Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Cormac McCarthy: The Road

Cormac McCarthy The Road Richard Gray A Biographical Sketch The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel. It is also the first of his novels to be met with almost unanimous critical acclaim. Those who were less than impressed with his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, have greeted it with something pretty close to relief. Others—and these are so far in the majority among critics of The Road—have focused their attention, and their admiration, on what has been seen as a return to stylistic form and a return to the overwhelming questions that haunt so much of McCarthy’s earlier work. In a time of literary minimalism, when so many writers seem intent on pursuing a style of scrupulous meanness, McCarthy has reverted in The Road to the rich and even baroque rhetoric of his novels Suttree and Blood Meridian. And at a mo ment when the notion of a grand narrative has been dismissed and deconstructed , McCarthy has chosen to continue his search in The Road for some answer to the overwhelming questions of life, death, meaning, and nothingness , and to address fundamental questions in what one critic of the novel has termed “a thought and feeling experiment, bleak, exhilarating (in fact endurable) only because of its integrity, its wholeness of seeing” (Mars-Jones 2006, 19). Like all novels—if we are to believe Bahktin—The Road is a curious hybrid. It is, like all McCarthy’s fiction, haunted by the lives and writings of others; it is densely allusive and yet it is unmistakably the work of a fiercely original writer, swimming against the tide of literary fashion. It has the elemental quality of allegory and myth but also addresses issues that are ferociously contemporary, specific to the here and now. It declares the imminence, and perhaps the inevitability, of entropy, a world running down to inertia and oblivion, but it also offers a testament of faith in the will to meaning, the possibility of human intimacy and the simple, inextinguishable desire of the human animal to go on. To take the allusiveness first: McCarthy has never made any secret of just how deeply intertextual he takes all texts, including his own, to be. “The ugly fact is that books are made out of other books,” he declared once in a rare interview. “The novel depends for its life on other novels that have been written ” (Woodward 1992, 36). One critic has called McCarthy “a literary hybrid” Cormac McCarthy The Road 261 (Ragan 1993, 15). Another has remarked that reading one of McCarthy’s novels is “like strolling through a museum of English prose styles,” adding that the border trilogy appears to have been written “by the illegitimate offspring of Zane Grey and Flannery O’ Connor” (Pilkington 1997, 312, 318). There is a hint of criticism here, a sly suggestion that something is not quite right with a book that is a forest of allusion. Some commentators have gone beyond hinting and openly expressed offence. “Should a novel be quite so reminiscent of other novels as this one is?” one clearly exasperated critic asked of All the Pretty Horses (Doody 1993, 20). But such uneasiness or exasperation is surely beside the point. As a matter of principle, all literature is intertextual. McCarthy knows this. So, for that matter, do such otherwise different writers as the Kentuckian Wendell Berry and the Russian Joseph Brodsky. “All good human work remembers its history,” Berry has pointed out. “The best writing, even when printed, is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself . . . it is a palimpsest” (Berry 1986, 192). “A good poet,” observes Brodsky, “does not avoid influence or continuity but frequently nurtures them, and emphasizes them in every possible way. . . . Fear of influence, fear of dependence, is the fear—the affliction—of a savage, but not of culture, which is all continuity, all echo” (Brodsky 1999, 184). What matters is not the fact of dialogue between texts, since that is unavoidable, but the quality of that dialogue, what a writer adds to the existing monuments of literature, to use an Eliotic image, and how he reaccentuates the voices of his literary forebears in echoing them. And McCarthy certainly, and decisively, reaccentuates the voices of his literary ancestors in The Road. The novel describes the journey of two people, a father and son, “moving south” across a bleak, devastated, and sparsely populated landscape because, as the father realizes, “there’d be...