The Road #1 & #2 & #3

This the first dispatch back from The Road. It covers the first 20 pages (to the part where The Man remembers his final conversation with his wife).

FAVORITE LINES

• He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
  
  
• By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
  
  
• Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad.
  
  
• They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands.
  
  
• Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake.
  
  
• No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
  
  
• The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.
  

DREAM - Creature Across The Black Lake

 
On my first reading I though the creature lifting its head from the "black and ancient lake" was a brontosaurus (or whatever they are called these days) staring at the man and boy to say "welcome to the extinction club, humans." I figured its strange white bones where just a metaphor for fossils. This reading I can see the creature is clearly his dead wife staring across from the land of the dead. His next dream will be explicitly about the wife and her nipples and ribs painted bone-white in correspondence the beast's "alabaster bones". There will be more dreams when the dead stare at him from across the far shore of death, sometimes these will be beloved relatives but the wife/beast's sinister "spider-egg" eyes reveal her to be among the spiritual blind.
 
The creature has always reminded of a  catoblepas, a monster D&D adopted from the Romans who took it from 2nd hand accounted of wildebeests. It is pictured as a bovine beast with a strangely down-cast head usually feeding in a swamp. If it ever raises its head it's gaze/breath is deadly. Wildebeests are found in Africa and have such bizarrely down-angled neck that there are scientific papers on it. During the next dream of his skeleton-painted "pale bride" she will have "downturned eyes". I admit this is speculation but it that next dream "siren"s are referenced and later the boy will be called a "firedrake" so there is thread of oldtime monsters.

<-- Catoblepas from Monster Manual (1979)
 
There is also some minor foreshadowing with the beast's brain under the glass jar that will payoff later...
 
Seeing the blind beast as dead wife makes clearer her presence as almost a 3rd ghostly presence on the journey but it even more revealing shows how much of the novel is a recently divorced man's rant against his ex. Such art is often raw but distasteful, and this type of hate does produce art. Watching David Cronenberg's The Brood I few years ago I thought "this guy is going through a messy divorce," because it features a blameless father (he won't even fuck his kid's teacher when she came onto him) versus his ex-wife and her enabling psychiatrist. The ex-wife is literally a monster by the end. Sure enough Cronenberg was going through a messy divorce.
 

ART & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 
This bald autobiography translated into revenge fantasy does not disqualify these artworks because lust/love/longing and hate/envy/revenge produce 75% of all art. The flood of neuro-chemical drugs and egotistical rage produces art because it loads an artist with primal energy. Take the lyrics of most pop songs seriously and you'll find people trying to get laid - this is autobiographical not just a pose. This gets disguised because it is crass, and there are other sources of art (like mourning, wonder, intellectual games, ect..) but The Road is about CM's divorce and new son. When the boy says "I wish I was with my mom" I think you are hearing the real words of his son stuck on a road-trip with dad.
 
I suspect that authenticity of boy's dialogue (and therefore the soul of this novel) is based CM's own son and CM says in interviews that his son was the "co-author" of the novel.  This insight gives away one of the great secrets of writing - that writers are vampire and cannibals who ruthlessly turn those around them - their friends, family and enemies - into characters in their novels. They begin by cannibalizing themselves first. The ring of truth in writing comes from the constant conversion of your life into words.
 

THE ROAD to MEMORY LANE

 
Deepening this autobiographical aspect is that route the Man and Boy follow is through CM's home-state of Tennessee, through his hometown and he stops by his old house. The original impetus for the story came from taking his son to the Texan metropolis of El Paso but the narrative is a trip down memory lane for CM (and I suspect CM might have actually taken a literal version of this nostalgic trip between 2003 and 2006). It is strange that many reviews do not pick this up, assuming that the trip occurs in a "non-specified" place (as one review puts it) because the novel clearly presents the Man as going back to his ancestral home.
 
Once the autobiography is fore-grounded the novel is almost bluntly personal and little details stand out. For example, we the Man and Boy discuss the longevity of a well-built dam, that is the very dam his father helped build when he served on the Tennessee Valley Authority and those dams are seen as monuments of F.D Roosevelt's quasi-socialist New Deal (and thus hated by the right and loved by the left). CM often seems on the 'anti-state right' side of politics, but I think there is appreciation of the father and that dam is that little snip of dialogue. Another example if the lucky find of a Coca-cola can. On my first read this came off as forced product placement that was almost unexplainable (it would make a great commercial...), but reading CM's biography, he says a turning point in his life has a large grant from some Coke-backed foundation that came out of the blue and allowed him to keep writing. 
 
The Road is written by a elderly man reviewing his life in the face of having to raise a new child. The Man's nostalgia for a the world before the apocalypse is CM's nostalgia for world of his youth.
 
 
 

THE MAN & THE BOY

 
In transactional psychology there are 3 major internal voices: the Child, the Parent and the Adult. The Child is emotional open but self-centered, the Parent deals with the child in clear but overly-simple moral language, the Adult sits back cooly analyzing situations in a realistic manner. The Man is desperately Adult in his thinking, ruthless appraising each new danger with a survivalist's eye, his great fear is that his Adult is slipping away under the assault of hunger and despair. Yet the Adult voice is not primary in the novel, the Man acts Adult but that voice only sometimes register in the narrative,  usually around the need to ignore dreams, ex-wife and dreams of the ex-wife. I only realized on this reading that he is filling the bath-tub during the apocalypse to have water, he never answer his wife's question why he is doing it.
 
The core narrative is a Parental voice in primal dialogue with a Child voice. Since these characters are avatars for CM and his son we get an idealized Parent/Child dialogue and so it is a very comforting to read - doubly so because the Man is always patiently soothing the Boy's fears. I think this is why such a bleak novel can be featured on Oprah, most humans enjoy such soothing Parent/Child dialogues.
 
Is this alright? Did you like this paragraph? Everything okay? There are some parts you didn't like? That's okay, you read it once, you don't have to read it a second time. Okay?
 
Okay.
 
Even when the Man and the Boy are talking about death, the Boy's questions are open and the Man's response re-assuring: "What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes." The next lines read "He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this." I'm not cynically enough to disagree - that sort of conversation brings us to a bedrock level of humanity. CM is putting a core piece of his soul (and his son's) on display for millions to read about. And this unsettles me too.
 
 

THE WEIRD NARRATIVE FORMAT

 
All chapter breaks and much punctuation is tossed out. This is book on the edge on non-existence, sparse, austere, conserving its energy. Its thoughts are getting hazy as the Man's dreams, thoughts, memories and speech blend together and blend with the son's speech and an omnipresent 3rd person narration.
 
Take the part "He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this." In moves from 3rd person ("He lay...") to the Man's thought ("Bedrock, this") without pause. We are almost in William Burroughs or James Joyce territory.  Even the word 'bedrock' is blurred as it refers to the stone they are sleeping, the geological metaphors that gird the novel, and the emotional 'bedrock' of their Parent/Child conversation. It is a confusing but intoxicating style and it does capture that 'flow of consciousness' feel that our internal realm is like.
 
That combo of narrative scarcity and blurriness does work for me.
 

ECODYSTOPIAN HAIKUS and NOT BEING SAPPY

 
The spare naturalness of the language reminds me of Zen poetry. 'Zen poetry' might sound obscure or elitist but it is the complete opposite. If you devote yourself to purging your mind to make it clear enough to reflect the world around, your poetry is bare-bones. I'm going to open up a book of zen poets and type in some. Here is one from 700 AD (!):

A hermit's heart is heavy / he mourns the passing years/ he looks for roots and mushrooms / but seeks eternal life in vain / his yard is clear the clouds are gone / the woods are bright the moon is full/ why doesn't go home? / the cinnamon trees detain him
 
A pretty blunt look at being a zen hermit: loneliness, gathering roots, a clear mind (the clouds are gone) and the natural beauty that he cannot leave.
 
CM's writing can have similar qualities - but add in a divorce, a kid and an urge to strangle god ("Will I
see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you?"). His snapshot descriptions of the ashen wasteland are some of my favourite parts and are often they are intercut with Parent/Child dialogue for maximum impact:
 
The road was empty / Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river / Motionless and precise / Along the shore a burden of dead reeds / Are you okay? The boy nodded / They set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light / shuffling through the ash / each the other's world entire.

 
That sort of sparse observational prose is often called 'muscular' and associated with Hemingway's stories of bull-fighting or frontier or cowboy stories. In The Road it serves to surround statement of raw fatherly love with masculine/apocalyptic prose to keep them from being sappy.  Or, at least, to keep CM from seeing them as too sappy. I feel there is some sort of bad faith in this but I don't know if I can capture it because it close to the type of masculinity I subscribe to. I like noisy industrial music that has a hidden core of synth-pop, I prefer my deepest attachments to be understood not expressed.
 
Watching CM on Oprah was revealing. When she asked if the book was a 'love note to his son', this 70 year old man squirmed and hedged, until she blurts out, "Well, you said on the phone-call it was," and which point CM accepts it. Guys can love other guys - but we prefer to admit it only under conditions of the absolute death of the planet facing downing a band of cannibals.
 

A WASTELAND I CAN ENJOY

 
There is environmental vein of interpreting The Road that is fairly popular. A British environmentalist called it "most important environmental book ever written." The novel is definitely naturalistic in details, there is a deep nostalgia for trout and birds, CM is noted for having environmental sympathies, and it is a grim ecodystopian setting. Yet there is one key element that keeps this from being an 'environmental' book, the cause of this global extinction is not man-made.
 
"A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" is all we get in terms of figuring out what happened. This is either meteorite entering the atmosphere or - as CM has discussed in interviews - the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera.  There is no talk of radiation or nuclear war or man-made disasters, this is just another one of those planet wide die-offs that are the fossil-record tell us about. This is not about any blame game (except the ex-wife...), this is a trip within the amoral bedrock of reality. The life-filled Earth is an outlier in the vast, vast, vast empty darkness, the novel lets you experience it returning to this stillness. This is not a realistic novel, I doubt that if every other life-form on Earth was dead, humans would still be around. This is a bad-acid trip to edge of absolute extinction.
 
This lack of human guilty combined with a childhood spent on the black rocks of Sudbury make this a very appealing landscape. I'm fond of wastelands, I like industrial moonscapes, ocean-scoured granite cliffs, arctic tundra, so the "cauterized landscape" of The Road is strangely comforting. None of that annoying life.
 
The Road is comforting: nothing could have stopped the extinction and nothing can be done afterwards. The history of Sudbury is a far more discomforting tale: the creation and regeneration of wastelands is in human hands.
 
 

SCHIZOPHRENIA

 
The novel has the flavour of schizophrenic writing to me. This is a compliment because I find the writing of schizophrenics to very compelling. This statement may sound like I'm a hipster into outside art (I wondering what Wesley Willis is up to these days? I just checked he died in 2003 due to complications leukemia...) but having encountered schizophrenic writing on the internet I find I have a deep affinity for them. The blog 'Letters from Psychotronic Land' and the books written by her are art. Autobiographical, from the soul, compelling. I collected all those weird reviews on Amazon where the guys keeps talking about messages the AI version of his daughter is sending from satellites. Those classic Frankenstein-World-Gangster-Computer rants from the 1950s.
 
I have tried to understand what emotionally engages me with such writings. Schizophrenics are flooded by the messages from their internal realm (memories, guilt, paranoia) and convert them into powerful external archetypes. As someone who is introverted and so deals with that same internal realm, I feel more kinship with schizophrenic writings then most extrovert's externalized writing or very edited tours through internal realms. I find The Road has this aura about it as the narrative blends thought/dreams/memories with apocalyptic mysticism.
 
Much schizophrenic writing has to do with reproduction, women are childless due to Putin ravaging them, or destined to give birth to the messiah, or a father's daughter is an alien-AI who sends messages of love (except on weekends when he gets custody). The Man's view of his son is messianic and there is a deep claustrophobia to their relationship, neither one would survive without the other. Paranoia is another defining feature. So is the detailing of the struggle to survive.
 
Yet CM's schizophrenia is not the real thing. It is powerful vibe but even compared to the drug-fueled visions of Bill Burroughs or PK Dick it rings less true. CM is an elderly millionaire whose vices include marrying women he met at the gym and a brush with alcoholism he gave up on in his 40s. His ego is safe, he might be facing the twilight of his life with a young kid but he is not being torn apart by his struggles with Veterans Affairs or Mac's Milk clerks or ER staff like real sufferers. The world of The Road is totally depopulated and the few who remain deserve the paranoia they engender. The real-world is far more complicated and thus insanity-producing.
 
There is a certain posturing, an element on bad faith in The Road. CM wants to show us some of the bedrock, but he is in control of how much we get to see, there is a performance to the masculinity, vulnerability and nostalgia he exposes.
 
When I stopped reading last night, I had a mental image. The old Man, CM, elderly, wild-eyed and shaking a .38 revolver in my face. "I will do anything, ANYTHING, to protect my child! I will kill anyone." He's clutching the kid painfully tight to his waist. The kid looks as scared as I do by this ranting. "He's god, he's my warrant, I'll kill anything to protect him!"
 
I have to trust that his paranoia about blood-cults and cannibals and ex-wives doesn't apply to me because his willingness to kill is clear, his ability to accurately asses threats is my only hope.
 
Then I see a glint in his glare. This is all a sort of act. A performance for his enjoyment and a lesson for his Kid. All the woe and walking in sackcloth amongst the ashes. All the paranoid rumours of blood-cults and zombies.  He's still shaking and the spittle is still flying but this whole situation is, as Space Ghost wisely said, "just like I write it to happen."
 
The mask cracks. I'm staring at old rich white American male who wants any excuse to put his gun in your face. "I'll do ANYTHING I want to PROTECT MY CHILD."
 
The Kid's just as trapped as we are in this nightmare scenario. Just like CM wrote it to happen.

Zombie Apocalypse for Intellectuals

The Road is a more philosophical post-911 zombie apocalypse but it is still part of this genre and it contains the same core premise: to show 'liberals' that compassion and mercy are luxuries provided by civilization that must be discard in the dangerous post-911 world. The Kid's compassion only exists because the Man and his gun keep the Kid alive. This is the standard ruthless morality play at the core of this genre - but the novel is thankfully richer than that.

Apocalypse as Generation Gap

"He stood there. He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago. This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the waste of the yard. A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didnt."

The apocalypse world also operates as the gap between a 70 year old and his young son. The world the father grew-up in is gone and remains only in the stories he tells. The nostalgic trip to his old home, only show how little of that world is left.

I feel some of this loss when I talk to a class full of 20 year olds. The world is re-formatted so quickly. The hospital I was born in is gone, the school I went to is gone, the nature trials I went to only 5 years ago are gone. Gen X is the last generation to have memories of a pre-Internet world, the twentysomethings cannot remember a time before it.

The world of my past is already spilling into the void and I was born in 1975, CM was born in 1933. The apocalypse has already occurred, repeatedly so - the World Wars, globalization boom of 1980, the internet revolution of 2000, the War of Terror....

"He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory."

Apocalypse as Growing Old

As the eyes age the world grows dimmer. Time distorts the eye's lens, loosens the iris's sphincter, erodes the rods and cones, eventually glaucoma and cataracts grow.

I haven't feared what may hide in the dark since childhood but I can experience a sinister quality in darkness as I grow old. The failing sun of autumn and the long dark of winter of winter give me pause. Their darkness now resonates with the Great Darkness to come. CM is staring straight into that darkness. So is the Man.

"Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world."

Apocalypse as Meaninglessness (No Future)

"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. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation."

So much of our thinking and our culture is predicated on the future. It must necessarily be so to avoid the insular selfishness of the present. Yet the future is a gamble, it may not show up, a drunk-driver or meteorite might cast its vote against the future and that is that. The Road takes us to a world where the gamble on the future doesn't pay off and the Man and Kid must find the joy that is inherent in the now, in this day alone.

"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later."

Apocalypse as Meaninglessness (No Past)

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? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

To parse means to resolve something into component parts to comprehend and describe it. 'Parsible' means something is comprehendible. As the past falls into oblivion it shears off the references needed to parse anything that was built from it.

Previous generations had the Bible as common heritage and so could speak with meaningful metaphors that referenced that shared common knowledge base. When Civil Right protesters in the 1960s held signs that read "Pharaoh, let my people go!" it conveyed a deep history of longing for freedom, but it only made sense to other Christians.

"The Bible" for Gen X was common ability to quote the Simpsons and Star Wars and thus our language was shallow. Now transient internet meme and ads are the common fare. How fragile Western culture turned out to be. [/h3]

Apocalypse as Existentialist Dilemma

"All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you."

Until immortality drugs arrive every parent is a murderer. They bring a child into a world where they will die - and learn to fear death before that. This is base condition of all life, we are transient, we suffer, we wither and turn to ash. This is the long road of matter > life > mind > back to matter.

Between the Darknesses of pre-life and post-life is life, and if grace and beauty exist anywhere it is in this great transient in-between.

Rollo May - Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967) wrote:
I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox — the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state are aspects of the deterministic/object side of the dilemma — man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject.

We must take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity.

Breakup Poems & The Road

Take any teenage goth break-up poem ('Since you left me, baby, the Sun has gone away and everything is ashes, the days go on meaninglessly without you' ect...) and have a 70-year old divorcee write it up as a whole novel.

The deep perversity at the heart of it all

The perversity of The Road's wasteland - its' flickering life in the midst of a dawning mass extinction -  might have its origin in the perversity of a man becoming a father at 70 years old. The contrast of bright new youth and looming death is the paradox at the heart of the journey. Gothic literature generally has some sexual perversity at its' core, usually incest, but any reproductive fear will do.

Breakup Poems & The Road II

"She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift."

Divorce prepares you for the coldness of life. There are no mothers in The Road not even Mother Earth. You wake up in the cold grey light and know that any thoughts of comfort are a trap. That line is bitter and sarcastic and has a heart of truth.

In a way females don't experience, males have to separate themselves from females to grow. Every boy has to leave the domestic realm of mother to the outside world of other boys. Much of the boy-to-boy taunting during that transitional stage of life is a rough form of encouragement to not be a "momma's boy" or "to cut the (umbilical) apron strings". A grown woman with "Daddy's Princess" on her car is slightly creepy. A man with a "momma's boy" bumper sticker would be freaky. Soon after the taunting is to not be "pussy-whipped" by girlfriends. There is a truth to all this. 

Being abandoned by women - through their own maturing or the women's divorce, breakup or death - is a necessary pain for men. This is the world of The Road. No nurturing nature, no civilizing wives, no domestic comfort. Every man must come to this grim world at points in their life - but a whole life cannot be lived here without reverting to something less than human. 

Other people on The Road

The two biggest awkward passages are the two times the Man engages in dialogue with someone else. The conversations with the suicidal wife and Eli are stilted and too self-serving. They would read better as dream-dialogues where the Man is facing with interior demons, but as actually dialogues they don't work.

The first time I read them I interpreted them as philosophical debates between nihilism and the Man's desire to live, and CM wrote a 2 actor play called Sunset Express where they character are icons for these two perspectives. Yet CM presents them as actual encounters and on a 2nd read they didn't work for me because of this. It would have been better if the wife wasn't yelling "I'm a whore for Death" or Eli refused to thank the boy for sharing food. Making them slightly more human yet still being dangerous nihilists would have added depth without sacrificing the stakes of the debate instead CM describes them as spiders, the wife has "eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders" when she first appears as that strange beast and Ely is "dark and bent and spider thin."

Here is a critique of CM's overall handling of women characters:

'Women' entry from a Cormac McCarthy Dictionary:

Here is a interesting comparison of the novel's Ely scene to the movie's improvised version of it:

The Threepenny Review, No. 125 (SPRING 2011):