Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion

Andrew Hoberek

American Literary History, Volume 23, Number 3, Fall 2011, pp. 483-499 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press

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Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion

Andrew Hoberek *

Addressing the genre of Cormac McCarthys 1992 All the Pretty Horses, James Lilley writes that despite telling the story of its protagonist John Grady Coles journey from home and coming of age, the novel is a Western, not a Bildungsroman (274). Whereas the Bildungsroman is driven forward by a quest for novelty, Lilley writes, Westerns are necessarily retrospective, repetitive and elegiac, driven by a desire to repeat and relive the established patterns and plots of the past (274). Cole, whose story begins with his grandfathers funeral in 1949 (6), and who travels not west but south across the Mexican border in search of something missing in his modern Texas of cars and oil derricks, does not want to extricate himself from the pastestablishing a new beginning, divorced of all precedent, on the frontier; rather, his journey down into Mexico becomes an elegy to the Old West, an attempt to move backwards in time to a place where the codes of the Old West are still valorized (Lilley 274). Leaving aside the question of whether he conates all Westerns with the particular sub-genre of belated Westerns that ourished during the mid-twentieth-century period in which All the Pretty Horses is set, Lilleys curious distinction between the Western and narratives of new beginnings on the frontier is symptomatic of another implicit conation, in this case of the Western with genre ction as such.1 Arguing that John Grady returns to Texas at the end of the novel fully aware that life, like the Western, is driven by repetition, Lilley sees Grady as exemplifying McCarthys commitment to the sort of freedom within the ultimately empty and determined symbols of language described by Lacan (283). This reading of genre, with its stress on narrative and other forms of repetition,
*Andrew Hoberek is Associate Professor of English at the University of MissouriColumbia, where he teaches twentieth- and twenty-rst-century US literature. This essay comes from his work in progress on contemporary ction writers embrace of genre forms.
American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 483 499 doi:10.1093/alh/ajr019 Advance Access publication July 9, 2011 # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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analogizes at another level the difference within repetition that for Lacan characterizes language itself: In the same way that [McCarthys] characters realize a paradoxical freedom within the determinism of their landscape, so too we as readerssimilarly subjected to the determinism of plot and languagend an impressive, qualitative dynamic space within the connes of the text (284). This account of genre as reinforcing the novels representation of human agency seems at odds, however, with Lilleys suggestion elsewhere in the essay that the novels generic attributes exist not in McCarthys prose but in the mind of his protagonist. Thus, Lilley describes Grady as determined to live his own Western, complete with strict chivalric codes, daring rescues, and, much to the chagrin of many critics, love at rst sight (275), and argues that perhaps we should not be surprised that McCarthys description of [Gradys] love affair with [the Mexican heiress] Alejandra is so remarkably at and unoriginal; John Grady must see her in this way for his own narrative, the Western, to work (285n6). John Grady no doubt carries his preconceptions with him, but pushing the novels generic expectations off onto him, and crediting them with deadening effects on the novels language, seems to undercut Lilleys account of McCarthys commitment to freedom within . . . determinism, insofar as it makes Grady into s whose creatorlike Mark Twain ve exponent of genre cliche a na ` -vis Huckleberry Finnpresumably knows better. vis-a Lilleys equivocation at these moments, I want to argue, reects the widespread and persistent prejudice against genre ction central to what Mark McGurl has dubbed the program era of post-World War II ction. Committed, in its paradoxical character as an institutionalization of anti-institutionality (McGurl 221), to a modernist ideal of individual authorial genius, the writing program pushes anxieties about its own Taylorized character onto the machine-made quality of formulaic genre ction (26). Under these circumstances, it can at mostturning its critique back upon the institutional respectability that had put a glaze upon the great experimental works of the interwar modernist eraproduce works of meta-genre ction, in which a popular genreromance, western, science ction, fantasy and detective ctionis both instantiated and ironized to the point of becoming dysfunctional in the production of its conventional pleasures (McGurl 217). Here, irony generates the crucial distance between genre convention and its valorized opposite number, individual authorial style. A similar distancing, I want to suggest, lies behind Lilleys assignment of genre ctions at and unoriginal prose to Gradys consciousness, thereby associating his creator, implicitly, with the triumph over formula: the something about what

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happens within the repetitive pages of his novels that, despite the familiar terrain, the common cast of characters, and the overarching determinism of McCarthys landscape, nonetheless continually delights, disgusts, and mesmerizes (Lilley 272). Other critics, it should be noted, have been even more explicit in their celebration of McCarthys stylistic genius: Steven Shaviro, for instance, calls him our greatest living author (144), a writer whose sublime prose style resonates with those of Faulkner, of Melville and of the King James Bible, and whose work is by any criterion . . . as great as any of these (151). But Lilleys reading is interesting for the way it (not entirely intentionally) opposes McCarthys style to the genre templates that have only become more prominent in his ction since All the Pretty Horses, leading most recently to the crime thriller No Country for Old Men (2005) and the post-apocalyptic science-ction story The Road (2006). This account of McCarthys writing, I want to argue, prevents us from seeing his central role in the contemporary transformation of what counts as serious ction. If genre ction constitutes something like the repressed unconscious of program era ctiona situation distinct from that of the poetry workshop, where genres still offer models to be mastered rather than traps to be avoidedthen McCarthy is one of a number of writers who have recently undermined this structure by embracing genre models. The most visible of these writers has been Michael Chabon, whose oeuvre constitutes a veritable allegory of this transformation: from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), a rst novel heavily indebted to the approved workshop style; to thematic dissatisfaction with this style, and appreciations of genre ction, in Wonder Boys (1995); to the meta-generic work of comic-book magic realism The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), although even here the attitude toward genre is more sentimental than ironic; to the full-on genre ctions The Final Solution (2004), The Yiddish Policemens Union (2007), and Gentlemen of the Road (2007). This transition is by no means consistent or complete. Jonathan Lethems career, for instance, has operated in something like the reverse order. (Although arguably his accession to the status of serious writer via another work of comic-book magic realism, 2003s The Fortress of Solitude, had something to do with critics willingness to treat his earlier science ction and the 1999 detective novel Motherless Brooklyn seriously.) And authors as different as Colson Whitehead and Thomas Pynchon still continue to write recognizably meta-generic work (unless we consider Whiteheads most recent novel, the 2009 Sag Harbor, a covert work of Young Adult ction, or fail to notice the differencemarked by a distinctly increased readabilitybetween

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Pynchons 1973 epic Gravitys Rainbow and his 2006 Against the Day). With these examples in mind, we might describe this turn (as I have been hinting) as a transition in parentheses: not nished but increasingly visible as an emergent phenomenon in which genre ction resumes its status as a respectable terrain for serious writers. This complicates both a modernist/postmodernist understanding of twentieth-century literary history as a linear progression, and the counter-model of literary history, articulated most forcefully by Gordon Hutner, in which the critical attention given to difcult or experimental ction in fact belies the ongoing dominance of realism.2 The return to genre ctionwhich is, among other things, a return to the pre-modernist canon of literary respectabilitymight encourage us to pause over the question of how separate these two literary histories in fact are. From Henry James, the twentieth century, and eventually the creative writing program, inherit a commitment to both realist representation and continual stylistic innovation. What gets lost is the ability of a writer of Jamess stature to pen something like The Turn of the Screw (1898), let alone the even more insistently generic ctions of Jamess contemporaries like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevensonlost, that is, until the recent embrace of genre models by authors nonetheless committed to their status as writers of serious ction. The formal corollary of this argument is that McCarthys stylistic signature is not opposed to, but coincident with, his genre tendencies, a claim I counterintuitively wish to begin tracking with reference to a novel that seems to belie it. For a bestselling postapocalyptic genre piece, The Road is surprisingly committed to an unremitting affect of exhaustion. It is not simply that McCarthys father and son protagonists nd themselves continually exhausted during their wanderings across the Southeastern US following some unspecied event that has killed off most plant and animal life on earth, although that is certainly the case. The novels free indirect discourse narration begins with the father waking in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night from a dream (3), as though to locate us in this liminal space between sleep and waking, and the remainder of the book is full of passages, such as this one, that remind us how tired he and his son are: They camped almost in the road itself and built a great re, dragging dead limbs out of the snow and piling them on the ames to hiss and steam. There was no help for it. The few blankets they had would not keep them warm. He tried to stay awake. He would jerk upright out of his sleep and slap about him looking for the pistol. The boy was so thin. He watched him while he slept. Taut face and hollow eyes. A strange beauty. He got up and dragged more

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wood onto the re (102). As this passage suggests, the novels incidents constitute something like the antithesis of the disaster lm as famously described by Susan Sontag, with its commitment to the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess and the thrill of watching all those expensive sets come tumbling down (119, 121). McCarthy radically underplays the precipitating disastera ashback recalls A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions (52)in order to focus on the blighted world it produces. And even the books most suspenseful scenes end in anti-climax: the father and son run haphazardly from pursuers who give up the chase for undisclosed reasons, then set out upon the road again . . . like mendicant friars sent forth to nd their keep (126). But most importantly in the present context, The Road seems exhausted at the level of style itself. It mostly eschews the long rolling run-on sentences, the repetition of conjunctions, the tendency to use linked independent clauses rather than subordinate clauses, the demanding vocabulary, [and] the sonorous tone that the writer Madison Smartt Bell identies with McCarthys Faulknerian high style (5). The Road offers nothing like the sentence from Blood Meridian in which McCarthy writes of a character, Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing (309 310). Instead, it offers a more stripped-down prose, exemplied by the passage I have already quoted, consisting not only of simple declarative sentences but also, as Ashley Kunsa notes, a proliferation of sentence fragments, and brief, repetitive dialogue (68). About two-thirds of the way through The Road the novel shifts for the space of three sentences into something reminiscent of McCarthys characteristic style (The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell [181]), but even these sentences, shocking in contrast to what precedes them, offer nothing like the baroque word choice or convoluted syntax of the example from Blood Meridian. And immediately following them the novel snaps back into its characteristic terseness: Long before they reached the coast their stores were all but gone (181). It is as though McCarthy has given up the big messy salivating

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hairy style that Bell admired in favor of the nearly invisible Hemingwayesque style of the minimalists who stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from him earlier in his career (Bell 2, 4). How do we account for this departure from McCarthys characteristic style? Kunsa sees The Roads stripped-down prose as part of its quest for basic forms (68). Declaring herself on the side of those who favor the Southeast in debates over the novels setting, Kunsa sees in this return to the scene of McCarthys earliest novels evidence that he is pursuing a return to the beginning, to a time before all was tarnished and destroyed, a time characterized by potential in which The old might become new again, once more meaningful and pure, in a new world with a new language that can make it so (64). For Kunsa, the novels search for the prelapsarian eloquence lost in the postlapsarian babble (60), and for the essential elements of storycharacter, meaningful action, etc.that hold narration together when artice, selfconsciousness and irony are burned away (68), offers linguistic and narrative analogues to its investment in the essential nature of the father-son relationship that guides every moment of the novels action (67). Mirroring its vision of a post-apocalyptic future in which human existence has been reduced to the basics, Kunsa writes, The style of The Road . . . is pared down, elemental, a triumph over the dead echoes of the abyss and, alternately, over relentless ironic gesturing (57, 58). While Kunsas reading stresses the difference between The Road and McCarthys previous novels (in particular Blood Meridian), it in fact depends upon the same logic as readings of the earlier work like Lilleys, insofar as it subtly opposes McCarthys individual authorial agency to the constraining forces of society and history. If for Lilley these forces appear in the metonymic guise of genre, The Roads post-apocalyptic setting allows Kunsa to construe them more directly. Yet Kunsas stress on the novels vision of afterafter the world has come to disaster, after any tangible social order has been destroyed by re or hunger or despair may overstate the case for reasons that go beyond whether we agree with her belief in the fundamental quality of the father son relationship (57). The clearest piece of evidence that The Road takes place in the Southeast, for example, should remind us how resistant this region is to the erasure of historynot least for an author inuenced by Faulkner. When the father and son enter an old mansion that, unbeknownst to them, is occupied by a gang holding prisoners in the basement as food, the novel notes that Chattel slaves had once trod those boards bearing food and drink on silver trays (106). Given this, the ungodly stench that greets the pair when they descend into the cellar seems to invoke

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the tradition of accounts of slave ships holds (110). It is true that the ominous heap of clothing in the mansions foyer likewise hints at the Holocaust, but I would nonetheless argue that what is at stake here is more specic than some innate human potential for savagery unleashed by the breakdown of civilization (107). It is, on the contrary, a regionally specic historyembedded in the word chattel and in the resonance of ships holds and the cargo they containof the treatment of human beings as property. In the slippage from chattel to cattle, we can see the quite organized forms of cannibalism that McCarthy depicts in the novel not as Hobbesian throwbacks but as perverse extensions of regional tradition. Jay Elliss insight that McCarthys high style appear[s] more often than not, and most powerfully, in his descriptions of setting, suggests another account of The Roads stylistic shift (1). If Ellis is correct, then we might read The Roads at style as a response to the formal challenge McCarthy sets himself of describing a Barren, silent, godless world in which one is hard pressed to nd anything of color (Road 4). What is most compelling about Elliss claim in the present context is his insistence that, for McCarthy, setting comprises not just the natural world he frequently invokes but also the built world of houses, graves, and fences (1). The very title of The Road should remind us that McCarthy sets his latest novel in a world in which it is nature that has been destroyed, and Aluminum houses left standing (14). So far from the vision of a post-apocalyptic return to natureas in Tyler Durdens semi-parodic invocation, in Chuck Pahlaniuks 1996 Fight Club, of a world in which Youll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-ve-degree angle (116)McCarthys protagonists wear rags and push shopping carts like nothing so much as homeless denizens of an eternal city. The novel makes this explicit, describing them at one point as plodd[ing] on, thin and lthy as street addicts (Road 177).3 This suggests a very pessimistic reading of The Roads affect of exhaustion, one related to its rejection of Sontagian pyrotechnics. Phil Wegner, in a recent extension of Sontags argument, has identied Fight Club as one of those 1990s texts, like Roland Emmerichs 1994 movie Independence Day, in which scenes of mass destruction hint at contemporary desires for a radical change of affairs still at work amidst a widespread sense, at once cynical and despairing, of political paralysis, of a collective inability to do anything that might transform the social, cultural, and political landscape (141, 149). By contrast, The Road

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e of eschews such grand destruction in favor of the longue dure political hopelessness. McCarthys previous novel, the 2005 No Country for Old Men, had deployed exhaustion as the characteristic affect of white men amidst a changing world. No Countrys two main protagonists are the world weary WWII veteran Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran who comes upon a satchel of drug money and then nds himself pursued by the relentless, nearly mechanical hit man Anton Chigurh, complaining at one point that he aint [sic] had a nights sleep in about two weeks (230). But No Country, which we might read as a fabular prehistory of the rise of the contemporary rightit is set, signicantly, in 1980seems positively optimistic next to The Roads vision of universal exhaustion. In The Road, things occasionally get briey better, and they often get briey worse, but for the most part they hover around the same dull level of misery and hopelessness. It is in this context, however, that we should recall Kunsas assertion that, for all its bleakness, The Road is heavily invested in a sense of potential (64). Indeed, what novel that contains as one of its central episodes a man swimming out to a ship to salvage supplies could fail to resonate with Robinson Crusoes narrative of isolation as an opportunity for remaking the social order? At the same time, we should resist Kunsas efforts to ground this potential in the essential nature of the father-son relationship (Kunsa 67). As Wegner notes, Independence Day invokes the utopian desire for change only to redirect it into a conservative vision of U.S. global hegemony grounded in masculine political authority (160, 161). Reading The Road as a parable of restored father son relations would offer a subdued literary version of this recontaining operation (Wegner 154), with the destruction of the world compensated for by the restoration of the putatively fundamental relationship between father and son. There is reason to suspect, however, that the novel itself does not support this reading. For one thing, it repeatedly suggests that the fathers commitment to his son is far less common than the behavior of the group of three men and a recently pregnant woman who, startled by the protagonists, leave behind a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit (198). As this grim description suggests, even if The Road does propose basic forms (Kunsa 68)and we have already called this supposition into questionthey may not be ones we want to endorse. Kunsa is thus right to note that The Road is not a tabula rasa, not a re-imagining from scratch; it takes what remains after the world has been destroyed and goes forward from there in search of what is next (69). If these remainders constitute a bar to

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the Adamic delity between words and the world that she idealizes, it is within this very blockage, however, that the novel locates a different but no less meaningful sense of potential. Consider, for instance, the following passage about how the father amuses his son: Hed a deck of cards he found in a bureau drawer in a house and the cards were worn and spindled and the two of clubs was missing but still they played sometimes by relight wrapped in their blankets. He tried to remember the rules of childhood games. Old Maid. Some version of Whist. He was sure he had them mostly wrong and he made up new games and gave them made up names. Abnormal Fescue or Catbarf. Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad. (5354) The deck of cards, we might say, metonymizes the condition of human artifacts, material and otherwise, in McCarthys postapocalyptic world: damaged and incomplete, but still very much present. So far from engendering a transparent relationship between words and things, this situation requires the father to make up new things, with new names. The passage counterposes such acts of the imagination, moreover, with those engendered by the sense (a false one, on the basis of the passages own material evidence) that there is no past. So far from valorizing the latter, the passage suggests that they are problematic because they are untrue. At the level of style, meanwhile, we might note amidst the terse Hemingwayesque sentences of this passage the Faulknerian resonances of the obscure word fescue. And as if in verication of Elliss reading of McCarthys style, and our extension of that reading, fescue is a type of grassa highly cultivated one used on lawns and golf courses and for horse feed. Its invocation thus links the brief Faulknerian ourish to the ora that is absent, and dearly missed, in the world of The Roada world in which all fescue, and all plant life, is abnormal. Contra Kunsas reading of the novel, such abnormality here constitutes an object of desire, precious like the morel mushrooms that the pair discover in a wood the boy calls gooda phrase that cannot help but be signicant given the ethical weight placed on the pairs description of themselves as the good guys (41, 77).4 This helps us complicate our understanding of the novels style, and to think about the

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moments when such ourishes peek out from its minimalism as parallel to the dogs that the pair briey hear (82) or see (87) during their travels, and that the boy on both occasions begs his father not to kill. Michael Chabon hints at the dynamic at work in such passages in his reading of another that names various now extinct trees: Powder, dead; sure. But those words liveoak, pine, the somehow onomatopoeic splendor of magnolia, still ower greenly in the mind before McCarthy crushes them (114). The word fescue serves to notify us, however, that what is at stake here is not simply nostalgia for the lost world of nature. For McCarthy, dogs, grass, and, by extension, literary style are things of value beyond the questions of necessityindeed, they are things of value because they transcend the questions of necessitythat render the father and sons existence dire. And this is the case because they are emblems not of rst but of second nature: fescue is a form of grass used for purposes other than human consumption; the boy does not want his father to kill (and implicitly eat) the dogs because they are, as the most highly domesticated animals, bred for other purposes, including friendship. The novel likewise delineates the aesthetic as something with value beyond use: not like the canned foods that the father and son nd in a bomb shelter and consume with great pleasure over the course of several days, but like the sextant that the father comes across during his salvage mission on the capsized ship. The sextant, already an old and thus useless technology before the disaster, is like the deck of cards imperfectThe brass was dull and there were patches of green on itbut the father is nonetheless Struck by the beauty of it and nds it the rst thing hed seen in a long time that stirred him (228). To be stirred is a good thing, even in a world where one must ght constantly to survive. The novel enacts this lesson formally in the moments, to use William Kennedys version of the stylistic dialectic with which we have been concerned, when McCarthys Faulknerian convolutions peek through the terse dialogue and spartan narrative he learns from Hemingway (1). That Kennedy describes this as a set of stylistic choices always present in McCarthys repertoire, rather than a conict between him and another group of authors (like Bell), or the beginning and end points of a linear progression (like Kunsa), already complicates our understanding of what is going on in The Road. In The Program Era, McGurl employs Hemingway and Faulkner as names for a stylistic dialectic that has been institutionalized in creative writing programs and, through them, post-World War II ction more generally: minimalism or maximalism; exclusion or inclusion; privacy or publicity; contemporaneity (a narrow span of story time) or historicity (the great sprawl of

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historical ction); and nally . . . less or more verbiage or syntactic complexity (377). McGurlss model links these two stylistic options to the question (clearly the key one if we are to address the relationship between aesthetics and ethics or politics) of how much ction engages with (or thematizes its engagement with) the outside world. Thus, if minimalism does indeed signify the kind of winnowing that Kunsa nds in The Road via its turn toward the private, its exclusion of extraneous materials, and its disengagement with history, we can by the same token imagine the opposite qualities latent in the novels brief moments of Faulknerian effusion. Such moments occur precisely where we least expect them. In a passage following the fathers and sons ight from the mansion of the cannibal gang, for instance, the father experiences what we might take as an epiphany expressing what various critics have identied as McCarthys anti-humanism, his commitment to the principle that, in Bells words, The order of the universe does not require our survival (10): He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it (Road 130). Here, the Faulknerian use of the noun sorrow as a verb at the last minute swerves from the passages anti-humanism to suggest the potential for human creativity lying precisely in the misuse of things for purposes other than those for which they are intendeda productive misuse already apparent, as we can retrospectively see, in the preceding sentences simile. The Road employs simile and metaphor just often enough that the instances stand out from the baldly denotative character of the rest of the language. Here, in particular, the content of the simile seems to afrm the bleak naturalism of the preceding sentences: the father and son are like hunted animals. But the similes form departs from this message insofar as the pair are not animals, and even further because animals appear in this novel not as symbols of a heartless nature but as objects of desire for a previous world of abundance and life. The paragraph, that is, stylistically undermines its own assertion in its nal sentences, making clear that accounts of human beings as inconsequential to the natural order are themselves the products of human imagination, a way of thinking the world rather than a mimetic representation of it. Why the novel might want to imply this becomes apparent, moreover, in a subsequent passage in which the father recalls his

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dead wife and fears that doing so destroys her a second time in his mind: He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not (131). Here the father understands memory as a nite resource, comparable to the scraps of food and fuel the pair seek out, its pathos grounded in the loss of the reality that can no longer be known once memories degrade. If this formulation locates value in a forever departed past, implicitly critiquing the fathers literally conservative mission of merely keeping him and his son alive, the preceding passage locates value in a future governed by unimaginable and contingent misuses of things. This is the productive form of the imagination embodied in the fathers own (memory of ) childhood dreams that were not bound by desire for a lost past, but were (unlike the limited resources of his world) endlessly abundant and various: In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a childs imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be (27). In fact, the wife committed suicide, the novel suggests, not because she was a weak woman but because she succumbed to a deadening coincidence between the imagination and reality: she and her husband no longer talk about death, she tells him, because its here and as a result Theres nothing left to talk about (56). Hence the fathers more meaningful wish, looking at his son, not for stories that match an already lost world but rather for ones that extend into the future: imagining the boys head (via metaphor) as a Golden chalice, good to house a god, he thinks Please dont [sic] tell me how the story ends (75). The story can remain openended, the novel suggests, not because the boys head is the home of a god, but because we can imagine it as one: because we can imagine the human not only in relation to animal necessity but also in the opposite direction. This possibility is tied to languages freedom from material reality, its ability to restate without simply repeating and thus never simply to be identical to itself. Consider, for instance, another of the novels Faulknerian sentences: The snow fell nor did it cease to fall (96). Entering a room in a house they are exploring, the father and son c[ome] upon themselves in a mirror and the father nearly brings his pistol up, until the boy whispers, Its us, Papa . . . Its us (132). This is the uncanny, which as Freud reminds us is always the self that is misrecognized (and that we must learn to recognize) because it differs from what one expects. But perhaps even more importantly, the novel here indicts the fathers defensiveness as a form of self-violence, a shutting out of the world that eventually turns its aggression inward. This is in fact the chief

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difference between the father and the boy, who continually thinks about others (in both the cognitive and Samaritan senses) and whose desire for such connection is so strong that he either sees or imagines (an ambiguity the novel tellingly refuses to clarify) A boy, about his age, wrapped in an outsized wool coat with the sleeves turned back (84). If the father, that is, sees an image of himself that he does not recognize, the son recognizes himself in an image that he may not actually see. This reading of The Road suggests a different account of the shift from Blood Meridian to the latter novel, one that sees Blood Meridian, for all its baroque prose, as far more suspicious about the exercise of stylistic embellishment. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy embodies his own love of language in the gure of the Judge, a character whose oratorical skills exist in what the novel hints may be a non-coincidental relationship with his sociopathic nihilism. The Road, by contrast, associates languages freedom from what is with the sons empathy through their shared participation in imagination. Consider, for instance, the latter novels insistence on not resolving the question of whether the son sees or only imagines that he sees another boy. The father provides a rationalistic explanation for this sighting, thinking that the boy misremembers a dog that they had seen (87), but the novel as a whole stresses the connection between the boys imagination and his desire for social contact. Even when it comes closest to acknowledging the other child as a gment of the boys imaginationI just wanted to see him, Papa, the boy tells his father, I just wanted to see him (85)this formulation associates the vision with the boys longing for and commitment to versions of the social that transcend the father son dyad. The boy sees (or wants to see) another boy not only because he himself is lonely, but also because he worries that that little boy doesnt [sic] have anybody to take care of him (85). This is a version of the concern for others that the son expresses repeatedly. When the father wraps the boys feet to protect them from the cold, the boys response is Now you, Papa (100). When they escape from the cannibals mansion, the boy is concerned that they couldnt [sic] help the prisoners (127). Later, when they camp in an empty city and see signs of people who, his father informs him, are probably dead, the boy offers the non-sequitur, I wish that little boy was with us (131). And so onit is the boy who continually convinces his father to talk with and to the extent that it is possible to help strangers they meet on the road, and not to leave a man who steals their belongings completely destitute. So too the conclusion of the novels action, in which the boy is discovered and taken in by another family, undermines any

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reading of the book based upon a valorization of the father son bond. For one thing, his new family is not his natural family. For another, there are already two children in the family, so he is in effect demoted from messiah gure to another ( junior) member of the community. When his new adoptive mother tells him that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time (286), this serves as a gure not only of the Adamic connection and Genesis, as Kunsa argues (67), but alsoif we foreground not the origin but the circulationof the forging of social connections via the ability to imagine them. The decision that leads the boy to his new life occurs when, following his three-day sojourn, he sees someone coming on the road and resists his impulse to turn and go back into the woods (281). Seeing another person, that is, he decides in the face of all the realistic evidence that his experience has provided to imagine that things might go differently. The counter-factual imagination of things that realism misses is, we might say, one task of genre ction. With this in mind, I would like to argue that the shift from Blood Meridian to The Road also models the transition from the program eras suspicion of genre to recent writers embrace of it. This transition retroactively transforms our dialectical pair of Faulkner and Hemingway from exemplars of modernist innovation into representatives of a buried history of genre style. Within this recongured literary history, Faulkner would not stand for style and Hemingway for its excision, but on the contrary, both would stand for different kinds of style: on one side that of Poe, Wilde, and Faulkner (the side of the baroque, the excessive, the self-consciously purple); on the other, that of Hemingway and his numerous detective ction descendants (the side of the hard-boiled, the stoic, the economically understated). Having begun with Hemingways minimalist descendants as the gray background against which McCarthys more characteristically Faulknerian style occasionally blooms, we come nally to both of these authors as different versions of the same commitment to style for its own sake. Hence Chabon, who himself exploits the Hemingway axis in his 2002 The Yiddish Policemens Union, writes that ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road [in general] is best understood (119). If on one side the turn to genre pushes contemporary ction to pure narrative as exemplied by the renewed importance of plot, on the other, less obvious side, it pushes it toward something like the poetic delight in language that we associate with the modernist art novel but that has always stoodthink Absalom, Absalom! or Djuna Barness Nightwood, with Poe as the founding guredisreputably close to pulp. Shaviro rightly contends that The scariest thing about Blood

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Meridian is that for all its depiction of senseless slaughter it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one (154). In this respect it is not sui generis, as Shaviro hyperbolically proclaims, but rather the Faulknerian complement to Dashiell Hammets Hemingwayesque Red Harvest (1929): a book whose joyously pleasurable style exists in startling tension with its brutal and hopeless content. The Road, I would argue, abandons Blood Meridians residual suspicion of style and instead embraces it as the site of the worlds imaginative reconstruction. Hence the novels nal paragraph, which in elegiacally mourning the lost world of nature, seems to undercut any hopefulness evoked by the boys discovery of a new family: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their ns wimpled softly in the ow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery (287). While it rightly insists upon what has been lost forever and cannot be made right again, this passage nonetheless epitomizes the stylistic concomitant of the sense of potential that inhabits McCarthys bleak narrative. Among the most lyrically beautiful passages in the novel, it maintains the Hemingwayesque brevity and sentence fragments of the previous several hundred pages but injects ashes of Faulkners demanding vocabulary and sonorous tone (Bell 5). The linguistic equivalent of the fragmented objects that ll the father and sons environment, this passage unavoidably carries with it the whole history of these two styles in twentieth-century writing, but frees them to demonstrate the power of the imagination that remains even when the objects upon which it ruminates have passed. Here, in a notion of genre style as a xed form committed to a radically unxed potential, lies the possibility of becoming that has existed all along within the style itself of this most seemingly exhausted of novels. Notes
1. See Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (2004). 2. See Gordon Hutner, Historicizing the Contemporary: A Response to Amy Hungerford, American Literary History 20.12 (Spring/Summer 2008): 420 24; and What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920 1960 (2009).

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3. The British lmmaker John Hillcoat clearly picked up on this aspect of the novel, choosing to lm his adaptation in and around Pittsburgh for the post-industrial ambience of locations like abandoned coal elds, a deserted amusement park and an 8-mile stretch of closed freeway, and in post-Katrina New Orleans (Bowles n.p.). 4. See Ashley Kunsa, Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthys The Road, Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (Fall 2009): 57 74, esp. 59 62.

Works Cited
Bell, Madison Smartt. A Writers View of Cormac McCarthy. Wallach 1 11. Bowles, Scott. Sneak Peek: The Road Is Fiction, but the Bleak Scenery Is Real. USATODAY.com 8 Aug. 2008. 25 Oct. 2010 , http://www.usatoday. com/life/movies/news/200808-06-the-road-preview_N.htm . . Chabon, Michael. Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthys The Road. Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. San Francisco: McSweeneys, 2008. 107 20. Ellis, Jay. No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kennedy, William. Left Behind. Rev. of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. New York Times Book Review 8 Oct. 2006: 1 . Kunsa, Ashley. Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthys The Road. Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (Fall 2009): 5774. Lilley, James D. The hands of yet other puppets: Figuring Freedom and Reading Repetition in All the Pretty Horses. Wallach 272 87. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. 1992. New York: Vintage, 1993. . Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. 1985. New York: Vintage, 1992. . No Country for Old Men. 2005. New York: Vintage, 2007. . The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Pahlaniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Holt, 1996. Shaviro, Steven. The Very Life of the Darkness: A Reading of Blood Meridian. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 143 56. Sontag, Susan. The Imagination of Disaster. 1966. Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1976. 11631.

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Wallach, Rick, ed. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. New York: Manchester UP, 2000.

Wegner, Phillip E. Life between Two Deaths, 19892001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.