<p>Cormac McCarthy wins the Pulitzer prize for The Road, one of Dorothy_Parker X’s picks in CC’s great books thread.</p>
<p>Good nose, Dot.</p>
<p>Do you ever read thread titles, and answer them mentally before actually reading the posts, only to find out the thread was about something else entirely? I thought for sure this thread was going to be about the biggest pot hole or something, chosen by the Department of Transportation.</p>
<p>Hey binx- I thought it was about Dorothy Parker picking her nose… :)</p>
<p>Have you read The Road? </p>
<p>It’s incredibly thought provoking … and a tad scary.</p>
<p>The Road IS good – but McCarthy’s best has to be “Meridian.” A true classic of American literature. (Ponderous-sounding, but true, I think.)</p>
<p>I’d probably skip it based on Dot’s suggestion. ;)</p>
<p>I couldn’t get through Blood Meridian, but All The Pretty Horses is one of my favorite books ever. I didn’t read The Road based on my daughter’s advice that she thought it was second-rate compared to Blood Meridian and ATPH, and I had gotten my fill of second-rate McCarthy in The Border and Cities of the Plain.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>How kind of you to remember–and say so. </p>
<p>Over and over I find you to be one of the most thoughtful correspondents on cc. I know you have read it, and I hope you liked it, but I would not necessarily recommend The Road to everyone (certainly not to the secular-comintern on cc); it is too peculiar and singular, even while extending a very grand and powerful literary tradition into a world grown suspicious of the spirit of ‘the spirit’–even perhaps antagonistic towards it: Put differently, living in a material world any apocalypse will have to have a material cause and yet, here, on The Road, we find it remains equally incomprehensible if not quite as mysterious as its literary forebearers (as is the nature of art…and faith). </p>
<p>For some, like me, you may find in The Road that flicker of light and heat that has passed from old days into our prickly moment in time, as does the young hero of The Road, himself. For others there will be nothing but sisyphean hopelessness and meaningless death. </p>
<p>For myself, I was moved by many things–subtle and grand–staring down McCarthy’s Road. Apparently, some at the Pulitzer committee felt the same way.</p>
<p>Cheers!</p>
<p>I read it based on your recommendation–but I’m not sure I connected with that spirit in the way that you did, DOT.</p>
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<p>Could you please elaborate?</p>
<p>Please give us a lttle more about the book . Thank you.</p>
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Seriously?</p>
<p>Well, first, I should say that, for me, in matters of art and the spirit, transcendence is, in a Kantian sense, a priori; perhaps the common effects of the conundrums of something as inexplicable as love. That’s my guess, anyhow. </p>
<p>What’s more, I instinctually understand the same cause to the effect–transcendence–of the culture of both religion and art: and in that, of course, their bickering love affair back into the shadows of time. </p>
<p>Sadly, religion as a formal matter–as one of the two historical languages of the great mysteries (the other being high art)-- is recessing as far as I can tell due to, on the one hand, fundamentalism and the other materialism …which, I should add are to my mind different reactions to the same ramped-up desire for control; you can control anything with either a material or literal cause by simply manipulating the source and interactions of either one; thus the scourge of a take no prisoners materialism and boots on the ground fundamentalism in high art and religion (and philosophy). Materialism and fundamentalism, properly understood, are the domain of an ethically blind science and a spiritually neutered politics; neither one being a friend to religion or art and thus, here, its effects are largely derogatory to the spirit of both in a period of modernism and postmodernism.</p>
<p>Anyhow, to your point, Homer, Virgil, Attar, Dante, Milton, amongst others, got to the precipice of the end of man and looked out over the edge prior to McCarthy’s faltering peep–The Road is well worn and traveled. And yet, the ancient end-time was an enigma involving the deepest mysteries of theology and, in that, art: In short, eschatology. </p>
<p>The ancient premise:
The cause of the end of man was something that preceded the existence of man (contra Sartre) in the cosmology of life in much the same way that the mystery of love precedes and follows romance even into its inevitable oblivion. </p>
<p>In The Road we have a materialist eschatology; a material cause to the end, but the end in fact, nonetheless. The power of such a narrative is such that, even knowing the material cause (nuclear winter), the mystery of “the end” is as overwhelming and as incomprehensible as ever, at least in our visceral reaction and response to it: dread with no end beyond an ignoble death.</p>
<p>However, in past narratives there was an offer of redemption both in faith and in art (as one always informed the other): salvation. In The Road, there is only empathy in the face of an inevitable outcome…even beyond the salvation of transcendence, of religion, of art. Pure dread coupled with the irresistible demand for an empathy that offers nothing beyond its own helpless sympathies: the total collapse of the spirit defeated in the end by the ruthless inevitability of a world extending not a speck beyond material cause and effect. </p>
<p>Nowadays, this fear insinuates itself into our psyches in the form of nuclear war, global warming, Avian flu, SAR’s, terrorism (from Cho Seung-Hui to Al Qaeda) etc. etc. The eschatology is still there, something within whispers, ‘the world will not outlive us… the bad-guys are going to ruin it for us all’ (wherein the bad guy is our narrative opposite, usually politically defined); only now, the onetime transcendent reply is silent and adds nothing in the refrain, there is no resolving tone. </p>
<p>Our’s is a very old story with an innovative little plot twist: there is no beyond, beyond. Given this, I am at a loss to discern, say, the NYT’s thumping global warming enthusiast from the Bible thumping Armageddon enthusiast (other than one is responsible for more deforestation in their vile waste of paper): both imagine the world as extending not at all past themselves; like children that reflexively close their eyes to make the world go away only to open and find that the world has not cooperated …again, and so it goes.</p>
<p>Still, the nameless reader and the nameless hero, in this newest narrative, The Road, are inevitably called to interpret this direst of all outcomes in the only way humanity ever has: through transcendent reflection; same as in Dante, sans redemption. The global warming/SARs/Avian flu/nuclear winter enthusiast lacks the redemptive virtue of art while retaining the bluster of “the end of all time” shtick.</p>
<p>It is, needless to say, very droll of them to be so artless in their mini-eschatologies. Then along comes Cormac McCarthy.</p>
<p>Here I find this maxim of Oscar Wilde instructive:
Find expression for a sorrow and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.</p>
<p>McCarthy got the first half of that one (on the other hand, Nietzsche insisted that we only have words for what is already dead in our hearts. What a kill-joy…too many of these dire Nietzschean munchkins on campus these days, ughh!) </p>
<p>I am taken with Wilde on this point, as on so many others, as the opposite offers no room for art and in that hope…and, possibly, salvation: Art’s aim is ultimately the same as Religion, I suppose. There are no grounds for certainty in either one, just the languorous threads of hope.</p>
<p>Clearly, McCarthy found a way to express sorrow without hope, and it became dear to me, even if such a modest hope lacks the artist’s legacy: salvation. McCarthy reached and looked over the edge without seeing an end to the fall, providing a little art to the otherwise droll narrative of the materialist’s eschatology. Not bad.</p>
<p>Well. The first half of that explanation sent me scurrying to the dictionary kiddo. Eschatology?? Have mercy on the dim wits of a 40-something. Crikey.</p>
<p>Very interesting interpretation though, and it enhanced my understadning of The Road–so thanks for that.</p>
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<p>Hmmmm.</p>
<p>As art, even high art, has always been dependent on wealthy patrons, patrons (including religious patrons) engaged in obscenely material pursuits–I believe the relationship between Art and Materialism is far more complicated than what you’ve set out. </p>
<p>I’m not sure materialism has extinguished or even dimmed Art in 2007. I can think of Art, Film, Literature, Architecture and Sculpture from this era that is on par, or better, than art from the main of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I’m certain in my knowledge–and ecstacy, LOL–which gives me some protection from the doomsday scenarios.</p>
<p>I had never thought about the impact of these dommsday scenarios, Dot. But as you’ve broght them to light-- could the doomsday scenarios have an altogether different foundation? Could it be that Americans fear the eventual collapse of their beautiful bubble? After all, no society has maintained it’s wealth. Wealthy societies are doomed to disappear into history, leaving behind a legacy of invention and art. For me, the inescapable history of the Egyptians, the Romans, The Incans is a more believeable explanation of the overwhelming sense of dread in America.</p>
<p>Americans are wildly religious compared to the rest of the world. You live in the rarified air of East Coast intellectuals, Dot. When I visit the Great Flyover parts of the nation, I find people living their religion in a straightforward, historic manner. They attend the churches that their forebearers attended and they practice the religion in essentially the same manner. They aren’t drowning in fundamentalism–or even threatened by it–though many of my generation have been swamped by materialism–and don’t know it.</p>
<p>By the same token, the rest of the world isn’t as materialistic as the US. Only the South East Asian Tigers are as materialistic–because their governments have used materialism to lift the population out of poverty and Confucianism. Interestingly, I find that 40 to 50-something, university educated, native Koreans are highly articulate when it comes to the cost the Korean soul has paid. The transition from bitter slavery to unheralded consumerism and unrecognizable materialism happened so fast in Korea–a matter of decades. (Thoughtful Koreans are wringing their hands about the Cho incident–not his illness, but the willful and blind ambition of his parents).</p>
<p>The sad thing is that most Americans do not realize how materialistic they have become. I certainly didn’t realize it about myself until I lived abroad for the second time. Now, when I visit, I am struck by the fact that the MAJORITY of casual conversation in the US is about one sort of purchase or another. Even this board is essentially a discussion about a purchase.</p>
<p>That monomaniacal focus on consumption is not a part of other Western and Eastern societies. I had to live that reality for several years before I understood the difference–or even noticed it <em>yes, thick</em>. My innate trust in the righteousness of materialism was that deep.</p>
<p>Anyway, my outlook is not as bleak as yours, Dot–and I am the daft old bat. I hope you get a chance to get out of the rarified East Coast to check your beliefs against another reality.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure I’d agree that Dante and Hegel and Melville and Sartre offered redemption through ‘faith’. Their redemptive path was a highly ethical, highly intellectual life–one that wrestled with Spirit rather than embraced it in naive ‘faith’.</p>
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<p>If McCarthy had let the boy die, then I would buy this interpretation–but the boy meets a lovely young family and sets out with them. It was a tiny signal of hope–but a signal all the same?</p>