The Road: A Love Story
What makes a love story? Is it the tension between lovers in a budding romance? The slow build of a relationship over time? Passion? Something ineffable and divine? Though a love story may often be these things, it’s more than just romance; stories of love don’t have to be of romantic love. There are stories of platonic love, familial love, and religious love, to name a few broad categories. But when we think of love stories, we think of The Notebook, not Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic vision gut-wrenchingly laid out in The Road.
According to the Romance Writers of America, a romantic love story has a romance between two people as its central focus and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending to that story. Everyone loves a romance, whether we admit it or not, and the RWA touts that fact on their website, regaling us with statistics. Romance fiction generated $1.39 billion dollars in sales in 2009, and had the largest share of the consumer market at 13.2%.[1] Well-regarded as McCarthy may be (and even if his name has already started to be tossed around for the Nobel Prize), his writing isn’t exactly what I think of as mass market paperback consumer friendly. Most people would rather, I will venture to generalize, read a love story about the young and beautiful, not a man and his son walking a desolate earth prowled by cannibalistic slave drivers. McCarthy’s work, in The Road or otherwise, is by no means romantic, whether in its sense of love or genre, though nature frequently ravages both McCarthy’s work and the novels of true romantic writers. And yet The Road is certainly a love story.
The Road is the story of a man and his son on their journey south to the coast after the world has been ravaged by fire storms and god knows what else, leaving the earth burnt, crusted, and covered with gray ash. There is little left remaining that would allow humanity to survive (much of the day-to-day we experience in The Road consists of searching for canned provisions not plundered by survivors now dead), so many of those who have endured this far have resorted to some of humankind’s most base behaviors– enslavement, rape, cannibalism. With the sparse and level dialogue between father and son, McCarthy shows us that in this new world mankind can only see itself developing in one of two ways. It can follow the path of the “good guys,” the path of love and a hope to preserve what’s good, or it can follow the path of the various “bad guys,” embracing only evil and cruelty. Certainly nothing is that simple in The Road, but for the sake of the boy, the man tries to reduce the world to this good guys/bad guys dichotomy.
Out of this need to be good, the man and his son sustain themselves on their love for one another. McCarthy writes,
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
Individual pasts have been eliminated, and there is hardly hope for the future, so it is only possible for the man and his son to live for the relationship they have at present. This relationship, the only one we know, developed after the end of most of humanity. It is not predicated on memories of a world that no longer exists; it is formed in the rubble of a world broken and stagnant. The man eliminates all traces of his life from the old world.
He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers. Then one day he sat by the roadside and took it out and went through the contents. Some money, credit cards. His driver’s license. A picture of his wife. He spread everything out on the blacktop. Like gambling cards. He pitched the sweatblackened piece of leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph. Then he laid it down in the road also and then he stood and they went on.
The man sacrifices his memories for the sake of his survival, recognizing that there is nothing to be gained from remembering what used to be. There is only one specific memory that the man recalls with a bitterness about and anger with a world now gone.
He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music… She held her hands in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
But such reminiscences and longings are sparse. We are made to wonder “How does the never to be differ from what never was?” It hardly does; both are hopeless, and memories of an extinct world are too. Haunted by dreams of all the possible terrifying futures that exist, the man and the boy both try to suppress fears of the unknown days ahead and memories of the past, which doesn’t even exist for the boy. Their love for one another is a necessity, all that is worth holding on to, and even more than that, it is the new divine.
The Road asks us how we can hold on to the things we love in a vacuum, a world void of all the structures that help us find and make meaning in our lives. On the road the world is “shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities,” and only a love founded on surviving the here and now is sustainable, and it in turn sustains the man and his son. The road gives them purpose; love gives them the strength to fulfill that purpose.
As the man lays dying in the woods, he tells his son
You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
“Where men can’t live gods fare no better,” says an old man the boy insists on helping along the road. Yes, God has been dead since at least the time that Nietzsche said so, but he has clearly died a second, more recent death not long ago. New rituals may evolve in the absence of the God or gods we’ve known for so long, but it takes time. “Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” the man thinks as he cares for his child. Slowly the boy is initiated in a new religion, a religion still based on love. Anointed by his father’s gentle care, left starving and alone in the woods by him, the boy emerges from the road with his father his own god. Without the man’s presence, prayer must sustain the boy in the next phase of his journey on the road.
He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
In the epilogue and benediction of Revelation God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” And so is the love that the man and the boy have for each other.
This world is at the end of history– no past, no future, every day the same. Hegel wrote that “God governs the world; the actual working of his government– the carrying out of his plan– is the History of the World.” [2] There hasn’t been a God to understand, no History of the World to unravel, for some time. Rather, the man and boy exist of their own free will and determination, not by the grace or loving-kindness of God. Hegel writes a lot about Spirit, which he defines variously as “self-contained existence,” “Freedom,” and “self-consciousness.” “Spirit is immortal,” he writes, “with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now.” The essential now of The Road consists of survival and love, but in the end, the boy finds a kind of god in his father’s death, and perhaps history resumes.
[1] http://www.rwa.org/cs/the_romance_genre/romance_literature_statistics
[2] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, a general introduction to the Philosophy of History
