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European journal of American studies 12-3 | 2017 Special Issue of the European Journal of American Studies: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds The Dialectics of Mobility: Capitalism and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Simon Schleusener Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12296 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.12296 ISSN: 1991-9336 Publisher European Association for American Studies Electronic reference Simon Schleusener, “The Dialectics of Mobility: Capitalism and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”, European journal of American studies [Online], 12-3 | 2017, Online since 18 December 2017, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12296 ; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.12296 This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021. Creative Commons License The Dialectics of Mobility: Capitalism and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s Th... 1 The Dialectics of Mobility: Capitalism and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Simon Schleusener There’s not a lot of good news on the road. In times like these. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (186) 1 In this essay, I attempt to contextualize Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road against the backdrop of the new capitalism. Consequently, The Road is read here as an example of what, in allusion to Lionel Trilling, might be referred to as the “neoliberal imagination.”1 This does not mean, however, that I understand McCarthy as a neoliberal writer, nor that I understand The Road primarily as a neoliberal novel. Indeed, throughout my essay the term “neoliberalism” is not so much used as a well- defined political ideology, but rather designates what a number of economic theorists and political scientists have termed a mode of regulation.2 In the United States, this mode of regulation started to take hold in the late 1970s, becoming ever more dominant under the Reagan presidency in the early 1980s.3 And although the neoliberal model is currently undergoing a severe crisis, it is nevertheless safe to say that it continues to exist today.4 My argument, then, is not that The Road is a neoliberal novel, but that no matter how much McCarthy attempts to unmark the cultural and social space in his book, it is nevertheless in many ways marked by the conditions of neoliberalism. 2 Along these lines, the essay will focus on two aspects in particular. Firstly, it will highlight the way in which the novel engages with the theme of mobility and utilizes the classic road motif, which has a long and distinct history in American literary discourse. Secondly, it will discuss the peculiar temporality (and seeming “worldlessness”) of the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting, which is expressed, among other things, in the inability to think and imagine a genuine future. In this respect, my way of analyzing The Road is to some extent inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s and Fredric Jameson’s famous claim “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2)—a theme to which I will return a number of times throughout the essay. European journal of American studies, 12-3 | 2017 The Dialectics of Mobility: Capitalism and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s Th... 2 1. American Literature and the Dialectics of Mobility 3 Throughout American history, positive images and symbols of mobility constitute a key aspect of cultural discourse, ranging from the most conservative national mythology to the desire for radical alternatives. Hence, from Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” to the countercultural imagination of Easy Rider (1969), various forms and styles of mobility are evoked as revitalizing forces able to counter tendencies of cultural apathy, stasis, and conformity. Along these lines, the motif of the road has a long history in American literary discourse, exemplified by classic texts such as Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road,” Jack London’s hobo memoir The Road (1907), or Jack Kerouac’s Beat narrative On the Road (1957). In his novel from 2006, Cormac McCarthy explicitly picks up on the road motif, but does so in a totally different way and context. In the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting, mobility has lost all implications of transgression, discovery, and the pleasures of flight, manifesting itself instead as a means of sheer survival. 4 Hence, the use of the road motif in McCarthy’s novel seems to thoroughly contradict Whitman’s usage, whose “Song of the Open Road” begins with the following verses: Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. (165) 5 Obviously, there is nothing light-hearted in McCarthy’s The Road, and hardly a sense of freedom, health, or individual choice. Here, the road is evidently not a symbol for possibility or the pleasures of adventure and uncertainty experienced by a strong- minded and physically able individual. Rather, it seems to be the only route left in a devastated and decaying environment marked by lethal violence and destruction, leaving no viable reason for hope and no way out. Though the man and his son—the novel’s two protagonists—eventually arrive at the coast by the end of the book, the road seems to literally represent a dead end. And this, I would argue, is not substantially contradicted by the novel’s mythical ending with its vague messianic allusions and the fact that, after the death of his father, the son is taken in by a family with seemingly good intentions.5 While the novel surely reflects on the state of grace, human kindness, and compassion against the backdrop of a wholly catastrophic and hostile environment, there is no evidence anywhere in the book that the sheer existence of such qualities—the survival of people, that is, who continue “to carry the fire” (McCarthy 298)—gives reason to hope for any positive change at large.6 Instead, the glimmers of goodness one encounters in The Road are nothing more than just that: rare instances of human behavior in a setting in which the only thing to effectively hope for is the provisional postponement of death. And this, one can even detect in the survivalist discourse of the father, whose strong sense of endurance is constantly accompanied by thoughts about the inescapability of death and total extinction. At one point in the novel, the reader is told that some “part of him always wished it to be over” (163). Despite his survivalist ethos, then, the father seems to be in secret agreement with his dead wife, who, before committing suicide, explained: “We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film” (57). 6 Now, taking into account the way in which The Road contradicts the conventional idealization of the road motif, one can see the novel as an engagement with the more European journal of American studies, 12-3 | 2017 The Dialectics of Mobility: Capitalism and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s Th... 3 sinister side of mobility, portraying types of imposed or forced movement rather than the “joy rides” (Kerouac 13) and ecstatic explorations in Kerouac’s novel or Whitman’s blissful wanderings on the open road. This, as various authors have noted, sets McCarthy’s novel in relation to contemporary developments such as the refugee crisis. According to a recent estimation of the UNHCR, more than 65 million people worldwide are currently on the move, most often fleeing war, violence, poverty, political oppression, or the general hopelessness present in the countries of their origin.7 This being the highest number ever in the history of mankind, it certainly makes sense to read The Road against this backdrop, thereby ascribing it with current political significance. After all, not only the man and his son explicitly identify as “refugees” (McCarthy 82), but, in a sense, every character in the book is a refugee. “In those first years,” McCarthy writes, “the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland” (28). 7 Yet, a number of aspects of the novel seem to seriously contradict the possible analogies to the plight of refugees fleeing war, poverty, or political oppression. For instance, while it might superficially make sense to identify the novel’s description of so many of its characters along the lines of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of bare life8— something which Mark Steven has undertaken in an essay on “The Late World of Cormac McCarthy” (2012)—what surely contradicts Agamben’s narrative is that in The Road there obviously is no sovereign power anymore. Instead, all there exists, on the one hand, are seemingly unprotected fugitives and, on the other, what Julian Murphet has dubbed “those prototypical visions of Freudian ‘primal hordes’ shambling along the roads like the very incarnation of the death drive” (122). People on both ends of the spectrum, however, are marked by a certain “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 257), that is, a mode of existence in which the classic opposition between nature and culture has largely disappeared. Certainly, with respect to the boy’s and his father’s self-identification as those who “carry the fire,” there is a desire to maintain certain “forms” and “ceremonies” that might help to at least uphold the memory of civilized life9—a task, however, which becomes increasingly difficult to accomplish, for, as the narrator explains, the “names of things [are] slowly following those things into oblivion” (McCarthy 93).

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