This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating interview with Cormac McCarthy, the author most recently known for his book “No Country for Old Men” made in the award-winning film by the Coen Brothers. Among other things, McCarthy also wrote “The Road,” set for release in film version of November 25th. If you are not familiar with “The Road,” it is a post-apocalypic story of a father and son journeying towards the coast, their only potential place of survival in a world nearly destroyed by some past, yet rarely spoken of cataclysmic act.
The Road is a poignant, heart-wrenching tale. It pulls out emotion that are severely unpleasant in experience: specifically, the dull sense of loneliness and the profound experience of potential loss. While these are not emotions we actively seek out, it’s fair to say we are better from their experience. Recalling a recent conversation with Krista Tippet of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith,” my good friend Dave expressed that one of the most important things Tippet expressed was the sentiment that we are limiting ourselves when we seek a narrow version of ‘happiness.’ Rather, she suggested that we ought to seek a type of flourishing that encompasses a wider set of emotions and experiences, all which speak to the varied experience of humanity in both its good and bad forms. Cormac pulls you into these moments, highlighting the importance of relationships and the ways in which we often experience them most profoundly with the potential of their loss.
In the interview, McCarthy suggests that the story comes in large part out of his own attachment to his young son. And yet, the love between father and son in the book is different than often portrayed in traditional Hollywood love stories. For example, in The Road, the father and son never explicitly say “I love you.” About this, McCarthy states:
“A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say he’s the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid says are things that John said. John said, “Papa, what would you do if I died?” I said, “I’d want to die, too,” and he says, “So you could be with me?” I said, “Yes, so I could be with you.” Just a conversation than two guys would have.”
Similarly, McCarthy’s complex relationship with religion comes out in the the way his characters wrestle with the notion of god the seeking of transcendence, even while not ‘stating’ religious words, or calling to mind a ‘religious’ book or film. But like the love never stated, religious imagery and themes pervade his work. For example, near the end of The Road, the narrator states that the father, “knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’” While not traditional religion in the sense of sitting in mass, reciting creeds, or experiencing prayer, there is something spiritual in how the father feels a certain duty to his son’s protection, and acknowledges of the beauty in the world admidst the ugliness of the post-apocalytic setting of the novel.
Cormac’s own religious committment has seemingly adjusted over time, even if it appears his connection to religious orthodoxy was never very very strong. In the interview, speaking about his Irish Catholic upbringing, and religion in his life today, McCarthy summarizes:
I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person.
It seems that the type of spirituality that interests McCarthy is profoundly about an existential commitment to living out love in the world, all the while acknowledging his own impotence in this matter. Cormac, like the father in the novel, feels a certain pull of duty, and desires to see the transcendent in the profane. For McCarthy, this duty and transcendent comes in relationships and his desire to find in narration transcendent relationships in contexts typically narrated devoid of them. This posture towards life commits McCarthy to writing novels that, “take years of your life and drive you to suicide.”
It is this existential relationship to all things religious that ultimately makes McCarthy’s novels so profoundly gripping. He calls up religious questions, but doesn’t feel confident in the traditional institutionalized answers. To use the words of philosopher/ theologian Miroslav Volf, McCarthy is reacting against the ‘thin’ view of religion that often rely on cliches, acknowledging the importance of a thick meaningful framework, all the while simultanously doubting its existence.
But isn’t this in itself a TYPE of thick religious understanding, even if not orthodox in the traditional sense? In a review of the book, philosopher Jamie K.A. Smith weaves together the actual practices of father and son and what the mean for the characters, ultimately suggesting that they participate in a form of world-building through the nearly litergical nature of their interaction. Smith writes that, “the book is suffused with ritual and thus a kind of sacramentality. Quasi-liturgies both make and hold together the remnants of a “world” for father and son.” For two men depending on each other in a severely broken world, they needed a way to construct meaning, and live into a ‘reality’ not yet present. Smith highlights one such moment of life re-narration, recast in liturgical form:
The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not
topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the
boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat
holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.
All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the
forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out
of the air and breathe upon them
Perhaps it is such ‘quasi-liturgies’ that we, as the religious and non-religious alike, need more than anything.
