Cormac McCarthy’s Road to Nowhere

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is composed of the bare necessities. Like the filthy shopping cart pushed along the deserted road in this post-apocalyptic America, McCarthy’s novel is filled with only those things which are absolutely necessary. Father and son, dressed in rags, pale and hungry, move slowly through a blackened landscape – land and sky obscured by black ash. Most of America has burned away. What’s left needs no identification of color or scent or even sound to describe it. Sleeping in the shadows of rocks, highway overpasses, and what remains of the trees, McCarthy’s main characters – a man with a chronic cough and only one bullet left in his pistol and his young son - avoid with good reason what little human contact remains. Anyone could be one of the “bad guys.” They may steal their meager food supply (ancient canned fruit and vegetables, pork and beans) or, even worse, kill and eat them.

There is very little left in America as described in The Road. And very little left of McCarthy’s description of it. Descriptions of the world along the road are reduced to short, efficient, but painfully poetic sentences. Dialogue between the man and the boy (McCarthy gives them no names) is reduced, more often than not, to one, two, or three word utterances. The boy often speaks volumes by saying only okay.

Dialogue is devoid of quotation marks. Very little needs to be said and what is said is easy enough to identify with who said it. The quotation marks would be extraneous. There’s no room for them in the cart. Apostrophes are also missing. Can’t has become cant, couldn’t, couldnt. You know what they are anyway. Apostrophes appear only where they are necessary to identify the meaning. Its versus it’s, for example.

What is overwhelmingly represented is courage and determination – what one might refer to as pluck. Certainly conscious that life – for them and for the planet – will soon end, the man and his son keep moving, hunting for food, for shelter from the rain storms and the cold, hiding from the bad guys.

In a dark, colorless, and mostly lifeless world, these two survivors continue to carry the light until there is absolutely no fuel left to make light. They are heros with no one left to worship them.

Which Came First — The “Poem” or the Poem?

            The title alone was enough to pique my interest. Why call it simply “Poem,” Mr. Williams?  I looked up poem in the New Collegiate Dictionary (because it was handy) and was presented with a couple of interesting notions: 1) a poem is “characterized by the use of condensed language chosen for its sound and suggestive power” and 2) a poem is a “creation, an object, or an experience having beauty suggestive of poetry.” Neither were earth-shattering notions, of course; I’ve wandered through the realm of poetry before. But, they were eerily suggestive with “Poem” on the page of William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems lying open in front of me.

            The movement of the cat, an experience often observed as graceful, efficient, powerful, poetry in motion even, seems an obvious choice to illustrate the idea of poem. Here is a simple, but beautiful, example of a something suggestive of poetry using condensed language to sound out the message, or the meaning, or the whatever. Each short line suggests the slow, deliberate, evenly paced steps of a cat, perfectly balanced, showing no sign of effort. The strides “over the top of the jamcloset” are represented in much the same way as the descent “into the pit of the empty flowerpot.” Does the cat accept success and failure with equal attention, taking it all in stride? Perhaps the cat has its eyes on a prize beyond these present obstacles.

            Is this experience a poem because it is labeled as a poem or is it labeled as a poem because it is a poem? Which comes first — the poem or the “Poem?”     

On -ists and -isms

       

            I think I’ve always taken a rather defensive stance in response to literary criticism. My experience in the past  with literary criticism and theory has not been an intellectual environment in which I’ve felt comfortable. More often than not, it seems, the critics or theorists that I read have attempted to instruct me on what a story, or a character, or a setting means, represents, or communicates to the reader (me), but I often see something else entirely. I guess I’m tired of being told how I should read something by another reader who has formulated generalizations based on his or her own biased perspective. I’m not, usually, convinced by evidence carefully chosen (cherry-picked, to borrow a currently fashionable political cliché) to support a Marxist, feminist, or whatever-ist agenda.

            I’ve learned a number of things from my defensive position. Since my instruction in English Studies has occurred at a time which seems to have been dominated by voices categorizing themselves as one –ism or another (sometimes a combination), I have observed that critics and theorists sift carefully through the literature they study to find proofs of their theory within the text. From what I’ve read, these proofs are rarely iron-clad. From this I’ve learned that contradictory evidence may be conveniently ignored and, if one looks hard enough, any platform, any agenda, can be supported by virtually any text if one is clever enough with discovery.

            The idea that literature is a cipher that contains messages in secret code to be decoded by a clever –ist who knows how to correctly decode the messages has always seemed like bullshit to me, not to mention a bit like elitism. Am I to understand that authors hide clues within their works with the intention of handing that work over to the critics who then explain it to us readers?

I’ve never been comfortable with this chain of evidence.

I think meaning (whatever meaning means) is sometimes far less important within a text than an –ist may want to admit and sometimes these meanings or messages, if they exist, are so complicated, so convoluted, that they leave a lot up for grabs. And, the –ists rush in and grab what they’re looking for.

I am not trying to say that –ists are always completely off base, but I think that they are often overzealous in their pursuit of literary meanings, or truths, or proofs. They are too often too desirous of claiming an era, author, or text as the property of their –ism. I am wary of the generalizations within an –ist argument created (because they are more often created than found) in an effort to justify an –ist perspective.

        Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is at least one theorist who empathizes with my stance. By the time I got to the end of Erin O’Connor’s essay “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism,” I wanted to stand and applaud. I would love to see more of a criticism that does not equate “knowing with containing, classifying, and controlling” but honors “the sheer complexity of literature, of history, and of the uncertain, shifting relationship between the two.” Like O’Connor, I think we, as readers and critics of literature, should follow the lead of the material and not a map provided by an –ism. That would “be genuine scholarship rather than clever partisanship, honest inquiry rather than advocacy masquerading as inquiry.”

Amen.