4 minute read
The Road
How Cormac McCarthy challenges anthropocentrism and depicts the terrifying world our generation could end up inhabiting.
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by Dani Hales
We believe that ‘human life is the central fact of the planet’ – we are an anthropocentric species. I view ‘The Road’ as a trailblazer of 21st century ecological writing. It contradicts these stereotypical beliefs of writers being unable to fathom the sheer danger and unpredictability our planet holds and the fact that our race is exacerbating this sense of impermanence. McCarthy is eloquent in his raw style of writing, revealing the reliefs and downfalls of two characters with generational differences fighting to survive. He highlights in this novel that he is siding with ‘deep ecology’, and that the earth in all its power refuses to protect even the most innocent children from peril. In this dystopian world it could be argued that McCarthy is pointing the finger at humans and hence projecting an image of our dismal future, that in current times we are at the point of spiralling into, as we continue to worsen the disequilibrium of anthropogenically induced climate change. McCarthy’s use of anonymity in the way in which he characterises his protagonists struck me as a particularly significant form of symbolising subordination. By taking the identity away from such pivotal characters in this text it allows a process of reader to character detachment to take place, take the forefront of the reader’s
overall thoughts on The Road. Alongside this, unidentifiable protagonists amplify the power and superiority of the burning Earth. It is perfectly encapsulated by Monbiot’s criticism of it being ‘the most important environmental book ever written… It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world’. This transformation of a reader’s outlook on the world is fairly instantaneous, as McCarthy immediately pursues the harrowing and broken arguments the man has with himself when facing danger. The rhetorical questions ‘Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?’ relating to whether one day he will have the strength to kill his son for the sake of safety emphasises the overpowering and solemn nature of the postapocalyptic world they live in. This, alongside McCarthy’s juxtaposition of developing rounded characters whilst simultaneously maintaining their flatness through lack of identity, solidifies this idea of disorientation and true despair expressed by the man and his boy as they hold no sense of direction on their destroyed Earth. McCarthy therefore proves that he actually challenges the conflict that Kerridge questions: ‘why does the realist novel have such difficulty in involving itself with environmental issues?’. Furthermore, keeping dialogue simple and minimal as well as giving his characters a lack of identity provides a disjointed character arc that, for readers, can appear quite confusing. McCarthy may have employed this difficulty of reading to align readers on a similar level to the characters, and by doing this would give readers the opportunity to acknowledge how they would cope in this dystopian situation, and upon meeting another person, whether they would be selfless or adopt the attitude of ‘I wouldn’t have given you anything’, as the man does later on in the novel. A pastoralist novel has ‘one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human’ and in my opinion, McCarthy perfects this balance in The Road. His raw style of writing, signified by his unapologetically vivid depictions of the man and boy talking on how to commit suicide, reveals contemporary societal insecurities that he could be suggesting are blocking the human race from saving the planet. Not only are we subordinate to the planet, but so are our societal issues, as the environmental problems we face are far more dangerous and significant; McCarthy chooses to victimise a broken son and father to echo these ideas. The language displayed throughout the narrative is quite basic and almost primal, offering an emphasis on the visual description McCarthy is trying to offer. The burning of humans in the middle of the novel creates grotesque imagery as ‘the burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses’. The imagery, toying alongside the metaphor of humans being snakes gives a sense of the man and boy experiencing hell on Earth, and the entire setting of The Road is actually one of purgatory, an eternal punishment for what our race has done to the planet. This symbolism would tie in well with McCarthy’s conversion to Catholicism and the idea that ultimately, the Earth is superior, and without it, we wouldn’t exist. In contemporary society, it’s evident that due to the lack of action taking place and the flakiness of certain globally influential nations, climate change and the future of not just our race, but our planet, is undermined and almost patronised. It is therefore only acceptable to agree with the criticism that ‘The Road may not be a climate change novel, but it is a novel that owes much of its cultural impact to climate change, at least to the anxieties that have accompanied it’. Another angle that this idea could be analysed is that the man and the boy could be acting as microcosms for the peril that is occurring in third world countries today. This could mean therefore, that this novel is not demonstrating a dystopian image of our planet but is simply a construct of what inhabitants of third world countries today view the Western World doing to their livelihoods. It is with this then, that McCarthy is arguing that our race cannot concentrate on the ways in which we are ruining our planet, as our anthropocentric nature means we focus on human vs human destruction within our societies; humankind is subordinate to the planet, but we are too selfish to realise this currently.
