The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
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The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
by Hobb Fri 15 Jan 2016 - 16:43
[I'm going to keep editing this post over the next few days - it's just easier to post and edit ]
It's 2003 and American is flailing.
9-11 had blasted upon the flood-gates of imagined anarchy and it pours across the land. Outside, Special Ops soldiers riding horses stalk through Afghan mountains hunting wild bearded warrior-monks planning their next apocalypse. Inside, devils wearing 1000 dollars ties grab the mega-phone and yell their lies across the country until 'War' is proclaimed. The world is full of tribal savages and the American Empire is a run by incompetents - there is no place for civilization between the two. The center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed.
You and your son are in El Paso, Texas. There are over a million people in the El Paso metropolitan area. Like every metropolis it seems like a stack of armed bear-traps balanced into a giant pyramid - beautiful, steel, waiting for just the right push to explode. Worse, in the madhouse atmosphere on every airwave and mind, the city begins to strips off it's face and grins it skull, it's million+ skulls, you recoil like every old white man before you does...
This cannot hold, this will fall apart, the pyramid will tip. You imagine what this hellhole will look like a century from now - after the end of civilization. You head to your high-rise hotel window and stare across the sprawling urbanscape. First, the put out all the lights and return the primordial darkness, next you add smothering layer of ash, then you add a few points of bonfires on dark mountains hedging the cities - and the smell of roasting human meat wafting from them....
You turn back to your 5-year old son jumping on the bed. You were 65 when he was born so you'll be luck to see him reach 20. He was born to your 3rd wife and it looks like another divorce is coming. The hills have eyes and they are staring at your anti-septic hotel, past you, toward your son as they lick their lips. It's only you and him, and you're old, and the future has no place for old men. You've written enough blood-soaked Westerns to know that that tales of Indian massacres and torture have a core of truth and that the cowboys were no better.
Man can be reduced back to the animal, worse than animals. You look back at your son and catching the fear in your eyes, he asks a direct, heart-breaking question - he seems to specialize in those.
"Papa, what would you do if I died?"
"I'd want to die, too,"
"So you could be with me?"
"Yes, so I could be with you."
You look back out the window and your soul churns.
Fast forward to 2006. The divorce is finalized. You are in Ireland talking to your brother by phone, on CNN the burnt bodies of Blackwater mercenaries hung from some Iraqi bridge keep appearing.
You and your brother are discussing the apocalypse (again!). He's talking about how the last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. You are intrigued when he deliver the punchline that some divers in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. You both laugh and smile and you know in your heart that the world will be all right.
Wives will come and go, cannibals will pour from the hills, you'll get old and die abandoning your son to a dark-horizoned future - but it will be alright. A few good men is all it takes to keep the hope alive - or at least you must believe that when laughing with your brother or talking with your son. There is a goodness to this type of masculinity that even the wasteland cannot kill.
After the phone call, you returning back to writing. You are writing about the apocalypse and a cowardly mother that commits suicide in the face of it - but the much mocked husband will go forward nonetheless, for his son, because he is one of the good guys
Maybe the story is is Mad Max fan-fic with a patina of mysticism. An cynical old man guides a idealist boy through a wasteland toward the ocean, evil men attack them. Old men are good but weakening, young boys are empathic but still weak, it is the males in their prime that are the monsters. This is the hidden divide that separates conservatives from liberals - do you understand that single males are ready to devolve to monsters when the shackles of civilization fade away? Do you understand that chaotic biological energy of males 15-25 must be continually channeled by civilization or it will destroy it all? Do you know what depravity such males are capable of?
The world of 'The Road' is - like every post-911 zombie apocalypse setting - a conservative one. The nanny State smashed, man's barbarity re-asserts itself with a vengeance, leading to the usual Hobbesian world where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
But there not a truth to this cynical conception? Is not life full of pain and decay? Are not humans the most dangerous animal on the planet?
Do you trust crowds? I don't.
1933 - HE WAS BORN CHARLES JOSEPH MCCARTHY, JR., on July 20, 1933, into a Catholic family in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the third of six children of an eminent lawyer.
Sometime later, he or his family—no one seems to know which—changed his name to Cormac after Cormac MacCarthy, the Irish chieftain who built Blarney Castle
1937 - his family moved to Knoxville, where his father was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority - the famous 'socialist'/'nationalize' energy producer created during FDR's New Deal
[1937 - H.P Lovecraft would die in Providence, Rhode Island and has "I Am Providence" carved on his tombstone. Both men dreamt of empty American cities yet feared the anarchy waiting to emerge for the shadows with "deranged chanting" [The Road]. Blarney and Providence are both terms assoicated with LUCK - a vital element in McCarthy's philosophy]
1940s - Grew up outside Knoxville; Tennessee, attended parochial schools; entered the University of Tennessee, which he dropped out of;
1951 - graduated from Catholic High School in Knoxville
1953 - joined the Air Force; which sent him to Alaska, to kill the tedium he began reading in the barracks. "I read a lot of books very quickly,"
1957 - quit the Air Force, returned to the university, which he dropped out of again
1959 - began to write novels.
1961 - married Lee Holleman, whom he had met at college and quickly divorced, the yet-unpublished writer taking off for North Carolina., and New Orleans. Asked if he had ever paid alimony, McCarthy snorts. "With what?" He recalls his expulsion from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent.
1962 - First son born, Cullen (now an architecture student at Princeton),
1966 - Publish first novel "The Orchard Keeper" and subsisted on awards money he earned for-- including grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the William Faulkner Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
1967 - trip to Europe in 1967, where he met DeLisle, an English pop singer, who became his second wife
1968 - They settled for many months on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he wrote "Outer Dark," published in 1968,
1973 - Move back to America and publish "Child of God"
1974 - Move to the Southwest. Annie DeLisle recalled how when they lived in the converted barn in the seventies, “Someone would call up and offer him two thousand dollars to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”
1976 - McCarthy moved to El Paso - “ONE OF THE LAST REAL CITIES LEFT IN AMERICA,” McCarthy told a friend - leaving his wife behind. McCarthy quits drinking when he hooks up with one of his young girlfriends -- "The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking," he says. "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking."
1979 - He finished Suttree, a dark, surreal, and hilarious story of a drunken existentialist dropout who lives among the lowlifes on the Tennessee River in Knoxville —a multilayered narrative of dreams, putrid reality and aimless wandering through the underworld.
1981 - Divorced finalized
1985 - Publishes Blood Meridian a "harsh and densely written 1985 Western novel, about American mercenaries hunting Indians in the Mexican borderland, which involves frequent scalping scenes" and stars "Judge Holden - one of the great characters of modern literature: a hairless, seven-foot-tall killer, pederast, and nihilist philosopher—a Captain Ahab of the desert." "The collision between the inflated prose of the 19th-century novel and nasty reality gives "Blood Meridian" its strange, hellish character."
1992 - after years of obscurity (none of his first five novels sold more than 2,500 hardcover copies), McCarthy changed his writer’s voice, switched publishers—to Alfred A. Knopf—and became a star. All the Pretty Horses, about two teenagers fleeing the dying ranches of Texas in 1949 and journeying to Mexico, is a subtle, modern western with less violence and more adolescent yearning, unsentimental visions of the natural world, and sublime dreams of horses.
1997 - Cormac McCarthy, 64, weds 32-year-old Jennifer Winkley, who has degree in English and American Literature from UTEP. "They work out together at Gold’s Gym. Gossips say she’s pregnant."
1998 - Second Son, John, born
2003 - Idea for The Road - as 70-year old Cormac raises a 5 year old son in post-911 America
2005 - No Country for Old Men: story occurs in the vicinity of the United States–Mexico border, in 1980, and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert backcountry.
2006 - Third Divorce / 'The Road' published
McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. McCarthy has never been much on female characters—his women are generally either inscrutable old sages or inscrutable young beauties with some world-destroying charisma.
McCarthy is no typical reactionary. Like Flannery O'Conner, he sides with the misfits and anachronisms of modern life against "progress." His play, "The Stonemason," written a few years ago and scheduled to be performed this fall at the Arena Stage in Washington, is based on a Southern black family he worked with for many months. The breakdown of the family in the play mirrors the recent disappearance of stoneworking as a craft.
"Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is," he says, sipping a Coke. "Not even prostitution can come close to its antiquity. It's older than anything, older than fire. And in the last 50 years, with hydraulic cement, it's vanishing. I find that rather interesting."
His hostility to the literary world seems both genuine ("teaching writing is a hustle") and he spends his time with scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey's death in 1989, they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona.
CM: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."
It's 2003 and American is flailing.
9-11 had blasted upon the flood-gates of imagined anarchy and it pours across the land. Outside, Special Ops soldiers riding horses stalk through Afghan mountains hunting wild bearded warrior-monks planning their next apocalypse. Inside, devils wearing 1000 dollars ties grab the mega-phone and yell their lies across the country until 'War' is proclaimed. The world is full of tribal savages and the American Empire is a run by incompetents - there is no place for civilization between the two. The center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed.
You and your son are in El Paso, Texas. There are over a million people in the El Paso metropolitan area. Like every metropolis it seems like a stack of armed bear-traps balanced into a giant pyramid - beautiful, steel, waiting for just the right push to explode. Worse, in the madhouse atmosphere on every airwave and mind, the city begins to strips off it's face and grins it skull, it's million+ skulls, you recoil like every old white man before you does...
el paso - A sprawling stain of concrete, dirt, liqour stores, and angry people who yell at you in a language you can't even understand. The entire city is covered in a reddish-gray haze between the hours of 5 to 8 PM. (then it gets dark). The only place in america with an amusement park right next to giant, polluting oil refineries that spew toxic water into the drinking water of millions.
This cannot hold, this will fall apart, the pyramid will tip. You imagine what this hellhole will look like a century from now - after the end of civilization. You head to your high-rise hotel window and stare across the sprawling urbanscape. First, the put out all the lights and return the primordial darkness, next you add smothering layer of ash, then you add a few points of bonfires on dark mountains hedging the cities - and the smell of roasting human meat wafting from them....
You turn back to your 5-year old son jumping on the bed. You were 65 when he was born so you'll be luck to see him reach 20. He was born to your 3rd wife and it looks like another divorce is coming. The hills have eyes and they are staring at your anti-septic hotel, past you, toward your son as they lick their lips. It's only you and him, and you're old, and the future has no place for old men. You've written enough blood-soaked Westerns to know that that tales of Indian massacres and torture have a core of truth and that the cowboys were no better.
Man can be reduced back to the animal, worse than animals. You look back at your son and catching the fear in your eyes, he asks a direct, heart-breaking question - he seems to specialize in those.
"Papa, what would you do if I died?"
"I'd want to die, too,"
"So you could be with me?"
"Yes, so I could be with you."
You look back out the window and your soul churns.
wikipedia wrote:In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy said that the inspiration for the book came during a 2003 visit to El Paso, Texas, with his young son. Imagining what the city might look like fifty to a hundred years into the future, he pictured "fires on the hill" and thought about his son.
WSJ wrote: WSJ: "The Road" is this love story between father and son, but they never say, "I love you."
CM: No. I didn't think that would add anything to the story at all. But a lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say that he's the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid [in the book] says are things that John said. John said, "Papa, what would you do if I died?" I said, "I'd want to die, too," and he said, "So you could be with me?" I said, "Yes, so I could be with you." Just a conversation that two guys would have.
Fast forward to 2006. The divorce is finalized. You are in Ireland talking to your brother by phone, on CNN the burnt bodies of Blackwater mercenaries hung from some Iraqi bridge keep appearing.
The Road wrote:No one spoke. He was as burnt-looking as the country, his clothing scorched and black. One of his eyes was burnt shut and his
hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon his blackened skull. As they passed he looked down. As if he'd done something wrong. His shoes were bound up with wire and coated with roadtar and he sat there in silence, bent over in his rags. The boy kept looking back. Papa? he whispered. What is wrong with the man?
You and your brother are discussing the apocalypse (again!). He's talking about how the last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. You are intrigued when he deliver the punchline that some divers in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. You both laugh and smile and you know in your heart that the world will be all right.
Wives will come and go, cannibals will pour from the hills, you'll get old and die abandoning your son to a dark-horizoned future - but it will be alright. A few good men is all it takes to keep the hope alive - or at least you must believe that when laughing with your brother or talking with your son. There is a goodness to this type of masculinity that even the wasteland cannot kill.
After the phone call, you returning back to writing. You are writing about the apocalypse and a cowardly mother that commits suicide in the face of it - but the much mocked husband will go forward nonetheless, for his son, because he is one of the good guys
WSJ wrote: WSJ: What do you and your son do together? Where do you find common ground?
CM: My feeling is that consanguinity doesn't really mean much. I have a large family and there is only one of them I feel close too, and that is my younger brother, Dennis. He's my kind of guy. I'm his kind of guy. And my son John's my kind of guy.
WSJ: What kind of research did you do for "The Road"?
CM: I don't know. Just talking to people about what things might look like under various catastrophic situations, but not a lot of research. I have these conversations on the phone with my brother Dennis, and quite often we get around to some sort of hideous end-of-the-world scenario and we always wind up just laughing. Anyone listening to this would say, "Why don't you just go home and get into a warm tub and open a vein." We talked about if there was a small percentage of the human population left, what would they do? They'd probably divide up into little tribes and when everything's gone, the only thing left to eat is each other. We know that's true historically.
WSJ: What does your brother Dennis do? Is he a scientist?
CM: He is. He has a doctorate in biology and he's also a lawyer and a thoughtful guy and a good friend.
WSJ: Brotherly conversation just turns to the apocalypse?
CM: More often than we can justify.
WSJ wrote: WSJ: Is there a difference in the way humanity is portrayed in "The Road" as compared to "Blood Meridian"?
CM: There's not a lot of good guys in "Blood Meridian," whereas good guys is what "The Road" is about. That's the subject at hand.
WSJ wrote: WSJ: When you discussed making "The Road" into a movie with John, did he press you on what had caused the disaster in the story?
CM: A lot of people ask me. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.
Maybe the story is is Mad Max fan-fic with a patina of mysticism. An cynical old man guides a idealist boy through a wasteland toward the ocean, evil men attack them. Old men are good but weakening, young boys are empathic but still weak, it is the males in their prime that are the monsters. This is the hidden divide that separates conservatives from liberals - do you understand that single males are ready to devolve to monsters when the shackles of civilization fade away? Do you understand that chaotic biological energy of males 15-25 must be continually channeled by civilization or it will destroy it all? Do you know what depravity such males are capable of?
The Road wrote:"An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks ... The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of truck springs in some crude forge upcountry. The boy lay with his face in his arms, terrified. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground shuddering lightly. 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 supplementary consort of catamites ill-clothed against the cold and fitted in dog collars and yoked each to each. All passed on." [The Road p.77]
Catamite: A boy who has a sexual relationship with a man. [Latin catamītus, from Catamītus, Ganymede, from Etruscan Catmite, from Greek Ganumēdēs.]
The world of 'The Road' is - like every post-911 zombie apocalypse setting - a conservative one. The nanny State smashed, man's barbarity re-asserts itself with a vengeance, leading to the usual Hobbesian world where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The Road wrote: REVIEW OF THE ROAD: Theirs world that rewards extreme caution and wariness. A stranger appearing on the road ahead is almost certainly a threat to their lives. A wisp of smoke in the distance could mean the presence of other humans, just as the flicker of a campfire in the darkness of the night signals potential danger. Abandoned homes, burned-over villages, empty cities–each one in turn no longer reveals the bond of human society and hospitality but instead the strong possibility that depraved and bestial blood cults are too near for comfort.
But there not a truth to this cynical conception? Is not life full of pain and decay? Are not humans the most dangerous animal on the planet?
Do you trust crowds? I don't.
WSJ wrote: WSJ: When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw "The Road" in your head?
CM: I guess my notion of what was going on in "The Road" did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [Director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, "This is just hell. Who would do this?" Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.
WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?
CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.
FACTS ABOUT MCCARTHY
1933 - HE WAS BORN CHARLES JOSEPH MCCARTHY, JR., on July 20, 1933, into a Catholic family in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the third of six children of an eminent lawyer.
NYT wrote:The large white house of his youth had acreage and woods nearby, and was staffed with maids. "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks," he says. What went on in these shacks, and in Knoxville's nether world, seems to have fueled his imagination more than anything that happened inside his own family. Only his novel "Suttree," which has a paralyzing father-son conflict, seems strongly autobiographical. [At least until 'The Road' which is also autobiographical - Hobb]
WSJ wrote: WSJ: You grew up Irish Catholic.
CM: I did, a bit. It wasn't a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don't even remember religion ever even being discussed.
WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in "The Road" questions and curses?
CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.
Sometime later, he or his family—no one seems to know which—changed his name to Cormac after Cormac MacCarthy, the Irish chieftain who built Blarney Castle
1937 - his family moved to Knoxville, where his father was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority - the famous 'socialist'/'nationalize' energy producer created during FDR's New Deal
[1937 - H.P Lovecraft would die in Providence, Rhode Island and has "I Am Providence" carved on his tombstone. Both men dreamt of empty American cities yet feared the anarchy waiting to emerge for the shadows with "deranged chanting" [The Road]. Blarney and Providence are both terms assoicated with LUCK - a vital element in McCarthy's philosophy]
1940s - Grew up outside Knoxville; Tennessee, attended parochial schools; entered the University of Tennessee, which he dropped out of;
NYT wrote:"I was not what they had in mind," McCarthy says of childhood discord with his parents. "I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it." Pressed to explain his sense of alienation, he has an odd moment of heated reflection. "I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn't have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."
1951 - graduated from Catholic High School in Knoxville
1953 - joined the Air Force; which sent him to Alaska, to kill the tedium he began reading in the barracks. "I read a lot of books very quickly,"
1957 - quit the Air Force, returned to the university, which he dropped out of again
1959 - began to write novels.
NYT wrote:McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death."
1961 - married Lee Holleman, whom he had met at college and quickly divorced, the yet-unpublished writer taking off for North Carolina., and New Orleans. Asked if he had ever paid alimony, McCarthy snorts. "With what?" He recalls his expulsion from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent.
1962 - First son born, Cullen (now an architecture student at Princeton),
1966 - Publish first novel "The Orchard Keeper" and subsisted on awards money he earned for-- including grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the William Faulkner Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
NYT wrote:"The Orchard Keeper," is the story of a boy and two old men who weave in and out of his young life, it has a gnarliness and a gloom all its own. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, the allusive narrative memorializes, without a trace of sentimentality, a vanishing way of life in the woods. An affection for coon hounds binds the fate of the characters, who wander unaware of any kinship. The boy never learns that a decomposing body he sees in a leafy pit may be his father.
1967 - trip to Europe in 1967, where he met DeLisle, an English pop singer, who became his second wife
1968 - They settled for many months on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he wrote "Outer Dark," published in 1968,
NYT wrote: "Outer Dark," a twisted Nativity story about a girl's search for her baby, the product of incest with her brother. At the end of their independent wanderings through the rural South the brother witnesses, in one of McCarthy's most appalling scenes, the death of his child at the hands of three mysterious killers around a campfire: "Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly."
1973 - Move back to America and publish "Child of God"
NYT wrote:"Child of God, tested new extremes. The main character, Lester Ballard -- a mass murderer and necrophiliac -- lives with his victims in a series of underground caves. He is based on newspaper reports of such a figure in Sevier County, Tenn. Somehow, McCarthy finds compassion for and humor in Ballard, while never asking the reader to forgive his crimes. No social or psychological theory is offered.
1974 - Move to the Southwest. Annie DeLisle recalled how when they lived in the converted barn in the seventies, “Someone would call up and offer him two thousand dollars to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”
WSJ wrote:I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they'll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here's a good subject. And it was.
1976 - McCarthy moved to El Paso - “ONE OF THE LAST REAL CITIES LEFT IN AMERICA,” McCarthy told a friend - leaving his wife behind. McCarthy quits drinking when he hooks up with one of his young girlfriends -- "The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking," he says. "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking."
1979 - He finished Suttree, a dark, surreal, and hilarious story of a drunken existentialist dropout who lives among the lowlifes on the Tennessee River in Knoxville —a multilayered narrative of dreams, putrid reality and aimless wandering through the underworld.
1981 - Divorced finalized
1985 - Publishes Blood Meridian a "harsh and densely written 1985 Western novel, about American mercenaries hunting Indians in the Mexican borderland, which involves frequent scalping scenes" and stars "Judge Holden - one of the great characters of modern literature: a hairless, seven-foot-tall killer, pederast, and nihilist philosopher—a Captain Ahab of the desert." "The collision between the inflated prose of the 19th-century novel and nasty reality gives "Blood Meridian" its strange, hellish character."
Blood Meridian, a pitiless hallucination of savage violence in mid-nineteenth-century Texas and Mexico in which McCarthy continued his stylistic evolutions, painting the blighted desert terrain and relentless killings and brutalities in stark, protracted, almost biblical language; his resistance to the use of commas and apostrophes makes the words on the page seem even harsher. There are no white hats in Blood Meridian. Everyone is evil, yet everyone is all too human.
1992 - after years of obscurity (none of his first five novels sold more than 2,500 hardcover copies), McCarthy changed his writer’s voice, switched publishers—to Alfred A. Knopf—and became a star. All the Pretty Horses, about two teenagers fleeing the dying ranches of Texas in 1949 and journeying to Mexico, is a subtle, modern western with less violence and more adolescent yearning, unsentimental visions of the natural world, and sublime dreams of horses.
1997 - Cormac McCarthy, 64, weds 32-year-old Jennifer Winkley, who has degree in English and American Literature from UTEP. "They work out together at Gold’s Gym. Gossips say she’s pregnant."
1998 - Second Son, John, born
2003 - Idea for The Road - as 70-year old Cormac raises a 5 year old son in post-911 America
2005 - No Country for Old Men: story occurs in the vicinity of the United States–Mexico border, in 1980, and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert backcountry.
2006 - Third Divorce / 'The Road' published
McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. McCarthy has never been much on female characters—his women are generally either inscrutable old sages or inscrutable young beauties with some world-destroying charisma.
McCarthy is no typical reactionary. Like Flannery O'Conner, he sides with the misfits and anachronisms of modern life against "progress." His play, "The Stonemason," written a few years ago and scheduled to be performed this fall at the Arena Stage in Washington, is based on a Southern black family he worked with for many months. The breakdown of the family in the play mirrors the recent disappearance of stoneworking as a craft.
"Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is," he says, sipping a Coke. "Not even prostitution can come close to its antiquity. It's older than anything, older than fire. And in the last 50 years, with hydraulic cement, it's vanishing. I find that rather interesting."
His hostility to the literary world seems both genuine ("teaching writing is a hustle") and he spends his time with scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey's death in 1989, they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona.
CM: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."
Last edited by Hobb on Wed 12 Apr 2017 - 18:40; edited 5 times in total
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Re: The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
by Reb Fri 15 Jan 2016 - 20:17
I have gotten further into the book now and the terrible writing has eased up and is turning into more a story (which makes for much quicker reading).
I think this sums it up pretty well. It feels like a story that has been told a 100 times. Granted I do generally like post apocalypse settings but so far this story has offered nothing new and based on how the movie goes I can only assume that the rest of the book will offer nothing new as well.
Considering this a modern day classic is kind of sad really.
hobb wrote:The world of 'The Road' is - like every post-911 zombie apocalypse setting - a conservative one. The nanny State smashed, man's barbarity re-asserts itself with a vengeance, leading to the usual Hobbesian world where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
I think this sums it up pretty well. It feels like a story that has been told a 100 times. Granted I do generally like post apocalypse settings but so far this story has offered nothing new and based on how the movie goes I can only assume that the rest of the book will offer nothing new as well.
Considering this a modern day classic is kind of sad really.
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Re: The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
by Hobb Tue 19 Jan 2016 - 19:57
I actually enjoyed many passages in The Road. I think I have enough of the references under my belt (Book of Job, Revelations, Moby Dick, Lovecraft, post-modernism) to get it. The problem is that the American genres of the Western and the Post-Apocalypse - and they strongly resemble each other - are so conservative at core, that the book's philosophy is set before the first word is written.
Paranoia, brutality, gun fetishism, lack of a state structure, rugged individualism, nature as religion, machismo. Check, check, check. Add in the fact that the books has strong autobiographical touches so you know the Boy is not going to die and there are few surprise in it.
I think the books popularity is due to it's timing. In 2006 the Wars of Terror madness was still giving America a fevered dream of barbarity and tough men - and even the Oprah crowd wanted of tasted of roast baby and amputations as long as the book had a happy ending. Academics were happy to see a wasteland where the zombies were replaced with little poems about meaninglessness.
Apparently the answer to meaninglessness is freaking out over all the child rapists coming after your golden-haired son, you know, the little boy who is the Messiah. I think McCarthy was watching CNN's Iraq coverage, NBC's To Catch A Predatory and the movies of the Georges (Romeo and Miller) as he wrote this.
I still like the book though, I like its gothy nihilism and erudition. But it's politics are akin to The Wars of Terror ideology: Liberals (aka compassionate children) need to be protected by Conservatives (aka gun-toting paranoid family-values veterans) and even occasionally told Noble Lies (about death, about killing dogs). Or to give the quotable version: "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us."
Americans love to commit 'justified' violence, especially to protect their kids, so they imagine all sorts of crazy bogeymen - but they just end up killing other people's kids in their violence. It's like America's imagination stuck in perpetual adolescence of the violent pioneers days.... But they will not dream of a better way than killing other people's kids because to dream of a more peaceful future is weakness!
So in this mad world the best you can do is clutch your child close, carry a gun, talk vaguely about God, and take your loving, innocent son to see the ocean...
But above all - make sure you say the hell away from America's 'Wars of Terror'!
Paranoia, brutality, gun fetishism, lack of a state structure, rugged individualism, nature as religion, machismo. Check, check, check. Add in the fact that the books has strong autobiographical touches so you know the Boy is not going to die and there are few surprise in it.
I think the books popularity is due to it's timing. In 2006 the Wars of Terror madness was still giving America a fevered dream of barbarity and tough men - and even the Oprah crowd wanted of tasted of roast baby and amputations as long as the book had a happy ending. Academics were happy to see a wasteland where the zombies were replaced with little poems about meaninglessness.
Apparently the answer to meaninglessness is freaking out over all the child rapists coming after your golden-haired son, you know, the little boy who is the Messiah. I think McCarthy was watching CNN's Iraq coverage, NBC's To Catch A Predatory and the movies of the Georges (Romeo and Miller) as he wrote this.
I still like the book though, I like its gothy nihilism and erudition. But it's politics are akin to The Wars of Terror ideology: Liberals (aka compassionate children) need to be protected by Conservatives (aka gun-toting paranoid family-values veterans) and even occasionally told Noble Lies (about death, about killing dogs). Or to give the quotable version: "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us."
Americans love to commit 'justified' violence, especially to protect their kids, so they imagine all sorts of crazy bogeymen - but they just end up killing other people's kids in their violence. It's like America's imagination stuck in perpetual adolescence of the violent pioneers days.... But they will not dream of a better way than killing other people's kids because to dream of a more peaceful future is weakness!
Cormac McCarthy wrote:"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy says philosophically. "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." [NYT Interview]
"He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death [...] When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you." [The Road]
So in this mad world the best you can do is clutch your child close, carry a gun, talk vaguely about God, and take your loving, innocent son to see the ocean...
But above all - make sure you say the hell away from America's 'Wars of Terror'!
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Re: The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
by Hobb Thu 21 Jan 2016 - 16:24
If you want me to summarize The Road in one sentence: "It McCarthy's play Sunset Limited done as a post-apocalyptic version of Lone Wolf Cub"
The Sunset Limitied was a play by McCarthy done in 2005 about Mr. White, suicidal white atheist professor arguing with Mr. Black, a born-again black ex-con who is trying to convince him to live. White makes the same arguments of the The Wife and Eli in The Road, while Black uses the life-affirming arguments of The Man. The whole philosophical argument of The Road is plainly spelled out in Sunset Limited and sometimes the exact same imagery and wording is used so it's hard to miss.
--------------------------------------------------------------
White was to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train and this makes the train platform becomes a microcosm of to the whole post-apocalyptic world of The Road
"It’s just a train platform. Aint nothin else much you can say about it. But they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it’s somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He’s starin at the end of all tomorrows and he’s drawin a shade over ever yesterday that ever was."
-----------------------------------------------------------
WHITE (the professor): You see the whore I am? [...] I know who is out there. I tush to nuzzle his boney cheek. No doubt he'll be surprized to find himself so cherished. And as I cling to his neck I will whisper in that dry and aneitn ear: Here I am. Here I am. Now open the door.
WIFE: I dont care. It's meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a
new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
MAN: Death is not a lover.
WIFE: Oh yes he is.
-----------------------------------------------------
The MAN: Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. [...] The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought.
White I believe in things. [...] Lots of things. Cultural things, for instance. Books and music and art. Things like that.
Black All right.
White Those are the kinds of things that have value to me. They’re the foundations of civilization. Or they used to have value. I suppose they dont have so much any more.
Black What happened to em?
White People stopped valuing them. I stopped valuing them. To a certain extent. I’m not sure I could tell you why. That world is largely gone. Soon it will be wholly gone.
Black I aint sure I’m followin you, Professor.
White There’s nothing to follow. It’s all right. The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didnt know that. I thought they were indestructible. They werent.
[...]
White The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
--------------------------------------------------------
WHITE: I'm a professor of darkness. The night in day's clothing.
ELY: There is no god and we are his prophets.
WHITE: Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions
ELY:People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.
WHITE: The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion.
MAN: Do you wish you would die?
ELY: No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you. [...] I'm just on the same road as you. No different.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELY: 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.
Black What do you think is wrong with you that has finally narrowed all your choices down to the Sunset Limited?
White I dont think there’s anything wrong with me. I think I’ve just been driven to finally face the truth. If I’m different it doesnt mean I’m crazy.
Black Different.
White Yes.
Black Different from who?
White From anybody.
Black What about them other folks tryin to off theyselves?
White What about them?
Black Well, maybe them is the folks that you is like. Maybe them folks is your natural kin. Only you all just dont get together all that much.
White I dont think so.
Black Dont think so.
White No. I’ve been in group therapy with those people. I never found anyone there that I felt any kinship with.
Black What about them other professors? They aint no kinship there?
White (Disgustedly) Good god.
Black I’m goin to take that for a no.
White I loathe them and they loathe me.
Black Well now wait a minute. Just cause you dont like em dont mean you aint like em. What was that word? Loathe?
White Loathe.
Black That’s a pretty powerful word, aint it?
White Not powerful enough, I’m afraid.
Black So how come you be loathin these other professors?
White I know what you’re thinking.
Black What am I thinkin?
White You’re thinking that I loathe them because I’m like them and I loathe myself.
-------------------------------
WHITE: You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?
MAN: [The Bandit] was the first human being other than the boy that he'd spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word.
----------------------------------------------------------
Black You see yourself as a questioner, Professor. But about that I got my doubts. Even so, the quest of your life is your quest. You on a road that you laid. And that fact alone might be all the reason you need for keepin to it. As long as you on that road you cant be lost.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
WHITE: The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?”
MAN: He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? [[This is the feeling of nihilism the Man overcomes in his journey]]
-----------------------------
White You see everything in black and white.
Black It is black and white.
White I suppose that makes the world easier to understand.
Black You might be surprised about how little time I spend trying to understand the world.
White You try to understand God.
Black No I dont. I just try and understand what he wants from me.
MAN: My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. [...] We're still the good guys. And we always will be.
--------------------------------
Black You dont think gettin run over by a train might smart just a little?
White No. I did the calculations. At seventy miles an hour the train is outrunning the neurons. It should be totally painless.
MAN: You wont [hear the gunshot that kills you]
BANDIT: How do you figure that?
MAN: Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They'll just be soup.
-------------------------------
Both books are semi-autobiographical. The professor has a government lawyer for a father - as did McCormac. The ex-con quit drinking as did McCorman.
-------------------------------
I also gives a now light to the end of The Road when the Veteran tells the Son "You're kind of weirded out, arent you?"
BLACK: Ever had one of them days when things was just weird all the way round? When things just kindly fell into place? One of them days when everything turns out right?
This is 'weird' taken back to it's older root as 'wyrd' meaning Fate or Destiny. The Son is not 'weirded out' because he has PTSD but because he is Chosen.
-------------------------------
Sunset Limited also talks about nihilism as 'blindness', a major motif in The Road
Black: I think anyone in your position [being suicidal] is automatically blind.
--------------------------------------
One of the key lines in The Road is the Man stating, "If [my son] is not the word of God God never spoke" and we get a much fuller discussion of this in Sunset Limited.
White (Pointing at bible) You dont think you have to believe everything in there in order to be saved?
Black No. I dont. I dont think you even have to read it. I aint for sure you even got to know there is such a book. I think whatever truth is wrote in these pages is wrote in the human heart too and it was wrote there a long time ago and will still be wrote there a long time hence. Even if this book is burned ever copy of it. What Jesus said? I dont think he made up a word of it. I think he just told it.
White Do you believe everything that’s in there? In the bible?
Black The literal truth?
White Yes.
Black Probably not. But then you already know I’m a outlaw.
White What is it you would disagree with?
Black Maybe the notion of original sin. When Eve eat the apple and it turned everbody bad. I dont see people that way. I think for the most part people are good to start with. I think evil is somethin you bring on your own self. Mostly from wantin what you aint supposed to have.
------------------------------------------------------------
The play is quick read and clarifies the core philosophical arguments the The Road eludes to. So you may want to give it a go.
www.deltastage.com/SunScript.pdf
http://www.goreading.net/The_Sunset_Limited.html
The Sunset Limitied was a play by McCarthy done in 2005 about Mr. White, suicidal white atheist professor arguing with Mr. Black, a born-again black ex-con who is trying to convince him to live. White makes the same arguments of the The Wife and Eli in The Road, while Black uses the life-affirming arguments of The Man. The whole philosophical argument of The Road is plainly spelled out in Sunset Limited and sometimes the exact same imagery and wording is used so it's hard to miss.
--------------------------------------------------------------
White was to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train and this makes the train platform becomes a microcosm of to the whole post-apocalyptic world of The Road
"It’s just a train platform. Aint nothin else much you can say about it. But they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it’s somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He’s starin at the end of all tomorrows and he’s drawin a shade over ever yesterday that ever was."
-----------------------------------------------------------
WHITE (the professor): You see the whore I am? [...] I know who is out there. I tush to nuzzle his boney cheek. No doubt he'll be surprized to find himself so cherished. And as I cling to his neck I will whisper in that dry and aneitn ear: Here I am. Here I am. Now open the door.
WIFE: I dont care. It's meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a
new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
MAN: Death is not a lover.
WIFE: Oh yes he is.
-----------------------------------------------------
The MAN: Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. [...] The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought.
White I believe in things. [...] Lots of things. Cultural things, for instance. Books and music and art. Things like that.
Black All right.
White Those are the kinds of things that have value to me. They’re the foundations of civilization. Or they used to have value. I suppose they dont have so much any more.
Black What happened to em?
White People stopped valuing them. I stopped valuing them. To a certain extent. I’m not sure I could tell you why. That world is largely gone. Soon it will be wholly gone.
Black I aint sure I’m followin you, Professor.
White There’s nothing to follow. It’s all right. The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didnt know that. I thought they were indestructible. They werent.
[...]
White The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
--------------------------------------------------------
WHITE: I'm a professor of darkness. The night in day's clothing.
ELY: There is no god and we are his prophets.
WHITE: Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions
ELY:People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.
WHITE: The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion.
MAN: Do you wish you would die?
ELY: No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you. [...] I'm just on the same road as you. No different.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELY: 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.
Black What do you think is wrong with you that has finally narrowed all your choices down to the Sunset Limited?
White I dont think there’s anything wrong with me. I think I’ve just been driven to finally face the truth. If I’m different it doesnt mean I’m crazy.
Black Different.
White Yes.
Black Different from who?
White From anybody.
Black What about them other folks tryin to off theyselves?
White What about them?
Black Well, maybe them is the folks that you is like. Maybe them folks is your natural kin. Only you all just dont get together all that much.
White I dont think so.
Black Dont think so.
White No. I’ve been in group therapy with those people. I never found anyone there that I felt any kinship with.
Black What about them other professors? They aint no kinship there?
White (Disgustedly) Good god.
Black I’m goin to take that for a no.
White I loathe them and they loathe me.
Black Well now wait a minute. Just cause you dont like em dont mean you aint like em. What was that word? Loathe?
White Loathe.
Black That’s a pretty powerful word, aint it?
White Not powerful enough, I’m afraid.
Black So how come you be loathin these other professors?
White I know what you’re thinking.
Black What am I thinkin?
White You’re thinking that I loathe them because I’m like them and I loathe myself.
-------------------------------
WHITE: You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?
MAN: [The Bandit] was the first human being other than the boy that he'd spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word.
----------------------------------------------------------
Black You see yourself as a questioner, Professor. But about that I got my doubts. Even so, the quest of your life is your quest. You on a road that you laid. And that fact alone might be all the reason you need for keepin to it. As long as you on that road you cant be lost.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
WHITE: The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?”
MAN: He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? [[This is the feeling of nihilism the Man overcomes in his journey]]
-----------------------------
White You see everything in black and white.
Black It is black and white.
White I suppose that makes the world easier to understand.
Black You might be surprised about how little time I spend trying to understand the world.
White You try to understand God.
Black No I dont. I just try and understand what he wants from me.
MAN: My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. [...] We're still the good guys. And we always will be.
--------------------------------
Black You dont think gettin run over by a train might smart just a little?
White No. I did the calculations. At seventy miles an hour the train is outrunning the neurons. It should be totally painless.
MAN: You wont [hear the gunshot that kills you]
BANDIT: How do you figure that?
MAN: Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They'll just be soup.
-------------------------------
Both books are semi-autobiographical. The professor has a government lawyer for a father - as did McCormac. The ex-con quit drinking as did McCorman.
-------------------------------
I also gives a now light to the end of The Road when the Veteran tells the Son "You're kind of weirded out, arent you?"
BLACK: Ever had one of them days when things was just weird all the way round? When things just kindly fell into place? One of them days when everything turns out right?
This is 'weird' taken back to it's older root as 'wyrd' meaning Fate or Destiny. The Son is not 'weirded out' because he has PTSD but because he is Chosen.
-------------------------------
Sunset Limited also talks about nihilism as 'blindness', a major motif in The Road
Black: I think anyone in your position [being suicidal] is automatically blind.
--------------------------------------
One of the key lines in The Road is the Man stating, "If [my son] is not the word of God God never spoke" and we get a much fuller discussion of this in Sunset Limited.
White (Pointing at bible) You dont think you have to believe everything in there in order to be saved?
Black No. I dont. I dont think you even have to read it. I aint for sure you even got to know there is such a book. I think whatever truth is wrote in these pages is wrote in the human heart too and it was wrote there a long time ago and will still be wrote there a long time hence. Even if this book is burned ever copy of it. What Jesus said? I dont think he made up a word of it. I think he just told it.
White Do you believe everything that’s in there? In the bible?
Black The literal truth?
White Yes.
Black Probably not. But then you already know I’m a outlaw.
White What is it you would disagree with?
Black Maybe the notion of original sin. When Eve eat the apple and it turned everbody bad. I dont see people that way. I think for the most part people are good to start with. I think evil is somethin you bring on your own self. Mostly from wantin what you aint supposed to have.
------------------------------------------------------------
The play is quick read and clarifies the core philosophical arguments the The Road eludes to. So you may want to give it a go.
www.deltastage.com/SunScript.pdf
http://www.goreading.net/The_Sunset_Limited.html
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Age : 49
Re: The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
by Hobb Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 18:55
"Between The World and Me" - a 2015 book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is written as a letter to the author's teenaged son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history of violence against black people and the incommensurate policing of black youth. A common theme is his fear of bodily harm. Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore. The work takes inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time. Like Baldwin, Coates does not share in traditional black Christian rhetoric of uplift, and more bleakly believes that no major change in racial justice is likely to come. {Wiki}
"Black people love their children with a kind of obsession," writes Coates, according to Slate. "You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made."
This is the same debate the Man wrestles with - whether to kill his own or take the chance the omnipresent 'bad guys' will kill him.
"Black people love their children with a kind of obsession," writes Coates, according to Slate. "You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made."
This is the same debate the Man wrestles with - whether to kill his own or take the chance the omnipresent 'bad guys' will kill him.
Last edited by Hobb on Wed 27 Jan 2016 - 2:55; edited 3 times in total
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Re: The Road (2006) - Cormac McCarthy
by Hobb Thu 28 Jan 2016 - 13:54
Top 10
1)It is heavily autobiographical. The book chronicles the Man returning to his hometown, Morgan's research has convinced me that the town is Knoxville, Tenn, Cormac's own hometown. In fact Cormac was visiting Tennesse when 9-11 occured. The dam they visit is the one built by the Tennessee Valley Authority his father was a lawyer for. The book is dedicated to his son, John Francis, contains verbatim dialouge between him and Cormac, and the kernel for the novel came when a 65-year old Cormac imagined America descending into anarchy while travelling through El Paso with his 8-year old son. Cormac is said to dote on his son to make-up for his abandoning a previous son and calls him "the best".
2) It is 'Wars of Terror' text: The book was written between 2003 and 2006. This takes us through the criminal invasion of Iraq, the war turning sour in Abu Gharb and Falluja, BushII's re-election and national rejection, the cultural dominance of To Catch A Predator, Survivor, South Park and FoxNews. The Man divides the world into civilized Good Guys and barbaric Bad Guys, he is on a mission from God that justifies killing to protect naive innocents who don't understand how bad the Bad Guys are - these are familiar arguments from that era.
3) Mystical! When I read about the missing 'two of clubs' I wondered if it was a Tarot reference - and sure enough Blood Meridian has a whole tarot scence featuring another minor arcana: the '4 of cups'. When I looked up the word 'salitter' it was from the alchemist/mystic Jacob Boehme's cosmology and, once again, Blood Meridian has another Boehme quote.
4) Biblical: The main moral wrestling is a variation on Abraham debating whether to kill Issac. Add in some Jobian landscape and quotes.
5) Dream Prophecies
6) Luck:
7) Agnostic Prayers Answered:
Upwards-DownCast:
9) Genre Conservatism: Westerns and Survival Horror
10) Leviathan:
1)It is heavily autobiographical. The book chronicles the Man returning to his hometown, Morgan's research has convinced me that the town is Knoxville, Tenn, Cormac's own hometown. In fact Cormac was visiting Tennesse when 9-11 occured. The dam they visit is the one built by the Tennessee Valley Authority his father was a lawyer for. The book is dedicated to his son, John Francis, contains verbatim dialouge between him and Cormac, and the kernel for the novel came when a 65-year old Cormac imagined America descending into anarchy while travelling through El Paso with his 8-year old son. Cormac is said to dote on his son to make-up for his abandoning a previous son and calls him "the best".
2) It is 'Wars of Terror' text: The book was written between 2003 and 2006. This takes us through the criminal invasion of Iraq, the war turning sour in Abu Gharb and Falluja, BushII's re-election and national rejection, the cultural dominance of To Catch A Predator, Survivor, South Park and FoxNews. The Man divides the world into civilized Good Guys and barbaric Bad Guys, he is on a mission from God that justifies killing to protect naive innocents who don't understand how bad the Bad Guys are - these are familiar arguments from that era.
3) Mystical! When I read about the missing 'two of clubs' I wondered if it was a Tarot reference - and sure enough Blood Meridian has a whole tarot scence featuring another minor arcana: the '4 of cups'. When I looked up the word 'salitter' it was from the alchemist/mystic Jacob Boehme's cosmology and, once again, Blood Meridian has another Boehme quote.
4) Biblical: The main moral wrestling is a variation on Abraham debating whether to kill Issac. Add in some Jobian landscape and quotes.
5) Dream Prophecies
6) Luck:
7) Agnostic Prayers Answered:
Upwards-DownCast:9) Genre Conservatism: Westerns and Survival Horror
10) Leviathan:
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