Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Tereza Šplíchalová
Conceptions of Humanity in Three Works of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.
2016
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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Author’s signature
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his patience, excellent guidance and words of encouragement. Many thanks go to all who had to cope with me and my apocalyptic frame of mind during the entire process of writing.
Table of Contents
Introduction ...... - 5 -
1 The Theory behind the End of the World ...... - 9 -
2 The Last Man ...... - 14 -
2.1 Post-Apocalypse as Personal Testimony ...... - 14 -
2.2 Society Reflected: Anatomy of Failed Ideals ...... - 22 -
3 The Scarlet Plague ...... - 30 -
3.1 Darwinism, Social Darwinism and Evolutionary Throwback ...... - 30 -
3.2 Humanity Lost: Culture, Science, Language ...... - 39 -
4 The Road ...... - 48 -
4.1 Language of Post-Apocalypse and Religious View ...... - 48 -
4.2 Motivations, Love and Hope...... - 57 -
4.3 Morality and Ethical Choices...... - 63 -
Conclusions ...... - 72 -
Works Cited ...... - 75 -
Résumé ...... - 78 -
Resumé ...... - 79 -
Introduction
Humanity has been said to be pre-occupied with a sense of crisis. Such feelings are undoubtedly reflected in literature and might as well answer the question what makes post- apocalyptic genre so appealing and popular today. Post-apocalyptic representations often examine how mankind behaves in times of crisis and what, with respect to humanity as a quality, ends and what is preserved. This thesis focuses on different conceptions of humanity in three works of post-apocalyptic fiction, namely The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, The Scarlet Plague by Jack London and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. These three novels, published within a 180 years range, provide a framework within which different conceptions are defined with respect to the oddities of the genre. The main focus is put on the aftermath of apocalypse, i.e. how, in particular areas of concern, humanity changed or developed after having to face the world’s end. The main objective aims to show how humanity is, both in terms of population and quality, treated by three different authors and what can one deduce from it with regard to the author’s historical background or personal convictions. The possibility that any apocalypse can be highly personal is discussed, as well as the option that it responds to the current affairs taking place during the author’s lifetime.
Each novel is approached individually as they, besides the issues directly connected to post- apocalypse, differ in themes and motifs connected to the conceptions of humanity. The motif of apocalypse is discussed separately as the end itself, its actual nature and the outcome of it form the core of any post-apocalyptic narrative.
In order to provide a comprehensive image, the first chapter is devoted to the theory behind the end of the world and used methodology. It traces the origin of the idea of apocalypse back to the Bible and offers several possibilities of interpretation, as well as a proposed methodology of how to understand apocalypse and whether it really has to look like the end of the world in the biblical sense. Three another interpretations are offered so as
- 5 - to illustrate how broadly the genre can be construed. The first chapter compiles relevant passages from the Bible – for this purpose, The New International Version is used. The theoretical part is largely based on James Berger’s study After the End: Representations of
Post-Apocalypse which provides a framework and a base from which one can proceed toward his/her own interpretation. Berger offers a distinct point of view on how to look on post-apocalyptic fiction and interpret it within the means of today’s culture. His ideas are implemented throughout the thesis as he provides many thoughts on the genre in general.
The second chapter studies The Last Man and is divided into two subchapters according to two main areas of concern and two different modes of interpretation. The first part reads The Last Man as Mary Shelley’s personal testimony and explores to what extent the novel can be read as autobiographical. The second part looks into its political statements and presents The Last Man as a list of failed ideologies - hereby it greatly relies on Lee
Sterrenburg’s article “The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions”. Sterrenburg gives a brief overview of the political situation in Mary Shelley’s era and explains the concept of revolution with its ideals as well as its dangers. He interprets The Last Man as Mary Shelley’s response to what is happening in her world outside her private life and thus serves as an antithesis to the first part. Both parts implement Anne K. Mellor’s observations compiled in the introduction to The Last Man where she attempts to spot the author’s persona in her writing and illustrate the way Mary Shelley’s personal life is projected in The Last Man, with regard to character construction, described events or proposed ideology. To support
Mellor’s claims, Mary Shelley’s personal journals are used, mainly to emphasize the link between herself and the narrator’s situation. To give a full credit to Mary Shelley’s contribution to the genre as known today, the first chapter also deals with the concept of the last man and his position as the narrator of post-apocalypse. The relevancy of his testimony and its significance is explained through John Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science
- 6 - and Ethics of Human Extinction, which aims to prove that without such figure, any apocalypse is in general irrelevant. The chapter further proceeds to depict a frequently occurring figure of post-apocalypse, the false prophet.
The third chapter examines The Scarlet Plague and is as well divided into two parts.
The first part reads the novel as London’s projection of Darwinist thoughts, his greatest inspiration. London presents the devolution of humanity and creates a double narrative to emphasize the distinction between the pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world. Such division marks any apocalyptic event as a divisive tool, as something that divides the world into before and after and expands the thought of apocalyptic timetable discussed in the first chapter. This part further examines London’s attempts to undermine the idea of social
Darwinism and assigns it to his political convictions that are also noticeable in London’s treatment of the concept of social equality. The second part focuses on what precisely constitutes humanity as such and what is, in the world after, inevitably lost. Culture, science and language are three pillars that, according to London, are inseparable from humanity at its evolved stage and thus act as a marker of what does it mean to be human. To understand
London’s background, the article “Jack London and Evolution: From Spencer to Huxley” by Lawrence I. Berkove is used. It provides a comprehensive view on London’s journey to accepting Darwinism with its amoral aspects and, besides other London’s works, searches for social interpretation of The Scarlet Plague. Berkove’s ideas complement those presented by Berger as both attempt to explain what happens to society when it is confronted with great changes, such as apocalypses.
The last chapter studies post-apocalyptic representations in The Road, altogether with a number of aspects connected to greatly reduced humanity. McCarthy’s minimalistic approach supports the idea of condensed humanity as he illustrates the fate of the human race on two central characters only. This thesis is particularly concerned with two major
- 7 - themes, religion and morality, since they both contribute to the eventual interpretation of
The Road. This chapter constitutes of three parts; the first one claims that The Road can be read as a highly religious novel featuring the search for New Jerusalem and aims to interpret a number of religious representations that pervade the novel. The second subchapter focuses on the central characters and their personas and defines the moral codex they promote. The third part provides a synthesis of the novel’s most complicated ethical issues and looks into how they do or do not correspond with the moral codex defined in previous subchapter. This chapter is largely based on Ashley Kunsa’s linguistic study “’Maps of the World in Its
Becoming’: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy's The Road” and Elizabeth
Tallent’s review “Thinking about The Road”. Both authors look into the complexity of ethical choices of the survivors and derive the conclusions that are in accordance with what this thesis advocates. Kunsa focuses on McCarthy’s stylistic nihilism and interprets it as a sign of new kind of fiction; her observations on the account of McCarthy’s use of proper names are of great use, just as Tallent’s polemic on the moral aspects of cannibalism.
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1 The Theory behind the End of the World
The idea of apocalypse together with its consequences is a central theme of post- apocalyptic fiction. It changes the world and enables a new one to arise from the ashes.
Apocalypse, for now simply the end of the world, in the biblical sense does not much differ from apocalypses one can find in today’s works in terms of the actual execution. What differs greatly are the connotations and the reason the apocalypse was brought about for, as well as what happens after.
James Berger points out that post-apocalypse is a genre of paradoxes, given that it follows what happens after the actual, definitive end (5). Nearly every apocalyptic fiction announces and describes the end of the world, but in the moment of the apocalypse, the fictional world presented in the narrative does not end, nor does the narrative itself (5). In short, “something remains after the end” (Berger 5). This paradox might give a brief overview of what post-apocalyptic genre precisely follows and provide a key to decide which representations can be classified as post-apocalyptic, and which not. The generally accepted definition states that post-apocalyptic fiction employs a narrative that happens after the end, after some kind of apocalypse. In order to understand the genre, it is necessary to determine what an apocalypse in fact is. According to Berger, apocalypse as such can be perceived in three senses, first one of them being “the eschaton, the actual imagined end of the world, as presented in New Testament Apocalypse of John and other Jewish and early Christian apocalypses, or as imagined by medieval millenarian movements” (5). The eschaton, or the apocalypse in the biblical sense, has its roots in the Book of Revelation, and in simple terms marks the unification of God with people, destroying everything that was before. As for the actual execution, biblical apocalypse plays on fruitful imagery of destruction – “the heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare” (The New International Version Bible, 2 Peter 3:10).
- 9 -
It describes a violent annihilation of the entire planet caused by superficial force, a world set ablaze, leaving nothing behind. The apocalypse, thus, “will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat” (2 Peter 3:11). In respect to the great flood leaving only the microcosm of Noah’s Ark, one can perceive that both apocalypses in the Bible has much to do with elements – in the end, it is nature that destroys humanity, either by water or fire; however, especially in the Book of Revelation, there are other signs that will mark the lord’s coming – “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places” (Matthew 24:6-7). The world will crumble, and people will turn against each other. Furthermore, the biblical apocalypse predicts the existence of false prophets, “for false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24). Apocalyptic signs are further enhanced with the coming of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, i.e. symbolic descriptions of different events that will happen in the end times. Although only the fourth horseman is named – “there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death”
(Revelation 6:7) – they are all traditionally given names according to their description, resulting in Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. The interpretation of the first horseman, however, fluctuates between more appellations, varying from Pestilence to Plague or
Conquest, as he “held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest“ (Revelation 6:2). Either way, these events will take place in order to end the world, the flood as a punishment for misconduct of mankind, the apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation as a final act of God’s rule. However, neither of these apocalypses is definitive, there is no void as an outcome – the first results in re-populating of the Earth owing to Noah’s Ark, the latter is followed by God’s creation of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), thus “the new Jerusalem” (Revelation 21:2). Overall, the biblical
- 10 - apocalypse allows some sort of purification, enabling humanity to arise once again, only better.
The apocalypse of today often resembles the biblical one, as many authors adopt the entire concept and cut away the idea of a superior divine entity. The second out of three senses of apocalypse mentioned above refers to a catastrophe that is not directly presented as the ultimate end, but rather “resemble[s] the imagined final ending, that can be interpreted as eschaton, as an end of something, a way of life or thinking” (Berger 5). In compliance with this definition, apocalypse does not necessarily need to feature a world ablaze, falling skies or population at war; it simply needs to bring something to an end. With this in mind, one can imagine that apocalypses do not exclusively happen on a global scale; many authors admit the existence of minor personal apocalypses affecting individuals only. The third sense refers to apocalypse in “its etymological sense: as revelation, unveiling, uncovering” (Berger
5). Such apocalypse has “an interpretative, explanatory function” (Berger 5) and ultimately ruptures the timeline and defines historical periods by “separating what came before from what came after” (Berger 5). To conclude, the apocalypse “is The End, or resembles the end, or explains the end” (Berger 5). However, the end-of-the-world literature, as mentioned before, can be constructed only on the post-apocalyptic paradox: the end is never the end.
Yet another feature proper to apocalyptic literature is what apocalypse does to narrative. It “divides the world into before and after” (Berger 5), therefore ruptures the timeline and changes everything – no matter on which scale apocalypse happens, the world after is never the same. As such, the divided narratives can be analysed separately and can be approached as two different fictional worlds having more or less in common. The continuity of the worlds depends solely on the author’s distinctive use of apocalypse and his/her decision what to keep and what to expire. The apocalypse always ends something, but in post-apocalyptic writing does not necessarily equal the end – “the end itself, the
- 11 - moment of cataclysm, is only part of the point of apocalyptic writing” (Berger 6). What comes after the end is in essence a subject of post-apocalyptic study, and of this thesis as well.
Besides the precise character of the apocalypse in respective novels, one needs to examine the apocalyptic timetable, i.e. spot the precise moment when does the apocalypse happen and what does it really change. In many novels, the apocalypse and the end do not necessarily have to be interchangeable terms as the actual end might be conditioned by other event. For instance, The Last Man’s apocalypse can be interpreted as the end of entire humankind; however, as long as there is merely one survivor, the end does not take place.
The Scarlet Plague evokes the apocalypse retrospectively, as something that happened in the past, ended the then way of life and caused evolutionary throwback. Thirdly, it is universally acknowledged that some kind of apocalypse have struck the world of The Road, though it is not included in the narrative or further specified as the reader is thrown right into the post- apocalypse with its own set of moral values only loosely based on those of today’s world.
Thus, the apocalyptic timetable provides a framework and determines what direction the narrative heads towards, whether to the catastrophe as in The Last Man, or whether the catastrophe functions as a starting point as in The Road.
If one was to define what the post-apocalyptic genre is, the fittest definition demands a narrative that happens after the end, after the apocalypse. However, with different approaches to what apocalypse is, one can grasp it rather loosely since it often overlaps with other genres. Many readers tend to seek a clear line between apocalyptic and post- apocalyptic literature, but it often blurs as the only possible distinction lies in determining what emphasis is put on what happens after the end. However, post-apocalyptic literature of today encompasses several tropes that can facilitate its identification. Some of them are based on their counterparts from New Testament, e.g. the figure of false prophet
- 12 - accompanies post-apocalyptic writing thenceforward. Central figure of post-catastrophic literature is undoubtedly the survivor, the one making the narrative possible. His/her unique qualities often singularize him from the potential rest of the survivors or other generations and turn him into a solitary hero. Moreover, the main protagonist often displays qualities that have been lost, but are desired, such as unshakeable morality or resistance to corruption or exploitation of others. As such, he/she represents humanity encapsulated in one single figure.
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2 The Last Man
Ever since its publication in 1826, “reviewers and critics have often sought out the autobiographical meaning of Mary Shelley’s disastrous novel” (Sterrenburg 327).
Interpreting The Last Man as a roman à clef is legitimate especially concerning the first part of the novel; the second part, however, brings the reader to a post-apocalyptic world where nothing really is as it used to be. The novel explores humanity both at its best and at its worst, and, according to M. Keith Booker’s The Science Fiction Handbook, is considered to be “the first postapocalyptic science fiction tale” (Booker 53). However, the complexity of the novel cannot be limited to Mary Shelley’s confession only; it is also a study of political anatomy and a survey into a chain of failed ideologies and beliefs, simultaneously laying foundations of post-apocalyptic genre as such, which, especially in retrospective look, reveals the truth about humanity. The image of the world being at the edge of an abyss is particularly resonant even today.
2.1 Post-Apocalypse as Personal Testimony
Although the second part of the novel represents a slightly more relevant section when assessing its contribution to the genre, the first part with its autobiographical undertone cannot be left out, especially if interpreting the treatment of an apocalypse. James Berger deals with this particular issue in After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and claims that it is not uncommon to find a link between the concept of trauma, in this respect the death of the beloved, and the idea of apocalypse. (19). In fact, to some extent “the apocalyptic sign is the mirror image of traumatic symptom” (Berger 21); as such, Mary
Shelley’s trauma can be the source of inspiration whose final product, The Last Man, later inspired many more writers and led to the formation of the post-apocalyptic genre of today.
The renowned duo of the late Romantic era, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley,
- 14 - comprised an omnipresent element in Mary Shelley’s life. As such, it is somehow expected that they would both appear in her novel, especially if one reads The Last Man as a memoir of their lives, or a product of coping mechanism when Mary Shelley had to deal with their loss. With this in mind, one can notice that several characters remarkably resemble the trio; however, the resemblance does not reside in particular actions or situations only, but also in the cautious way the characters are constructed.
Percy Bysshe Shelley is portrayed in quite an idealized way as Adrian, the intellectual. His “love of knowledge” (Shelley 21), “transcendent powers of intellect”
(Shelley 30) and “dreadless independence of thought” (Shelley 30) are only fragments of the idealized description Mary Shelley uses to make Adrian stand out as a representative of a superior morality. He is genuinely loved by others, the narrator “agreed in loving Adrian”
(Shelley 21) with mostly everybody and mentions that soon the “desire again to enjoy the society of Adrian became a burning thirst” (Shelley 27). He is a character who is simply
“loving all, and beloved by all” (Shelley 65) and who bases the idea of a democratic principle on the unconditioned love he treats entire mankind with. This depiction correlates with
Byron’s exclamation on Shelley’s account, saying “I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison to him” (Elf).
Nonetheless, Mary Shelley also implements some criticism regarding Shelley’s personal values and irresponsible behaviour he manifested as a husband – she lets Adrian to remain alone till the end of his life, “destined not to find the half of himself which was to complete his happiness” (Shelley 65). Anne K. Mellor explains that with this unhappy destiny assigned to him, Mary Shelley expresses her reproaches on his account, partially blaming him for the loss of two of their children (Mellor 13). Apart from not being destined to start a family or find a partner for life, Adrian also fails as a father figure of orphaned
Clara. Towards the end of the novel, there are only four people left alive, two of them being
- 15 - adults: Adrian and Lionel. As they both take responsibility over the two children, they are supposed to take care of them, raise them and try to protect them. The fact that Shelley might have been somewhat selfish when it comes to taking care of children is reflected in the last glimpse Lionel catches of Adrian and Clara drifting away. Firstly, he “caught her up, and sustained her in his arms” (Shelley 323) but a minute later, Adrian is “clinging to an oar”
(Shelley 323) alone, as he probably let her slip away. In addition, he is to some extent the one to blame for Lionel’s eventual misery, since when Lionel “objected to the dangers of the ocean and the distance of the mountains” (Shelley 320), Adrian rather irresponsibly decides to comply with Clara’s wishes and endanger the entire group, persuading Lionel to “consent, to please [him]” (Shelley 20). This situation once again turns the attention back to Mary
Shelley’s alleged accusation of Shelley having a share in the death of their children, one of them conveniently named Clara (Mellor 13).
If one accepts that Adrian is partly modelled on Shelley, it is possible to look for more analogies between Mary Shelley’s characters and real people she encountered. In this respect, Lord Raymond evinces several eminent features that markedly resemble those of
Lord Byron. This character is driven by his passions; however, “the selected passion of the soul of Raymond was ambition” (Shelley 106), which manifests itself in the way he often changes the object of his pursuit, changing back and forth from his political ambitions and the need for love. In a way, his “passions were violent” (Shelley 31) as he was “remorseless and unyielding in in the pursuit of any object of desire, however lawless” (Shelley 106).
Throughout the novel, he is best described as a conqueror, be it a conqueror of a woman’s heart, a political arena or an actual conqueror of Constantinople. As for his relationship to women, Mary Shelley does not omit Lord Byron’s notorious Don-Juanism, making his corresponding figure quite “courteous and honey-tongued” (Shelley 28) and mentioning that to all “women he was the idol” (Shelley 28). Overall, she describes him as an unbelievably
- 16 - fascinating, intense figure worthy to be unconditionally admired; to what extent this tallies with Mary Shelley’s actual relationship to Lord Byron remains a subject for discussion, though one may argue that she might have been fascinated by him as many other women have.
On the other hand, Mary Shelley notices that Lord Raymond’s ambitiousness and tyrannical passions were also the cause of his eventual downfall. He nearly loses the love of his life when he turns from being full-time “husband of Perdita” (Shelley 106) to secret
“lover of Evadne” (Shelley 106), seeking only sensual pleasure instead of deep-rooted love.
This situation and his inability to resolve it eventually leads to his hastened flight to Greece where he meets his death, once again during the passionate and ambitious act of trying to conquer Constantinople by himself, as he “addressed himself to enter the city alone” (Shelley
144). With many “incongruities of his character” (Shelley 31), Lord Raymond’s portrayal, together with the god-like, dominant personality and deep fascination he evokes in others, tallies with the contradictoriness of Lord Byron’s persona. Additionally, the striking difference between Lord Byron and Shelley is not omitted and is reflected in Lord
Raymond’s contrast to Adrian; ultimately, “no two persons could be more opposite than
Adrian and he” (Shelley 31). To Lord Raymond, “the earth was spread out as an highway
[sic]” (Shelley 31), whereas for Adrian, “all nature was akin to him; the mountains and sky were his friends” (Shelley 31).
Adrian and Lord Raymond are largely characterized through interaction with Lionel.
Taking into consideration Mary Shelley’s previous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus, one may notice that Mary Shelley tends to write herself in her novels in masculine form1. This allows her to take a very special viewpoint and enables her to, from
1 Numerous scholars identify Mary Shelley’s loneliness and frustration in the figure of the misunderstood monster, e.g. Anthony F. Badalamenti’s article “Why did Mary Shelley write Frankenstein?” - 17 - transgressed position of a female writer, articulate many issues regarding gender. Thus, it is possible that she would have identified herself with three characters at once – two female figures, and Lionel.
Lionel is the narrator, though he is the narrator of post-apocalypse, which indeed is quite an interesting position. Berger suggests that any post-apocalyptic narrative is in a way an attempt to speak out the unspeakable (7). In this fictional world, there is no one else left alive; as such, Lionel is writing down a memoir of humanity for no human audience to read, which somehow results in a post-apocalyptic paradox, when this ‘memoir’ is finally read.
Additionally, Lionel plays with this paradox in several passages when he directly addresses his readers as a “tender offspring of the re-born world” (Shelley 318), supporting the idea that in post-apocalyptic narrative and end-of-the-world literature, the end does not have to be definitive.
Lionel’s memoir also refers to a different phenomenon, once again closely related with Mary Shelley’s personal convictions – finding solace in the creative process of writing.
Therefore, Lionel is not just writing down the story of mankind for other possible generations to read, but uses the process as a personal coping mechanism for imminent crisis, i.e. what
Mary Shelley does as the author of The Last Man. Lionel’s position as the narrator and at the same time the last human alive underlines the complexity of post-apocalyptic narrative, especially with regard to Lionel being the living witness of the foregone catastrophe. In The
End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, John Leslie considers the role of a witness or a survivor and suggests that, according to many philosophers, his/her very existence can change the entire meaning of an apocalypse and its consequence:
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[Other] philosophers would say that the fact that humans have died out couldn’t be a
sad, pity, something less than ideal, unless there were somebody to contemplate and
evaluate it. (170)
As such, Lionel’s very existence makes this post-apocalyptic narrative possible. Thinking of the fictional world alone, Lionel is the sole survivor of the human race, the reason why the precedent tragedy in fact matters; the moment he ceases to exist, there would be literally nothing to be upset about, as there is no one to contemplate the situation. Leslie further suggests that a certain philosophical thinking goes even further in evaluating the problem of the last man, finding a way to see the positive side of the world’s actual end including an irreversible annihilation of human race – in certain cases, “the dying out of the human race would be fortunate, because at least a few human lives are unhappy” (171). This is closely linked to the previous statement about no one being there to contemplate; there is nothing unfortunate about the end of the human race “unless people were actually made unhappy about it” (Leslie 170). Besides, turning one’s attention to Lionel’s significance as a witness might also clarify the apocalyptic timetable mentioned above – the actual end comes when there is no one left to be affected by it.
Yet none of these specifications of Lionel’s position as the narrator truly supports the claim that he is supposed to represent Mary Shelley herself; it is his immediate situation that does. Lionel spends significant amount of time contemplating his loss, while determining the true nature of what has been lost in general. However, when the dust settles, his
“sentiment of immediate loss in some sort decayed, while that of utter, irremediable loneliness grew on [him]” (Shelley 329). In short, he is completely alone and isolated – an exploration of a certain isolation and alienation from fellow human beings can be found in many works of the Romantic era, though in case of The Last Man it is in part deprived of the theoretical aspect as it reflects an actual situation. The deep exploration of the feeling of loss
- 19 - and detailed description of utter isolation and loneliness are the most prominent features of
Lionel’s speech, sounding weightier if interpreted as a projection of Mary Shelley’s own feelings. In her journal, she wrote that after she was left alone, being the sole survivor of the
Lake Geneva group, she found herself “in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before endured” (Norton 880). This statement markedly correlates with Lionel’s – in short, there is no way he could be lonelier than being literally the last one alive. Another entry in her journal proves that she identified herself with Lionel:
The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself
as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me. (The Journals
476)
Despite the fact that Mary Shelley’s feelings probably concur mostly with those of Lionel, he is not the only character that can be regarded as her literary version – two distinctive female figures also bear her prominent features. Idris is primarily described as a mother, and allows the author to explore the wide range of mother’s fears and anxieties, up to the experience of having to deal with a loss of a child. Alternatively, Perdita shares her pragmatism and reserved approach – as for her worshipping of Lord Raymond, Mellor suggests to treat it as Mary Shelley’s half-conscious fantasy of being the only one chosen by such an eminent persona as Lord Byron, regardless of whether over any other woman or the pursuit of military glory. Perdita’s tragic end can be read as a rebuke for going to extreme in name of dog-like devotion to one’s master, be it as well the master of one’s heart.
It was already suggested that any interpretation of Mary Shelley’s treatment of gender can be quite insidious, especially with regard to her parents’ influence. Her somewhat masculine and emancipated approach can be noticed in the way she treats female figures in
Frankenstein, slaying them one by one as victims of unlucky circumstances mostly related
- 20 - to their submissive roles. Nevertheless, The Last Man employs one female character that transcends this pattern and is explored in somewhat different dimension. Clara was previously identified as a projection of Mary Shelley’s deceased daughter. With her angelic appearance and “admirable docility and patience” (Shelley 304) she is the perfect woman, who simultaneously takes pleasure in taking care of others. For Lionel, she is as dear as a daughter, but at the same time reminds him of his late beloved. The tricky part comes when
Clara finds herself among the last three survivors and her faultless behaviour suddenly changes, seemingly without a reason.
Before we quitted Milan, a change had taken place in her habits and manners. She
lost her gaiety, she laid aside her sports, and assumed an almost vestal plainness of
attire. She shunned us, retiring with Evelyn to some distant chamber or silent nook;
. . . She approached us timidly, avoided our caresses . . . Her beauty grew as a rose,
which, opening to the summer wind, discloses leaf after leaf till the sense aches with
its excess of loveliness. (Shelley 315)
Drawing attention to Clara’s growing beauty implies that Clara is changing into a young woman, she is no longer a child. Further, Clara’s “vestal plainness” may as well be a reference to the Vestal Virgin, hinting Clara’s realization of involuntarily imposed chastity.
She is truly the last woman, with no prospects for any romantic liaison; her newly awakened sexuality cannot be satisfied except for an incestual relationship or relationship with Adrian, who, regardless of the age difference, was formerly Clara’s playmate, patron and father figure as well. The burden of being responsible for re-populating the Earth is a common theme in various narratives of post-apocalyptic fiction; in The Last Man, this theme seems to be partly substituted with young girl’s frustration with her no-prospects situation. Berger argues that in many cases, “after this ending civilization, the human community seals itself from – at times it appears primarily from – sexuality” (10); this statement is however more
- 21 - applicable when there is an actual community with its intern set of rules and universally accepted values left. In this universe, there is only a triad of survivors, forming rather a family than a community. As such, sexuality remains in existence, though its awkward prospects cause frustration only.
2.2 Society Reflected: Anatomy of Failed Ideals
Reading a post-apocalyptic novel as a personal testimony is rather uncommon, unlike different interpretation that compasses the idea that apocalypse can represent a sophisticated way to respond to various social issues or historical events. Lee Sterrenburg’s article “The
Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions” describes the novel as “an anatomy or encyclopaedic survey of a number of political positions, including utopianism, Bonapartism, and revolutionary enthusiasm of various kinds” (328), i.e. various political viewpoints Mary
Shelley cancels out. With regard to the ongoing French Revolution in Mary Shelley’s day, identified by Berger as one of the “absolute breaks with the past, as catastrophes bearing some enormous or ultimate meaning” (XII) and, notably, being often “portrayed apocalyptically” (XII), one may suggest that the plague and the unfortunate fate of humankind might as well be a representation of political apocalypse. Berger further acknowledges that this phenomenon is not sporadic and is, in fact, one of the characteristic features of post-apocalyptic fiction:
Post-apocalyptic representations often respond to historical catastrophes and that,
either explicitly or obliquely, the apocalypses of post-apocalyptic representations are
historical events. (19)
The above-mentioned characters, modelled on those Mary Shelley encountered in her life,
“try to enact various reforming and revolutionary solutions, but all such endeavours prove to be a failure in Mary Shelley's pessimistic and apocalyptic world of the future”
- 22 -
(Sterrenburg 328). She converts the idea of revolution into a natural catastrophe and explores what impact it would have on actual political body, or society in general. With regard to the novel’s ending, one can suggest that each reform, revolution or political system is eventually dysfunctional as it is destined to succumb to the plague. Sterrenburg further notices that the idea of revolution is often connected to various disease metaphors in terms of disease or sickness attacking political body (329), providing that just as human body attacked by sickness, the political body would eventually recover. Such interpretation ultimately plays down the impact of any revolution, defining it as only temporary – all of this Mary Shelley subverts with creation of literal plague that does not only kill humans, but causes human institutions to crumble. The impact of her plague is definitive, without any chance of recovery or restoration.
One of the many influences one can perceive in the construction of The Last Man politics is Edmund Burke’s philosophy. According to Mellor, Mary Shelley’s sympathizes with his ideas, but also recognizes the flaws (21) whereby she lays the foundations for the subversion. Burke’s political body resembles a natural organism; thus, “if society is an organism, then it is subject to disease” (Mellor 21). In this respect, it is the plague that attacks society and decomposes it – Burke’s ideas are repeatedly quoted by Lionel, but it is Lord
Raymond who enacts them and becomes the benevolent, enlightened leader of organic-like society, bringing about gradual political reforms that contribute to the common weal.
However, it functions only as long as he truly lives up to the expectations of a benevolent leader; the moment he subdues to his passions and loses focus, all he has created crumbles and the scales tip in favour of the plague.
However, Mary Shelley “rejects not only Burke's organic metaphor but also the philosophical system that goes along with it” (Sterrenburg 333) and executes it by means of
Adrian taking Lord Raymond’s place as Lord Protector. He wishes to govern people with
- 23 - love, on democratic principle and defeat the plague with order and kind leadership. However, his revolutionary version of government gives the impression of a social experiment as it is the last option to be tried after everything else failed; either way, the plague seems to be unstoppable and consequently, Adrian’s “utopian hopes prove futile in The Last Man because nature is impervious to human will and human rationality” (Sterrenburg 335).
Moreover, his political viewpoint is positively Godwinian; its failure allows Mary
Shelley to articulate an opposition to William Godwin’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s utopian visions. In a way, she is “rebelling against the political faiths of her parents' generation”
(Sterrenburg 333), particularly against several ideas promoted by her father in The Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice. Godwin’s envisioned utopia of the improvement of human race after all leads to a victory over death, a state where humanity conquers the greatest enemy and becomes free. This thought is based on a principle that humanity suffers voluntarily – Sterrenburg evokes the famous passage from Political Justice, which reads “we are sick and we die . . . because we consent to suffer these accidents” (qtd. 333). But if humanity improves, this would no longer happen. Mary Shelley, being his critic, dismisses this idea and choses opposite direction, leading humanity to its extinction. Ultimately, she
“copes with the problem of revolution by cancelling out history itself” (Sterrenburg 331), along with a set of regimes and ideologies that are no match for the horrors of the plague. It cannot be escaped or defeated, no one is immune and each attempt to combat proves to be vain, just as does every attempt to enact a revolutionary solution.
In the novel, any political regime fails when it encounters the deciding power of nature. The vast majority of tested systems includes some leader, an individual being more important and socially higher than the others. Perhaps to eliminate the option that each failure was caused by simple human error, the author also gives a chance to absolute social equality – as the number of survivors thins out and “each life was a gem” (Shelley 223), the
- 24 - plague turns out to be the great social leveller. Lionel claims that “death and disease level all men” (Shelley 176) and observes that “poor and rich were now equal” (Shelley 223).
England, one of the most stable monarchies in the world, suddenly becomes a classless society in the late 21st century.
We were all equal now; magnificent dwellings, luxurious carpets, and beds of down,
were afforded to all. (Shelley 230)
At this point, the poorest beggar can live in a luxurious palace and enjoy all of its facilities, while the noblest lady would be left with no other option than to participate in manual work.
This ideal image of social equality is only disrupted by the fact that anyone can drop dead at any minute.
More importantly, this state of social equilibrium is not sustainable in a long term. In the after part, when all the political ideologies are overpowered by the horrors of the plague,
Mary Shelley deals with the true nature of a human mind and switches to a type of what-if narrative, illustrating that equality and non-existing hierarchy is not the natural state of humanity. The formation of various fanatical groups or sects can be spotted in many post- apocalyptic narratives, demonstrating that rational thinking can be easily supressed by fear.
This phenomenon is explored through the short episode of people turning against each other in France, leading to the formation of the “Elected People” (Shelley 278), grouping around one charismatic individual promising redemption to his followers. This fanatic leader, no longer being happy with people being equal, seizes the opportunity to grasp some power over the survivors and forces his belief upon them. One can compare this development to the formation of a number of religious groups operating today, noticing, for example, that one of the “key features of millenarian groups was the messianic leader or charismatic prophet” (Ábel 105). However, the messianic leader of The Last Man is shortly after he
- 25 - appears recognized as an “impostor” (Shelley 296) so that his actions can function as a deterrent example. The process of mass influence using unhealthy religious zeal can be found throughout history up until today, usually following the same pattern, starting with a charismatic individual that would be, as the impostor is, a subject to the same definition:
Charismatic authority, after all rests on the ability to produce ‘signs of the
miraculous’ for one’s followers and, perhaps most importantly, convincing them that
they are genuine and a sign of election. Consequently, if such signs are revealed to
be deliberately faked, then the consequences for the leader’s perceived charismatic
authority can be potentially disastrous. (Walliss 18)
If applied to The Last Man, the impostor can be followed only as long as he can sustain the image of people being elected, i.e. being immune to plague. The redemption and salvation he promises is based only on a lie covered by religious fanaticism and his charismatic appeal to others, as he demands unconditioned “obedience to the will of the Most High, made manifest to these his Elected People” (Shelley 278), realized through him. The spell is broken when the plague reappears in the summer and once again spreads even among the
“Elected” (Shelley 278). The impostor “endeavoured to conceal this event” (Shelley 296), but eventually young Juliet “denounced to the host of deceived believers, the wickedness of their leader” (Shelley 296). The disastrous consequences of the exposure include the impostor’s suicide and awakening of his followers, joining once again Adrian.
At this point, it is necessary to distinguish between these two situations and two figures of post-apocalyptic narrative, the impostor and the leader, both to be found in The
Last Man. The impostor is, however, not the only one of his kind that can be found in the novel. A set of prophets, maniacs and fanatics2 appear, trying to make use of the opportunity
2 See The Last Man 131, 189, 190. - 26 - to seize some power and influence. The leader is in the second part of the novel represented by Adrian, the person everyone eventually returns to with the same goal: seeking redemption and a way to survive. According to James F. Rinehart’s study Apocalyptic Faith and
Political Violence, this kind of leadership “necessitates three essential components: one who will guide the way forward, a willing group of followers, and an end state that they wish to achieve” (80). This definition is applicable for Adrian as well as for the impostor, though their motivations differ greatly. If one wishes to lead,
He or she must reconfirm the fundamental values of the society by reminding the
audience of who they are (identity) and why they have important meaning and value
(transcendence). (Rinehart 80)
The Last Man’s impostor fails at both of these tasks as he only identifies his followers as the for-no-reason-in-particular elected and rather than a leader acts as self-proclaimed messiah.
The identity of his audience is irrelevant as he only uses them for his own propaganda.
Adrian, on the other hand, switches from the representation of a failed democratic principle to the enlightened leader when he fights tooth and nail to preserve what was left of humanity, treating all human lives and their values as a gem. The eventual failure of his endeavour is thus not a complete loss; Lionel is, owing to Adrian’s influence, aware of both, his identity and transcendence, being all that was left of humanity encapsulated in one single figure.
In many cases, religion and religious motivations play an important part in post- apocalyptic fiction, especially if the apocalypse retains its original religious meaning. Since religious fanaticism was mentioned and criticized as the cause of “incalculable mischief”
(Shelley 273), one can reflect upon Mary Shelley’s approach to religion as such to see how she treats it in The Last Man. Despite numerous religious references scattered throughout the novel, the plague is never attributed to any Christian superior power, but to the unlimited
- 27 - power of nature only. However, along with the apocalypse labelled as “the day of judgement” (Shelley 270), one can spot the biblical reference; overall, it leaves the impression that Mary Shelley is not undermining the religious faith in general, but ridicules too obsessive devotion to religion. The derision is however executed on subtle linguistic level and can be, for instance, spotted in the way the impostor rushes into summoning the
God’s wrath on the misbelievers:
God hears you, and will smite your stony heart in his wrath; his poisoned arrows fly,
his dogs of death are unleashed! We will not perished unrevenged – and mighty will
our avenger be, when he descends in visible majesty, and scatters destruction among
you. (Shelley 278)
In essence, the impostor uses conspicuously bombastic language to threaten an alleged sinner with an apocalypse, annihilation and mass destruction after it has had already happened.
Instead of an intended threat, the statement sounds rather grotesque, especially with Adrian simple and plain response “My good fellow … I wish that you were ignorant only” (Shelley
278). This uncritical religious zeal is condemned and ridiculed, though its possible dangers and consequences are formulated. Further, Mary Shelley focuses on one’s personal faith rather than mass influence. Initially Lionel appears to be quite religious, though when he is searching for the cause of his inflicted misery, he is not directly blaming God – “I accused earth and sky – the universal machine and the Almighty power that misdirected it” (Shelley
324). The “Almighty power” does not have a strict reference to God; it could as well refer to the mighty power of nature. Shortly after, Lionel compares his situation to that of the
“monarch of waste – Robinson Crusoe” (Shelley 327), and the discourse seems to adapt to
Daniel Defoe’s religious language. Robinson Crusoe can be read as a spiritual journey that accompanies the Puritan drama of the soul – Crusoe sees God’s will manifested nearly everywhere and constantly contemplates whether he is being punished or tested. His belief
- 28 - in divine providence is, apart from his actions, manifested through his speech as he often addresses providence directly in some sort of exclamation, such as “how strange a chequer- work of Providence is the life of man!” (Defoe 142) and portrays it as a ruler, as “a secret hand of Providence governing the world” (Defoe 246), occasionally doubting its purpose.
Similarly, Lionel finds himself in a situation of utter isolation and for a moment doubts the purpose of his existence, immediately re-assuring himself that something greater rules the world. Just as Crusoe repeatedly does, Lionel exclaims “No! no! a God rules the world – providence has not exchanged its golden sceptre for an aspic’s sting” (Shelley 32), which, compared to Lionel’s previous statements and speeches, sounds rather inappropriate and could be therefore interpreted as Mary Shelley’s ridicule of too intense belief. Lionel’s providence also holds a metaphorical sceptre as a sign of a ruler and is mentioned with emphasised exclamation.
- 29 -
3 The Scarlet Plague
According to Lawrence I. Berkove’s article “Jack London and Evolution: From
Spencer to Huxley” dealing with London’s changing life perspective, “among the many intellectual influences on Jack London, none is so central and profound as that of Darwin”
(243). Darwin’s On the Origin of Species left a strong impression on London’s mind and influenced the development of his philosophy since he did not only ponder it in terms of changing morphology of living organisms (Berkove), but also attached big importance to the evolutional drawback such as subsequent devolution of human mind and thinking. The
Scarlet Plague revolves around this topic and touches upon the conception of social
Darwinism, as well as London’s notion of social atavism and degradation of society triggered by the devastating impact of the apocalypse. London presents his readers with degradation at two different levels – firstly, it is the declining society unable to deal with occurring crisis which evokes the worst in all men, and secondly, the after world with humanity turned into barbarians, forming loose tribal society with no culture existing.
London’s conception of humanity, or what does it mean being a human, largely depends on the idea that the greatest prerogative of humanity is knowledge, be it the knowledge of history, culture, arts, science or language, i.e. attributes that the newly-formed society painfully misses.
3.1 Darwinism, Social Darwinism and Evolutionary Throwback
London’s philosophy and understanding of Darwinian principle firstly occurs in the novel in its proverbial sense, related to the survival of the species. Darwin’s concept of evolution is frequently simplified to one single phrase capturing the general idea – the survival of the fittest. However, the fittest are not further specified, and thus can change greatly according to circumstances and specific situations – therefore, being fit for one
- 30 - context can at the same time mean being very unfit for the other. The Scarlet Plague illustrates the understanding of Darwinism on the example of the evolution of dogs after the catastrophe, the plague, and explains the evolution as an adaptation to circumstances where only the fittest dog, i.e. the most adapted to the new conditions, can survive. In chapter one, the narrator cursorily mentions “several wolfish dogs” (London I) crouched near one of the boys but does not really draw the reader’s attention to them until later, when Granser explains how they looked before:
In the last days of the world before the plague, there were many many very different
kinds of dogs—dogs without hair and dogs with warm fur, dogs so small that they
would make scarcely a mouthful for other dogs that were as large as mountain lions.
Well, all the small dogs, and the weak types, were killed by their fellows. Also, the
very large ones were not adapted for the wild life and bred out. As a result, the many
different kinds of dogs disappeared, and there remained, running in packs, the
medium-sized wolfish dogs that you know to-day. (London I)
In short, London demonstrates the hastened evolution of a species, resulting in only the fittest kind of dog to survive. There is less diversity in the remaining individuals, though they are more fitted for the environment. The evolution forced all the non-adapted individuals to be bred out and resulted in the new, less diverse species with better prospects and abilities to survive. This entire process can be as well described as giving preference to species at the expense of individuality, attributing every single representative with same indifference.
Berkove notes that like many other writers, London “was concerned about individuals and character” (244) and it is therefore uneasy to imagine “he would be enthusiastic about a system which was not concerned about individuals and treated them all with equal indifference as expendable” (244). Berkove further suggests that in time London found a way to accept Darwinism with its amoral aspect while maintaining the conviction that
- 31 - individuality truly was important (244), though if one rethinks it in the context of post- apocalypse, there might be no such compromise needed. In essence, London treats the dogs as a test subject; letting the apocalypse to storm into the world and ending it subsequently creates a new world where everything can happen again, even evolution – the change of conditions enables London to imagine how would the dogs evolve in equally swift period, and to put it in contrast with what happens to humanity. Therefore, in The Scarlet Plague, the post-apocalyptic narrative functions as a platform for the author to start-over and re- organize things in different way. This speculative aspect of the novel is paradoxically possible only if the existing order ends; consequently, the apocalypse is a cleansing tool providing the author with a blank sheet.
Nonetheless, the blank sheet cannot be fully applied to human race as long as there is still a person who remembers. Granser’s reminiscence of the old times reveals a lot about the former society and gives space to articulate London’s approach to social Darwinism, which, according to Berkove, was often a thorn in London’s side (249). He believed in
Darwinism, even though “his attitude toward evolution was not static” (Berkove 243), but also respected the importance of an individual, which social Darwinism ultimately denies.
Also, being a member of the Socialist Party of America, London’s convictions did not comply with the idea of a superior breed. As such, he undermines this idea in his works and many of them, including The Scarlet Plague, can be recognized as continuing “satire of social Darwinism” (Berkove 249). In one of his monologues, Granser evokes the former society of 2013 and the change of society during the plague pandemic, leading to the formation of the prowlers:
In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a
race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon
- 32 -
us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves
as well. (London IV)
This passage advocates London’s conviction that there is no superior race or the fittest group of humans. Social Darwinism, in terms of creating a superior race, “is here exposed as an illusion that leads to a dead end” (Berkove 252). London recognizes that any society consists of the large strata of civilized development (Berkove) and different classes, including the under-class described above as “a race of barbarians” (London IV) and the upper-class exploiting them greatly. It is worth noticing that the narrator sees himself as a member of the latter, and looks down on the other social group as on completely different race, having nothing in common with them. In view of London’s critique of social Darwinism, one can perceive this satirical division of races as a valid proof of its impossibility.
In addition, London examines this phenomenon further within the fictional world and depicts the former society of 2013 as widely stratified, far beyond the upper-middle-lower division, showing some traits similar to slavery or feudal system of land owners and workers:
Our food-getters were called freemen. This was a joke. We of the ruling classes owned
all the land, all the machines, everything. These food-getters were our slaves. We took
almost all the food they got, and left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and
get us more food. Any food-getter who would not get food for us, him we punished or
compelled to starve to death. And very few did that. (London II)
It appears London’s concern does not only reside in satirizing social Darwinism, but also in working class rights and elite domination. The fictional society consisting of land owners and freemen resembles far-fetched model of capitalism allowing London to criticize its amoral practices. The ruling class holds the capital, thus the land, and exploits the lower, working class that is forced to work for an absolute minimum of little food so they would
- 33 - work more. The power over human lives the land owners hold only strengthens their position as ruling class, as the leaders. Though London does not explicitly criticize this model, one can perceive its satirical connotations in the way Granser recollects this model as the ideal good old times when people “were very wise” (London II). However, the nonsensicality of such society is articulated by one of his grandsons being unable to grasp the logic of such concept, commenting only with “if any man tried to take it [the food one obtains himself] away from me, I’d have killed him” (London II).
In The Scarlet Plague, the apocalypse does not end the world completely – in fact, it ends the society and its entire culture and causes evolutionary throwback, creating the new world strikingly similar to the one that was here before. The post-apocalyptic society is almost deprived of language, culture and science and any surviving remnants of it are considered to be of no use; but lacking culture and human achievements throw humanity instantly hundreds of years back in time. London’s atavistic vision happens on two different levels: the pre-catastrophe society declining as the catastrophe advances, adopting more and more savage behaviour with no moral code, and then the society after it reached its bottom, thus turned to tribal-like society still learning to live off the resources of their environment.
The decline begins as early as the plague breaks out in California. Shortly after the first cases are confirmed, people are seized by panic, adapt the predatory-like behaviour designated to ensure their survival and basic human virtues disappear. The civilization crumbles almost immediately, with swiftness equal to the one the plague ravages mankind with. The sickness advances rapidly, “the first death came on Monday morning. By Thursday they were dying like flies” (London III), without any exception since people “died everywhere—in their beds, at their work, walking along the street” (London III). The panic advances just as quickly. London explores crisis behaviour of the masses and notices that in difficult times, basic family units and other human communities crumble as the main concern
- 34 - of each individual relates to preserving his/her own life – Granser sums it up with
“civilization was crumbling, and it was each for himself” (London III). The imagery of panic, chaos and people turning against each other behaving worse than animals is often put into contrast with what happens after, when some kind of society is re-established. In The Scarlet
Plague, London disintegrates the initial society completely:
A third of the New York police were dead. Their chief was also dead, likewise the
mayor. All law and order had ceased. The bodies were lying in the streets un-buried.
All railroads and vessels carrying food and such things into the great city had ceased
runnings and mobs of the hungry poor were pillaging the stores and warehouses.
(London III)
Pandemic fears break all the boundaries, law and order in the first place. People in horror no longer respect anybody’s personal belongings or rules of the market and simply take what they can. London emphasizes that nearly every embodiment of the law is dead, therefore there is no one to enforce the law, or even remind the terrified people how to behave. Further, the same fate stroked local representative so there is no one left in authority, with the power to prevent mass hysteria. Thus, the absence of leadership, authority or guidance causes mayhem as hundreds of people roam around aimless. With supplies cut short and order non- existing, civic duties meaning nothing, institutions stop working as well and deprive people of basic human rights and dignities, such as the right for proper burial. In fear, people do not have the capacity to take proper care of their dead as they did ever since Palaeolithic era. In consequence, the ignorance of one of the main features of humanity worsens the situation even further as the un-buried bodies hasten the spread of infection. The carelessness does not really pay off. Apart from this, the exodus of millions of people “carrying the plague with them” (London III) causes the pestilence to truly turn into pandemic. In London’s depiction, people run from the cities and spread out exactly as the plague, ruining everything
- 35 - in the way in the headless attempt to save their lives, “pillaging the farmers and all the towns and villages on the way (London III) and leaving those who stayed to tackle with “low creatures [who] gave rein to their bestiality and fought and drank and died” (London III). In contrast to Mary Shelley’s vision whereby the survivors stick together and consider each life to be “a gem” (Shelley 223), London depicts humanity at its worst, with no respect to human life as “murder and robbery and drunkenness were everywhere” (London III). With millions of people dying, the value of human life seems to have two distinct attitudes, i.e. being too precious as mankind thins out, or being absolutely irrelevant as there is a number of people dying anyway.
Berger claims that “in many science fiction post-apocalypses, what survives is some version of humanity in the midst of the inhuman” (10). This statement applies to The Scarlet
Plague as well, as even among this chaos Granser, at this point still Professor James Howard
Smith, restrains himself from mob violence and insanity, even though it puts his life in danger. His decision to preserve life in all forms is not unconditional, not when encountered with necessity; Smith’s “absolute, wanton act” (London IV) of not shooting a random prowler results in his mate being dead and Smith forever regretting that he did not shoot the prowler in the first place (London IV). However, his role as being the survivor, thus humanity within the meaning of quality encapsulated, becomes apparent in the way he functions among the new society that consists only of those from post-apocalyptic generation, not remembering the world as he does.
London re-creates this new world from a scratch and models it on the base of his atavistic visions. The new tribal society has some unconscious links to the previous one, known only to the narrator and the reader, which brings quite amusing note to the text as it is taken seriously by the tribe members. For instance, naming the great tribe as “the
Chauffeurs” (London II) after its founder’s former occupation and letting the members in
- 36 - utter ignorance of what a chauffeur was makes their self-imposed social superiority over other tribes sound silly. The Chauffeur tribe is a good example of London’s playfulness with class and social hierarchy; instead of handling the plague as the great leveller3, London does not use it to force equality, but uses the apocalypse to tip the scale and reverse it upside down, as in the inserted cameo of lady Vesta Van Warden and her chauffeur, Bill. After the apocalypse, her former social superiority disappears and she is degraded to a role of a tribal woman, with Bill being her chief. This development can be also interpreted as intentional revenge of the former oppressed class, since Bill happens to be the rare example of a person whose life was actually improved by the apocalypse:
He said that in the old days he had been a servant, had been dirt under the feet of men
like me and of women like Vesta, and that now he had the greatest lady in the land
to be servant to him and cook his food and nurse his brats. 'You had your day before
the plague,' he said; 'but this is my day, and a damned good day it is. I wouldn't trade
back to the old times for anything.' (London V)
Bill’s primitive disposition allows him to ignore the loss of culture, science, art and life standards; his desire was to move upwards on the social ladder, and the apocalypse and the new order of the post-apocalyptic world enables him to do so. In addition, with the roles reversed he is now in authority over formerly unreachable woman and can exercise that authority at any time – the fact that he is aware of this and is happy about it shows Bill as a man on a petty ego trip, healing his wounds from previous life. According to Berger, “the study of post-apocalypse is a study of what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed” (7). By incorporating Bill’s story into the narrative,
3 See chapter II: Mary Shelley’s approach. - 37 -
London shows that what survives any apocalypse and blooms even in savage tribal society is a man’s ego and the need for superiority.
London further expands on this idea in the passage devoted to the envisioned destiny of humankind. In the introductory part it was mentioned that one of the most important things one can trace in post-apocalyptic fiction is what the entire experience teaches us about humanity. In London’s vision, the apocalypse reveals that the world will go on and on in the same pattern, which somehow makes any human’s evolution sound unimportant, considering it would always reach the same peak. London recognizes the three “eternal types
– the priest, the soldier, and the king” (London VI) which occur repeatedly in human history.
This model is illustrated on Granser’s three grandsons, one by one arguing for particular type as they are envisioning their future as a warrior or a witch-doctor. At this point, the narrator touches upon an interesting paradox; out of the three savages, the seemingly most cultured one happens to be the most dangerous as well. The two other boys argue about the pros and cons of becoming a priest or a soldier while the third one reveals his ambitions of becoming the king:
"I'm going to get Granser to remember this here gunpowder stuff," Edwin said softly,
"and then I'll have you all on the run. You, Hare-Lip, will do my fighting for me and
get my meat for me, and you, Hoo-Hoo, will send the death-stick for me and make
everybody afraid. And if I catch Hare-Lip trying to bust your head, Hoo-Hoo, I'll fix
him with that same gunpowder. Granser ain't such a fool as you think, and I'm going
to listen to him and some day I'll be boss over the whole bunch of you." (London VI)
Even though Edwin is the only one who manifests some interest in the old knowledge, he plans on using it to subdue the others and gain superiority over the solider and the priest.
These impulses of the boys are described as natural, only revealing “the wisdom of all the
- 38 - ages” (London VI) lying dormant in them, since the pattern of “some will fight, some will rule, some will pray” (London VI) applies to any functioning society that ever existed.
Moreover, this passage also touches upon the possible dangers of knowledge in the wrong hands. It is further illustrated on the “medicine-men, [who] call themselves doctors”
(London VI), being nothing but “liars and charlatans . . . performing a thousand abominations” (London VI), making use of people’s fears and superstitions. Various shamans, witch-doctors and prophets with some link to the supernatural are nowadays tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction, often illustrating that people need something to believe in, be it the prophet seemingly chosen by God4 or a witch-doctor with a death-stick. In many post- apocalyptic narratives, these impostors are exposed when confronted with common sense, i.e. with Adrian in The Last Man, and Professor Smith in The Scarlet Plague, exclaiming that “the doctors must be destroyed, and all that was lost must be discovered over again”
(London VI). Such exclamation refers to Granser’s urge to preserve knowledge or re- discover it in order to move humanity forward. He wishes to speed up the development by giving his grandsons little ‘hints’ they should pass on their progenies; such as the “wonderful thing called steam” (London VI).
3.2 Humanity Lost: Culture, Science, Language
The atavistic vision is distinguished by the prehistoric way of living where, as characterized by London, three essential components of advanced humanity are missing – culture or arts, science and language. The former is mainly present in Granser’s approach to books containing the ancient knowledge and wisdom, which he carefully guards. The former professor still shows affection for culture; he finds pleasure in talking to Vesta Van Warden about “art, and books, and poetry” (London V) and more than the culture itself misses equal
4 See chapter II: the impostor leading “The Elected” (Shelley 278). - 39 - companions to fulfil his intellectual needs. As he painfully realizes the decline humanity has gone through, he sets himself up to a single task – to preserve as much as possible for future, more cultured generations:
I have stored many books. In them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a
key to the alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print.
Some day men will read again; and then, if no accident has befallen my cave, they
will know that Professor James Howard Smith once lived and saved for them the
knowledge of the ancients. (London VI)
His devotion to move humanity forward proves to be inefficient, though he approaches it quite systematically as he envisions the possible progress of human knowledge from hieroglyphic or picture writing to alphabet that would eventually unlock the wisdom preserved in the stored books. This task, however, also implies his personal involvement in the case and his desire to be remembered, to inform others about his very existence and gain recognition for what he has done. Similar doings can be found in The Last Man, in two distinct versions. Firstly, Lionel’s message to the empty world written in three languages, saying “Verney, the last of the race of Englishmen, had taken up his abode in Rome“ (Shelley
332), which can be read as rather practical tool to let any possible survivors know they are not alone, but with respect to his indomitable conviction that he truly is the last man, resembles more a written testament that he existed. This theory is confirmed in the dedication of Lionel’s memoir with sole purpose to “leave a monument of the existence of Verney, the
Last Man” (Shelley 339). Unlike Granser, Lionel does not soothe himself in noble task to mediate the knowledge, but shows the same desire to be known. Granser’s urge to let the world know that he “once lived” (London VI) therefore does not only express one’s need to left something behind after one passes; it is a statement saying that the moment he dies, all wisdom would die with him, until rediscovered. However, later in the narrative Granser
- 40 - realizes that his presence in this world does not bear such significance, and paradoxically expresses his hope for future by destroying all the cave-stored books. His initial intention to facilitate the evolution proves to be vain and impossible, just as storing the old wisdom written in books – “whether they remain or perish, all their old truths will be discovered, their old lies lived and handed down” (London VI). Eventually, it can be read as London’s lesson on learning – even though humanity falls backwards, it will eventually be rebuilt, and all the arts rediscovered, with or without anybody’s attempt to ease the journey.
Granser’s re-told stories also help him reconcile with the past. Besides the urge to make one’s existence known, the post-apocalyptic narrator, therefore the survivor, is by his unique position given an “epistemic privilege” (Berger 48). His testimony functions as the only connection with the old world and “often acquires an aesthetic authority as well”
(Berger 48), the narrator himself being the authority of knowledge. Overall, “the survivor has seen, and knows, what no one else could see and know” (Berger 48); therefore, his testimony cannot be rationally opposed. Granser’s tales of the old world are not taken seriously and are heavily doubted, though none of the grandsons can produce a solid argument to disprove them. As such, any characterization of the former world and its downfall reside in the survivor and his task to re-tell it. Bearing in mind that Granser is not the only narrator of The Scarlet Plague, one can perceive that London’s distinct use of metafiction works for post-apocalyptic genre efficiently. It was already suggested that
London cuts a clear line between the world before and after the catastrophe; the division is even more emphasized by the double narrative, the frame narrative describing the outcome of the apocalypse, therefore the very post-apocalyptic world, and Granser’s narration that solely constructs an entire fictional world, the world before the apocalypse. The boundaries eventually blur, but that does not take away Granser’s responsibility for accurate message.
The difficulties of post-apocalyptic narrator were already mentioned in respect to Lionel’s
- 41 - position – his narrative is essential in terms of the impact of the apocalypse, so as to make the apocalypse actually matter; Granser’s narration has rather informative function that creates the important link to the past. His narration is a survivor’s vision of what was lost, his unique ability to compare the two worlds is the essence of his epistemic privilege, his authority of knowledge and aesthetics. Therefore, his conclusions of how the world works and operates in circles do have a solid base.
With this in mind, one can accept Granser’s take on science. Science as such cannot be even imagined; the new generation born after the plague seems to be deprived of abstract thinking, or is at least very suspicious and careful in accepting any existence of something one cannot see or touch, such as the invisible micro-organic world Granser tries to explain:
You're a queer un, Granser, talking about things you can't see. If you can't see 'em,
how do you know they are? That's what I want to know. How do you know anything
you can't see? (London II)
Hoo-Hoo’s response to Granser’s depiction of germs proves his inability to imagine something beyond the unaided eye scale. Later on, Hare-Lip objects on its existence as well, accusing Granser of “gabbl[ing] about them as if they was anything, when they're nothing at all [sic]“ (London III), trying to produce a logical argument saying that “anything you can't see, ain't, that's what“ (London III). To the boys, the very idea of tiny invisible world full of dangerous germs with power to kill of mankind seems rather ridiculous. Hare-Lip further comments on his predecessors’ doing with „fighting things that ain't with things that ain't!
They must have been all fools in them days“ (London III), a statement that makes Granser cry. In short, as mankind starts over, any scientific progress originally achieved throughout centuries disappear, no matter how hard Granser tries to explain where the scarlet plague came from. However, it might be partially Granser’s fault as the boys consider his stories to
- 42 - be only a “babble” (London I); in some respect, they believe in the supernatural, bad luck, ghosts or shaman-like practices of their doctors, but not in anything too scientific that
Granser gabbles about.
These beliefs stand in a stark contrast to the pre-apocalyptic world where people were highly dependent on science, and had great faith in it. In the old days Granser speaks of, “the bacteriologists fought all these sicknesses and destroyed them“ (London II), so it felt natural to have faith in them when the new germs appeared – they “were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past“ (London II). This unconditioned faith in science eventually proves to be overestimated as none of the world’s top bacteriologist manages to stop the plague. Granser mentions that
“it was in London that they first isolated it“ (London II) and eventually someone “had discovered the serum for the plague“ (London II) but it was too late, the serum never got to
America and in fact, the news of its discovery were “the last word, to this day, that we of
America ever received from Europe“ (London II). London’s message, however, does not criticise science as such or labels it as overestimated – it resonates as a warning for society being too dependent on work of others, no matter how crucial their work is. In The Scarlet
Plague, bacteriologists who fought the germs “were heroes” (London III) for their incessant endeavour to stop it, even though they “were killed in their laboratories even as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death” (London III). These heroes of the doomsday are distinguished by extraordinary bravery and effort to save mankind, regardless of the danger they expose themselves to, or the horrors they must have seen. Granser emphasizes that “as fast as they perished, others stepped forth and took their places” (London III), knowing that they predecessor died a horrible death, but still pushing forward, even though they “had so little chance in fighting the germs” (London III). Granser admits that “the micro-organic world remained a mystery to the end“ (London II), but makes sure to appreciate the effort.
- 43 -
It is the swiftness of the plague that makes it so difficult to combat, as it, similarly as in The Last Man, does not avoid anyone and only very few are immune or uninfected. Taking into account Berger’s argument that any “apocalyptic event, in order to be properly apocalyptic, must in its destructive moment clarify and illuminate the true nature of what has been brought to an end” (5), it is necessary to define the true nature of what was lost. In
The Scarlet Plague, it is an entire civilization and all the perks of civilized world with the vast majority of population that ceases to exist; as such, the apocalypse, or the plague, can be seen as a tool to shuffle things around when they are heading nowhere. In addition,
Granser claims that one of the main factors influencing the spread of the infection was overpopulation:
In spite of all these diseases, and of all the new ones that continued to arise, there
were more and more men in the world. This was because it was easy to get food. The
easier it was to get food, the more men there were; the more men there were, the more
thickly were they packed together on the earth; and the more thickly they were
packed, the more new kinds of germs became diseases. (London II)
With this passage, London evinces good understandings of the science of contagion and population growth, together with its dangers and prophetic warning that someday, with all the new germs arising, too destructive and lethal one can appear and wipe out humankind.
Paradoxically, the apocalypse is simultaneously the consequence and the solution to the overpopulation problem as there are few individuals spared, destined to re-populate the earth and re-discover what was once known and lost. For London, humanity at its civilized state is by no means flawless, but highly desirable and somewhat expected – The Scarlet Plague and its scarce philosophical passages teaches its readers that no matter how far humanity falls, it will always arise. Too many people walking on the earth were exterminated only to
- 44 - reach this point again. There is great hope in it, but also great pessimism, depicting humanity as being constantly on a path to its destruction.
Moreover, people born after the apocalypse evince somewhat devolved ability to use language whose changed character marks London’s precision in constructing the fictional world. Whereas in the world before, Californians use undefined Standard English, in the world after language use has undergone some serious changes. It would appear as if the language is a subject to devolution as well – at least its corrupt usage would signify that
English reverted to the ancestral type as well, having no extended vocabulary that is not needed for everyday practical use. This new type of English is particularly pronounced during an interaction with Granser whose English has devolved a bit, but still evinces qualities typical for common usage, especially when he gets carried away in some of his monologues. The narrator declares that “even the speech of Granser was so corrupt that were it put down literally it would be almost so much nonsense to the reader” (London I), i.e. deliberately admitting that the characters’ utterance is transcribed so as to be comprehensible to the readers outside the post-apocalyptic world. Granser’s corrupt usage of English is an outcome of himself adapting to the circumstances, be it to facilitate the communication between him and other tribe members, or simply falling out of habit due to having no one to talk to. His language, however, changes when he gets into his typical babbling; “in these rambling soliloquies his English seemed to recrudesce into better construction and phraseology” and “slowly purged itself into pure English” (London I), a phenomenon defined by sentences growing longer, being “enunciated with a rhythm and ease that was reminiscent of the lecture platform” (London I). It looks as if getting lost in one’s thoughts makes him forget about the catastrophe and return him instantly to the times when his occupation was to, as understood by Hoo-Hoo, “just talk, talk, talk” (London I).
- 45 -
The language his grandsons use noticeably “lacked the greater portion of the words he used” (London I), so it seems accurate that “when he talked directly with the boys [his
English] lapsed, largely, into their own uncouth and simpler forms” (London I). Granser is simply adapting, though he probably cannot imitate their language correctly. At the beginning of this chapter, post-apocalyptic narrative was defined as study of what disappears and what remains; same definition can be applied on the post-apocalyptic language London invents by taking so much away, leaving only what is necessary to communicate basic ideas.
The boys’ speech was “truly a gabble” (London I):
They spoke in monosyllables and short jerky sentences that was more a gibberish
than a language. And yet, through it ran hints of grammatical construction, and
appeared vestiges of the conjugation of some superior culture. (London I)
Overall, their speech is quite economical, lacking any flow or rhythm whatsoever. The presence of some sort of grammatical construction or remnants of conjugation signify that it evolved from some comprehensive system but did not preserve its complexity – having in mind that nearly every tribe was founded by rather barbaric representative of former lower working class, one can imagine that in time it could have mutated even further. Granser, being formerly a member of academia, is likely to have better starting position, though now his language is “approximately an English that had gone through a bath of corrupt usage“
(London I). Moreover, his speech is notably different and paradoxically unconventional as the majority of current population descended from working class survivors – at one point,
Hare-Lip rebukes him for it, ordering him to “talk sensible, Granser, like a Santa Rosan ought to talk. Other Santa Rosans don't talk like you” (London I).
The difference of initial social background can be seen in the knowledge the boys are lacking, or rather the terminology they are not familiar with. They are the second generation
- 46 - born after the apocalypse, but already unfamiliar with such concepts as money or education
(London I), probably because their grandparents did not see any use in talking about history; for instance, Chauffeur exercised unquestioned dominance over educated Vesta Van Warden and prevented her from talking to others. As for himself, “all he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages“ (London V) with occasional exception devoted to
“his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague” (London V). Owing to his brutish disposition, his progeny does not hesitate to call Granser’s wife “hash-slinger” (London I), but does not fully understand what ‘a lady’ means (London I). Overall, one may draw a conclusion that in the world where education is no longer a privilege but rather a burden, language adapts simultaneously with its users. As such, the form that remains is highly influenced by the persona of its preserver and the form, vocabulary and syntax he shares with his offspring, themselves doing the same afterwards. The mingling of the tribes assures its uniform development, but cannot compensate for its initial constituents.
- 47 -
4 The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s take on apocalypse is in many ways unique. The Road revolves around a very intimate relationship between father and son and their journey across the wasteland. Mankind is greatly reduced, and those who survived pose a great threat to the central couple. McCarthy conjures a world where everything is reduced to only a few surviving entities that are about to perish as well. Such doing has a parallel in McCarthy’s minimalist approach to language and naming, which puts language among the representations of post-apocalypse. Further, what is left of humanity in The Road struggles with many ethical issues and choices that the new world bring about, and that are necessary for survival. The novel offers a clear distinction of what is considered to be wrong or right and has therefore a lot so say about one’s morals. Strong sense of morality pervades the entire novel and contributes to the interpretation that in the end, The Road can be read as highly religious text.
4.1 Language of Post-Apocalypse and Religious View
It was already suggested that post-apocalyptic language often employs many oddities, such as for instance McCarthy’s approach to punctuation or his reluctance to use it. The absence of any unnecessary commas, colons or quotation marks can be at first sight confusing, although McCarthy argues it is all in the name of clarity - during an interview
McCarthy gave in 2008, he claims that “there’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks” (00:24) and goes on with stating that he “believe[s] in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it” (01:59). His stylistic convictions have great impact on the final character of the text and are by all means significant as a representation of the post- apocalypse. The final part of previous chapter deals with this phenomenon in The Scarlet
Plague and states that many post-apocalyptic worlds include somewhat changed, devolved
- 48 - or simply different, apocalyptic language which eventually helps reconstruct the world after a catastrophe. However, London’s devolved language operates only on a theoretical level as the readers are told how the characters would speak; McCarthy approaches it stylistically and creates a novel where all the “weird little marks” he spoke of are simply missing. In general, it invites all different kinds of interpretations, among them one that sees The Road outside any restrictive classifications of a genre – Ashley Kunsa in her essay “’Maps of the
World in Its Becoming’: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” posits
The Road as an argument for “new kind of fiction, one that survives after the current paradigm of excess collapses, one that returns to the essential elements of narrative” (57).
Therefore, at least according to some scholars, The Road is not only a novel dealing with representations of the post-apocalypse or following the world after its end; it is simultaneously a novel that itself, outside the fictional world, would remain after some kind of end and would be “the one that survives”. With this in mind, one can argue that The Road to some extent surpasses the usual paradigm of post-apocalyptic metafiction depicting two worlds, one before and one after; the novel itself intervenes as well with the world of its readers. Kunsa further suggests that the novel “is best understood as a linguistic journey toward redemption” (58), which implies the possibility to read the real-life journey of The
Road metaphorically.
McCarthy’s reluctance to use punctuation is not the only feature that makes the language of The Road different; it is as well his restrictive use of proper names and their general absence. The main characters are simply referred to as “the boy” (McCarthy 2) and
“the man” (McCarthy 174), or “Papa” (McCarthy 3), so any occurrence of a proper name calls for special attention. Moreover, the characters are not the only nameless feature that pervades The Road; in fact, McCarthy grants his entire narrative certain anonymity since the novel does not provide any time or geographical specification and neither is the type of
- 49 - catastrophe specified. According to Elizabeth Tallent’s review “Thinking About ‘The
Road’”, the anonymity of the narrative, or its “noncommittal vagueness” is in fact what
“invites all kinds of believer, from evangelical to ecowarrior, along for the ride” (14). The novel could be set anywhere, and apply to anyone. However, the general consensus, with regard to McCarthy’s other novels and John Hillcoat’s 2009 film adaptation, sees the novel as set in south-eastern U.S., which does not disprove any hypothesis that the novel can be set in, for instance, different continent, provided that there is a coast and a possibility to travel southward to it. Nonetheless, searching for a proper geographical location is not vital in terms of interpretation and the impact of the novel. The anonymity that surrounds it only makes the novel more universal and therefore more relevant as it speaks volumes in terms of humanity as such. Furthermore, certain vagueness breaks links with the past world before the apocalypse, as “omitting the names of the pre-apocalyptic world allows the ruined places
(and the ruined civilization of which they were a part) to be left in the past” (Kunsa 64). The nameless characters in the nameless world can be read as a part of McCarthy’s narrative strategy, or a way to distinguish the world before from the world after. The apocalypse changed the world so much that names in general no longer mean anything and are no longer needed. The world in which one needed to know the name of the street he lives in or for instance one’s birth certificate number are inevitably gone, therefore there is no need to keep them alive as anachronisms.
However, the narrative cannot function without any means of identification at all, so it “often relies on pronouns for character identification” (Kunsa 61). The use of pronouns draws “away as little attention as possible from action verbs” (Kunsa 61) and therefore emphasises the action itself while expecting the readers to be able to distinguish what is happening to whom. Following passage describes the boy being assaulted by “the roadrat”
(McCarthy 68) and the man’s prompt reaction:
- 50 -
He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest
with the knife at his throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung
with him and levelled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on
both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood
bubbling from the hole in his forehead. (McCarthy 68)
The focus is by all means on action and action verbs describing the situation in its swiftness.
However, it is also noticeable that McCarthy relies on his readers’ ability to rationally distinguish who is at what point in the text “the man”, as the personal pronoun he does not have a constant reference. The absence of any antecedent the pronoun would refer to causes a little ambiguity, but more importantly emphasises the anonymity mentioned above. In the post-apocalyptic world, they are both just men, without a need to distinguish whether one happens to be a father or a marauder. He simply engages in a situation and it is only the outcome that shows who survived. After Papa grabs the boy and runs away, he puts him down and later “he wiped the blood from his face and held him” (McCarthy 69). It is not definitely clear whose face was cleaned and who held whom, but in general, it does not really matter, providing that the outcome would remain the same. The language, however, fights for survival as well. In “The Lonely Road”, Mark Fisher notes that the “language [of The
Road] itself is dying and those who speak it will surely be extinct within a very few generations” (14). Such phenomenon is not a privilege of The Road, since language is a system proper to humans, and if humanity is dying out, which in The Road undoubtedly is, the language is consequently doing the same. Same phenomenon appears in The Scarlet
Plague when London depicts language as no longer necessary to use and therefore declining, or in The Last Man when Lionel realizes that there is, in fact, no one left alive to read his memoir, i.e. language in written form is as meaningless as spoken.
- 51 -
The language is disappearing, but so is anything else in the world. Post-apocalyptic landscape often resembles a wasteland where very little remains when compared to the world before, but McCarthy’s wasteland keeps alive as little as possible. It is not just devastated, but nearly empty as well. McCarthy depicts a world where nothing is left and vividly portrays a landscape where anything to relieve the eye from the soul-destroying sameness of ashy, grey, dead land is a rare exception:
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? (McCarthy 93)
The man explains the absence of naming, as well as how much is truly left in the world of
The Road. The world is shrinking, and the vast majority of what belonged there is disappearing along with the names. Animals are gone, there are no birds, therefore no names for them. Food is very scarce and does not require a name. “The things one believed to be true” can refer to the man’s shaken system of moral values, or all those former securities one simply took for granted. Nonetheless, the world is nothing but a raw core. The absence of colours is noticeable throughout the narrative as the only repeatedly appearing colours are grey or black. However, as with the proper names, any occurrence of any other colour is not coincidental. In majority it relates to a situation or an object connected to the past, such as
“an old blue enamelled pan” (McCarthy 130) or the “blue wall of the mountain” (McCarthy
19) where the man last saw a falcon. Colours are also connected to dreams, or eventually expectations and hopes. Whereas the reality is mostly grey or black, the man has “dreams so rich in color” (McCarthy 20) and interprets them as a calling of a “siren world” (McCarthy
20). The expectations and hopes include colours as well, for instance the boy’s inquiry “is it
[the sea] blue?” (McCarthy 194) followed by the man’s response to the boy’s disappointment
- 52 - of greyish reality “I’m sorry it’s not blue” (McCarthy 230). To conclude, the apocalypse destroyed nearly everything and left the world dying with only few survivors walking the colourless world.
Despite the fact that the precise nature of the apocalypse is not revealed, McCarthy gives away enough for some kind of interpretation. He minutely describes the surroundings and the outcome of the apocalypse, but keeps his readers in the dark about what actually happened, or what caused it in the first place. In summary, McCarthy’s apocalypse is violent, devastating though not terminal to mankind, and unexpected. In fact, people are the only species to survive – both animals and plants are dead, the planet itself is dying. Everything is covered in ash and one can perceive a significant climate change as the planet “is getting colder every day” (McCarthy 43). The man mentions that “all was burnt to ash” (McCarthy
13), implicating that one of the most destructive powers was fire. The moment of apocalypse is marked by “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions“ (McCarthy 54), and “a dull rose glow in the windowglass“ (McCarthy 54). For all that matters, the source can be anything from a nuclear bomb, an astray comet to a massive seismic activity – it caused inferno that swallowed the earth. Moreover, the apocalypse comes unexpected, “the clocks stopped at 1:17” (McCarthy 54) and then everything was changed. Despite the clear identification of the moment of the apocalypse, it did not simply end the world at once. It is not, as mentioned above, instantly terminal, but causes a gradual decline as a response to a catastrophe. The man regrets that there are no birds anymore, but remembers that “in those early years he’d . . . lay listening to flocks of migratory birds” (McCarty 54); thus, the birds, most probably as other animals, died out in a process and same fate is happening to humans.
They somehow survived, but immediately begin to behave the worst: “within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road“ (McCarthy 33). Some people tried to escape from
- 53 - the prevailing violence so “in those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing“ (McCarthy 28). It only took a year to form savage groups of cannibals devouring one another or, given the number of corpses, to start a war. Additionally, those human bodies the man and the boy encounter are “sprawled in every attitude“ (McCarthy
48) as the people met their death unexpectedly, being on the road or sitting on their porch.
Overall, given the unexpectedness, violence and fire, McCarthy’s apocalypse notably resembles the biblical one discussed in the first chapter. The cause of apocalypse is not specified, therefore does not disprove some kind of divine intervention. There is fire, war and suffering, but all eventually leads to something good when The Road reveals its uplifting message. The unexpectedness or the notion that life could end any minute also applies to both biblical apocalypses:
For the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving
in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what
would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at
the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:38-39)
Similarly, people in The Road do not see it coming and cannot prepare for it. They are engaged in their everyday activities when the apocalypse comes and takes them away. “The coming of the Son of Man” indicates the second apocalypse described in the Book of
Revelation. At this point, one can perceive an interesting paradox –there is truly no way to see the apocalypse coming, neither according to the Bible nor in The Road, but both feature a figure of a prophet that somehow anticipates the catastrophe. The Bible mentions a number of false prophets wrongly marking the coming of the lord, though given the period the anticipation stretches across, there is a good chance one prophet would be eventually right.
Such prophet can be found in The Road in the figure of Ely, who simply “knew this was coming” (McCarthy 178).
- 54 -
The notion of faith and belief in general pervades the novel from the very beginning, but it appears to be centralized around Ely, the old man the boy shows mercy to. This character stands out in two ways defined above as significant – with his “grayblue eyes”
(McCarthy 174) he is associated with some colour, and moreover, he is the only character who is named. Ely, probably being an abbreviation for Elijah, can be an embodiment of the biblical prophet predicting the end:
See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of
the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts
of the children to their parents. (Malachi 4:5-6)
Ely “knew this was coming . . . [and] always believed in it” (McCarthy 178), thus some prophetic quality is assigned to him. Also he strikes right at the heart of the man with his remarks about the boy and is alternately starring at the boy and the man in the firelight without any explanation, only “God knows what those eyes saw” (McCarthy 180). Later the man asks whether he thought the boy “was an angel” (183) and continues with “what if I said that he’s a god?” (183) on which Ely does not provide any unequivocal answer, hoping it not to be true, because “to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing” (183), whereby he admits some former existence of more gods. As for God of Christianity, Ely literally denies his existence with “there is no God” (180) and subsequently adds a counterstatement of “there is no God and we are his prophets” (181). Being a prophets of non-existent God can be interpreted as a metaphor for the meaningless of their terminal existence, or possibly Ely’s twisted way of telling the truth, i.e. there is a God. Such doing can be perceived in the way he treats his name – the only name in the novel might not eventually be correct, providing the negative response to “Is your name really Ely?” (182).
Ely seems to be concerned with anyone knowing his name for a reason:
- 55 -
I couldnt trust you with it [sic]. To do something with it. I dont want anybody talking
about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk
about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody.
(McCarthy 182)
Firstly, the man does not have any compromising information about Ely, and more importantly, there is no one to tell it to, unless Ely has something else in mind, some superior entity watching over. Thus, revealing his real name would make him vulnerable, he can be punished by God – as long as he keeps his name secret, he can be anybody and does not have to be responsible for anything he says – such as, for instance, a claim that God does not exist.
Besides this hypothesis about Ely, it is the boy who is closest to be religious, or is the one who makes the man believe. Ely suggests that “maybe he [the boy] believes in God”
(McCarthy 185) but the man does not “know what he believes in” (185). However, when the man fires a flare, the boy comments “they couldnt see it very far, could they, Papa?” (263) and engages in following conversation:
Who? Anybody. No. Not far. If you wanted to show where you were. You mean like
to the good guys? Yes. Or anybody that you wanted them to know where you were.
Like who? I dont know. Like God? Yeah. Maybe somebody like that. (McCarthy
263)
In this passage, McCarthy depicts a child in a godless world with an urge to signal God that he exists. This aspect of the novel is however debatable, especially due to the fact that the boy’s belief, like his morals, does not have a base in the pre-apocalyptic world since he was born after the catastrophe already begun. The man, on the other hand, perceives the child as a God’s sign, or partially an embodiment of a god and sees the angelic-like quality in him.
Hence, “if he is not the word of God [then] God never spoke” (McCarthy 3). Although the
- 56 - man’s relationship to God is quite problematic and constantly evolving, his belief does have a solid base and some of it was adopted by the boy, who, in the upshot, believes in
“somebody like that”, best interpreted as a belief in humanity. Also, in their little closed up world, they idealize each other almost to a personal god – the man proposes such idea to Ely, and the boy in the end “tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father”
(McCarthy 306) instead.
4.2 Motivations, Love and Hope
The novel revolves mostly around father-son relationship, which can be chosen to reflect the relationship between a man and his creator, i.e. God. However, more emphasis is put on preserving the family as it is, therefore surviving dehumanization with one’s humanity intact. This endeavour is evident in the man’s attempt to, despite the crisis, be a good father.
He protects the boy at all costs, attempts to cover the basic necessities of life but also tells him uplifting “stories of courage and justice” (McCarthy 42) and teaches him to read. He considers the upbringing to be his personal duty and tells the boy that to take care of him, he
“was appointed to do that by God” (McCarthy 80). His motivations can be external, but the effect remains the same. The man also evinces a lot of self-sacrifice, for instance his decision that the last bullet is meant for the boy. In order to spare him any unnecessary suffering, the man plans to shot the boy if they ever got caught by “the bad guys” (McCarthy 108), but having only one bullet, the man would have to suffer. In the aftermath, his parenting has a huge flaw. He guards the boy like a gem and hardly ever leaves him alone, albeit with best intentions. Therefore, the boy has no chance to eventually meet other good guys, providing that the man’s strategy is to avoid everyone and trust no one. By keeping him so close and in general not listening to his pleas, the man abolishes the boy’s chances to ever find a new family, not until the man dies. The veteran mentions that “there was some discussion whether
- 57 - to even come after [the boy] at all” (303), perhaps due to the threat the man poses as overprotective parent with a gun.
The boy, however, is not always in the subordinate position. He is noticeably mature, despite he cries a lot and needs to be comforted by his father. Often he represents the moral authority or asks questions inappropriate to his age, which, although not specified, appears to be somewhere between 9 and 11. For instance, asking the man “what are our long term goals” (McCarthy 170) does not sound appropriate. Further, the boy’s double nature makes the post-apocalyptic settings even more painful, especially if put in contrast with the childish things he does, such as painting silly pictures – “the boy had found some crayons and painted his facemask with fangs” (McCarthy 13) or randomly “pick[ing] up something and carry[ing] it with him for a while” (213) just for fun, or dreaming about his penguin toy (37).
All these images of almost happy childhood stand in stark contrast with the desolate world and the things the boy must undergo, such as holding the gun ready to shot. Thus, no matter how hard the man tries to maintain the boy’s childhood, he was deprived of it even before he was born. Moreover, the figure of the boy is in many ways unreal.
Most importantly, the boy is the moral centre of the novel. The Road resonates with strong moral lesson that are, paradoxically, issued by the boy. The greatest paradox of The
Road therefore is the fact that, providing that moral code is passed on through society, the boy still has an unshakeable moral code that he does not share with his father and that could not be adopted since the civilization and society ended even before he was born. The man struggles with what is wrong or right and sometimes needs the boy to remind him. The man sometimes hurts people, and considers it fair. He leaves the thief with nothing because he stole from them, kills a man with the flare because he shot at him first and shoots dead another because he threatened the boy. All these actions strike right at the heart of the boy’s moral convictions, because he wants to help people, no matter what they did to them, not
- 58 - harm them. The boy “begs for the life of a dog to be spared [and] he urges his father to share their food with the fellow travellers they encounter” (Tallent 16). During an encounter with a man struck by lightning, the boy asks “cant we help him? Papa?” (McCarthy 15) and since his pleas are not answered, next time he switches from questions and suggestions to imperative and orders “Just help him, papa. Just help him.” (84). This switch only proves that it is not the father who gets to say what is wrong or right, but the boy whose moral convictions are not adapted or imposed, but come from within, as an innate understanding of morality that people are born with. After all, as Christopher McMahon notes in his ethical study “Discourse and Morality”, one of the theories regarding the source of morality says it is possible that “a single individual, reasoning carefully, could arrive at a correct understanding of the requirements of morality” (514), even without a society to assist.
Conversely, the man’s actions can be justified as well. He belongs to the last generation born before the catastrophe and has to deal with all the contradictions in his head relating to the world as it is now, while remembering how it was before. Being raised in conformity with the traditional moral values, he struggles to adapt and accept the new moral code. As a result, he is always somehow torn apart between these two worlds and has to balance them well, otherwise himself and the boy will not survive or will not be able to see themselves as “the good guys” (McCarthy 23). To some extent, his pre-apocalyptic code of conduct is a burden not only to himself, but to the boy as well; neither of them is therefore able to adapt and accept the world as it is, so they are aimlessly wandering through the wasteland with a single desire to “keep heading south” (McCarthy 43) with a vague hope that the situation might be better there.
As was already suggested, the journey in its essence can be also read metaphorically.
Kunsa claims that the journey of father and son “acquires an explicitly religious quality, a sense of divine mission” (59) which is only reinforced by the repetitive “litany or a prayer”
- 59 -
(Kunsa 59) of being “the good guys . . . [who are] carrying the fire” (McCarthy 136).
Interpreting the journey as a divine mission means that there must be something at the end that is desired and can be reached. Initially, the pair heads south in search of milder climate with faint hope that other good guys could have the same idea; but as they are getting closer, nothing is truly changing, even after they reach the coast. Thus, the desired target might as well be just plain hope that somewhere things might be better, but in order to preserve it, they have to keep going, as the moment they stop, they give up hope for something better.
Therefore, the “divine mission” cannot be thought without the elusive chance of eventual reunion of the boy and his new family. Kunsa suggests that after the man dies, the boy “goes on to seek that still elusive New Jerusalem” (69), which is supposed to be the world re-born, where everything is in order, finally makes sense and falls perfectly in place. Admittedly, the boy finds a new family and discovers that there are still good people in the world, but nothing changes as long as the initial conditions are considered – the world is still dying, humankind will disappear within few generations and anyone’s life can be taken any minute.
Nonetheless, in order to understand The Road’s moral message, one has to define what does it really mean to be “the good guys” (McCarthy 81). In short, the main principle of the good guys is not to eat people, and be kind to others. Such motivation does not facilitate their survival, on the contrary it makes in more complicated – however, it accentuates the fact that no matter how difficult the conditions are, one has to preserve his
Christian morality in order to be able to live with oneself. Apart from strong understanding of who they are, the motivation might as well refer to the boy’s conviction that he needs to stay moral in the eyes of God, providing that it is God that the boy believes in. It was already suggested that there is a chance the boy does not entirely grasps the concept of God, and simply believes in something that he considers to be right, such as his belief in humanity and hope. The boy is in a way unreal; his motivations have no logical base and his moral code
- 60 - does not seem to be inherited or learned, but comes from within. Kunsa further notes that the boy’s scrupulous morality is a proof that he is a “new Prometheus, a twentyfirst-century good guy, Adam reinvented” (69); belief in humanity and urge to help people at all costs are qualities worthy of Prometheus, so it appears to be a solid comparison. The boy also manages to connect the old, pre-apocalyptic world with the new one – despite being born after the catastrophe, he evinces strong morals based on the world before, which, in the world after, are completely lost. Hence, the boy is “carrying the fire of hope and righteousness from the old story toward the new one” (Kunsa 69), providing the readers with an uplifting message that mankind might not be eventually lost.
Hope as such is an integral part of the novel as well. In The Road, losing hope equals deliberately ending one’s life; preserving it is thus the only way to survive. According to
Fisher, The Road’s hope can be “hardwired into the organism itself, a stupid ineradicable drive to persist in conditions where death would be preferable, or it is some kind of Gnostic religious impulse” (14), i.e. a faith in a distant God who already abandoned the Earth.
However, the persistence of hope can be explained quite pragmatically as well. McCarthy sees the centre of hope in the survival of traditional family and morality as it is undoubtedly the existence of the boy that keeps the man going and ultimately prevents him from killing himself. The woman summarizes it as follows:
The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I
would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to
cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with
words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.
(McCarthy 59)
- 61 -
In the post-apocalyptic world, one has to find reasons to maintain one’s existence, to have something to live for to help the survivors endure the worst. The man literally lives for the boy, shall the boy die, the man “would want to die too” (McCarthy 9). His concern for the boy much resembles the treatment of the “passable ghost” the woman describes. He offers him anything he finds, be it food or some remnants of the old knowledge and shields him from any possible danger. The “words of love” imply that love, together with hope, is what it takes to survive in the world of chaos and destruction. On the other hand, the denomination passable ghost in every respect does not imply long-term duration or reality. The boy, as a
“passable ghost” might not be here forever, one’s existence is only temporary, but the man needs him to survive. Also, the situation can be reversed, the boy will not survive without the man’s care, knowledge and survival abilities which he developed to keep the boy safe; were it not for the boy, the man would lose interest in life. This mutual need for each other therefore constitutes the core for a new type of family in the post-apocalypse, altogether with love for each other and hope it can get better.
Apart from the ending, McCarthy incorporates subtle images of hope throughout the novel, be it only a glimpses of happiness or unexplained motifs. In McCarthy’s post- apocalyptic world, all the animals ceased to exists, but no other species is as missed as birds.
Bird can be in today’s pop culture considered to be a symbol of hope or freedom, but with regard to The Road’s religious subtext, one can attribute it to the episodic narrative of Noah and the dove:
When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked
olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited
seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
(Genesis 8:11-12)
- 62 -
The dove is a messenger of hope, so in the world where there are no birds anymore, there is no one to bring hope. Birds, however, appear in the man’s dreams whereby he memorializes the world as it used to be; he dreams of “walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue [sic]” (McCarthy 17). The dreams are in colour and incorporate birds and living nature, thus the core of what the man misses.
Another “siren world” (20) he wakes up from features “softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun” (292), i.e. once again the same three phenomena. The absence of birds is also perceptible through the man’s habit to look at the sky – “he looked at the sky out of old habit but there was nothing to see” (109), which he does repeatedly. Interestingly, the same doing can be perceived during an encounter of the boy and the veteran who “looked at the sky. As if there were anything there to be seen” (302). It can be out of an old habit, searching for any signs of hope or turning one’s face up to God; either way, it is a behaviour proper to the good guys only. The connection between hope and birds is also subtly hidden in the name of the sailboat the pair finds half awash and whose provisions ensure their survival – the ship is named “Pájaro de Esperanza” (McCarthy 239), which is rather unusual phenomenon in The Road, and can be translated as Bird of Hope5. On a side note, the biblical dove eventually does not return and disappears, which does not indicate the loss of hope, but that it perched somewhere on the land and it is therefore safe to set ashore. Thus, the forlorn disappearance of the birds in The Road can be, in a bit far-fetched interpretation, read the same way, i.e. the birds flew to safety and it is only up to the survivors to follow them.
4.3 Morality and Ethical Choices
The persistence of hope and morality stands in a contrast to the expected behaviour of people in crisis. In practice, it is said that one has to fulfil his/her basic human needs, such
5 Own translation. - 63 - as need for shelter or food, to move on to more elaborate needs, such as love. The boy, however, ultimately denies this structure – he has no shelter, no home, starves for most of the time and sleeps in damp woods, but still feels the need to show compassion and love for others. His urge to find “other good guys” (McCarthy 196) is thus presented as stronger than basic survival instincts that should command oneself to ensure his/her own survival as a matter of priority. The boy’s concern for “that little boy” (McCarthy 300) he repeatedly mentions also illustrates the boy’s unrealness – for the major part of the narrative he has very little or nothing to eat, but still begs the man to go after the little boy, promising that he would “give that little boy half of [his] food” (McCarthy 90). Such generosity, together with the willingness to give others even though he has very little, marks the boy’s morality as superior to human instincts that are, in the world of The Road, described as wrong.
McCarthy’s take on human nature is diametrically different from the one depicted by
London. The process of devolution of mankind is in The Scarlet Plague eventually understood as natural, as a phenomenon that every now and then occurs and is just humane.
London’s pattern “some will fight, some will rule, some will pray” (VI) admits that violence is in a way inevitable, and that humans are, in their very nature, very selfish6. McCarthy, on the other hand, despite his statement of “no such thing as life without bloodshed” (Tallent
16), does not portray the declination of the human race as inevitable. In The Road, humans do tend to decline, but it can be avoided if one has love, hope and high moral standards deeply encoded in his/her heart. By this idea, human nature and instincts can be subordinated and supressed with morality.
The claim that good cannot possibly exist without bad is represented in The Road as well; being the good guys can only have some value if there are bad guys in the opposite. In
The Road, the bad guys are those who abandoned the morals and turned to cannibalism and
6 See chapter III: London’s view on human development - 64 - extreme violence, in other words, “the cannibals serve as the gory Other for the man's and boy's self-identification as the good guys” (Tallent 14). To facilitate the distinction, the cannibals are noticeably dehumanized and even compared to animals, with “eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk” (McCarthy 65), looking “like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes” (McCarthy 65). This particular representative comes from the party running the diesel truck – some of them are “wearing canister masks” (63) or even a
“biohazard suit” (63), they are “holding rifles” (64) or at least marching with “clubs in their hands” (63). The initial image McCarthy conjures evokes danger and aggression, though based on no particular action and it is not until the following day the man finds “the bones and the skin piled together” (73) next to “a pool of guts” (73) and reveals to the readers that they were truly the bad guys, the cannibals. This first encounter, despite the violence, danger and eventual bloodshed, seems to be the least of three evils, since the second parade they encounter poses much less danger, but represents the far side of humanity:
They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their
breath smoking through their masks. . . . Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves
in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in
number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites
illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. (McCarthy
96)
This party appears to be even bigger than the first one and evinces more despicable practices than the first one, although they probably managed to restore some sort of social hierarchy, as proven by the existence of slaves. The Road does not employ many female characters or women in general, the presence of such a big number is quite singular. However, they are marching behind the slaves and goods of war, which, in terms of hierarchy, indicates that they do not have any adequate position and are most likely in subordinate, if not slavery-like
- 65 - position to men so common in post-apocalyptic fiction.7 Their pregnancies can be either a sign of sexual exploitation, given that the conditions are not exactly favourable to proliferation of humanity, or can have even more tragic undernote with regard to the “charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (McCarthy 212) the pair finds later. Either way, this procession is morally questionable, closed by a number of human beings in dog collars, the “supplementary consort of catamites”, i.e. boys kept solely for homosexual purposes as sex slaves. Despite the fact that any piece of information regarding the initial state of same-sex relations in the pre-apocalyptic world is missing, one can argue that such demeaning treatment of any human being would be wrong in any world; especially in the one where superior morality plays the first fiddle. Furthermore, the notional top is reached with the third encounter featuring a cellar full of people kept as living supplies:
Huddled against the black wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to
hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs
gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. (McCarthy 116)
Thus, the slave-like position is not the worst that can happen. This party does not distinguish between genders, which, with regard to the presence of catamites, they have in common with the previous one. The cannibals appear to be using these supplies little by little, not killing a person at once, but chopping one’s legs of only because someone gets hungry; the last group consists of the ultimate bad guys, the evil incarnate.
Due to these differences, one cannot simply put a label of the bad guys on all the cannibals in The Road. It appears that McCarthy intended them to stand in opposition to the moral choice, but it was already suggested that his treatment of reality, especially in respect of more naturalistic side of human nature, is not always accurate in The Road. The
7 See chapter III: Vesta Wan Varden and Bill. - 66 - ambivalence relates to the question whether all the cannibals standing in opposition to the novel’s good guys are really so immoral. Tallent quotes from Timothy Taylor’s investigation
The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death so as to prove that “cannibalism is tightly intertwined with the origin of our species. Like it or not, it is human” (qtd. in Tallent 14).
Tallent further opposes this statement giving the argument that “so is resourcefulness” (14) that the cannibals do not evince as no one thinks of “saving seeds from haymows or withered apples and wrapping them in damp cloth to see if they’d sprout (14). The weak point of this argument lies in the fact that neither the good guys show such endeavour; admittedly, the man is resourceful, especially regarding his survival skills, but when he finds an apple, he
“[eats] it entire, seeds and all” (McCarthy 127). Thus, providing that cannibalism does not necessarily have to be viewed as fundamentally immoral, one can pose it as a proof of mankind’s adaptation. All three cannibalistic parties show some traits of community building and overall are better equipped to survive, or at least live a slightly more comfortable life. They have plenty of ammunition and guns to defend themselves from others and some women to potentially produce future generations. They do not starve or hide in the woods from others and the third party, albeit the cruellest, has a permanent shelter, a big house they repeatedly return to. In a way, the occurrence of cannibalism can be a sign of brutal acceptance of the post-apocalyptic world as it is, without trying to preserve dead remnants from the world that no longer exists. The Road’s narrative does not offer many details about what exactly those who are labelled as the bad guys do for living; they are simply described as horrible and put in opposition with the morality and love that surrounds the relationship of the father and the son. Thus, “even as it [The Road] exalts this love, its hatred of complexity makes it a deeply conservative and fearful work, anti-trust, anti- community, anti-commitment” (Tallent 16). McCarthy does not take into account any possibility of any future, his main concern lies in the man’s love and care for the boy, which
- 67 - makes him so pre-occupied he does not give a single though to the idea that the world can eventually recover, be it, once again, upon the roots of cannibalism. Let alone the fact that cannibalism is not only intertwined with the origin of humankind, but occurred even much later, for instance during the crisis crossing the path of the Donner Party.
It is important to mention that such contemplation does not advocate cannibalism as the ideal mode of survival; the purpose is to illustrate McCarthy’s possible mistreatment of human nature. The novel itself presents many paradoxes regarding this issue, but none is as fundamental as the discrepancy of what McCarthy assigns to have origin in human nature, and what not. The boy’s morals, for instance, so deeply human yet not taught, stand as a beacon of superior morality and virtue, proving the pureness of mind of a little child and his self-righteous take on quite complicated issues. The boy’s morality and understanding of the world therefore can have origin in his own nature, but cannibalism does not since it is considered to be fundamentally wrong in The Road – it violates human nature, but enigmatic morality does not, despite the fact that it is not so complicated to find arguments to put it the other way around. For instance, the first group of cannibals did not harm anyone whatsoever, but it was the father who shot dead one of their members. The remnants of his body prove that he was eaten, but he was already dead when the others found him. Since burials do not seem to occur anymore as the world of The Road “is a world in which mournfulness is a luxury” (Fisher 15), the others are left with only two options – to leave the body to rot, or to use it efficiently to ensure their food intake. The second option, providing that so many people have died already that no one seems to be particularly touched by it, seems the best thing to do. The bad guys are not granted any further reality or history to explain to the readers what they did before or what they do now on daily basis, so this particular action can be, under the circumstances of the post-apocalypse, equal to a bit more disgusting scavenging system of the central couple.
- 68 -
It is evident that The Road discusses a number of difficult ethical issues, among them the theme of suicide, especially in relation with the woman. In the post-apocalypse, suicide is often a considerate option, unless one has something or someone to live for, or is willing to adapt. At one point, even the boy wishes that he “was with [his] mom” (McCarthy 56), i.e. wishes he was dead. Those who are chained to the past often do not see any other way out, even the boy’s parents “sat up arguing pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall (60), resulting in the woman killing herself, despite the man’s effort to convince her otherwise:
We’re survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp. Survivors? she said. Yes.
What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking
dead in a horror film. (McCarthy 57)
In short, she has nothing to live for and is convinced that “sooner or later they will catch
[them]” and “they are going to rape [them] and kill [them] and eat [them]” (McCarthy 59).
In fear, she chooses to take her own life to avoid violation by others, and wishes the same for the rest of her family as she believes she “should have done it a long time ago” (57) when they still had three bullets. Even at this point, the woman is still convinced that taking the boy with her is “the right thing to do” (58); the morning after she leaves the man takes the boy to begin their quest of indefatigable “keep heading south” (43). In view of the fact that
The Road can be read as strongly religious, one has to take into account the fact that suicide is considered to be a sin – “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away” (Job 1:21) and one is therefore not allowed to take his/her own life. With this in mind, suicide can be understood as the other immoral choice; the right thing to do is to go on and struggle. This shows the woman as the weaker one, as a mother whose son was not a motivation enough for her to keep going.
- 69 -
Overall, McCarthy’s approach to women in The Road is rather problematic; the woman and her decision is even considered to be “the most problematic case” (Tallent 15).
The coldness of her departure simply deprives the novel of any “realistic treatment of grief” and instead “enables McCarthy’s preferred mode of impersonal eloquence” (Tallent 15).
Truth is she is not fully present as a character, but rather as an icon of the past. Tallent notes that she is never referred to as the boy’s mother and the man does not recall any scenes of mother-and-son interaction (15). Furthermore, she “vanishes even from the birth scene”
(Tallent 15) as it was actually the man who “held aloft the scrawny body” and “cut the cord with kitchen shears and wrapped his son in a towel” (McCarthy 61). Throughout the novel, the boy is however never referred to as her son. Within the world of The Road, she functions as the other necessary half to give birth to the boy, or as a ghost of the man’s past; the novel, however, does not appear to be “granting her reality as a mother” (Tallent 15). The ghost- ish quality can be perceived when the man dreams about her:
In his dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy . . . She
wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of
shell. (McCarthy 17)
In short, the woman is not fully acknowledged as a character and neither is any other female.
McCarthy’s women either attempt to eat their new-born, serve as pregnant sex slaves or abandon their families; the central female character is only a reminder of what the world used to be like and is left out of the narrative for the rest of the time. The boy’s unrealness fits into this structure, given that “he’s equally unreal [as compared to the abandonment of the only photograph of his dead mother] after his mother’s suicide” (Tallent 16), asking only
“She’s gone isn’t she?” (McCarthy 60), settling with no explanation at all, only a confirmation of “Yes, she is” (McCarthy 60). The boy shows no emotion, no mournfulness or not even a surprise and is instantly ready to leave. Tallent argues that this situation
- 70 - highlights the fact that “the novel grants the boy emotional reality exclusively in relation to his father, and it does this so that the father-and-son bond can remain the novel's uncontested centre” (Tallent 16). The woman, wife or mother is not granted a place in the post- apocalyptic world, and the boy seems to be aware of this.
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Conclusions
After all, this thesis can be concluded with one more Berger’s claim – “humanity in its essence . . . is what these apocalypses unveil” (10). Nowadays, humankind faces many threats that, were they in literature, could be considered as apocalyptical, be it an occurrence of new or incurable diseases, wars, natural catastrophes or slowly changing climate. These events lead to the state in which humanity is somehow pre-occupied with a sense of imminent crisis, and every now and then expects the world to end on global scale. Yet all these events has already happened, and humanity is still moving forward. What if the world ended today is apparently a question asked by many, and it is post-apocalyptic fiction that aims to provide a satisfactory answer. Post-apocalypse functions as “a semantic alchemical process; it burns and distils signs and referents into new precipitates” (Berger 10) and then sees after what is left when the process ends. As portrayed in the three novels discussed above, what remains is some representation of humanity in its raw core, often even the entire concept of humanity encapsulated in one single figure facing the inhuman. The authors of post-apocalypse tend to use the notion of human extinction as a platform from which they proceed to develop a certain ‘what-if’ narrative that allows them to study how the survivors would behave. That includes the study of how far would one go in order to preserve one’s humanity, even if the conditions are not favourable.
The way the theme of apocalypse is treated depends largely upon the background environment of respective authors, historical era they lived in and perhaps even they own personal convictions or ideals, be it the notions connected with The Romantic Era,
Darwinism or Christianity. These observations present the genre of post-apocalypse as a genre of ideals and paradoxes – ideals of those who narrate the story or create in in the first place, and paradoxes based on the greatest prerogative of post-apocalyptic fiction, i.e. the end is never the end. The end itself, thus, divides the narrative into two fictional worlds, one
- 72 - before, and one after; hereby the approach of individual authors differs, mainly in the way they connect these two world and what link they do or do not create between them. Despite being content-wise different, each novel features a figure of a survivor who, being born in the pre-apocalyptic world and surviving long enough to see the dawn of the post-apocalypse, creates this important link and thus balances on the verge of feeling the sensation of complete loss and the idea of accepting the new world as it is.
The human race of the world after is always significantly reduced and always searches for a way to reconstruct the world and reconcile with what happened. The depiction of this process allows the authors to implement somewhat changed language of post- apocalypse and assign it to striking narrator voices. The voice of the narrator can be, providing that he is the one who survived as well, an embodiment of humanity; this conception can be noticed in The Last Man as well as in The Scarlet Plague. The first features a narrator who is himself the only survivor, the last species of the human race, thus the one who makes the narrative possible and who is simultaneously the reason why any apocalypse matters. The Scarlet Plague employs a double-narrative to facilitate a clearer distinction between the two worlds while the narrator of the old one is granted an epistemic privilege to pass the story on, being the only one who is sufficiently informed about what happened to the world. His stories highlight the importance of knowledge and together with culture, science and language mark it as the most important features of what it means to be human, subsequently noticing how dehumanized mankind is when all of these are missing. The
Road’s impersonal narrative closes the notional triangle with a vision of anonymous, impersonal world that emphasises each moral lesson as universally applicable. McCarthy’s conception of humanity is strongly connected to religiousness and Christian morality as he wipes the world out with an enigmatic apocalypse and leaves only two characters to face the world of immoral choices. The Road offers a strongly religious reading which eventually
- 73 - unveils that humanity does have tendencies to choose the wrong path, but with hope, courage, and potentially faith in God, it is possible to choose the moral option. Jack London does the opposite thing and focuses on rather naturalistic side of human nature, explaining that humanity is simply destined to make the same mistakes repeatedly, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong about it. The Scarlet Plague portrays the inevitability of violence and does not necessarily see it as deplorable, but as something that is deeply humane and frequently occurring throughout history. London’s conception of humanity also employs the circular notion of human devolution as he does not see humanity as straightforwardly declining, which is something Mary Shelley does, but believes in reoccurring evolutional throwbacks that reveal the most important quality of humans, the ability to recover.
Regardless of what happens, The Scarlet Plague’s mankind is said to eventually move forward and rediscover all that was lost in the process. Mary Shelley’s gloomy vision of the annihilation of the human race is, compared to the other two, the least optimistic, though The
Last Man eventually includes an uplifting message connected to its readers who are reading a testimony of the fall of mankind and are repeatedly addressed as the new generation that has somehow arisen. Thus, even though the human race perishes, humanity as conception can never be diminished, not as long as there is at least one survivor to carry the story on.
Despite the fact that post-apocalyptic narratives work with the notion of hope, they also reveal that there is something rotten in human nature, something that causes only destruction when unleashed. The end can be brought about by irresponsible behaviour of people, or their inability to handle crises without mass hysteria; such conclusions sadly do not apply on fictional worlds only. Either way, what post-apocalypse does best is reveal the core of humanity and the basic forms of being human with both, the good and the bad side included.
After all, there is nothing more human than humanity at its worst.
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Works Cited
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Résumé
The aim of this thesis is to analyse three different works of post-apocalyptic fiction, namely The Last Man by Mary Shelley, The Scarlet Plague by Jack London and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Each novel was published in different century to allow objective comparison of various conceptions of humanity the authors present with respect to their personal background as well as historical era. Post-apocalyptic fiction can be read as a mirror to one’s fears or worries, as well as a piece of social criticism. Both approaches are discussed and linked to the oddities of the genre itself, focusing primarily on such eminent figures as the narrator of post-apocalypse, the false prophet or the figure of survivor with epistemic privilege. As for the used methodology, the very first chapter deals with the theory behind the end of the world and offers several options how to approach post-apocalyptic representations and the apocalypse itself. This study reveals the imagery behind a lot of catastrophes as being based on the biblical apocalypse whose particular features are frequently re-occurring in today’s fiction as well. Altogether, this work analyses three works of post-apocalyptic genre as being able to answer the question of what does it mean to be human according to respective authors, and how humanly humanity behaves in times of crisis.
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Resumé
Cílem této práce je analýza tří děl post-apokalyptické fikce, jmenovitě Poslední
člověk od Mary Shelley, Rudý Mor Jacka Londona a Cesta od Cormaca McCarthyho. Každá z nich byla publikována v jiném století, což této práci umožňuje relevantní srovnání jednotlivých přístupů autorů k pojetí lidstva a lidskosti obecně. Post-apokalyptická fikce nabízí čtenářům zrcadlo současné společnosti a umožňuje autorům vyjádřit nejniternější obavy, stejně tak může sloužit jako platforma pro kritiku společnosti. Obě možnosti interpretace jsou probrány a srovnány se zvláštnostmi žánru jako takového – práce se primárně soustřední na význačné postavy post-apokalypsy jako je post-apokalyptický vypravěč, falešný prorok nebo jediný přeživší. Co se metodologie týče, první kapitola nabízí syntézu teorií týkajících se konce světa a nabízí několik možností, jak tyto motivy a reprezentace interpretovat, mezi nimi samozřejmě motiv apokalypsy jako takové. Tato studie nachází prapůvodce apokalyptických představ právě v apokalypse biblické, jejíž typické obrazy se často objevují i v dnešní fikci. Obecně tato práce připisuje všem třem studovaným dílům vysokou výpovědní hodnotu v oblasti problematiky „Co to vlastně znamená býti člověkem?“ podle jednotlivých autorů a jejich zobrazení lidského chování v době krize.
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