Insidious Lassitude

 Pushing a shopping trolley, a nameless man and his young son make their way across an America that is ashed and desolate and wasted. Nothing lives except a few human survivors who feed themselves by pillaging the homes of the dead, looting abandoned cities, and eating each other. Some sort of disaster has befallen society and twisted and fossilised remains of cadavers are fused into the scorched earth. The sun is concealed behind a veil of ash; everywhere is grey and lifeless; snow and permafrost cling to the tarp the man and boy spend nights huddled under. The man wrestles with memories of his lost wife as he collects brittle charred limbs from fallen trees to build fire after fire by the roadside. In the long nights of black they eat tinned food from the shopping trolley. His son, emaciated and strangled with fear, peers out of a face smeared with another man’s blood and his own tears. They keep going, heading for the coast though there is nothing there except more death.

There is a lot I could write about Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. Written in stark, economical prose it is a sort of lament for America, and also a sort of parable or prophetic poetic imagining. The novel has a relentless tempo, a slow death-march across the country; a dirge for America’s lost society and its dispossessed. McCarthy’s prose weaves a brutal blanket across the story; and with it he draws humanity and spirit out of vignettes of hopelessness and despair, but in the end it is unclear whether this spirit can possibly save the man and his son, or indeed what being saved is and whether the pursuit of salvation is a valid means to an end.

Metaphor and symbolism drive the novel and there are hundreds of McCarthy’s images that open out into ideas that could be discussed. Some off the top of my head: The road as a transect; the resonance of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ in ‘The Road’; the significance of the shopping cart they push through streets as though they were aisles; the use lightening and fire as a central motif; the role of the gun in the constitution of a self and a society; the infinitely delayed destination of their journey; the role of a pilgrim in a postmodern society shorn of destination; the illusion of arrival; the pervasiveness of topological metaphors in everyday American metaphor; the derivation and contextual connotations of some American slang vocabulary; ‘The Road’ vs. Richard Brautigan’s ‘Trout Fishing in America’; the nuclear family vs. the state; the father figure vs. God; the child figure vs. Jesus . . . etc . . .   

At times the imagery in ’The Road’ is very reminiscent of Robert C. O’Brien’s ‘Z for Zachariah’. Although ‘Zachariah’ was written in the 70s, both books share a similar sort of premise. O’Brien sticks a young girl, Anne Burden, in the only (as far as we are aware) valley on earth (or America really, but it stands – in that American way – for the whole earth) which hasn’t been affected by a chemical bomb. Here she lives self-sufficiently, assuming herself to be the only person alive until one day a man arrives on the horizon in a radiation suit. Mr Loomis has apparently dragged a cart along the road through America looking for a place unaffected by radiation. Drawing on themes of the book of Genesis and with echoes of neo-colonialism and modern war, a sort of power-struggle ensues, and the book ends with the girl stealing the radiation suit. Turning her back on what may be the only other human survivor, the girl takes to the road and travels west, hopeful of finding life.

‘The Road’ also reminded me of Sarah Hall’s ‘The Carhullan Army’. Influenced by ‘Zachariah’ and written around the same time as McCarthy’s novel, Hall ploughs a similar furrow and the first-person account of a post-breakdown/dystopian society tends towards a similar ideological standpoint as that implied in the narrative in ’The Road’. A woman, known only as Sister, leaves the city, the ’Authority’-ruled ‘Zone’, and travels through the flooded and desolate English countryside, to join a commune of ‘unofficials’ living on a farm up in the Lake District hills.

In none of these novels is the exact nature of the cause of the catastrophe made explicit. In ‘Zachariah’ it’s a World War III-esque scenario; in ‘Carhullan’ it’s an unspecific environmental and economic calamity – probably initiated by the pursuit and use of oil; and in ‘The Road’ it’s something else, something perhaps a little like the other two, but something which is open to interpretation and leaves room for divine intervention. One of the things that this makes evident is just how plausible this kind of scenario is. By leaving blanks, the reader is gently corralled into the realisation that these situations are closer than might be imagined. The effortless way the blanks are filled in by the mind is one of the reasons these stories are so powerful.

All three are set in what appears to be contemporary society. In all there is of course the supposition that this is ‘the future’ – and the narrative in ‘Carhullan’ may contain the odd reverie that is loosely recognisable as ‘today’ - but in each of the novels the premise is unfettered by historical detail. The stories could be read at any time in the past fifty years – or, in all likelihood, fifty years hence – and be taken as a depiction of contemporary society. Obviously, ‘Zachariah’ is already thirty years old, and it reads not as the past, or the future, but as a parable of now. This is ostensibly the future, but the dramatic impetus – as always with these things – is in the way the future looks frighteningly like today. There but for the grace of God. These are timeless warnings. They are also timely - and perhaps within them there is the suggestion, that unless they are heeded, they are warnings with a time-limit.   

In ‘The Road’ the man and boy worry about resources constantly, yet aren’t economical with them or fastidious about the ways in which they use them up. Supplies are always just around the corner. I suppose this is analogous to the general attitude and specious political policy of America (and western urbanised civilisation in general) to the threat posed by the finite supply of resources like oil and gas – as well as the possibility of a food crisis, and also of environmental catastrophe. Interestingly, despite the foregrounding of the search for food – and the postulation that over-consumption is the canker that threatens America most - it is not lack of supplies which closes ’The Road’. The denouement that the man and boy have spent the novel staving off is in the end rejected entirely by McCarthy. The implied destination is once again thwarted, resolution is indefinitely postponed, when he chooses not to have them starve or run out of light or warmth. He doesn’t even have them eaten by a pack of ravenous nomadic curs, or gun-swinging cannibals. At the end of the novel, in dire and heartbreaking circumstances, he posits humanity – the cause of this catastrophe – as a cause too for hope.

In ‘Zachariah’ too, there is a well-stocked store in the valley, as well as a farmyard of animals. Food and supplies are never an issue in the tale. Burden and Loomis are aware of that the store is not a bottomless well of provisions, and spend much of the novel attending to a planting and farming strategy. But in the end it is not a shortage of food or resources which brings about their downfall; it is – fundamentally – their humanity.

 

There are many comparisons I could make between the books. The use and significance of dogs; the use and significance of fish; the characterisation of masculinity; the characterisation of God vs. the characterisation of masculinity; traveling to the coast vs. traveling to the hills; the symbolism of birds; the significance and subtext of ‘deal making’; the ‘Good Samaritan’ references; the individual vs. community/society . . . etc . . .  

  

One of the small motifs that struck me most in ‘The Road’ was the number of times that the man and boy eat tinned peaches. Obviously, if your protagonists are scavenging in long-abandoned homes and shops, then the longevity of tinned foods makes them the single most plausible source of food. But the number of times McCarthy chooses peaches in particular is noticeable. And although tinned food very seldom appears in ‘Carhullan’, on at least one of the occasions that it does, it’s tinned peaches that is mentioned. Both McCarthy and Hall very overtly choose peaches as the tinned food for their characters.

 

Clearly they both make use of a wider tinned fruit metaphor. Indeed, though peaches seem by far the most frequently featured, McCarthy deploys several varieties of tinned fruit in ‘The Road’. The image has resonances of the book of Genesis. It’s also suggestive perhaps of the attempted capture, manipulation, or subjugation of nature by man. Here a commodity of soft, sweet, goodness is foisted into an armored shell and sealed from the world. There is too, the unspecific contrast of the sweetness of the fruit – particulary with peaches – in such a desperate world; the representation of fecundity and life and sexuality in a dead world. Peaches could even be seen as connoting something about people or society or state control – it’s a furry, soft, juicy fruit which has a hard inedible stone at the centre; and its tinned guise it has an additional hard manmade shell. But on top of those readings, there is the very specific symbology of the peach.

 

In Asian symbology peaches represent spring, as well as good fortune and prosperity. In ‘The Road’ the peaches are tinned and the spring never comes. The man and his son travel east, but never prosper. In ‘Carhullan’, Sister has a tin of peaches in her rucksack as she travels into the hills. Here they could be seen as being at odds with the state of the country – Sister finds them ‘overly sweet’. But more so, they are a representation of the loss of British identity, and, by proxy, autonomous personal identity. They aren’t an indigenous food, these tins are imported from America and Sister hates the dependency Britain has on them. But despite this, there is still the image of Sister carrying the peaches, just like the man and boy carry them; she carries a symbol of good fortune, carries that dormant fecundity, a representation of spring as she toils through the dark city and the fallow autumn fields, in search of hope and life.

 

In Chinese folklore peaches are a symbol of immortality; those who consumed the mythical ‘peaches of immortality’ lived an eternal life of tranquility. Again, McCarthy and Hall seem to be making use of this when they have their characters carry peaches as they search for a future.

 

As an aside – and to go back to Eden again, so to speak – though Genesis only ever refers to ‘the fruit’, in European or western representations of the Fall, it is, of course, most often depicted as an apple. It is interesting to note that the Latin for apple is malum, a word which has a meaning which encompasses words like ‘bad’, ‘calamity’, ‘plague’, ‘misfortune’, ‘disaster’, ‘punishment’, ‘harm’, ‘evil’, and ’sin’. The peach is malum persicum – literally Persian apple.

 

As another – possibly less anal and academic – aside, Google tells me that there is a ‘post-Apocalyptic’ play called ‘Canned Peaches in Syrup’. It ran in Los Angeles last fall (ahem, as Americans say), and it’s described (by the ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know it’ blog, no less) as ‘a post-apocalyptic Romeo and Juliet story between a cannibal and a vegetarian, the play takes place in a near environmentally-devastated future and it involves a can of peaches’. Split modifiers aside, the description makes it sound good. I’d look at the official website but – appropriately enough – it’s broken.

 

Here’s the trailer for it though: