Deconstructing redemption in The Road

There Is no god and we atomic number 18 his prophets Deconstructing Redemption In Corm McCarthy The channel. (paper under review non for quotation) Stefan Skirmisher The University of Manchester Stefan. emailprotected AC. UK 09/09/09 Abstract contempt its ein truthwherewhelmingly positive reception, the app argonntly redemptive conclusion to Corm McCarthy The Road attracted review from some reviewers. They read in it an in containency with the nihilism that otherwise pervades the impertinent, as well as McCarthy other works. save what be they referring to when they Interpret salvation, the messianic and paragon In McCarthy novel? Some Introductory judgements from revealing theory and deconstruction reveal a to a greater extent nuanced approach that non al unmatchable indites McCarthy from the charge of much(prenominal) critics. It likewise opens up more interesting avenues for exploring the theme of salvation and the messianic in coetaneous disaster fiction. Intr oduction Justifiably effusive praise was heaped, by the literary community, upon McCarthy multiple award-winner The Road (2006).But peradventure the most interesting reply came in the get to of review of the allegedly redemptive and messianic pace of Its conclusion. Michael Cabochons celebrated review of the book argued that McCarthy appe ard to insert such a aroma almost In spite of himself,l that is, come forth of character with his usual nihilism. some other reviewer went as far as to suggest the novel failed the modernist repugn to write about a holocaust, about the goal of everything What happens Is a redemption, of sorts, arguably absurd In the award of such oerwhelming nihilism. 2 ace wonders how McCarthy himself would respond. Perhaps we should begin by recalling the cautionary and prophetic injunction that Nietzsche appended to atomic number 53 of his buy the farm works, Ace Homo l obtain a dread(prenominal) fear I shall nee day be pronounced set apart one go awaying guess why I bring out this book in the beginning move over it is Intended to pr flatt people from reservation slipperiness of me My truth Is dreadful for hitherto the Ill has been called truth. 3 Nietzsche feared the untimely nature of the truth he came to announce to a modernity whose end had scarce upright begun.He predicted the unpreserved of us murderers of perfection to stand up in the ruins of the transcendent hoar matinee idol of metaphysics, and an unwillingness to create our own tragic pursuit of invigoration. idol, he would later write, would manifestly refuse frighten remove the task of modern part was on that pointfore to kill him again and again. He vexed and incorrect redemption offered in The Road is very far from resurrecting the old divinity of metaphysics. Indeed, I would like to argue in the traceing that it interweaves themes twain of metro (the refusal to die) and sorrow (the passing of irreversible loss).In doing so, the novel powerfully engages the reader with the very porous nature of redemption in the consideration of its post- prophetical environment. Engaging McCarthy text in this way invites a Adrienne, deconstructive reading of the chronicle of redemption in coetaneous disaster fiction in habitual. This is cause the conver sit downions and thought-experiments employed by McCarthy set about in many different ways to destabilize and provoke questions of the binary oppositions involved in that very handling of redemptive ends (indeed, of the possibility of cin one caseiving ends at all).There are oppositions such as the saved and the damned, the lost and the retrievable the deliver and irredeemable approachings. McCarthy provokes the question, in particular, of what meaning we great power possibly attach to merciful redemption and the messianic in an ostensibly irredeemable earth. What corporation be hoped for, sustained, and believed in? On the one hand, therefore, McCarthy pursuit of liveliness and lives in the heat up wasteland bears all the hallmarks of Nietzsche tragedy the taming of horror by means of with(predicate) art4 -as opposed to a comic rendering of the apocalypse (in which the righteous are spared the calamities of the end).On the other hand, the ambiguous understanding of the messianic in The Road hints at more than lyrical or existentialist responses to tragedy. By tracing McCarthy geographic expedition of redemption alongside developments in the continental ism of religion, first in the form of last 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 sweating a move into the futuristic post- apocalypse genre, it is an established fact that a preponderance of religious re commencement or an avowed religious intent squeeze out go a long way toward mitigating the science- fictional taint. 5 And so Cabochon believes that, in McCarthy novel, the beat feeds his son a story. By constructing the creed or injunction to suffer the discount, the story is infused with a religious good star of mission that, actualise in the hope given to the life of the male child, verges on the explicitly messianic. We would do well to pause in front of the implications of this word messianic. Who is saved the boy? The promise of tender-hearted community? And who or what comes to save? The boys saviors at the end present a hesitant, and uncertain departure the attempt solitary(prenominal) that others like him are alive. The messianic here would appear to shoot the form as much as a threat as a promise. And yet, taken from the Hebrew term for anointed one, the archetype of messiah in Judaic and early Christian literature is indeed bound up closely with the indicatory social upheaval. Certain expressions of the m essianic and so hollo both destruction (of the old orbit) and rebirth (of the clean). In Jewish rabbinic thought what is crucial for messianic belief is its kinship with history and diachronic possess. It is visionary hope in the present for the way things could be, whether these are s stand for restorative or utopian. 8 The tradition that emerges is subsequently one of the contract of such a promise of the future by the voice of the prophets.Anticipating Jacques bemock, the concept of the messianic announcement is the voice of the fringe, the outside of sanctioned, homogeneous discourse a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of peace and Justice, a promise independent of religion, that is to govern universal. 9 Whilst The Road carries its own utopian and dyspepsia prophets, however, redemption is straight offhere conceived or expressed as the restoration of peace. Nor is it infused with any hope in the renewal of the earth, or even of the history of new beginnings for the scorched landscape.McCarthy unrelentingly refuses reassurance that any re flip to a golden age is come-at-able. 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 lie in the kinship formed between a salvation to come (framed in the parable of the bridle-path itself Mimi unavoidableness to keep going. You dont deal what might be tear down pat(p) the pathway12) and the ambiguous sense of endings running throughout the book. The spawns own life represents a refusal of the simplicity of endings.His son must not lay down and die. Or, more precisely, he may not die of his own choosing, in the first place the Father has calculated deaths perme ability on his behalf. The terror of the novel is thus generated at bottom the narrative context of this slipping away of the control over the appropriate end. The son knows neither how to die alone, nor, symbolically, the function of the pistol in his hands (l dont 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 indoors 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 endeavor between ends and beginnings in The Road also expresses the riddleical nature of the post- prophetic genre in general. If we accept James Burgers account of post- revelatory narrative as concerned essentially with washs and remainders, then we must also follow his conclusion that it is eer oxymoron the End is never the end. The modernist assumption, in bluff Sermons celebrated study, has been that the sense of an ending is what gives our living in the middies1 5 narrative meaning. But post-apocalypse means the very unsettling of those temporal frames. It impossibly straddles the term between before and after some suit that has obliterated what went before yet defines what will come after. 16 Indeed, we apprize see the allure 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 crisis, replacing the sense of completion and fulfillment of history, in which we live. 17 such(prenominal) 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, and to those who refuse to die.If McCarthy style emulates, as some critics suggest, the biblical wording of Revelation, 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 indispensability to die and death will evade them. 18 A comedic vox of this craving crops up in the Backbitten character of Ely, echoing precisely the post-apocalyptic quandary Things will be better when everyones at peace(p). They will? Sure they will. Better for who? Everybody. Sure. Well all be better off. Well all glimmeringe easier.Thats good to know. Yes it is. When were all gone at last then therell be nobody here tho death and his days are numbered too. Hell be out in the road there with nothing 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 t he experience of the death of God as instant paradox. That is, as a source of the death of hope for some, precisely also of an absurd affirmation of life by others, condemning them to a life of scatological suspension of waiting, alone for what?Our encounter with the post of post-apocalypse is, then, immediately one with the challenge of making narrative and respectable sense of the life that remains, sort of than he purely nihilist gratuitousness of a death that wont come. It is more akin to Albert Campus Rebel, 20 charged with the task of making an ethics of action in the absurd condition, without resorting to a leap of organized religion that removed the lucid reality of the absurd itself. It is the life of Sisyphus, who has made his escape from his entire universe of meaning. 1 All 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 pe rhaps this one what does nee do, given the association of a certainty of the collapse of life, which might make walking possible along the remainder of the Road? How can this search operate 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 phrase22 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 catastrophe itself the uncertainty of relationships, ecology, and the possibility for man community.The thought experiment develops one of a tortuously open future, the absence seizure of referents for forging new values, new rules, and new duties. The novel thus plays on the post-apocalypse genre by creating a dissonance of temporal perspectives. Time has already run out and is yet, for the boy, opening out inexorably nothing has actually knishes. For the father, the character of the time that remains is defined by the anxiety not only of the limited time allotted to him (who is really dying) exactly of the questionable 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 funed on its head. We grapple not so much with the post-modern fragmentation of endless traumatic symptoms,23 but the juxtaposition of these twain unsufferable 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 honorable the least tortuo us 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? Apocalyptic 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 sought-after(a) 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 work outly demoralise reality. Through visionary events bestowed upon favored emissaries o r 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? unvoiced to all apocalypses there is an ethically loaded injunction that the truth of the world is not all that is visible or conceivable 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 Newly Arisen Tone in Philosophy. Dermiss trance is with the figure of John and the complex symbolism of the fragmented, yard messages of the future contained in his vision.There is, believes Deride, something primal to Western thought in Johns act as the messenger, this theatrical role of being the favored dispatcher 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 clue 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 earlier than completes it. 30 This same instability and impermanence of discourse is prevalent within the illegal bet ween father and son in The Road. The meaning of language 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-apocalyptic future. From the referent-less word of honor of metaphor as the crow flies31 (to the boy, who has never cognise the existence of birds) to the mans depot 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 speak in a world where words and meanings are disappearing mirrors ruefully the attempt to invoke credit 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 persistence of graven image or gods is a fearful prospect a nd impedance to the task at hand (of surviving?Or dying? ) Where men cant live gods add up 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 fill 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 an y 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 chip in the consciousness of creation 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 conundrum 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 debatable belief rather than to reject it or affirm it entirely through his characters.The fragmented quasi- theological discussions echo the brilliant, extended account of the p overturner who does theological battle with a dying faith in The Crossing. 37 But, once again, a deeper examination of what sort of theistic faith such references might imply goes some way to answering those readers unhappy with McCarth y redemptive conclusions. Ells sat remark bears similarities to attempts made in the sass to articulate a sure religious response to the existentialist current, through a Death of God Theology. Alongside Thomas J. J.Altimeter, The protestant theologian Paul Italics famously argued for the language of modern theology to acknowledge not only the ontological want 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 negative 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 abject in the mystery o f human suffering, not its resolution. Another exemplar, the Catholic qualify Simons Well, had expressed it through the figure of Mary Magdalene on Easter Saturday one moves towards the tomb motivated by death, an expectation of the corpse, not an optimistic part 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 reliable act of faith of the believer as one who does not attempt to square the existentialist crisis of despair but who has the courage to look into the abyss of non binding 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 square up 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 societys 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 signature of a last symptom, the convulsive effort to save a World that we no longer in habit no more kiosks, economy, ecology, livable site in which we are at home. 39 One recalls, in the ligh t 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.Ely confides in the man I knew this was coming. 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 getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there. 40 This hitch 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 reaffirmation of a certain messianic, a therefore mystical, mysterious return to a rev elatory 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 deconstruction, 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 sentiment 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 notion 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 t he event of The Road is announced The pin grass stopped at 1 Time itself, like discourse, and like belief, is hang shorn of its referent. The messianic impulse that survives even a book binding to the commitment 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 mute 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 cast aside? 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 anticipate to choose?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. manifestation is temporal catastrophe a disruption of our chronic desires, time we possess, can control.The future is certainly 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 comprehend order, not those of powers and principalities. 47 In The Road, however, the father is possessed by his office to Judge the right time of his sons end, and so spare unbearable life.The crisis recalls Abrahams struggle with Gods influence to act out the unthinkable, here repeated in the Fathers own diffidence Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. 48 One passes over it easily, but by the end of the novel, the fathers command to his son to leave 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 total 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 persistence 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 imaginative turn in what follows? I would argue that it is not that the boy subsequently finds logger 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 some other classic of the post-apocalypse ge nre.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 the 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 open by the recapitulation of humanity to a second wave of nuclear apocalypse at the novels horrifying conclusion.