Final Trip down The Road

It's too green to read The Road anymore. Spring is the horror of too much life, everything breeding and eating with little concern for the individual. The Road fits the slumbering grey of early spring but not the rising jungle of late May.

It is also a good place to end because I was able to figure one one more key to it. If you want to understand the topography of The Road you need only clues: 1) The Man is Cormac McCarthy, the Boy is his young son  2) They are traveling through CM's home-state of Tennessee 3) The biblical story of Abraham and Issac is about a elderly man who suddenly finds himself with a young son, and must decide whether he should kill his son or not.

You also need to read two other CM books. 1) 'The Sunset Limited' (2006) which makes the existential debates in The Road explicit instead of wrapped in dreams and stilted dialogue.  2) 'The Outer Dark' (1968), CM's second novel, because I see 'The Road' as a follow-up, and possibly an apology/refutation of it.

Outer Dark wrote:‘Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away."

A Cormac McCarthy Dictionary wrote: Outer Dark has received the most scant critical attention of all of McCarthy’s novels. Perhaps this can be ascribed to the novel being, as one reviewer put it, “the strangest and most formally challenging of all [McCarthy’s] novels,” and a work that combines “tortuous prose rhythms and a recondite vocabulary with disjointed plotting, tight suspense and unreasoning terror” (Hill).  In fact, McCarthy has not produced any other work that could even be loosely compared, in intent and style, to Outer Dark.

The 'Cormac McCarthy Dictionary' gives an excellent synopsis of Outer Dark so its assessment that CM "has not produced any other work that could even be loosely compared, in intent and style, to Outer Dark" is surprising because this early novel serves as a clear prototype for The Road.

Like The Raod, Outer Dark begins with an ominous dreams, this time of lepers and eclipses. A man awakes - he will not be named until later-  his nightmares were caused by the guilt he feels over the birth of a son from an incestuous union with his sister. Thus begins a waking nightmare describing the brother and sister's separate trip through rural 1700-1800s America. Like 'The Road' the exact time and place of the setting is never specified yet the signs point to another dark trip through a Southern Gothic dreamscape overlaid on Tennessee.

The themes of The Outer Dark are familiar ones from The Road:  the growing darkness, spiritual/physical blindness, religious imagery and the question of theodicy, the importance of sharing food, namelessness, and human violence. Some of the specific elements such as the blind prophets and roasted babies also re-occur. Both 'the Man' and 'the Brother' are men tormented by their responsibility to new sons while their traveling counterparts (the Boy and the Sister) have moral cores that shield them. The vital difference between the Man and the Brother is that the Man is trying to save his son, while the Brother is trying abandon/kill his.

Despite the apocalyptic setting the Road is a semi-autobiographical book based on the McCarty finding himself divorced with a new son, the same autobiographical setting surrounds the Outer Dark. McCarthy's first marriage at 28 with a fellow university student had quickly imploded within a year but not before producing a son. The first wife seems to have left McCarthy when he wanted her to find a job to support him while still looking after the child. According to McCarthy he paid no alimony and seems to have little contact with his first family. Now at 35 years old, McCarthy had recently remarried (to an English 'pop singer' he made met while traveling to his ancestral Ireland) and was publishing his 2nd novel, The Outer Dark (1968). I think the deep moral turmoil of his abandoned first marriage and child informs that novel.

The term 'Outer Dark' is a biblical reference to where sinners go, but it also refers to the unnatural trio of killers who follow the Brother and act as his externalized shadow, they are literally his darkest drives manifested in the outer world. I would suggest the Outer Dark is McCarthy's attempt to externalize his own shadow, his own evilest thoughts, by externalizing them in print. This is novel about a man who is haunted by the product of a mistaken union and so torn by guilt and unfilled responsibility he feels, that he wants the reminder to disappear, even if it must die. So the Brother wants his son dead and his externalized shadows do kill it. At the end of the Outer Dark the abandoned son ends up roasted on a bonfire. Here McCarthy is trying to exorcise similar feelings toward his first son, the darkness comes from the clash of Catholic guilt and child abandonment (perhaps a touch of abortion haunts any such fantasies of child murder).

CM was from a large, respectable Irish Catholic family but pursued a very individualist, bohemian lifestyle. Some have contrasted t Jack Kerouac's On The Road, the ultimate bohemian ode to no responsibilities and free love to the mature protective fathering of CM's The Road. I think elder McCarthy would enjoy this comparison. The Road acts as an apology for 'The Outer Dark', or perhaps a repudiation of it.

There is no ambiguity attached to the roasted baby of 'The Road', those who kill children are evil and the Man reassures the Boy that they would have helped the baby if they could have. 'The Road' is an long ode to a father who will neither abandon his son nor kill him Issac-style. This is 70-old McCarthy rejecting the youthful McCarthy's abandonment and deep ambivalence over a previous son. It is his promise to his new son he will not abandon him (except through his approaching death). This time it will be different, McCarthy swears and promises throughout The Road (but both novels occur in the wake of divorces following quick marriages suggest that some of his patterns are harder to break...)

More on Outer Dark
http://tomconoboy.blogspot.ca/2009/03/outer-dark-by-cormac-mccarthy.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1968/09/29/books/mccarthy-outer.html