Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come”

Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is frequently associated with the tradition of literary naturalism. Barcley Owens, for example, considers McCarthy’s novels in the context of theories of naturalism, and Steven Frye articulates McCarthy’s “romantic naturalism,” while James Giles argues that contemporary naturalism comprises a “multilayered determinism” visible in Outer Dark (2). Dana Phillips characterizes McCarthy’s narration as “radically unanthropocentric” (446), and Eric Carl Link discusses McCarthy’s critique of the “cosmic optimism” of American exceptionalism (“McCarthy” 157). Especially in his early work, but really in nearly all of his fiction, McCarthy is committed to a project of peeling away social and cultural conventions in order to explore the non-contingent humanity/animality that undergirds our existence. This reduction of life to its barest realities is one that characterizes many classic naturalist texts.

Such a commitment to a naturalist perspective, however, makes McCarthy’s work fit less obviously within science fiction or speculative fiction more broadly. Part of McCarthy’s naturalist impulse involves looking back to a distant, primal, and biological past, one that is antecedent to contemporary social mores or speculative thoughts about the future. At times, McCarthy’s backward gaze and his love of archaic language feel stubbornly resistant to the goals of science fiction. In Future Present, Michael Pinsky characterizes contemporary science fiction as being inextricably tied to the undetermined future, a genre that “favors indeterminacy: probabilities, chaos, wave functions. It resists its own traditional assertions of certainty. . . . Science fiction writes the future. And according to sf, our future apparently consists of both external encounters—technological marvels (and horrors), aliens, and outer space—and internal encounters—the mysteries of the human mind and body” (13). For the reasons I mentioned above, this description does not mesh well with much of McCarthy’s fiction, especially his Tennessee novels and the early Western fiction. It does, however, resonate with McCarthy’s most popular and recent novel, The Road (2006), which is heavily invested in the uncertainty of the future and contains both Pinsky’s sense of dramatic external encounters (post-apocalyptic destruction) and internal ones (the thoughts of the protagonist as he struggles to survive and to justify this struggle). How, then, to account for McCarthy’s science fiction turn in The Road? What does this shift from the distant past to the indeterminate future do for the ways we conceptualize McCarthy’s work?

In this essay, I argue that McCarthy looks to science fiction’s gaze into the future as a means of exploring the issues of trauma, loss, and mourning in a manner different from his earlier work. By imagining the unrealized and destroyed future, The Road reverses McCarthy’s tendency to remove from his narrative the entanglement of modern objects. In this speculative novel, he swivels his orientation towards, rather than away from, cultural artifacts, towards “things.” Bill Brown has developed an approach to literary texts that he calls “thing theory,” an approach that explores the “complex roles that objects have played in American lives” (“Thing” 12). McCarthy’s intense treatment of human-made things in The Road, the proliferation of his use of the term “thing” in the novel, and the tender treatment of these things by the book’s narrator, so different from McCarthy’s desire to shed his narrative of frivolous objects of civilizations, can best be accounted for by thinking about the aesthetic choices he makes when imagining the future. In other words, most of McCarthy’s fiction looks to the past, or the soon-to-be-paved-over present, and sees the trappings of culture and materialism as part of an entire system of forces that lead to artificial and false engagements with living and the world.¹ In The Road, these trappings become filled with a radiant power, as McCarthy imagines the disappearance of the world and considers the world that will never be. When faced with the erasure of our current culture, things become resonant with an at times nostalgic meaning for what is gone and at other times a poignant meaning of the expectation of a future that such things evoke...