• No results found

Post-Apocalyptic Language and Gender Aspects in McCarthy s The Road: The Sacred Idiom Shorn of Its Referents

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2021

Share "Post-Apocalyptic Language and Gender Aspects in McCarthy s The Road: The Sacred Idiom Shorn of Its Referents"

Copied!
26
0
0

Loading.... (view fulltext now)

Full text

(1)

Post-Apocalyptic Language and Gender

Aspects in McCarthy’s The Road: “The

Sacred Idiom Shorn of Its Referents”

Av: Helena Hänninen

Handledare: Sheila Ghose

Södertörns Högskola Institutionen för Kultur och Lärande

Kandidatuppsats: 15 hp

(2)

Abstract

This essay studies Cormac McCarthy´s The Road from a critical feminist perspective in order to suggest a new theoretical interpretation for this widely discussed novel. The essay analyses the way language in the novel reflects existing Western phallocentric thought, and its possible fall as the world in the novel has disappeared simultaneously giving emergence to a different kind of logos. By applying Luce Irigaray´s and Hélène Cixous´ critical feminist theories it can be argued that there is a development from a patriarchal Western logocentric tradition with its masculine world order and logos that slowly disappear towards another kind of order. There is an allusion to a new language. In the novel world has gone under due to some kind of ecological disaster, a couple, the father and the son are struggling through the devastated landscape. The mother in the story has committed suicide and even the language is disappearing and since all its referents are gone. Since the world and the language are gone together with them the Western logocentric tradition is abolished. The boy in the story has been born after the devastation, he is free from the old civilization and with the appearance of the new family and mother there is a possibility for renewal in “a world in it beginning” as the last poetic lines of the novel read.

(3)

Table of Contents:

Abstract...1

1. Introduction ...3

2. Previous research...4

3. Theoretical framework ...9

4. Analysis ...13

4.1. Mother´s death...13

4.2. World dying ...14

4.3 The sacred word dying ...16

4.4 The appearance of a new mother...18

4.5 Maps and mysterious mazes...19

5. Conclusions ...21

Works Cited ...23

(4)

1. Introduction

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 fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs there were vermiculate patterns that were the 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 they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery

(McCarthy 286).

These are the last lines from the last paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize- winning novel The Road published in 2006. The Road is a dystopian novel, a bleak vision of a world where a father and his young son embark upon a journey through a wasteland left after some kind of ecologic disaster where nothing living can be encountered except some human beings feeding on each other. There is no sun, no blue sky, night with ``blackness without depth or dimension`` (67). It rains ashes, and the only food is some left over cans in empty houses that the father and the son scavenge along the journey south. They are the good people carrying the fire and whatever the hardships and however much they starve they do not eat people. Time does not exist, only nights darker than black and days with no clear daylight. Even the language is disappearing.

The boy´s mother decides to take her own life early in the novel since she does not want to face this new reality and the two are therefore left on their own. At the end of the arduous journey they reach the sea. The father has been ill throughout the whole journey and he finally dies, but a new couple of good people, people who don’t eat other people, new parents, appear and rescue the boy. Although the novel is very dismal with its dead post-apocalyptic landscape and people feeding on each other the last lines produce a promise of something good and mysterious. There is no way to make things right, make them the way they were, but there are maps and mazes of a road to something beginning anew.

Previous critics have at large omitted gender aspects when interpreting language use in the novel, although language has been studied from varying standpoints. I argue that the novel

(5)

relates a language crisis and a development in chronological order that shows us how the old world and the old order together with the language is slowly disappearing. The end passage in the novel gives us an allusion of something new but at the same time ancient appearing. McCarthy's prose has been described as stripped- down and dominated by male characters by critics like Kunsa and Åström referred to in this essay. In McCarthy’s novels there are very few female characters. Throughout history in Western cultural tradition language has been the possession of men where the origin of logos, the word, is the Bible which I return to more in detail in the Theoretical Framework chapter. Even The Road can be described as male dominated since it is the father and the son whose journey, thoughts and dialogues that are described in detail. The women we meet in the novel are the boy’s mother and the ones on the road in the marauders’ gangs and finally the new mother at the end. The study will draw on French feminist critical theory, mainly by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, and based on their theories I propose that there can be seen a development from a patriarchal Western world and tradition with its masculine world order and logos slowly disappearing towards a new kind of order and with it a different language. The carriers of the new order are the boy and the new family with the father and mother appearing at the end. The boy has no connection to the old world and its God whom he does not know and consequently he has no connection to the logos connected to this God. The new mother appears at the end. McCarthy lets her speak and in my reading this brings her language to this male-dominated world.

2. Previous research

In this section I aim to present what some earlier studies on McCarthy's novel The Road have focused on and what sources I have found of relevance to this essay. Since The Road was

published in 2006 it has been studied widely by critics from varying starting points, from ecology, consumerism, religion to language or style. There has even been claims that since McCarthy is such a prominent author, critics seem to take his part and forget criticism and end up in some kind of post-feminist mother-blaming as proposed by Åström (113). I will return to Åström later on in the essay but first I will focus on other studies dealing with aspects of language in McCarthy's The Road.

(6)

Lee Clark Michell writes in his essay “ ‘Make It Like Talk That You Imagine’: The Mystery of Language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” that this “dystopian novel registers the end of a culture and through its varying linguistic register becomes a testament to cultural renewal itself “(Mitchell 205). Michell and the other critics mentioned later in this study, have taken language as the starting point for their study although from different standpoints. Michell states that The Road is not “a mere story of survival but a complex meditation on the crossroads of past and present, on the relation between language and experience, and some kind of a compromise between narrative and the tradition of literary expression”. According to Michell there is an effort to keep the language alive by the father, as when he tells his son long forgotten things from the past to make them alive for him (207). He finds the value of The Road in its insistence that words themselves, as part of a continuing domestic dialog as well as an enduring cultural legacy, are a necessary but not sufficient stay against dissolution when everything is lost (207). Michell presents, as an example, a fragment of The Road where the father is thinking of the world irrevocably gone, and not only the world but the word as well as he tries to think of something to say and cannot (208). Manuel Broncano, on the other hand, when referring to the same passage suggests that what McCarthy does is to construct a kind of “neologism” as a new interpretation to existing words so to link the vanishing world to a grammatical construction that can be parsed into basic units, these units being less every day (Broncano 133).

Ashley Kunsa also takes the language in The Road as the focus for her study in “ ‘Maps of the World in Its Becoming’: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”. She finds McCarthy´s style pared down and elemental, and she claims that it is precisely in The Road’s language where we can discover its unexpectedly optimistic worldview. Michell´s description is somewhat similar as he calls the language “fragmentary and distorted and that it gives the sentences a bizarre cadence and immediacy and sometimes generates a strange and rough depiction of the desolate isolation itself” (Michell 211).He proposes that it is in the transfiguring of wasteland imagery into dazzling descriptions where language might offer a stay against chaos and save the world linguistically, whereas Kunsa finds it a linguistic journey toward redemption and a search for meaning and pattern in a meaningless world (Kunsa 57).

(7)

essential elements of narrative without excess (57). As the world has turned into a devastated wasteland so has the language been returned to its rudiments and must be re-imagined. She claims that McCarthy´s odd approach to naming establishes the conditions for a New Earth, a New Eden and according to her this redemption of the language gives us hope for our redemption (59). Differing from Michell though, Kunsa proposes that there is a religious quality in the novel and this for her is demonstrated in what she calls a search for the prelapsarian eloquence lost in the postlapsarian babble (60). She sees allusions to religion in that the son has an ability to name as he says simply and directly what a thing is. He is a new Adam made more powerful by his ability to read and write, even in the absence of a culture that supports and nurtures these activities, and she proposes he can go beyond the novel’s end, to write the new story of the new world (67).

Both Michell and Kunsa see the language in The Road as a sign of hope for a future in this desolated world even though from different standpoints the same as Manuel Broncano who has studied the religious aspect and language in McCarthy's fiction in his book Religion in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands. He proposes that The Road is a powerful

representation of the end of the logocentric civilization that was inaugurated by the Bible. He suggests that in this post-civilized stage of humankind, language has lost its “holy” dimension as the sole interpreter of reality, and the logos has been made obsolete because its referent, the world, exists no more (Broncano 133). Kunsa, on the other hand, suggests that McCarthy in his quest of naming searches not simply for the original names given the world by Adam, but also, more fundamentally, for the God-given capacity to name the world correctly and that the names of the past become meaningless in this world. But she sees a new nature to meaning, a language of a new post-apocalyptic world. And by finding a new way to talk about this now-destroyed world implies the possibility of renewal. According to Kunsa by omitting the names of the old land the author makes both the characters and the reader free from the chains of the old language (Kunsa 64).

Broncano claims that McCarthy´s aim is to expose how language, and especially the written word, functions as a cage that imprisons humans in a logocentric universe in which the signifier oftentimes replaces the signified, the signifier being the material form of something and the signified as the mental concept of it. Furthermore, he claims that McCarthy's use of language is a

(8)

typically post-structuralist move where the language loses its “sacredness” as the only viable tool to interpret the world that we inhabit. Such a world is made of words only and when that world passes away, language passes away. This word is obviously par excellence the Bible as Broncano suggests (133). His interpretation is that what McCarthy tells us in The Road is that in order to restore the universal language of humankind. It is necessary to first let the old language extinguish itself through exhaustion- to deprive it of its referents and turn it into a signifier without signified. Irigaray also proposes that we should go back to the time of our culture when the growth of our natural belonging was not yet alienated and lost in a language defined by what is common to a group, a society (Irigaray 50) as discussed in the Theoretical framework chapter.

Michell, Kunsa and Broncano depart from the language in the novel in their reading and consider it as a promise of renewal, whereas Berit Åström parts from a feminist standpoint in her essay “Post-Feminist Fatherhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in Cormac McCarthy's

The Road”. She claims that feminist analyses of the novel are sometimes not taken into account

and are accused of being oversimplifications or simply of missing the point in their criticism and failing to take into account the ingenuity, subtlety or genius of McCarthy´s text. Åström refers to Gamblin who has claimed that to examine critically the representation of women in McCarthy’s novels is to focus on irrelevancies (Åström 113). She also refers to comments made by Naomi Morgenstern on the novel, which Morgenstern sees as “a text for our time” as it focuses on the father and is a “disturbing investment in getting rid of the mother” and Morgenstern sees the father´s caring for the son a kind of “mothering”. Further, for Morgenstern, killing the mother is not a problem since the father takes on her role “replacing her”. Morgenstern calls the novel heavily invested in promoting participatory fatherhood at the expense of motherhood and to be reclaimed as a progressive example of patriarchy narrating its own end (114). Åström points out that the mother in the novel is neither a traditional mother nor a new mother. She is a non-entity with no relevance in this new world that both reinforces traditional stereotypes and embraces a “new” fatherhood thus eluding mothers. She suggests that in this futuristic world presented by McCarthy and his critics in his favor the only parent who is needed is the father (114). Further, for her the novel presents a post-feminist fatherhood view where mothers are considered superfluous or incompetent particularly when raising sons and that the “valorization of the father, the

(9)

vilification of the mother and narrative misogyny” (114) are significant considerations that according to her are omitted in analyses of The Road.

The mother only contributes to the story by giving birth and she is lacking care, love and warmth, nurturing and survival skills. For Åström this represents a continuing cultural trend that marginalizes mothers and privileges fathers (125). To her the mother is constructed as expendable in every way and the father is presented as irreplaceable, the mother is quickly forgotten whereas the father is remembered. As mentioned at the beginning of this section Åström´s claim is that critics seem to take McCarthy´s part and forget criticism and end up in some kind of post-feminist mother-blaming (Åström, 113).

As seen from the essays above the authors have focused on the issues of language in The Road and to a connection of the end of the world and the renewal of language with it. As all things that have disappeared in the world also the names for them slowly disappear or, as Broncano sees it, the logocentric world is giving way to something new. Åström, on the other hand, suggests that the novel is a tribute to the valorization of the role of the father and is a kind of a narrative

misogyny. I suggest a different view to Åström´s though in my reading of The Road. I do not see the novel as over-valorizing the father's role and eluding the mother but rather as showing the end of a male dominated Western tradition and something new appearing.

The following passages show how both the world and the word have gone as when the father sees a snowflake fall and melt and it makes him think how close to an end the world has come.“He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom”(16). And later when he questions “How much is gone already. The sacred idiom shorn of its referent and so its reality” (80) and “The frailty of everything revealed at last” (28).

The language is disappearing and there is a promise of something new as proposed by Michell, Kunsa and Broncano but from my reading this promise can be read as the Western logocentric culture that has misused nature disappears and gives way to something new as expressed in the last lines “ things older than man” that “hummed of mystery” (287).

3. Theoretical framework

(10)

main proponents of écriture féminine, (“feminist writing”), Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Culler’s definition of French feminism is “where ‘woman’ comes to stand for any radical force that subverts the concepts, assumptions, and structures of patriarchal discourse” (Culler 104).

These theoretical approaches I find particularly applicable to my reading of The Road since the focus of my analysis is on language and gender aspects in the novel, - these being the core of their writing as well. Irigaray and Cixous have parted in their theoretical feminist critique from Western patriarchal philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. The Western traditional canon, they argue, is based on negating the feminine in history, culture and politics and making the masculine subject universal and they particularly see the importance for female writing to emerge and to be taken into account as a counterweight to what they consider the logocentric,

phallocratic, that is, phallogocentric Western thought.

Irigaray and Cixous propose a change to the existing imbalance by women gaining their own language of expressing female thought and, first of all, female writers gaining importance in spite of their difference by being female.

In their article “Back to the Beginning”, Ovidiu Anemtoaicei and Yvette Russell discuss Irigaray´s book In the Beginning She Was and what Irigaray calls the premise of negation of the feminine which means that the current structure in Western thought is based on certain masculine norms and that the female is not valued in the symbolic/cultural realm which historically is dominated by men. To change this order “we must constitute a possible place for each sex, body and flesh to inhabit which implies a horizontal transcendence” for male and female, says Irigaray (Anemtoaicei & Russell 774). In Irigaray’s project this is a new model of possible relations between man and woman,without the submission of either one or the other. In his essay

“Reclaiming Luce Irigaray: Language and Space of the ‘Other’”, Zhang Pinggong also discusses Irigaray´s theories of the negation of the feminine in Western cultural tradition and how women are written out of history. They exist but at the same time they do not exist. They exist as the others and are excluded and outcasts. They are associated with nature whereas men are associated with culture.

Women do not have a language because they cannot escape from the Imaginary into the Symbolic order, whereas males can. Irigaray explains that historically in Western thought men’s

(11)

language is a symbolic language and women's language is semiotic, emotional (Pinggong 251-252). Irigaray claims that male subjectivity is guaranteed by the Father-God who is the creator of the Holy Word and she describes patriarchy as “an exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers and the competition between brothers” (256). In her book To Be Born Irigaray further develops her ideas and discusses language and how to bring a change to the existing Western phallogocentric tradition. In her way of seeing it a possibility to change is in what she calls the middle voice that has disappeared from the world of today. The middle voice is neither active nor passive, the subject is both an agent of an action and somehow concerned in an accion. The subject and object are not autonomous but relating to one another.

The middle voice allows us to be in harmony or to part from an immediate communion with natural rhythms and to be in communion with the other. She explains that in this place of middle voice we can all dwell. We do not have a language or speak a language but we dwell in it as in a house (Irigaray 49-50).- She calls this the middle voice that allows us to unite with ourselves, and it means being in two, two different beings as male and female, with respect for the respective difference(s) (50). She explains further that we can recover the authenticity of our being if we go back to the time of our culture when the growth of our natural belonging was not yet alienated and lost in a language defined by what is common to a group, a society (50).

Irigaray explains the middle voice as the union of male and female. It is the word of the in between two, which attempts to create the place in which they can meet while remaining distinct. Its desire is unity but at the same time it accepts difference. This is the original word, of which any other ought to be born and receive its meaning but in harmony with difference as opposed to the Western logocentric world. This word seems to have been forgotten in our tradition (50). Furthermore, she proposes that it is necessary today to give meaning to the word again as it allows us both ‘to be’ and ‘to let be’. She presents the following reasons: we have to elaborate a world culture, and for that purpose we must start from a human or non-human universal again, common needs for human beings and all non-human beings, as the vital resources of living beings are failing for want of a language which tells and cultivates life. We have to consider and respect difference in order to coexist with all living beings. This requires us to overcome a logic which favours sameness. When it comes to human beings it is essential that we take into account

(12)

our natural difference(s) and the manner through which we can express them thanks to a language that induces us to enter into relations and brings meaning to the world as different (52). As I understand she means that in the history of Western thought there has been no understanding of our natural differences. Instead the male has dominated over female, the strong over the weak and differences have never been celebrated.

Like Irigaray,Hélène Cixous also discusses the absence of woman and her faith in Western history. In” Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays”, she explains how the binary systems like man/woman, active/passive, culture/nature are the base of symbolic systems like art, religion, family and language. She explains further that all conceptual systems are subject to man in this organization by hierarchy where male privilege is seen in the opposition passive/active and where he uses this to sustain himself. She sees it necessary to expose the existing solidarity between logocentrism and phallocentrism which she calls the phallogocentrism and sees as the cause of women´s non-existence in Western history (Cixous 65). Logocentrism refers to the tradition in Western thought and science where words and language are fundamental to expression and phallogocentrism refers to the privilege of masculine in the expression of meaning. She questions what would happen to logocentrism, to the great philosophical systems, to the order of the world if the system should crumble (65).

In “The Laugh of the Medusa” Cixous sees a remedy to ending the non-existence of women, which is écriture féminine: the necessity of the female voice and how a woman must write herself into being. She writes: “Woman must put herself into the text- as into the world and into history- by her own movement” (Cixous 875). The future cannot be determined by the past, the past exists but it is not irremovable, the equivalent of destiny, she claims. Women have been repressed in culture, silenced and beaten. She calls women the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies that are black and beautiful, women live in the dark continent most men are afraid of. She points out, though, that she has also met some men, mostly poets, who have not been afraid of the dark continent, of femininity (885). In The Road the female character, the mother of the boy, disappears one night into the dark to commit suicide because she does not bear the thought of being caught one day by the rapist cannibals. Much later the man looks at her picture and thinks how he should have kept her in their lives but he did not know how (McCarthy

(13)

54).

Like Irigaray, Cixous claims it is time for women to write their own history and by doing so to escape from the “superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty” (881). She challenges women to break out of the male dominance. (892). In Cixous terms, psychoanalysis was constituted to repress femininity, thus she also posits herself as a challenge to the Freudian establishment, as does Carolyn Dever in Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins. Dever discusses what Freudians call the absent mother and the anxiety connected to her departure. Her conclusion is that if the absent mother lurks in the unconscious as Freud has it, then the institutional anxiety is not that of her departure, but rather that of her return; not for her fort, disappearance, in Freudian terms, but perhaps ironically, for her da, her reappearance 1 (Dever 51). She presents object-relation theorist

Melanie Klein´s position that the returning mother is a direct challenge to the phallic mastery constituted in her absence. In accordance to this cornerstone of patriarchal discourse. Klein argues that the circumscription of the mother is a structural necessity; if that circumscription should fail, if that absence should become a presence, the entire structure comes tumbling down. In other words, if the mother does not disappear and thus the female does not disappear from the realm of subjectivity the patriarchal system does not function. If the mother appears, she enters the realm of subjectivity and must be taken into account whereas if she is gone, she is the realm of nature and no threat to the prevailing order. As will be seen in the analysis section there is both a mother disappearing and reappearing in The Road which will be discussed more in detail.

Cixous´ and Irigaray´s critical feminist theories treat the ideas of Western philosophical tradition that historically has omitted women and has been based on male dominance and logocentrism where the phallus is central to male language- that is, phallogocentrism. As an escape from the historical tradition Irigaray and Cixous present écriture féminine, women writing themselves into history with accounts of their own. My analysis will be conducted by applying their theories of the Western philosophical canon, logocentrism and écriture féminine. I find them

1 1 Freud uses the terms Fort! and Da! meaning Gone! and There! that he hears his 18-month old grandson use when

(14)

of relevance since the focus of my study will be on how the existing Western world order and the language have disappeared in the book, as seen in the analysis section there are several passages describing how the written evidence of language has been destroyed, books bloated, words disappearing. But there is also an allusion to something new and mysterious appearing in the last lines of the novel.

4. Analysis

In this section I will first give a brief summary of Cormac McCarthy´s The Road and

subsequently analyze the novel departing from a critical feminist perspective. In earlier research, the gender aspect has rarely been treated in the literary criticism carried out on The Road. I find the gender aspect highly relevant since in the novel the main characters are a father and his son, and we encounter the mother only briefly. She has existed but she is gone, and other female characters also appear only briefly.

4.1. Mother´s death

As mentioned earlier in the introduccion McCarthy’s prose is considered male dominated and so is The Road. We meet in the novel two female characters besides the ones roaming the roads with the marauders who bear children only to be eaten namely the boy’s mother and a new woman who appears with a man and at the end when the father has died. But the mother disappears early in the book and abandons her family leaving the man and the boy struggling alone “shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire” (6).

You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.

Death is not a lover. Oh yes he is.

(McCarthy 56-57)

These lines are from the paragraph when the father recalls his last moments with his partner before she steps into the cold night with a blade of obsidian to take her own life. She finds

(15)

everything hopeless and she does not have the strength to carry on. She sees her only hope in death.

According to Cixous, Irigaray and Denver, the disappearance of the mother in literature and generally in Western cultural tradition has to happen. Since the mother is the “other” as opposed to the father who is the male, she has to be put away. She must disappear so that the foundation of logocentrism and the great philosophical systems can prevail supporting the male dominance, and should she not disappear the order of the world in general and “the rock should crumble” (Cixous 65). Thus, women are written out of history. They exist but at the same time they do not exist, in order to maintain the phallic mastery. Furthermore, as a woman she is part of Nature and as the Nature in the novel is dead, so she is also dead. The female is connected to Nature and she thus belongs to the dark dangerous continent, something dangerous, and cannot be counted on. The mother´s words “you can think of me as a faithless slut” and “I have taken a new lover” give an allusion that she is faithless and not to be counted on and consequently dangerous.

But on the other hand, the mother decides to take her destiny into her own hands and make her own decision to end her life. The man, the father, insists that she should stay. -But, as Cixous explains, women are in no way obliged to be the subjects to the old drama restaged by men, to reinstate again and again the religion of the fathers. As Cixous explains women don't want that (884). Hence, the mother's decision is to not pledge allegiance to the negative, to men. She says she should have committed suicide long ago. And responds to the father´s insistence: “I didnt bring myself to this. I was brought” (McCarthy 56). She says she is done with her own whorish heart and has been for a long time. The world is destroyed and there is no hope for her, and she had no part in its destruction as she sees it. Ariel Saleh claims that the patriarchal culture was/is built on the domination of Nature and has destroyed itself. In The Road we see two sides of the Western patriarchal culture working its way through: on the one hand its way of writing the woman out of history and on the other hand the result of its working the world that is totally destroyed due to man's greed and desire to dominate Nature.

4.2. World dying

(16)

only to wake up to the bitter reality. But he has begun to learn how to wake himself from such dreams with “a fake taste of peaches in his mouth” (18). “He thought if he lived long enough the world would at last all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory “. In The Road the world is gone, what is left is the crushing black vacuum of the universe. “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and they have taken with them the world “(32). He thinks of himself and his son like “two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (130). Some remains of the world before exist but they do not make sense in this post-apocalyptic world, like the coins scattered around the soft-drink machine in a

supermarket that nobody collects because they are of no use (23). The father also finds some gold krugerrands in a place somebody had built as a bomb-shelter, but he leaves them as they are of no use either in this world (142). Seeing the destruction when walking through the burned

landscapes and cities “everything paling away into the murk”, “barren, silent, goodless” (4) the father feels how pointless men´s greed has been and fragile the world is (28). What led to the destruction of the world is left unsaid in The Road. In Broncano’s words the novel is a “powerful representation of the end of the logocentric civilization that was inaugurated by the Bible” (133). As a logocentric civilization it is a representation of Western philosophy as such and particularly of the Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture built on the domination of Nature, and domination of Woman as part of nature, as ecofeminist Ariel Salleh expresses it. Salleh´s claims concern the ecological crises of today (Pellow). In my opinion the crisis in the novel is the result of the same greed although she is referring to a non-fictional current situation as a sociologist. “The frailty of everything revealed at last” (28). Nature in The Road has been consumed by man and turned into a few dried apples, leftover cans and packages and even babies that serve as food (198).

As mentioned earlier the main characters are the father and the son on their journey towards the sea in the south. The father occasionally addresses God and has his doubts and questions his doings and existence as he asks: “Are you there? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart?” (11-12). In the novel, as in the Western tradition, male subjectivity is guaranteed by the Father-God who is the creator of the Holy Word and patriarchy has an exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers and the competition between brothers, as Irigaray claims (256).

(17)

In my opinion, indeed, the order is guaranteed by the Father- God and the respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers as the story is all about the journey the father and his young son make. But this society has come to an end and the genealogy is thereby broken and the holy word is gone, and as Broncano puts it, there are only left “the ashes of the biblical book that has finally been closed forever” (Broncano 127). The mother has disappeared years ago. The old order has gone.

4.3. The sacred word dying

In the novel the leading thought of the father is to keep themselves and the language alive. The people they encounter on the road are silent. “They neither spoke nor called to each other, the more sinister for that” (67). But in spite of his efforts he is faced with the loss of things along with the words describing them.

He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He´d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness of the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally, the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. (McCarthy 88)

The father is trying to have a conversation with his son but cannot find the words and finally comes to the conclusion that the words have disappeared with their referents but not only the names but the very “things one believed to be true”. He is trying to keep them alive by his memories against all odds in this world with the few people that are left feeding on each other “shuffling through the ash casting their hooded heads from side to side … Slouching along with their clubs in their hands, lengths of pipe” (60). Words he thinks are “More fragile than he would have thought”. They are disappearing and winking “out forever”.

Broncano´s interpretation is that McCarthy's use of language in The Road restores the universal language of humankind and in order to do so it is necessary to first let the old

language extinguish itself through exhaustion. It is necessary for its referents to die and to turn the language into a signifier without signified, into words without referents (133). I interpret the language dying out as a necessity for a new language to appear. Cixous and Irigaray

(18)

propose through their écriture féminine that if there is to be a new order in the world there is a need for the old phallogocentric language to disappear to make space for a new kind of language.

Kunsa sees the language in The Road as a return to the essential elements of narrative without excess, what she calls a return to a prelapsarian language after all postlapsarian excesses in language use (57). I share her view but through what Irigaray calls, the middle language. As Irigaray sees it, the middle language or the middle voice is a place where we all can dwell in spite of our differences (Irigaray 50).

Michell, on the other hand, sees in McCarthy’s use of the language to describe the wasteland imagery as dazzling descriptions, a stay against chaos and a way to save the world linguistically (211). But based on the extract with the father trying to think of something to say, I propose that since everything follows the disappeared things into oblivion there is, instead, a primal urge for something new to be born of this chaos. Irigaray proposes that in order for the voice of all to be heard there is a need of writing a new language, a common language where we all can “dwell in harmony”, that is, male and female to exist in harmony without the supremacy of either. She says that it is necessary to give meaning to the word again and to elaborate a world culture, and for that purpose we must start from a “human or non-human universal” since the world is in need of a language which tells and cultivates life (52).

In The Road the books the father finds during the journey are all destroyed. “Saggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and put it back. Everything damp. Rotting” (130). He comes upon a library where the books are all scattered around, and he thinks of them as thousands of “lies” (187). The books are sodden, illegible, as is the world. The old language is dying but there is a promise of something new appearing. Kunsa proposes that the boy is a promise of a new Adam, the new first human, although more powerful since he can read and write. She claims that omitting the names of the old land makes the characters and the reader free from the old language. I argue that, indeed, the boy is a promise of a new man but not a patriarchal Adam, as Kunsa proposes, but a newly born man in a non- patriarchal world since the old world is gone. Michell, too, has pointed out that The Road registers the end of a culture and through its varying linguistic register becomes a testament to cultural renewal

(19)

itself (Mitchell 205). Cultural renewal in Cixous´ terms requires that women who have been written out of history must write themselves in again and they must do it by their own

movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past (Cixous 875-877). I propose that the boy is not only a promise of something new along with the new mother and family but free from the old as he is born after the holocaust. He is unable to pray to God and talks to his dead father instead, so he is also free from the old logos connected to God.

4.4. The appearance of a new mother

At the end of the book a man finds the boy next to his dead father and takes him to his family where his wife lovingly receives him. The old father and mother are gone, as is the old world but a new mother and family appear and bring consolation, hope and promise.

“The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him about God. He tried to talk to God, but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget” (286).

But the boy continues to talk to his father. I propose that the boy cannot talk to God since he does not know God and instead talks to his father and since he does not talk to God, he does not speak the old word but a word in its beginning that has no restrictions of male supremacy. Hence there is a possibility for this language to be as Irigaray explains, the word of equality. This is the union of male and female, the word of the in between two, which attempts to create the place in which they can meet while remaining distinct. This word longs for unity but consents to

difference, it is the original word, of which any other ought to be born and receive its meaning. This word seems to have been forgotten in our tradition (Irigaray 50).

As mentioned earlier, the mother disappears early in the novel. Irigaray explains, that as there is no space for the woman in the phallocentric Western house of subjectivity, she is put away. Now, though, there is a new mother that appears at the end of the novel. Carolyn Dever´s interpretation is that in the Western philosophical tradition, the reappearance of the absent mother is the real menace to the existing world order. The menace is not in the disappearance of the mother but in her reappearance. The returning mother is a direct challenge to the phallic mastery constituted in her absence. In this case she is part of a family, but she takes the boy in.

(20)

In accordance with this cornerstone of patriarchal discourse the mother´s disappearance is a structural necessity; if that should fail, if that absence should become a presence, the entire structure comes tumbling down (Dever 51). In The Road the world has really come crumbling down. There is nothing living left. But after all the hardships of the long arduous journey and finally the father´s death the new mother appears along with the new father and rescues the boy. The phallic mastery constituted in the absence of the mother is at stake. As I see it, the reappearing mother is not an old scary ghost, as proposed by psychoanalysts, but a promise of a new world and along with it a language where the female is included. And as I discussed in the previous chapter, the boy is born after the apocalypse and has no ties to the old world and has thus no claims to a phallic mastery. I propose that the new mother´s appearance is effectively the end of the phallic mastery constituted in her absence. Cixous claims that, “women return from afar, from always: from "without," from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond culture “(Cixous 877). She appears together with a traditional family and takes the boy in. Cixous also says that there are some men, only a few who are not afraid of women and maybe we can, after all, count McCarthy to them with the finishing lines of the novel that I present in the next chapter. Is he enabling the woman to write herself into the history again?

4.5. Maps and mysterious mazes

Åström proposes in her reading of The Road that it both reinforces traditional stereotypes and embraces a “new” fatherhood thus eluding mothers. I propose that, indeed, it does reinforce the traditional stereotypes, but it also finishes the world of these traditional stereotypes to give way to a new world order, as in the following paragraph:

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 fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back there were vermiculate patterns 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 (286-287).

These are the last lines of the novel that in my reading differ from the rest of the post- apocalyptic stripped scenery in the book with their poetic sound. What are these lines referring to

(21)

in the world where everything is gone? What is older than man? Logically woman could be said to be older than man since all men have to be born of a woman. And what is considered mysterious if not the female that in Western cultural tradition has been represented as the mysterious, dark continent as Cixous explains (885). According to Cixous women have for long wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow spaces and having been brainwashed. She continues: “You can incarcerate them, slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only but now they are returning, arriving over and again” (878). She exclaims that women are returning and finally can be seen after all the time they have been kept prisoners of the phallogocentric world, oppressed and written out of history.

Kunsa´s interpretation is that the boy in the novel is the new Adam, since he can read and write and thus, he can go beyond the novel’s end, to write the new story of the new world (Kunsa 67). My interpretation is that indeed he can read and write but there is something more to this promise in the last lines of the novel although it is not clear what the promise is. I claim that the boy is not the new Adam but a new being, a new male with no chains to the old world since he does not know it. His father has prepared him to “carry the fire”on (83, 216, 278, 279) and to tell his story. “You tell me a story about yourself. You have stories inside you that I dont know about. You mean like dreams? Like dreams. Or just things you think about. Yah, but stories are supposed to be happy. They dont have to be. (267-269). He says he has no happy stories like his father. His stories are “more like real life”. I read in him a promise of a future that allows differences to exist in this new word and which also allows the female voice to be heard.

Irigaray says that it is essential for human beings to respect our natural differences and the manner through which we can express them thanks to a language that induces us to enter into relations and brings meaning to the world as different (52). She also points out that if our being in the world is to be authentic we have to return to the time in our culture in the Heideggerian meaning, when the growth of our natural belonging was not yet alienated and lost in a language defined by what is common to a group, a society (Irigaray 50). Since the society in the novel is gone there is a possibility to return to our natural belonging and as the boy says tell stories “more like real life”. The language survives. Michell interprets the last lines “they hummed of mystery” as a sign of how enigmatic the survival of the language itself has been (Michell 207).

(22)

As mentioned earlier, Cixous asserts that there have been poets who would go to any lengths to slip something by at odds with tradition. She refers to them as men capable of loving love and hence capable of loving others and of wanting them. These men can imagine women who would hold out against oppression and constitute themselves as superb and equal. Further, she claims that should these women appear it would mean that there would be trouble as the bastion of the

patriarchy was supposed to be unbreakable. This can happen, she says, by a natural cause,

“through that radical mutation of things brought on by a material upheaval when every structure is for a moment thrown off balance and an ephemeral wildness sweeps order away” (879). This is when the poet can slip something by, for a brief span, of woman, she says. Indeed, in the novel there has been a thorough material upheaval as the material world is all gone and as even Kunsa proposes there is born a new language of a new post-apocalyptic world.

In Irigaray’s words we can recover the authenticity of our being if we go back to the time of our culture when the growth of our natural belonging was not yet alienated and lost in a language defined by what is common to a group, a society (50) to “ the world in its beginning”. Is the end of the novel the moment when McCarthy lets the woman slip by? What will happen in the future is a “mystery” but the “the maps of the word in its beginning” give an optimistic hint of something positive.

5. Conclusions

This study´s aim was to analyze the language and gender aspects in Cormac McCarthy´s The Road by studying it through the lens of critical feminist theory and particularly applying Hélène Cixous´ and Luce Irigaray´s approach on language and gender aspects. My claim is that most critics have largely omitted a connection between gender and language when studying the novel. I propose that there can be seen a development from a patriarchal Western world and tradition with its masculine world order and logos slowly disappearing towards some new kind of order and with it a newly born language. The carriers of the new order are the boy as he has no connection to the old world and its God whom he does not know and consequently to the logos connected to this God and the new mother and father appearing at the end. The mother’s appearance gives the female voice a possibility to come to life in this post/apocalyptic world. As Cixous says, women are returning

(23)

from afar, from beyond culture to overthrow the phallic mastery and to write herself in. In the first four parts of the analysis I have focused on what Cixous and Irigaray call the Western philosophical tradition and what they find relevant to this tradition regarding language and the position of women. Language has been the possession of men and written by men with the origin of logos being the Bible. The woman is repressed Western tradition as she is written out of history and consequently her language does not exist either. In the novel the mother has existed, but she has disappeared. The final part of the analysis as seen from the example passage I have chosen, I claim that it can be interpreted as a beginning of a new world order and according to my reading there is an allusion to a kind that could permit both men and women coexist in harmony. Cormac McCarty´s earlier production has been considered as handling extremely violent themes and so also this current novel but there is in spite of a total destruction of the world a promise in it of a new world as also suggested by the critics cited in the Previous Research chapter. The end of the novel might be a turning point in McCarthy´s intensely male dominated fiction. Is he leaving the

postlapsarian babble and reversing to the beginning as he says, “all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery”? Is he making an allusion to a new era referred to by Irigaray and Cixous with equality, where the old language is dead and a new more equal without connection to the old, is emerging.

My conclusion is that by letting the old world and the old language die together with the sodden books and the referents McCarthy suggests the beginning of a new language and world with the remaining good people. The disappearance of the referents opens up for the possibility of a new language to emerge. The boy has no connection to the old world since he does not know it and he can name things in his way. He can read and write in this world where literacy seems to have disappeared and the marauders on the road do not even speak. The new mother appearing with her own gentle language, a female word he does not remember, and showing affection makes it

possible for a language to emerge from a female source and connect with the boy´s language. As the last paragraph in the novel says: “The world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again” (286).

Broncano also points out:” The ambiguity of the ending is the supreme paradox in a text full of paradoxes, and represents perhaps the most controversial finale of any of McCarthy’s

(24)

works”(125). With the horrifying landscape it depicts we should also be reminded not only of the catastrophes occurring in our world but also of the beauty left in it and the possibilities to make it a better place with tolerance of difference.


(25)

Works Cited

Anemtoaicei, Ovidiu and Russell, Yvette. Luce Irigaray: Back to the Beginning.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 21, no. 5, 2013, pp. 773-786. Broncano, Manuel (2013). Religion in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands.

London: Routledge.

Cixous, Hélène . Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays in The Newly Born Woman. Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Cixous, Hélène, et al. ´´ The Laugh of the Medusa``. Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011.

Dever, Carolyn. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998.

Irigaray, Lucy. To Be Born- Genesis of a New Human Being. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.

Kunsa, Ashley. ``Maps of the World in Its Beginning``: Post- Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy´s The Road. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 33, no. 1. 2009, pp. 57-74. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Random House, 2006.

Michell, Lee Clark. ``Make it Talk That You Imagine``: The Mystery of Language in Cormac McCarthy´s ‘The Road’. Literary Imagination, vol. 17, no.2, 2015, pp. 204-227.

Pinggong, Zhang. Reclaiming Luce Irigaray: Language and Space of the ``Other``.Linguistics and Literature Studies, vol. 6, no. 5, 2018, pp. 250-258.

Åström, Berit. Post-Feminist Fatherhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in Cormac McCarthy´s ‘The Road’. Women: a Cultural Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 112-128.

(26)

Internet Sources

Buchanan, Ian. Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010,

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095829728

6 jan. 2020.

Pellow David review on Salleh, Ariel (1997) Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. London: Zed Books Ltd. 2018,

References

Related documents

Results of the survey are categorized into the following four areas: primary method used to conduct student evaluations, Internet collection of student evaluation data,

This qualitative case study explored the experiences and perceptions of those business university students who are facing some social and emotional challenges and in this

We also performed unilateral orchidectomy as well as scrotal ablation to prevent recurrence of hernia, seroma formation and to preserve the unaffected testicle.

The new Indonesian policy that intends to grant partial property rights to 33,000 villages will allow the villagers to gain economic benefits from their local forests, albeit

However, if different patterns of progress are identified, as in the charts presented, and the pattern to which a given child con- forms is recognized he may be found con- sistent

Kendra houses calculated from the Moon in this example, are the fifth (first house calculated from the Moon), eighth (fourth house calculated from the Moon), eleventh (seventh

UN/EDIFACT Trade Data Interchange Directory (UNTDID)!. UN Standard Message

Tablica „Pacijenti“ (slika 23.), koja se nalazi u bazi podataka korištenoj za potrebe izrade ovoga diplomskog rada, pohranjuje podatke koji se unose na stranici unos