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Prof.Rodica Mihaila
Curs Cormac McCarthy
2011

Science Fiction and the apocalyptic novel

Michael Chabon. Dark adventure: On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (107)
107-How the world ends: radiation, plague, an asteroid, some other cataclysm kills most of
the humankind.
The remnants mutate, lapse into feudalism, or revert to prehistoric brutality. Old cults are
revived with their knives and brutal gods, while tiny noble bands cling to the tatters of the
lost civilization preserving knowledge of machinery, agriculture, missionary position
Ambivalence toward technology is the underlying theme—stories about the end of the world
seen as science fiction (deal with the changed nature of society in the wake of a cataclysm –
these societies mirror and comment upon our own….SF=a powerful instrument of satire)
108—“the post-apocalyptic mode has long attracted writers not generally considered part of
the science-fiction tradition (this quality of SF to be a satire) – critics would use words as
“parable” or “fable” – appeal of the post-apocalyptic story to mainstream writers like Walker
Percy (themes of annihilation and recreation are easily indexed to the Books of the New
Testament and the first book of the Old.
-also a strong current of conv entional gard-edged naturalism at work in much post-
apocalyptic science fiction to draw the mainstream writer.
109 – the great British tradition of the post-disaster novel pioneered by M.P.Shiel’s The
Purple Cloud and John Colleir’s forgotten masterpiece Tom’s A-Cold, retooled in the fifteies
by John Wyndham and John Christopher and brought to perfection by JG Ballard in the early
sixties, is very much a mainstream naturalist tradition, cold-eyed and unadorned, and novels
like Christopher’s No Blade of Grass and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids were popular
successes
-the growing sense in the minds of readers and writers alike, since the mid-twentieth century,
of the plausibility, even the imminence, of the end of the world.

Cormac McCarthy: The Road (Vintage International, 2006) Pulitzer Prize Winner

--“It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful.” San Francisco Chronicle

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--“Simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear. The Road offers nothing
in the way of escape or comfort.” The New York Times”
--“There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull…making [it] easily one of the
most harrowing books you’ll ever encounter.” Bookforum
--“…violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences…”
Rocky Mountain News
--“A dark book that glows with the intensity of [mcCarthy’s] huge gift for language….in its
lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know,
this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness.” Chicago Tribune
--“The Road…exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has
never felt more physically and spiritually real.” Time
--“Its hard to think of [an apocalypse tale ] as beautifully, hauntingly constructed as this one.
McC possesses a massive, Biblical vocabulary…” The Star-Ledger
--“powerful storyteller”; “the writing throughout is magnificent” Chicago Sun-Times
--“Devastating…McC has never seemed more at home, more eloquent, than in the sere,
postapocalyptic ash land of the Road….[A] masterpiece.” Entertainment Weekly
--Mc C “captures the knife edge that fugitives in a hostile world stand on…Amid the Godot-
like bleakness, McC shares something vital and enduring about the boy’s spirit, his father’s
love and the nature of bravery itself.” USA Today
--“Vivid, eloquent….The Road is the most readable of [McCarthy’s] works, and consistently
brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization.” The New
York Times Book Review
Coperta a patra: “The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become C MCCarthy’s
masterpiece”
Subiectul: A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the
ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It’s cold and when the snow falls it is gray. The
sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything awaits
them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands
that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in
which no hope remains, but in which the father and the son, “each the other’s world entire,”
are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching
meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness,
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desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total
devastation.”
p.286 – “She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best
thing was to talk to his father…She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it
pass from man to man through all of time.”
--Ultimul paragraph – al creatiei lumii inainte de aparitia omului, care o distruge, fara putinta
de a mai reface ceva. Vezi si metafora hartii si opozitia maps-mystery: “Maps and mazes. Of
a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep gglens where they
lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” p. 287