The Road and Why “Post-Apocalyptic” Is Everybody’s Favorite Word Right Now
Actually, I don’t have a complete explanation for the current popularity of “post-apocalyptic” film and literature. Writer Cormac McCarthy, prodded by Oprah in his first-ever TV interview this week, suggests that it has to do with 9/11. I would think Hurricane Katrina would be an even more scary parallel, but, sadly, that doesn’t seem to have made such a mark on the national consciousness as our suddenly realized vulnerability to “foreign” threats.
Anyway, just think over the past year: in movie theaters we’ve had Children of Men and Apocalypto (the latter of which I have no intention of seeing, though I suppose it could remind us that widespread cultural disaster has happened in the past without the dawning of THE Apocalypse). Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road won the Pulitzer Prize this April—and, perhaps even more significantly, became an Oprah’s Book Club selection. “Post-apocalyptic” is suddenly the word on everyone’s lips.
But what does it mean? According to the common usage, “after a big, bad thing happens.” In the original Greek, however, “apocalypse” means “unveiling”—or “revelation,” as we are more accustomed to seeing it translated. What gets unveiled or revealed in the biblical book of Revelation? Pretty much everything that was in the dark. Evil is revealed for what it is. As is Jesus, who finally appears as conquering king, as well as suffering servant.
However, in the post-apocalyptic art of today, human nature is more often the subject of revelation—and there’s nothing wrong with that. Putting humanity on the brink exposes both our depravity and our God-given goodness—often both within the same heart. This is what we see most clearly in The Road.
On the surface, it’s a simple story in a bleak setting: a tale of a nameless father and son merely trying to survive in a land where most plant and animal life has died after some unspecified disaster (some readers have suggested that it’s a nuclear holocaust—whatever the cause, the earth is covered with ash, and the man and the boy have to wear masks to keep from breathing it in). Marauding bands of bearded men have turned into cannibals and rapists, and the father is determined to protect his son from them at all costs.
I have to admit that I thought of these marauders as Reavers (from Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity universe); unlike Whedon, however, McCarthy is largely uninterested in how these Reavers became Reaver-ish. They’re just there, as if every human has the potential to turn into one if, under certain extreme circumstances, he begins making evil choices. Father and son not only have to protect themselves from the physical threat of the Reavers (it’s easier to just call them that, even though the novel doesn’t), but also from letting the Reaverishness creep into their own hearts.
The father refers to the Reavers as “the bad guys,” and the boy keeps asking for reassurance that he and his father are the “good guys.” What entails goodness is never fully explained, though it certainly involves not eating dogs or other people. According to the son, it also means helping people they encounter on the Road. The father is not so sure about this, because he loves his son and is reluctant to give up anything (canned food, etc.) if doing so would lessen the boy’s chances of survival. He reasons that the few non-Reaver people they encounter are near death anyway, so it’s not worth helping them. The boy has a more compassionate ethical code—is it inherent, somehow inborn, or has it been taught to him by his father at a slightly less desperate time in their lives?—and he begins to doubt the “good guys” label. At one point, he tells his father that he doesn’t want to hear any more of his stories because they’re not true: “in the stories we’re always helping people and we don’t help people.” Ouch.
Nevertheless, The Road is also about serendipity and the persistence of goodness. In this, as well as in the father-son theme, it reminds me of Marilynne Robinson’s recent novel Gilead, though that book was about the unseen beauty in ordinary things, while The Road is about how marvelous a tin of beans seems in extraordinary circumstances. (The prose styles are also about as different as one could imagine!)
Oprah’s interview with McCarthy suggests that much of this attitude comes from his own experience, even if under very different circumstances from those of the characters in The Road. He tells a story of one time when he was so dirt-poor that he couldn’t even buy toothpaste. The day he ran out, he happened to go out to the mailbox, and there was a free tube of sample toothpaste. A lifetime of these occurrences leads McCarthy to say in the interview, “Life is pretty d— good, even when it looks bad, and we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don’t know who to be grateful to . . . but you should be thankful for what you have.”
Oprah: “You haven’t worked out the whole God thing yet?”
Cormac McCarthy: “It would depend on what day you asked me. But sometimes it’s good to pray. I don’t think you have to have a clear idea of who or what God is in order to pray. You could even be quite doubtful about the whole business.”
Just when McCarthy seemed to be getting on a roll, freely giving his opinions without being poked and steered by Oprah, she switched topics and asks him how he feels about having many more readers now. Grr! I wanted to hear more. (By the way, you can hear excerpts from the interview online at Oprah’s Book Club, though you have to be a member—it’s free to join—to do so).
At times, both father and son wonder what they’re living and journeying for; they long to take the path of the boy’s mother, who said, hauntingly, “I am done with my own whorish heart,” and went off alone to commit suicide. Occasional flashes of goodness are part of what sustain father and son, but even more than that it’s the courage to continue on even when no goodness is visible. And, as the father says, goodness will find them. “It always has. It will again.”
It’s strange for such a bleak book to not be depressing. It’s not depressing, though it will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished it. What is depressing is that some readers (see Oprah’s forum) respond to its poignancy by thinking about how they should stockpile some canned goods for the future. Ack! Well, the human heart is a mysterious thing.
2 comments June 7th, 2007