Deconstructing redemption in The Road

There Is no divinity fudge and we are his prophets Deconstructing repurchase In Corm McCarthy The Road. (paper under re scan not for quotation) Stefan Skirmisher The University of Manchester Stefan. emailprotected AC. UK 09/09/09 Abstract Despite its overwhelmingly positive reception, the ap parently redemptive ratiocination to Corm McCarthy The Road attracted criticism from around reviewers. They read in it an in compriseency with the nihilism that other(a)wise pervades the novel, as well as McCarthy other works. but what are they referring to when they Interpret redemption, the messianic and graven image In McCarthy novel? Some Introductory thoughts from apocalypse theory and deconstruction reveal a more nuanced approach that not only saves McCarthy from the charge of such(prenominal) critics. It too opens up more interesting avenues for exploring the theme of redemption and the messianic in contemporary hap fiction. Introduction Justifiably effusive praise was heaped, by the literary community, upon McCarthy multiple award-winner The Road (2006). exactly by chance the roughly interesting reaction came in the form of critique of the whollyegedly redemptive and messianic tone of Its completion. Michael Cabochons historied review of the obtain concluded that McCarthy started to insert such a tone almost In spite of himself,l that is, forth of character with his usual nihilism. Another reviewer went as far as to suggest the novel failed the modernist argufy to write approximately a holocaust, astir(predicate) the flack of e verything What happens Is a redemption, of sorts, arguably absurd In the shell of such overwhelming nihilism. 2 whizz wonders how McCarthy himself would respond. Perhaps we should begin by recalling the cautionary and prophetic servicemandate that Nietzsche appended to one of his last works, Ace Homo l have a terrible charge I shall nee day be pronounced holy one impart guess why I bring out this book before pa ss around it is Intended to pr government issue people from making mischief of me My true statement Is dreadful for hitherto the Ill has been called uprightness. 3 Nietzsche feared the un metrely nature of the truth he came to announce to a modernity whose end had only just begun.He predicted the unpreserved of us murderers of deity to stand up in the ruins of the transcendent old God of metaphysics, and an unwillingness to create our own tragic pursuit of flavor. God, he would later write, would scarcely garbage spend the t shoot of modern man was in that locationfore to kill him again and again. He difficult and paradoxical redemption offered in The Road is very far from resurrecting the old God of metaphysics. Indeed, I would worry to argue in the following that it interweaves themes two of resistance (the refusal to expire) and mourning (the passing of irreversible loss).In doing so, the novel powerfully engages the lecturer with the very porous nature of redemption in the con text edition of its post- significative environment. Engaging McCarthy text in this bureau invites a Adrienne, deconstructive reading of the annals of redemption in contemporary disaster fiction in general. This is understanding the conversations and thought-experiments employed by McCarthy attempt in many a(prenominal) different ways to destabilize and provoke top dogs of the binary oppositions involved in that very discussion of redemptive ends ( and so, of the chess opening of conceiving ends at all).There are oppositions such as the saved and the damned, the lost and the retrievable the redeemed and irredeemable approachings. McCarthy provokes the question, in particular, of what means we powerfulness possibly wed to human race redemption and the messianic in an ostensibly irredeemable earth. What mountain be hoped for, sustained, and be double-dealingved in? On the one hand, thus, McCarthy pursuit of feel and lives in the scorched wasteland bears all t he hallmarks of Nietzsche tragedy the taming of horror through with(predicate) art4 -as op god to a comic rendering of the apocalypse (in which the righteous are stopd the calamities of the end).On the other hand, the ambiguous sense of the messianic in The Road hints at more than lyrical or experientialist responses to tragedy. By tracing McCarthy exploration of redemption alongside developments in the continental philosophy of religion, first in the form of final stage of God theology, and second, that of indestructibility of the messianic, I hope to open up some exploratory questions about the ambiguity of redemption in this highly influential piece of contemporary fiction.Ends of The Road Michael Cabochon states that for authors attempting a kick the bucket into the futuristic post- apocalypse genre, it is an established fact that a preponderance of spectral imagery or an affirm religious intent can go a long way toward mitigating the science- fictional taint. 5 And so Ca bochon takes that, in McCarthy novel, the founding father feeds his male child a story. By constructing the creed or injunction to carry the wind up, the story is infused with a religious sense of mission that, incarnate in the hope given to the life of the boy, verges on the explicitly messianic. We would do well to pause in front of the implications of this intelligence agency messianic. Who is saved the boy? The hollo of human community? And who or what seeds to save? The boys saviors at the end have a hesitant, and uncertain departure the guarantee only that others like him are alive. The messianic here would appear to take the form as much as a threat as a promise. And yet, taken from the Hebrew term for anointed one, the model of messiah in Jewish and early Christian literature is indeed keep up closely with the apocalyptic social upheaval. Certain expressions of the messianic thus anticipate both destruction (of the old world) and rebirth (of the new). In Jewish ra bbinic thought what is crucial for messianic doctrine is its relationship with history and historic throw. It is visionary hope in the present for the way things could be, whether these are simply restorative or utopian. 8 The tradition that emerges is subsequently one of the announcement of such a promise of the future through the voice of the prophets.Anticipating Jacques Deride, the concept of the messianic announcement is the voice of the fringe, the outside of sanctioned, homogeneous treat a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the compliance of peace and Justice, a promise independent of religion, that is to say universal. 9 Whilst The Road carries its own utopian and stomach upset prophets, however, redemption is nowhere conceived or expressed as the restoration of peace. Nor is it infused with any hope in the variety of the earth, or even of the narrative of new beginnings for the scorched landscape.McCarth y relentlessly refuses reassurance that any return to a well-off age is possible. The novel is an exploration of the irreversible, of things which could not be put back. 10 In what, then, consist its alleged religiosity, its messianic expectation, or greater The clues untruth in the relationship formed between a salvation to come (framed in the metaphor of the road itself Mimi need to keep going. You dont know what might be down the road12) and the ambiguous sense of endings running throughout the book. The fathers own life represents a refusal of the ease of endings.His son essential not lay down and die. Or, more precisely, he may not die of his own choosing, before the Father has calculated deaths permeability on his behalf. The terror of the novel is thus generated in spite of appearance the narrative context of this slipping away of the look over the appropriate end. The son knows neither how to die alone, nor, symbolically, the function of the pistol in his hands (l don t know what to do, Papa. I dont know what to do. Where will you be? )13 In relation to a search for the messianic, we must seek the sense of redemption only within this disestablishing sense of time.The messianic takes on a perverse sort of tension between the desire for end as closure, and the refusal to end, as the resistance of death, and finality. The boys terror at the task asked of him (to kill himself) is not complicated. But this venture do between ends and beginnings in The Road also expresses the paradoxical nature of the post-apocalyptic genre in general. If we accept mob Burgers account of post-apocalyptic narrative as concerned essentially with aftermaths and remainders, then we must also follow his conclusion that it is always oxymoron the End is never the end. The modernist assumption, in Frank Sermons celebrated study, has been that the sense of an ending is what gives our life-time in the middies1 5 narrative meaning. But post-apocalypse means the very unsettli ng of those temporal frames. It impossibly straddles the bound between before and after some issue that has obliterated what went before yet defines what will come after. 16 Indeed, we can see the influence of this scatological tension a concern to much modernist and postmodernist literary exploration of the nature and meaning of narrative closure.Paul Fiddles wide ranging study of such explorations suggests that if there is a malaise in the writing of closure into contemporary fiction, it simply reflects the more general environment of constant quantity crisis, replacing the sense of completion and fulfillment of history, in which we live. 17 Such a paradox also partly reflects The Road as a study of the refusal of endings, and e ipso a refusal of the redemption normally associated with the narrative end. For our enthrallment is drawn not to those who are destroyed, tho to those who refuse to die.If McCarthy style emulates, as some critics suggest, the biblical address of Re velation, they cant have missed SST. Johns vision, borrowed probably from Job, that during the scatological calamities, people will long for death and not find it anywhere they will want to die and death will evade them. 18 A comedic articulation of this craving crops up in the Backbitten character of Ely, echoing precisely the post-apocalyptic dilemma Things will be better when everyones gone. They will? Sure they will. Better for who? Everybody. Sure. Well all be better off. Well all breathe easier.Thats neat to know. Yes it is. When were all gone at last then therell be naught here but death and his days are numbered too. Hell be out in the road there with nix to do and nobody to do it. Hell say Where did everybody go? And thats how it will be. Whats wrong with that? 19 McCarthy is arguably concerned, like Becket, to explore the experience of the death of God as instant paradox. That is, as a source of the death of hope for some, but also of an absurd affirmation of life by ot hers, condemning them to a life of scatological time out of postponement, but for what?Our encounter with the post of post-apocalypse is, then, immediately one with the challenge of making narrative and ethical sense of the life that remains, rather than he purely nihilist gratuitousness of a death that wont come. It is more akin to Albert Campus Rebel, 20 aerated with the task of making an ethics of action in the absurd condition, without resorting to a leap of faith that distant the lucid reality of the absurd itself. It is the life of Sisyphus, who has made his rock his entire universe of meaning. 1 wholly talk of redemption and the messianic must take seriously this simultaneous presence of both the end and the refusal, or undesirability, of endings. The question that emanates from The Road is perhaps this one what does nee do, given the knowledge of a certainty of the discover of life, which might make walking possible along the remainder of the Road? How can this search prevail within the traumatic experiment of post-apocalypse, of the never-ending? Dermiss interest in the concept of apocalyptic time.For Deride can be argued to echo the refusal of the security of endings that I have suggested lies at the heart of The Road. Deride refuses the scatological language of triumphal historicist (particularly in reference to Fuchsias end of history thesis), invoking Hamlets fearful dictum, the time is out of Joint22 To express this refusal. Similarly, McCarthy frames the experience of this time of the remainder not as the aftermath of the singular catastrophic event. Rather, it is the perpetuity of misfortune itself the uncertainty of relationships, ecology, and the possibility for human community.The thought experiment becomes one of a tortuously open future, the absence seizure of referents for forging new harbors, new rules, and new duties. The novel thus plays on the post-apocalypse genre by creating a dissonance of temporal perspectives. Time has a lready run out and is yet, for the boy, opening out inexorably nothing has really knishes. For the father, the character of the time that remains is defined by the anxiety not only of the trammel time allotted to him (who is really dying) but of the dubious gift of extending the time allotted the son into the future and whos death he will not be able to oversee.Through the tender and contradictory relationship of the father and son, then, the genre of post-apocalypse is turned on its head. We grapple not so much with the post-modern fragmentation of endless traumatic symptoms,23 but the juxtaposition of these two impossible positions in the dialogue of father and child. On the one hand there is a protection of and desire for the end the fathers desire to secure the least tortuous conclusion to his sons life.And on the other there is the need for a beginning the sons overwhelming concern for who and what must lie beyond who exists? What are they like? Who looks after them? Who will guarantee their safety in the future? prophetic Time Death, or limit, is thus explored in The Road as a painful loss of control over time. This resistance to the consolation of narrative ends represents the most unique and creative aspect of McCarthy apocalyptic style. But what can we say about apocalyptic literature in general that may shed light on the ambiguity of McCarthy redemptive turn?Literary apocalypses, in Jewish and Christian interdepartmental literature, intentionally want to trace the limits of communicable discourse. It did this, crucially, against the political traumas of history, in which an old world was thought to be dying and a new one arising, which would completely overturn reality. Through visionary events bestowed upon favored emissaries or recipients, heavenly truth revealed, through apocalypses, the place beyond the limits of language25 to unanimity. What is the function of this type of limit-discourse?Implicit to all apocalypses there is an ethically loa ded injunction that the truth of the world is not all that is visible or likely by human means. 26 At its root, then, apocalypse claims that a deeper destiny and purpose lies underneath, and is here, through text and vision, disclosed. Revealed. It is this aspect of the coding of Revelation that so attracts Dermiss attention in his celebrated essay, On a impudently Arisen Tone in Philosophy. Dermiss fascination is with the figure of John and the complex symbolism of the fragmented, yard subjects of the future contained in his vision.There is, believes Deride, something primal to Western thought in Johns act as the messenger, this role of universe the favored starter of revelation and denouncing the false ones, the impostor apostles. 27 Is there an echo of this cryptic prophecy in McCarthy for instance, the language of God who is both announced and yet uncontainable, even within the friendly womans talk of the breath of God that passes from man to man through all of If so, the crucial lesson for an apocalyptic reading of McCarthy would be that apocalypse guarantees no certainties about future realities.On the contrary, it would be to resist the temptation of one apocalyptic tone, and to hear instead apocalypse as an unmistakable polytonally. 29 There is, in a deconstructive reading, only a deeper fragmentation and disestablishing of meaning and truth. And this is precisely the concern of Dermiss critique of an ontological and contemporaneous reading of history. As Fiddles puts it, narrative can be deconstructionist in the sense that, like the book of Revelation, the ending deconstructs itself, and so disperses meaning rather than completes it. 30 This same instability and impermanence of discourse is prevalent within the illegal between father and son in The Road. The meaning of words and the possibility of language itself becomes shorn of its social or ethical grounds. McCarthy even poses the problem as one of the absurdity of text in the post-apocalypt ic future. From the referent-less discussion of metaphor as the crow flies31 (to the boy, who has never known the existence of birds) to the mans memory of pausing in the charred ruins of some library and experiencing absolute dislocation between the value of words and the burnt remains of the world to come. 2 An attempt to plow in a world where words and meanings are disappearing mirrors ruefully the attempt to invoke faith in a world in which God is increasingly absent. The God of The Road is the impossible presence, the one whose name is invoked (by the father, and by the woman at the end) but whose very existence would pose only problems, not solutions. To Ely, the possibility of the intentness of god or gods is a fearful prospect and impedance to the task at hand (of living(a)?Or dying? ) Where men cant live gods fare no better. Youll see. Its better to be alone. 33 But the existential struggle facing both the father and Ely is precisely the realization that, in he very act of their survival, something unshakeable of the trace of God (in the book it moves from word, to breath, to dream in that order) is incarnate. This appears, admittedly, as a curse to Ely, whose survival the father finds incredible.The fate bestowed on any unlucky enough to carry on down the road is to carry the remainder, the aftermath of this ineffability and this absence There is no God and we are his prophets. 34 It is, finally, in reference to the knowledge and memory of dying that any talk of the possible meaning of redemption must orient itself hence hat must the remaining humans carry on being humans? The man questions Ely on this point how would you know if you were the last man on earth? to which Ely replies It wouldnt make any difference. When you die its the same as if everybody else did too. 35 The framing of post-apocalypse narrative in this context reiterates the centrality of the question of remainders, of those who might remain to remember and to hold the consciousn ess of humanity and the possibility of discourse (and therefore of God? ) in their very surviving. God is Dead (again) The reference to God, and Gods potential for solving the riddle of the meander (perhaps, wonders the man, God would know that you were the last on earth) is typically McCarthy. He is concerned mostly to snarled belief rather than to deflect it or affirm it entirely through his characters.The fragmented quasi- theological discussions echo the brilliant, extended account of the sermoniser who does theological battle with a dying faith in The Crossing. 37 But, once again, a deeper interrogation of what sort of theistic faith such references might imply goes some way to answering those readers joyless with McCarthy redemptive conclusions. Ells sat remark bears similarities to attempts made in the sass to articulate a faithful religious response to the existentialist current, through a Death of God Theology. Alongside Thomas J. J.Altimeter, The protestant theologis t Paul Italics famously argued for the language of modern theology to acknowledge not only the ontological insufficiency of speaking of Gods existence (since the essence of God is a Being beyond Being). Theology must also acknowledge the failure of human experience to allow this access in the first place. For many of these thinkers the God of the theologians had died on the battlefields of Europe during World War l. To thus define God in negatively charged terms was not only a semantic step. It was to couch Thee-logos as the discourse of absence par excellence.And certainly through the eyes of the other religious existentialists (Aggregated, Bereave, Dostoevsky, Auber) the search for God was the reaffirmation of the absurd, its crucifixion in the mystery of human suffering, not its resolution. Another exemplar, the Catholic convert Simons Well, had expressed it through the figure of bloody shame Magdalene on Easter Saturday one moves towards the tomb motivated by death, an expecta tion of the corpse, not an optimistic fling off in life. It is human suffering that motivates our movement towards reality, and the mystery in which God (through his absence) is to be found.Likewise, influenced heavily by Nietzsche, Italics described the true act of faith of the believer as one who does not attempt to unbowed the existentialist crisis of despair but who has the courage to look into the abyss of nonbinding in the complete loneliness of him who accepts the message that God is dead. 38 A difficult God to find, to be sure, since for Well, Italics and others, the problem of nihilism was not to be squared by the gift of faith. It was to be lived in the paradox of human suffering in the seeking, not the finding, of an answer to suffering.Perhaps The Road shares some features of these attempts to grapple with the death of God. But it is only really with Dermiss exploration of the messianic and time that deconstruction, to repeat, attempts to go beyond philosophy and soci etys obsessions with talking of the end of thinking, metaphysics, God, politics, Marxism, etc. Deconstruction tries to counterbalance this fascination with definitive ends by announcing the end of a electronic crisis rhetoric itself. Deride thus highlights the err possibility of crisis discourse as the last form of meaning that one clings to, and whose loss signals a truly existential death.The true crisis is that there may no longer be a philosophy of crisis there is perhaps not even a crisis of the present world. In its turn in crisis, the concept of crisis would be the touch modality of a last symptom, the convulsive effort to save a World that we no longer in exercise no more kiosks, economy, ecology, livable site in which we are at home. 39 One recalls, in the light of this, the discussion in The Road of the possibility of both knowing, and not owing, preparing, and not preparing, for the event, the brief glimpse of which holds an elusive taint of horror over the narrative.E ly confides in the man I knew this was attack. You knew it was coming? Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it. Did you try to get ready for it? No. What would you do? I dont know. People were always get ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there. 40 This intervention into crisis thinking problematical the very status of event its undesirability, its uncertain definitiveness. It mirrors Dermiss critique of an Aristotelian, favored presence of the event itself.Ultimately, such a critique leads to Dermiss ability to pose a distinctively Jewish opposition to this privileging of the event namely, the reassertion of a certain messianic, a therefore mystical, mysterious return to a revelatory messianic. It is, however, a messianic without messianic stripped of everything,41 or in other words unbounded by the specificity of this or that dogmatism, religion, and metaphysics of salvation. In decon struction, then, we can no longer speak of the privilege of the contemporary. 2 What does that concept imply in the context of McCarthy narrative?It opens out the analysis to the concept of redemption without the guarantee of the event that would guarantee salvation in the manner of the promises of institutional religion. Such a scene recalls the iconoclastic reformulation of hope that was prevalent in post-war Jewish critical theory (particularly in Ernst Bloch). This meant a redemption without reference to the face of God only the judgment of promise itself. 43 Deride expresses a notion of the future as being not a future-present but as something perpetually out of reach.It produces, like death, the effect of interminable non-occurrence, perhaps in the manner by which the event of The Road is announced The alfileria stopped at 1 Time itself, like discourse, and like belief, is suspended shorn of its referent. The messianic appetite that survives even a book binding to the comm itment of expectation more akin, once again, to the suffering of the waiting Vladimir and Estrogen. The apocalyptic element of The Road, then, might not be the announcement of some catastrophic event in time either in the past (since this is never dwelled upon) or the future.It is rather the revelation of traces, of remainders and reminders, of the God who might also be dying since he fares no better than men when men cant live. 45 The apocalyptic always appears with a hidden face, in the impossible or inconceivable encounter with the end of all things, of death itself. The consolation offered to the boy by his father is that he has always been lucky. 46 Beyond irony, the word luck seems shorn of its associations with providence, destiny, and blessedness, and more like an unhappy covenant an unspoken agreement that the boy is bound to continue, to keep going.The continuation of life is a brute fact for the boy as much as for Ely (neither apparently aware what keeps them going). And yet the boy is very unlike Ely, not because of his innocence, but because of his temporal language. What will happen, he asks of his father, to the other boy? To the man they abandoned? To the people imprisoned in the house? The conundrum for Ely is otherwise, and framed in the time that was. What has happened did we see it coming? What were we thinking? Even if we did, how could we have been expected to strike?If there is redemption in The Road, perhaps all we can say of it is the ability o ask questions of the future, as opposed to only those of the past, of mourning that which cannot be put right. Redemption without redemption The event is indeed problematic for post-apocalypse. But it is problematic not simply because finality is put off indefinitely (as Berger claims). It is problematic for its revealing, or disclosing, our lack of control over its arrival. Apocalypse is temporal catastrophe a disruption of our chronic desires, time we possess, can control.The future is certai nly terrible, but it is agonizing particularly for our thorniness into its uncertainty. Redemption, then, if it is relevant at all, must be seen as the ability to imagine that what one sees now is not all that there is. In the book of Revelation calamities are predicted that meticulously symbolism the passing of apportioned periods of time according to divine order, not those of powers and principalities. 47 In The Road, however, the father is possessed by his responsibility to Judge the right time of his sons end, and so spare unbearable life.The crisis recalls Abrahams struggle with Gods command to act out the unthinkable, here repeated in the Fathers own self-doubt Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. maledict God and die. 48 One passes over it easily, but by the end of the novel, the fathers command to his son to withdraw from him occurs by way of an admission of weakness an apology for entrusting life with him l cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant49.Is this the conclusion thought to give some sort of redemptive lift to the narrative a fog leaf to the unacceptable narrative of entire disaster? 50 1 would argue cynical perspective, rather than the consolingly messianic one. In this view the ethers committal of the son to the future is not performed out of faith in the intentness of goodness. His commitment is, more simply, in the inability to cease suffering, to cease walking along the road. The fathers sense of an open future is not hard to grasp in itself it is the only thing left to offer his son.Yet what is the most significant chimerical turn in what follows? I would argue that it is not that the boy subsequently finds fellow travelers we are to believe are also the good guys who are carrying the fire. Nor even is it that they, like the woman, are also those that cosines the persistence of the divine in the world. Rather, it is an admission by all characters of a disestablishing uncertainty about that road that lies ahead. It is there in the implied pause of the mans response to the boy at the end of the novel He looked at the sky. As if there were anything to be seen.Yeah, he said. Im one of the good guys. 51 There is no evidence in what precedes this moment that any place the new community will reach can support life. Nor, I think, are we meant to intuit such a turn towards the future. One cannot ignore, in any case, the terrifying allusions that lie underneath McCarthy choice of the word fire. Cabochon is quick to point this out the new hope for human community are people carrying fire in a world destroyed by fire. 52 But we can go further than this, since the irony recalls the central theme of another classic of the post-apocalypse genre.In William Millers A Canticle for Leibniz, the scattered survivors of global nuclear war attempt to construct the new civilization by destroying all forms of scientific knowledge. They do this on th e premise that such knowledge will lead inexorably to the same situation of nuclear terror. A secluded community of monks become the last guardians of ancient knowledge, preserving it for such a time that knowledge will once again be responsibly applied. But the fear is vindicated by the recapitulation of humanity to a second wave of nuclear apocalypse at the novels horrifying conclusion.