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?”     

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

        Whether or not it was Faulkner’s intention, his experimental narrative style depicts a family that is as disconnected as the narrative. The Bundren family suffers as a result of a number of circumstances – poverty, lack of education or intelligence of the world around them, a harsh climate – beyond their immediate control, but their own inability to connect with each other, to communicate, to be sensitive to the struggles of one another individually and thus as a family unit seems to be the worst circumstance of all and one which cannot be blamed on anything outside of themselves. In fact, if they had, sometime along the way, been sensitive to one another’s troubles, dreams, weaknesses, fears, maybe they would not have become such victims of the environment in which they barely survive.        

        All of the Bundrens, except Darl, are far too wrapped up in their own suffering to concern themselves with the others. They seem to be tenants living under the same delapidated roof, uninterested in the happiness of those with whom they share space on this farm. They do not function as a family unit and suffer together as a result. Suffering seems to be the only thing they share. 

        The only familial bonding apparent in the narrative are attempts by Darl to understand his siblings. I got the impression that he may have tried to connect emotionally with his brothers and sister, but was rebuffed, considered strange by them. Considering how self-involved the rest of the family members, it’s no surprise to read their impressions of their brother. His sensitivity is to them a weakness, a flaw, even evidence of insanity. Darl knows about the others’ suffering, they see it in his eyes, and they are frightened by his knowing. Ultimately, Darl’s sensitivity and the actions he takes to possibly ease his family’s suffering, result in them shipping him off to a mental institution where he degenerates into what they think he is, allowing them to return home and pick up where they left off – before they were so inconvenienced by Addie’s death and her desire to be buried with her original family. No doubt Addie knew this family was a lost cause and did not want to spend eternity with them.

A Short Review of The Amber Spyglass

Gorgeous, sad, inspiritional, lush, emotive,… Phillip Pullman’s novel – the third and final installment of the His Dark Materials series – is the best book I’ve read in a year. It’s an entertaining story and an inspiring novel. Pullman’s imagination (except the stuff he pirated from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series) and literary craftsmanship restored my faith in contemporary fantasy fiction.

Throughout, I kept wondering who he intended his audience to be, and the fact that I couldn’t pin one down galvanized my opinion that The Amber Spyglass is an excellent novel worthy of the attention of more than just escapism-loving fans of fantasy and reactionary protectors of Christian morality.

Pullman’s clever characters and imaginative plot breathe fresh air into the lungs of those debating the details of human belief systems. Who (or what) is God? Why are we here? What is good and what is evil? What does it mean to love? What is worth fighting for? Is anything worth dying for?

Pullman’s characters, seen through his Amber Spyglass, are smart, brave, and beautiful. What more could a reader ask for?