Dtek Industries

Well, I said the setting, but I meant the antagonistic force, which in this story is also the setting. "Reverse Shot" is good to remind us that we have seen or might have read several other post-apocalyptic stories (--I wonder if it constitutes its own genre yet), but McCarthy's strikes me as something different--something more powerful than almost anything I have experienced or than anyone else could. Why? Because it's not post-apocalyptic. I made that same mistake in my last post. No, it's apocalyptic. An active, implacable force--an absolute doom is here completing itself.

Yes, here, we don't approach the absurd, like Conrad's Marlow. No, we are literally being consumed by it, and are hopelessly clinging to our last two heroes. Here, I see a final frontier of literature: new, which is exciting, but also the end--the end of the game, and of everything. McCarthy blows it all up--and this before the book begins--can't get more deft than that, literarily speaking--a bit like slicing the Gordian knot in half--or, if you don't mind the triviality, like Indiana Jones shooting his would-be sword-twirling opponent. Here, Pandora's box is not just opened. It's shattered and all the pieces and all the contents are subsumed into one impenetrable darkness, made all the more evil for it's gradual spread. I am thinking specifically of the shot, early in the movie, where Papa and the boy kick through a hubcap and some dollar bills. Greed, lust, pride, wrath, ambition, ignorance--everything literature can and has warned against--all the hang-ups that keep us from what's most important--they are all swallowed up here, as everything else will be. And yet, The Road is the story of the one thing still standing--a thread of humanity, a final nobility, brilliant though ultimately inconsequential.

Mine is not a cynical joy of destruction--I remember being so crudely proud once, but no longer. Mine is rather a resonance with the triumph of spirit over its circumstance--against its fate. The Road is one of the most encouraging stories I've ever read. McCarthy's vision is not dark to me. The one thing left, the parent-child responsibility, McCarthy crowns as the most vital or sacred bond we have. And the father-son pair is the perfect symbolic unit--what can we not apply to it: creator, creation and its self-propulsion? As I warbled in my last post, this bond is the most basic building block of meaning--the least superficial relationship by which we humans can derive a sense of purpose. Thus, McCarthy's most fundamental meaning is raised in defense against an all-consuming oblivion. But it's not the futility of the father-son's struggle that matters. What matters is the full measure of nobility--of the heroism within the human spirit, which only its certain defeat can display.

Whatever solace one finds in the boy's "happy" ending is ephemeral, though mistakenly made to seem more sturdy in the movie version. Hieb, you and I both commented on this weakness already. The reason the newborn/spit scene is so significant (insufficiently substituted in the movie) is because it reveals the absolute destruction of meaning--the full sweep of apocalyptic darkness against which the boy and father stand like flickering candles: a woman nine months pregnant, trudging along, struggling heroically, only to give birth to a last supper. The father-son journey on, flicker on, most triumphantly to the sea, but we can no longer sustain any hope for them after that, and it should be no surprise that the sea holds no promise for them, or that the boy's "rescue" would have scarcely satisfied our extinguished hope. The movie's quality, for me, is in that it falters on this design only slightly. As in the book, the father dies and the boy founders, but their spirits impress us pre-apocalyptics completely, and I go home, hold my child and look at him like I never had before.

That said, the central conflict is different for the boy than it is for the man, and it's the movie that helped me realize this (--you'll remember the climatic conversation in which the boy defies his father and tells him that he too greatly feels the burden of worrying). The boy is hope, of course. And the father must protect it throughout, but in so doing, is in danger of being consumed by the mere practicality of survival--of becoming ruthlessly savage himself. But the boy is more than this. He is also the guiding light, the saving grace of the man's humanity--of his humaneness. The boy recognizes (instinctually?) the all-valuable cause for humaneness--for kindness and compassion. Curiously, the mother forfeits, saying, in the movie, she does not just want to survive, and in so doing summarizes the boy's entire point. The boy, in this way, is carrying the father the whole way too, and is right to call it even a heavier burden: not simply the good guys vs. the bad guys--but the pivotal task of keeping good guys good, beset though they may be with bad guys and mere oblivion. And thus the practical concern of protecting the fire is coupled with the last reason it is worth protecting and the unit is complete--the human spirit as triumphant as the darkness which gulps it down.

The new mother at the end of the book, telling the boy that his father's voice is God's breath carried generation by generation all the way through to the end. This is not mere metaphor. It's the apotheosis of the father's spirit--of the last vestige of effort spent to save man from man--man from his most savage self--from the all-too-human, I might go so far to say.

Want to talk. I will say nothing about it yet. Hope you will watch, arh1, RED, and anyone else, and I don't want to have any influence on your viewing. Write once you have something to say.

Hey, i just started Blood Meridian and am about a quarter into it. I would love to get in on the discussion!