Minicast #2: The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Rough Draft

Nobody likes Cormac McCarthy, but you have to reckon with him. There are no rich rewards from his books, all you need is twenty pages to understand how much more they demand than they give. No humor, no compassion, no fun, no character observations. What you get from McCarthy is hundreds of pages of nature descriptors, and the pure, unmitigated darkness of our worst fears - for our people, for our country, for our selves.

Much moreso than George R. R. Martin, McCarthy is only interested in human beings for the way they die. What really interests him is the desert, the western American landscape, described more ripely than any John Ford movie. There are none of the traditional Western myths where manly heroes kill outlaws and Choctaws. For McCarthy, there is no higher human being - humans are no less part of nature than animals, and humans kill as animals do, squalidly, gorily; they kill to enjoy themselves, they kill to eat each other, they kill to use the features of the dead as jewelry.

There is nothing unique about human beings in a Cormac McCarthy novel. To him, we're all mere ridges on the ancient mesas, natural manifestations of a dead earth who don't belong upon it, born merely to die in a climate that kills everything, and therefore have a barely suppressible urge to end one another's lives, seeing the out of place within each other which we do not see in ourselves.

I'm currently reading the infamous Blood Meridian, and will probably have a cast about that. Was the American West truly as brutal as Blood Meridian makes it seem? Well, I doubt it was in every particular, but there is no question to my mind that Blood Meridian conveys the spiritual reality of the West. Blood Meridian means what it is to reckon with Manifest Destiny - a doctrine with genocide seared into its dogma.

In an era when we begin to wonder anew of what bigots are capable, it's important to remember how little control we have over their rage. Even at its height, Manifest Destiny was not embraced by more than a portion of the entire American public. Raised against Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were voices from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln, but even if you prevent the slaughter a hundred times, there will always be a hundred-first. Grisly murder is part of the human condition, and McCarthy is its prophet.

Part of grappling with Manifest Destiny's reality is the realization that America is too big to be a mere country - there are too many facets, too many peoples, too many cultures to govern something so unwieldy without good intentions going awry. Perhaps no continent should be its own country, and within that continent there are so many foreign places and peoples to take in that many facets of the country will always be foreign to each of us.

To those of us hailing from plentiful vegetation, nothing is more foreign than desert. There is nothing more foreign than that climate of death who seems to install a homing device in its citizens to return as many of each other to the land of the dead as we can before we are duly returned ourselves. And yet, the desert of McCarthy and the southwest may yet be our truest future, a worldwide desert, perhaps even a universal desert, in which all remaining life is alone for all time. This is the sort of image of climate change that haunts our dreams - an image of universal death. This is the image that clearly haunts Greta Thunberg, and probably haunts all those millions who protested with her.

This is why it's simultaneously stunning and unsurprising when I read an article today reporting that Cormac McCarthy edits science articles for the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It makes a perverse kind of sense that a writer who spends hundreds of pages chronicling every hue of sky and rock would be interested in their formation, and would also take an interest in questions of what might happen to the landscape after the age of sentient humans.

I've spent so little of this podcast talking about The Road. Suffice to say that it's a book so perfect that a critic can say little about it. The Road's journey is as much spiritual as physical - of a father to keep his son alive in an age post-apocalypse most food humans can eat is each other. It is not only a book about preserving life, but about preserving souls. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy's fascination with violence deadens our horror, you almost feel him rooting for the killers. In The Road, the desire of a nameless father and son to survive is so basic that our horror at the dangers they pass will never cease. This is real horror, not the macabre gore of Stephen King whose disgust you're meant to enjoy, this is what it means to live in a place where the homing instinct to return all things to nature is so strong that it's obliterated nature itself. This father's desire to raise a decent son may be the last good impulse in the universe. It's such a simple story, and yet how many reverberations does it have to human history? How many reverberations would it have to the many, many stories of cannibalism during World War II, the civil wars of Africa, the Communist and Imperial famines?

And how many more reverberations will it have to the future? Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 - part of the same pessimistic generation as Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick who first heard of the Holocaust and the Bomb when they were adolescents, spent their adulthoods haunted by nuclear war, and are now in their dotage must hear about planetary death. The specter of planetary apocalypse has been with us nearly seventy-five years, and yet it has not come. When the generation born between 1925 and 1942 passes, the 'Silent Generation', will we remember their era as an age of anxiety, beset by premonitions of a disaster that never came, or will their anxieties be vindicated?