Doomsday

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/waitingforarmageddon/

Quite timely…

Last Friday, the radio show Soundcheck had a feature on Apocalyptic music.  I thought it might inspire some of your creative projects:  http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/12/04

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/movies/25road.html?_r=1

Last week, I wrote about dreams, and how the father denied himself the escape offered by good dreams, instead preferring nightmares, or better yet, reality. In this week’s reading I was again struck by the father’s refusal to let go of his chokehold on reality, this time by refusing to relive good memories.

The father in The Road strives not to remember. “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins…So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (McCarthy 131).

I think the father’s reluctance to remember is more than just concern for the origins of the memory. If he allows himself to be distracted by a memory, even for a second, it could be fatal.  This, I think, is why he leaves the mother’s picture in the road – to remember her would be to damage her even further, but more importantly, would damage himself.

In The Albertine Notes, the junkies are forever chasing good memories, looking for relief from life after the bomb. Either that, or they’re trying to jump into the future, desperately seeking to experience something, anything, other than the present. By using Albertine, they’re destroying their ability to remember, but they don’t care about the forgetting, the “brownout” in their brains caused by the drug (Moody 181-183).

The concept articulated by McCarthy, above, that remembering something inevitably causes the memory itself to change, is the basis of Moody’s ahistorical remembering phenomenon. If the act of recollection can change one’s experience of a memory (becoming numb to a painful experience, a first impression colored by the ensuing relationship, etc.) why stop there? Why not be able to change the very reality that created the memory in the first place?

Do you wish you would die?

No. But I might wish I had died. When you’re alive you’ve always got that ahead of you.

Or you might wish you’d never been born.

Well. Beggars can’t be choosers.

(The Road, 169)

—

The dialog between the old man who calls himself Ely and the man was potent and insightful.

The man asks Ely if he tried preparing for the thing that caused the destruction. The man responds, “People were always getting ready for tomorrow…Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them.” This tone veers from the traditional apocalypse towards the neo-apocalypse. The world takes no heed of its “inhabitants.” (168)

Ely’s thoughts on God confirm this: “There is no God…There is no God and we are his prophets.” The survivors of the apocalypse, in their rags and caked vomit, show the prophecy of their creator more than tell it. Man is made in God’s image, and in this world, God is at the end of the line and perhaps not even there at all. (170)

In a story within a story, Kurt Vonnegut writes that’s Hitler’s last words were “I never asked to be born.” Putting the choice of suicide (ceasing life) aside, “never asking to be born” is a concept that concerns the man, Ely, Dr. Manhattan, and perhaps every human being ever subject to judgment. (The concept is concerned less with Dr. Manhattan’s human birth, but his God birth – becoming something that can no longer relate to human life and the moral quandaries and judgments that follow.) Ely’s response to this objection is that “Beggars can’t be choosers,” as if the natural state of our souls is supplication, as if being alive fulfills our (what exactly does “our” mean here?) most basic necessities, which may be life affirming after all. (169)

The Road is a very emotionally gripping book and, at many times, I was tempted to put it down because the images were too gruesome, the lack of compassion forced upon the characters because of a need to survive was hard to read, and the utter hopelessness of their situation was too much to bear. As I mentioned last week, I believe that it was inhumane for the father to keep his son alive under these circumstances and that suicide would have been the most compassionate and rational thing to do. However, after reading the end of this story, I am not so sure if I agree with what I said last week.  Perhaps, when faced with adversity, we do have to do everything to make sure we survive because we never know when things might start getting better or if all hope is absolutely lost. Maybe, if all humans responded to catastrophe by committing suicide, the human race would have died out eons ago. Responding to this crisis in the way that this man and his son did, by taking “the Road” and by not giving up, they are doing their part to continue humanity. Although there may no one left to appreciate the struggle that the father, son, and those like them went through at the end of this ordeal, this may have been the “right” thing to do. They are carrying “the light” even if their dreams may not be attainable because they have not given up on the hope for a more decent life in a distant future for their descendants. I am reminded of another song by Regina Spektor called “Apres Moi” which contains the line “‘I’m not my own, it’s not my choice” (although the song is not explicit, I believe that it is talking about suicide). Perhaps, suicide is selfish, even in this situation, because it is robbing potential offspring from a life. In the end of this story, there is hope because  the son from “the Road” and a young girl have been brought together: I almost believe that the father’s sacrifice may have been worthwhile. Finally, although I agree with Simone that the ending is a bit lackluster, I am not really sure if the story could really end in any other way (in my opinion, having both the son and the father die would have been a waste of the reader’s time and having the father live would have been too happy an ending for this book).

The ending of The Road was rather lackluster for me. Knowing the neo-apocalyptic structure, I didn’t expect the story was going to end happily.

The father’s symbolic death on the road that was going to lead to them to anticipated salvation of the coast functions as his cold, asphalt deathbed. The pair has feared the road but believed that had no choice but to travel on it to get to their destination. I’m still not certain why the southern coast was the place to go (but honestly I don’t the man was either). The father knew his was dying, trying to hide the bloody ominous signs of his death from his son. He broke his promise to stay with his son because when the time came he abandoned him in death. When the time came he broke their unspoken suicide pact. So the question remains, was it better for him to keep his son of alive, enduring the harsh world, or kill him, along with himself, when his mother wanted to die. The only answers that come to mind are the final words of Angels in America – more life.

The barren world, McCarthy creates with nameless characters seems to be very neo-apocalyptic but there a glimmer of hope when the boy finds someone else who has the fire. While the boy has found a family to protect him, he still faces the problems he faced before – there’s no renewable food source so they will not be able to sustain themselves. McCarthy leaves the reader hanging with no real conclusion but the inevitable, eternal end of death.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road seem to be a typical example of what Liz Rosen would call “neo-apocalyptic” literature. Two survivors, the elect, are living in a dystopia in the aftermath of some worldwide catastrophe. In the beginning, the child is called the voice of God. Food basically nonexistent—what the two find through scrounging can barely feed them and they often go hungry. They live in constant fear of being caught and eaten by cannibals, ostensibly representing the unelect. Only the cannibals have anything resembling an organized society, and they create one only by oppressing and murdering other people. The world is covered in ash, creating an endless stretch of gray. In short, they live in a never-ending Tribulation.

At second reading, however, I started to see the more biblical apocalyptic story. McCarthy obliquely hinted that fierce fires that burnt everything in its path ravaged the world, leaving behind the ash. The traditional idea of Hell is a place with lakes of ever-burning fire.  Food is often found spoilt, as if touched by Famine, the rider of the black horse in the Book of Revelation. Everywhere, you see the dualistic relationship between the living and the dead, young and old, and good guys and bad guys.

Then, you have to consider electism. The father and the boy are not elect. By the end of the book, the father is forced to commit several acts that might have killed people. Even then, the father dies before the boy meets up with the new family, who might be considered New Jerusalem. Finally the child will have the company of other “good guys.”

Last week I read the entire book because I thought that we were assigned the entire book. I unfortunately do not have any new insights on the novel (because I read it over a week ago), but I plan on commenting on everyone’s posts for inspiration and discussion…so everyone post please!

One of the realizations that came to me as I read Cormac McCarthy’s The  Road was that life is far more precious if you had to fight for it. Every sacrifice you make to accomplish something means that the worth of that sacrifice goes into that accomplishment. To have to fight everyday for survival, to be hunted, hungry and cold everyday either breaks one spirit or tempers it into steel.

Another thing that caught my attention was how the father kept telling his son that they were the “good guys.” The son’s uncertainty shines through in that he is not secure in the knowledge that the measures his father took to survive were not unquestioningly moral. To a great extent, this moral ambiguity is justified. That they left the slaves that they found to the cannibals rather than setting them free comes to mind as an example. However, the practicality of these actions cannot be questioned. Everything the father did, was for his own and son’s survival. In a dystopia where everyone is in imminent threat of being eaten by other people, your own survival becomes far more important than anyone else’s.

This brings me to the subject of cannibals. While I have heard accounts of cannibalism when people are in desperate straits, somehow desperation does not seem quite extreme enough to justify the idea of cannibalism. Seriously, you are eating other people! That’s a terrifying idea to contemplate—eating people or being chopped up and eaten by other people. I can’t wait for this book to be over.