THE ROAD: Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalyptic Vision

NOVEL SERMONS: GOSPEL IN LITERATURE AND LIFE

6. " THE ROAD: Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalyptic Vision”

Luke 21: 5-19

First Presbyterian Church, Jamestown

Rev. Angus Watkins

August 2, 2009

Most of us meander forward in our own life journeys informed and directed by particular stories that have influenced us along the way. That’s how powerful stories can be! When we hear a story told to us by parents or Sunday school teachers, when we see a movie, when we stand before a great work of art, and (yes) when we read literature, there’s a sense in which all our senses are trying to absorb the teller’s particular view of the world; and then, we determine whether and how it might guide the next stretch of our own lives. Isn’t that, after all, the function of a community such as this – to share and compare our stories, to consider how they shed light on the times and circumstances in which we live; then, if there is merit, to re-direct our steps together on the road ahead..?

Think, for example, how powerful and influential the great biblical journeys have been to the Judaeo-Christian community for centuries – like the great Israelite exodus and wandering for 40 years through perilous wilderness circumstances as well as grace-filled moments toward a better destination! In my own bookbag of extraordinary journeys are the likes of Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, Slavomir Rawicz’ The Long Walk, David Halsey’s Magnetic North, R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, The Log of Columbus’ Voyages, and The Journals of Lewis and Clark, to name a few. You can add your own list to these, I’m sure! Maybe we ought to all compare books with one another, mindful of the power of literature or film or some fine art to touch us in powerful ways. Why don’t we carry on a conversation with each other about what “story” or what book is the one that currently is directing our view of the world and how each of us is making our way through it!?

The book that continues to beguile me, fill me with awe, hauntings, and wonderment is Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Road. Before we wade into its own scriptures, I must say McCarthy’s writing has impressed me for some years now, even before The Road came out. His border trilogy, including the National Book Award- winning All The Pretty Horses, certainly rises like champagne bubbles to the top of great journey literature, with truly extraordinary wordplay. I’ve developed this habit, perhaps annoying to librarians, but maybe helpful to subsequent readers, of bending over the corners of pages with particularly haunting or beautiful passages pointing toward significant ideas. And my copy of The Road has many, many dog-eared page corners!

Before we explore the story further and consider why this is an important book (scheduled to come out this October as a major blockbusting movie), let me read aloud a substantial, opening passage:

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none... with the first grey light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there... watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He only knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God [then] God never spoke.

When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a tablecloth on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He’d pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he look out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I’m right here.

I know.

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried their knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? He said. The boy nodded Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire. (pp. 3-5)

Do you get the picture? The stark, but poetic language of a father and his son making their way through a bleak and burned-over American landscape imagined in some not-so-distant coming time. Near-perfect language by a modern-day prophet depicting a world that has sunk to the lowest depths of imperfection.

We find ourselves reading about a parent’s fierce love for a child as they walk together across a charred and ashen landscape, where there are no longer any fish in lakes or streams, no longer any birds in skies or trees, and there are precious few people still alive, and even less morsels left by which one might live and prosper. The father struggles valiantly as they try to scavenge, survive and travel toward some uncertain ultimate destiny, as in this brief paragraph:

“Mostly he worried about their shoes. That and food. Always food. In an old batboard smokehouse [along the way] they found a ham gambreled up in a high corner. It looked like something fetched from a tomb, so dried and drawn. He cut into it with his knife. Deep red and salty meat inside. Rich and good. They fried it that night over their fire, thick slices of it, and put their slices to simmer with a tin of beans. Later he woke in the dark and he thought he heard bulldrums beating somewhere in the low dark hills. Then the wind shifted and there was just the silence.” (p. 15)

Then later, when they are very hungry eating the last of what food they’d been able to find to that point, the father and son have this exquisite conversation:

What is it? The man said.

Nothing.

We’ll find something to eat. We always do....

We wouldn’t ever eat anybody would we?

No. Of course not.

Even if we’re starving?

We’re starving now.

You said we weren’t.

I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving. But we wouldn’t.

No. We wouldn’t

No matter what.

No. No matter what. Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.

Okay. (pp.108-109)

So... the story goes on. And for me it is not a story that provides answers, but rather it provokes terribly important questions. When life is good and bountiful for us, when we have so much and virtually anything we’d like to eat day or night, it is almost laughable that we read a book which makes us ask, Well, what if we made our way into a time when there was little or no food left? Are we on a path as a civilization toward an endlessly prosperous and secure future? As populations continue to grow exponentially, as remaining natural resources are consumed at unsustainable rates, as armed conflicts for what is left continue in many corners of the world, as weapon systems and nuclear proliferation continues among “good guys” and “bad guys” alike leading to a potential conflagration with global consequences not unlike the landscape we see in McCarthy’s apocalyptic story – implicit in the message of The Road is the question: What kind of world will we leave for coming generations and species and habitats? What irreversible choices have we already made? What fresh alternatives might we decide to live by and stand for in these increasingly precarious times?

Cormac McCarthy wrestles, as we do at times, with the “God question” on The Road. The father is grappling with deep despair, angry with a seemingly absent or detached divinity that comes while they stumble forward, as it says when:

“He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through [charred skeletons of] the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? [Blast] you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.” (p. 100)

Then later, he alludes to circumstances so bleak that faith in some external kind of divinity becomes non-existent:

“On the road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never-to-be differ from what never was?”

And yet, you get the unmistakable impression that if there is such a reality as god, it is known primarily through each of us – in the compassion, tenderness, and fierce protective love we demonstrate for all those and all life which is... And when the boy and his father remind each other from time to time that “we are the good guys and we’re carrying the fire,” it is an unmistakable affirmation of something like divinity, affirming the more-ness lurking within us, among us, and around us. It is that burning bush kind of extraordinary spirit-light that keeps pulling us forward in even the most gloomy circumstances.

But a time comes when we will have gone as far as we can go, done as much as we can to extend the story of life together on this beautiful but fragile planet, and we must pass on whatever is left to a coming generation. Listen to a passing of the baton, so to speak, of the father in The Road, to his son:

“The man took his hand, wheezing. You need to go on, he said. I can’t go with you. You need to keep going. You don’t know what might be down the road. We were always lucky. You’ll be lucky again. You’ll see. Just go. It’s all right.

I can’t, the boy says.

It’s all right. This has been a long time coming. Now it’s here. Keep going south. Do everything the way we did it.

You’re going to be okay, Papa. You have to.

No. I’m not. Keep the gun with you at all times. You need to find the good guys but you can’t take any chances. No chances. Do you hear?

I want to be with you.

You can’t.

Please.

You can’t. You have to carry the fire...

I don’t know how to.

Yes you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is.

Yes, you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it...

You said you wouldn’t ever leave me.

I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

Will I hear you?

Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up, okay?

Okay.

I’m really scared, Papa.

I know. But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be lucky. I know you are. I’ve got to stop talking. I’m going to start coughing again.

It’s okay, Papa. You don’t have to talk. It’s okay. (pp. 234-235)

We could go on, but I will not speak of the culminating events in this great book so there’s a better chance you might be touched by reading them, too. As I finished re-reading The Road propped up in bed, munching on cookies, I was overcome with tears for its pathos, its poignant and powerful eloquence, its tenderness, its truth, and the splinter of hope it holds up, like a firefly blinking in the dark.

So let us keep alert to stories such as this, and dare read them, hear them, see them; then, to ponder them and consider how we might live better and make better policies and personal choices – for the sake of this lovely, fragile planet and future generations. Why? Because I want to think we’re “the good guys” and we can still “carry the fire.”

Amen.