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  • Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and the Responsibility to Protect
  • Spencer Morrison (bio)

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), the unnamed father, mortally sickened as he traverses a postapocalyptic and stateless wasteland with his young son, sees the boy from afar, "standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle" (273). This passage's spiritual resonances ("tabernacle") express what Amy Hungerford identifies as a "turn to religious authority" by US writers since 1960 (136). For Hungerford, The Road's many evocations of indeterminate divinity emblematize a growing fascination with spiritual language untethered from specific doctrinal content. Both Hungerford's and John McClure's recent work on US literature's spiritual currents suggest that this literary phenomenon has complex political entailments. For one, novels like The Road register what scholars have called the rise of postsecularism, a category denoting a religious culture in which subjects feel the pull of spiritual forces yet nevertheless do not subscribe to institutionalized faiths.1 Moreover, this postsecular fiction incarnates a "philosophically grounded public pluralism," modeling a "public sphere where no constituency's claim to authority is sanctified" (McClure 16). Hungerford's and McClure's distinct but complementary accounts of the weak religiosity of contemporary US fiction elaborate the political and aesthetic stakes involved in the comparing of the son to a luminous tabernacle: McCarthy's language channels a religious idiom emptied of content in order to claim new powers for literature in a pluralistic, as well as allegedly secular, age. Together, Hungerford's and McClure's work has encouraged a religious turn among [End Page 458] Americanists, which Donald Pease describes as the "laicization of American literary studies" (174).2

Yet beyond the scrim of McCarthy's numinous language lie sacred energies thus far unaddressed by the religious turn. These energies flow from the nondoctrinal visions of human sanctity that animate contemporary human rights consciousness. After all, as The Road's nameless father gazes upon his son he sees not just a tabernacle-like being but also a child, the figure that Joseph Slaughter identifies as the paradigmatic subject of global human rights culture.3 Moreover, in a novel peopled exclusively with stateless refugees, this child's "unimaginable future" forms the substrate upon which The Road imagines prospects for human development in an exhausted world, invoking protocols of Bildung that Slaughter considers foundational to international law's figurations of the human. In what follows, I pair The Road with Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) to suggest how new ethical, political, and aesthetic valences become discernible in postsecular US literature when we associate sacredness with both spiritualistic idioms or tentative theologies as well as with scenes of humanitarian crisis.4 Gilead and The Road jointly but distinctly deploy theological idioms in order to register the high stakes of epistemological uncertainty in moments of humanitarian witnessing wherein a dying father seeks to protect an endangered son. In each, the language of a halting, tentative theology renders the nature of human value unknowable by locating it within an unknowable cosmos, what McClure calls postsecularism's "mysterious precincts of the spirit" (7). The very differences in spiritual outlook between this pair of counterintuitive companions—Gilead's Christian commitments suffuse the text, while The Road posits a godhead only dimly knowable—disclose the diversity of potential intersections between belief and human rights culture in contemporary US literature. Indeed, the very pliability of human rights discourse renders it a versatile catalyst of ethical undecidability, adaptable across novels that differ widely in their representations of spiritual uncertainty.

Spiritual uncertainty's ethical consequences surface most saliently in The Road and Gilead through scenes of humanitarian deliberation, advancing a crucial new context for understanding literature described as postsecular. Combining insights from the religious turn with those in the field of literature and human rights thickens our histories of literary postsecularism, since the same post-1960 era within which Hungerford and McClure place postsecular US fiction's emergence is also the moment of human rights' entrenchment within global consciousness.5 Indeed, attending to belief's enmeshment with contemporary human rights culture adds a chronological fold to the post-1960 story McClure and Hungerford [End...

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