Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Winning Post-Apocalypse
What separates The Road from the wannabe doomsday books?
A common complaint you’ll encounter about The Road is “why did Cormac McCarthy’s book win a Pulitzer and not post-apocalypse novel XXX”
This is often accompanied by the claim that The Stand by Stephen King is a better book. It’s certainly a cheerier read, which considering most of humanity dies is quite a statement.
The Walking Dead. Night of the Living Dead. The Last of Us. And a whole bunch of other end of the world stories usually crop up as “more Pulitzer worthy than McCarthy”.
McCarthy’s passing this week will bring many of us back to thinking about his most famous novel, and why his prize winning post-apocalypse is more meaningful than most.
A google search reveals that the apocalypse has now been dumbed down to “Doomsday Movies” that mixup a weird assortment of stories. Doomsday Adventures. Doomsday Satires. Doomsday Dramas. Where we find The Road.
In fact Doomsday no more means the End of the World than Apocalypse. Hunt down the etymology of either and you learn that they both refer to metaphorical endings. The end of how we see the world, not of the world itself.
Learning Santa Claus doesn’t exist is an apocalypse. Discovering the Democrats are just as corrupt and ramshackle as the Republicans is doomsday. The world itself does not end, but you and your world will end, often and again.
For most of history the Apocalypse was understood in these symbolic and metaphorical ways. As were the other Biblical myths. Genesis doesn’t describe the literal creation of the physical universe. It’s a mythic presentation of the emergence of the consciousness that observes the universe. Of human consciousness.
Our ancient ancestors, asked where the physical universe came from, would likely have said “no idea brother”. Because they knew they had no way to know. But while the desert fathers of early Christianity had no way to observe the universe, they had ample time, quiet and solitude to observe their own thinking, imagination, and the processes of consciousness. Observations that were expressed in mythic stories of Genesis and Revelation.
But our left-brained, logoic, literalistic world has no time or capacity for symbolism. We end up sneering at creation myths because we interpret them literally, which is no less weird than sneering at the rhyme of The Owl and the Pussycat because CATS AND BIRDS CAN’T SAIL A BOAT.
Ok.
And when we tell stories of the Apocalypse they become, nine times out of ten, literal depictions of the end of the world. Which in turn makes us misunderstand our real world anxieties about the real end of the real world. You only think you’re anxious about climate change. Like the Viking scared of the sky falling on his head, what you’re really terrified of isn’t the possible end of the world.
But the absolutely certain end of you.
And we’ve lost the symbolic stories that helped process the fear of the end of I.
But The Road tries to give them back to us.
A final holdout of mythic meaning
Cormac McCarthy, The Road his most famed book, the movie through which most people know it, and the audience who appreciate the story, are all holdouts of symbolic and metaphorical meaning in the midst of a wasteland of literalism.
The Road takes the many symbolic meanings that have been attributed to the Apocalypse over the millennia and fuses them into a new and meaningful story for our post-modern times.
Coincidentally, the day before McCarthy’s death was announced, member of the Science Fiction community (26,000 members and growing, join here) Patrick Flannery made a detailed observation of the Christian themes of the Trinity in The Road. I think it’s perfect.
But even noting the obvious Christian symbolism in a story like The Road is enraging to some people. The first comment (deleted) from the post was a swear laden dismissal of the idea The Road had any meaning. Then the second comment (also deleted) was a blunt insult.
Why?
Because we live in an age of literalism. Certainly, the majority of people who watched The Road as a movie saw only a literal representation of the end of the world. Possibly a large minority of those who made it through The Road as a book (it’s a dense read) understood it literally.
Some of this is a specific hatred of Christian religious symbolism. My recent video essay on INTERSTELLAR went mostly unwatched, until I removed the word “religious” from the title, when engagement on youtube more than doubled. We are a people enraged, filled with anger and fury, at the religions that gave us meaning, which turned out to be just a bunch of stories.
The irony of rejecting The Road for it’s Christian symbolism is that McCarthy isn’t dragging it up to celebrate Christ. The Road is about, symbolically, exactly that anger and fury we feel towards our old sources of meaning. It’s a metaphorical journey through the collapse of meaning, and the rise of nihilism, into the “disenchanted” world we inhabit today, where everything is interpreted literally, because like children robbed of Santa Claus, we can’t bear the pain of losing our beliefs, so choose to believe in nothing.
Which is why The Road won a Pulitzer prize for its complex symbolic meaning, while The Stand, which means nothing, is just a perennial bestseller. Both are journeys into the apocalypse, but one is a literal story about the end of the world, while the other is about the end of you, me, us and I.
