Thoughts on - Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Nature-Culture and Language + Cultural 

Reality 

 

  

Nature and culture are interdependent. According to Donna Harroway society is not neural thus these categories cannot separated (cf. Kollin 2011 158f). Society exists within nature and is therefore not only affected by any “natural disaster”, but may, as Elizabeth Kolbert suggests, unwillingly contribute to its own annihilation. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the characters face such a “crisis of nature-culture” (cf. Kollin 2011 159), which is probably felt most acutely in the extinction of language as a means of communication and an expression of cultural reality (Karmash 2003 3). 


Thrust into post-apocalyptic wasteland that is covered in the ashes of a seemingly burned-out civilization not only father and son maneuver their way through the remnants of what Kollin calls a “post-abundant reality” (Kollin 2011 160), the reader is confronted with the largely mimetic language of disaster and deprivation that engages with but ultimately refuses to activate the conventions of disaster narratives in order to allow the reader to critically examine the connection between nature and culture. 

The use of language as a means for communication between the characters and a tool to express cultural reality is utterly problematic. It seems the longer father and son travel the more fraught with difficulty their communication becomes. For long stretches of time they do not communicate at all: “I don’t want to talk about anything” (Road 269). The son at one point even criticizes his father for telling untrue stories of heroes helping people that do not correlate with the reality of their present circumstances (Road 268). It seems he implicitly criticizes his father for telling “happy stories” (Road 268) to escape real life by creating a fictional world, where humanity can be saved through courage and valour. While the father refuses to acknowledge the end of those narratives “don’t tell me how the story ends” (Road 75), the boy does not share his father’s longing for the “old stories of courage and justice” (Road 41). Born into a world after disaster struck, his father’s narratives of the manageable end do not resonate within the boy. Forced to live in the present, he does not “have any stories” (Road 268) inside. Consequently he refuses to activate the same cultural conventions of his father’s stories that according to Susan Sonntag (cf. Kollin 2011 168), both beautify and normalize the unbearable, in this case the nature-culture crisis the characters are faced with. Engaging with the forever altered world where the veneer of civilization, morality, faith, and even history seem to have been stripped away, the son stands for a change in perception, a new awareness of “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again” (Road 268) and on a meta-level for a different kind of narrative. This clash of the old, embodied by the father, and the new, embodied by son who “carries the fire” (Road 284) opens up a new dimension for understanding the connection between culture and nature.

 REVIEW:

Warner, Alan. "The Road to hell". The Guradian. Nov. 4, 2016. Web. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4