationality often defines the terms of humans’
relationships with nature and with each other, their brutality seemingly in
accord with the economic policies spurring society toward crisis. The Road, per-
haps more than any other McCarthy novel, pits modes of human relationality
rooted in values of love and community against the historical grain, demonstrat-
ing their fundamental incompatibility with the ethics of late capitalism. The
Road destabilizes the notion of historical progress, urging us toward an arrest of
history, a staying of its destructive movement through the reassertion of ideolo-
gies that would demand radical changes to the political and economic structures
of the modern world.

Casey Jergenson is a PhD student at Loyola University Chicago. His

research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first century American fiction
and Marxist literary theory.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.
New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64. Print.

Cas ey J e rg e n s on 131

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
Broncano, Manuel. “Grocery Shopping in the Commissary of Hell: The Road.” Religion in
Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands. New York: Routledge, 2014.
125–39. Print.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dialectics of Seeing. Malden: MIT P, 1991. Print.
Cant, John. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York:
Routledge, 2008. Print.
Cooper, Lydia. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative.” Studies in the
Novel 43.2 (2011): 218–36. Project Muse. Web. 13 December 2011.
Donnelly, Brian. “‘Coke Is It!’: Placing Coca-Cola in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The
Explicator 68.1 (2010): 70–73. Print.
Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009.
Print.
Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Hoboken: Blackwell, 2002. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions. New York: Verso Books, 2005. Print.
. Valences of the Dialectic. New York: Verso Books, 2009. Print.
Knox, Paul. “‘Okay Means Okay’: Ideology and Survival in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.”
The Explicator 70.2 (2012): 96–99. Print.
Kollin, Susan. “‘Baren, Silent, Godless’: Ecodisaster and the Post-abundant Landscape in The
Road.” Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. Ed.
Sara Spurgeon. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.
Kushner, David. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse.” Rolling Stone. 27 December 2007. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.
Phillips, Dana. “‘He ought not have done it’: McCarthy and Apocalypse.” Cormac McCarthy:
All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. Ed. Sara Spurgeon.
New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.
Schaub, Thomas. “Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Renascence 61.3
(2009): 153–206. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso Books, 2009. Print.

132 The Cor mac M c Ca rt h y J our na l

This content downloaded from [Link] on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:15:10 UTC
All use subject to [Link]