New Topic: The Road

Have written up my notes towards the session as a paper which can be read in two halves on my blog here and here, or in one piece over here.

One quotation which the book reminded me of was from the philosopher Hans Jonas. He suggested that an appropriate moral principle for our technological age is that "never must the existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of an action" ("The Imperative of Responsibility", 1984).

The mention of 'essence' here links to what's striking for me about the book. Even if we don't believe in a fixed, unchanging 'human nature', something that arguably is universal in human life is the experience of uncertainty: we don't know how the future we are helping to create will turn out. The 'essence' of humanity is perhaps, then, the necessity of a creative response to this experience (we need to deal with uncertainty, domesticate it, make it meaningful).

In this sense, the book is all about 'keeping the flame alive', keeping an eye on a future in which care and love can continue, and thus preserving the possibility of such a creative response. Everything the father does, from tending fires, fixing the shopping cart, washing his son's hair has this symbolic resonance as well as a simple, survival-oriented one, one which seeks to keep the story of their relationship (framed by the father initially as a narrative of a journey South, and to the sea) continuing - holding open a gap between present and future.

That's why, for me, the book is about hope - it's an experiment that explores how, even in a situation where the past is being erased thanks to the lack of the possibility of history continuing (that is, at least for now), hope remains an intrinsic part of being human - and also explores how hope has a moral significance too, because without hope there is only survival, even to the point where one is prepared to eat one's children.

Re-posted from elsewhere on the forum:

The Road

Submitted by Bathportian on Wed, 04/07/2012 - 20:29.

It is probably THE most powerful modern novel about the times we live in. It warns us about our fate and it also directs us to a more positive future. It is a massive work which speaks strongly to me. I wondered about my father’s advice to me once which was “In this life, you have to look after yourself because no other bugger will”. At the beginning of the book and through most of it, I thought of how relevant that was as this father and son relied totally upon each other, treating all other survivors as hostile (hence the gun) but throughout there is a moral compass and the only survivor of the two is the boy, who resolutely holds that moral compass, talking of “the good guys” and, throughout, trying to ensure civility towards others.

The boy, like the pigeon in Pigeon English, is the conscience, soaring high above the dehumanising action on the ground. His values and his stubborn refusal to abandon them much more than the brute, hard-boiled survival instincts of his father ensure that in the end he can move ahead with his life. He finds a family and he finds hope that, somehow, life can continue despite the waste, carnage and desolation.

This uplift at the end changes the mood from unrelenting bleakness and desperation (I found it gripping and compulsive but I was uncomfortably aware throughout of a chilling parallel with the world we live in today, with so many European countries, federal institutions, banks, governments, capitalism itself seeming to be in dire threat of complete moral breakdown and mass insecurity which emanates from the threat of terrorism and internet privacy/freedom abuses which makes us behave differently, seeking the enemy within and losing trust in communities and in our neighbours) to optimism and hope.
What interested me most was McCarthy’s decision to dispense with grammatical rules such as apostrophes. I wondered if this was deliberate or if it was more a mistake because at points there is inconsistency. “You’re freezing, arent you?” page 132. It seemed to me to be a copy editor’s mistake and these occurred liberally. His decision to write dialogue without quotation marks, however, was consistent throughout and at first I found this annoying but soon grew to find it somehow fitting. I wondered if this was to reflect the breakdown of rules and conventions in what remained of the world and to accurately portray the stripped-down reductionist nature of survival and the loss of culture. Do we lose grammatical rules when we lose culture or is all we are left with the rules? I see myself as the last survivor on earth going around correcting grammatical mistakes!

I blog on http://garrywgibbs.wordpress.com