EN270
Dr. Jeff Abernathy
November 11, 2007
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
He, on the other hand, who really could participate in [the fortunes and sufferings of others] would have to despair of the values of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. -But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, Aphorism #33
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a grimly oracular account of human existence in the literal absence of culture and tradition. However, to call the book “existential” would be a academically specious maneuver. The novel certainly addresses some of the most profound mysteries of human existence: sacredness, death, good, evil. But in calling the book “existential”, one would be claiming either too much or too little. If one claims The Road is existential for addressing the riddles of human experience, how does that separate the novel from other great (or not so great) literature? Certainly Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited also addresses meaning, death, and the way we ought to live. Few would argue that all books that bear these themes are “existential”.
Or can one legitimately claim that The Road was written in allegiance with certain 20th century soi-disant existentialists (e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus)? Neither does such a claim wholly aid, for oftentimes the philosophical systems of even self-described existentialists can be entirely at odds with each other.
Furthermore, the extant criticism has scantly explored the connection between any of McCarthy’s books and “existentialist” thought. In her essay “De los herejes y hué rfanos: the sound and sense of Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction” in the critical anthology Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy, Linda Townley Woodson examines the semiotic and linguistic connections between Nietzsche and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (a subject of inquiry which I am not much concerned with here, but perhaps upon which I will elaborate in the final draft) (Woodson 201-208).
More relevant though, in that it addresses the moral and metaphysical underpinnings of McCarthy’s work, is J. Douglas Canfield’s essay “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy” in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (256-269). This piece highlights the prophetic nature of characters in McCarthy’s trilogy by way of reference to existentialist works. Canfield, however, makes several puzzling moves, such as only briefly mentioning Nietzsche in connection with “the nihilists” and grouping Martin Heidegger with the theological existentialists (he openly denied that he was one). Canfield spends the bulk of the essay relating the Border trilogy to Camus, vis-à -vis Camus’ conception of human existence as absurd, which is a not altogether misguided project. However, Canfield also presciently cites a passage by Heidegger, which is as useful at striking at the character of McCarthy’s work as the passages by Nietzsche which I sight below. This disheartening observation appears in An Introduction to Metaphysics:
[These questions] still haunt us like a specter: What for?--Whither?--And what then?
The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline […], and appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with Kulturpessimismus, and of course nothing to do with any sort of optimism either; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since been absurd. (Heidegger 38)
Although observations such as these do seem to reflect the sentiment of McCarthy‘s work, his famed reticence is certainly a hindrance in examining any certain allusions to such work: in his three or so interviews, he gives few clues as to where his literary and philosophical sympathies lie (NY times).
Nevertheless, the fact that The Road cannot be summarily described with one very loaded and often very ambiguous word (existentialism) does not prohibit one from exploring the thematic kinship between the book and oft-labeled existentialist works. In such an investigation, several topics especially lend themselves to fertile exposition and comparison: humanity’s loss of faith in traditional religion and a theistic god; morality in light of such a newly secularized world; the meaning of our existence (collectively and individually) in the face of such a world; and the phenomenon of death and our attitudes towards it.
McCarthy succeeds so soundly in confronting phenomena such as death and meaning in part because of his clear-eyed and unflinching narrative. The Road is a ruthlessly constructed artifice depicting a total wasteland: a literal wasteland in the text, but no less symbolic of the secularized industrial milieu into which humanity has increasingly confined itself for roughly the last two hundred years. Perhaps ultimate desolation has never been better realized: all life on Earth has been annihilated, save man. Thus McCarthy has torn away the “mask” of everyday, biological life, resolutely juxtaposing human beings with the lunatic void of the universe.
In this way the stage is set for the man in The Road to continually remark upon the atheistic characteristics of the new world in which he finds himself. Upon viewing the land about him at the opening of the book, he thinks “Barren. Silent. Godless” (4). Indeed, some of the only source of movement in the novel, the winds, are often characterized as “secular”. Lastly, during the man and boy’s encounter with the “prophet” Ely, a richly ambiguous exchange occurs:
How would you know if you were the last man on earth? [the man] said.
I dont guess you would know it. You’d just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.
I guess God would know. Is that it?
There is no God.
No?
There is no God and we are his prophets. (169-170)
At this point the man turns the conversation away from the absence of God and back toward how Ely has survived thus far. However, the conversation makes for fascinating comparison with remarks made by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche famously and quotably claimed “God is dead”, he intended more than a simple ontological declaration. Moreover, this segment is interesting for the similarity in tone between what Nietzsche claims follows from God’s death and McCarthy’s own prose. The aphorism is related as an allegory in which a “madman” confronts a stunned crowd:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers. […] What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all direction? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? [The Gay Science 125]
Coldness, night, and void are certainly leitmotifs which recur throughout The Road. Yet compare here the remarkable similarity between Nietzsche’s language concerning the motion and quality of the earth with McCarthy’s:
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (130)
What kernels of truth can we extract from these two decidedly merciless passages? Both certainly emphasize the apparent isolation of both mankind and the individual. In our lives, we are thrown initially in media res, and we have no control over the initial circumstances in which we find ourselves. Both the man in The Road and Nietzsche’s madman are struck by the incoherence and fatal coldness of the newly secularized universe: “Darkness implacable”, “The crushing vacuum of the universe”, and “Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?”, “Isn’t night and more night coming again and again?”.Essential to McCarthy’s narrative exposition, however, is the tragic temporal nature of human beings. The faculties with which man can even apprehend the “ultimate truth” about the universe, its irrefutable nihilistic character, are “borrowed”: we must return them to our “benefactor” upon our dying. Thus it is that not even our sorrow at the universe is permanently ours.
Yet, even though both McCarthy and Nietzsche reject any comfortable traditional worldview (religious or scientific, for ultimately not even the laws of physics can combat the darkness implacable), neither thinker can be accused of straying further into moral nihilism.
For Nietzsche, belief in a theistic God, either by way of reason or faith had been fatally wounded by the collective intellectual transformation of the Enlightenment. What then, he demanded, were the consequences of the absence of God?
Firstly, he does claim that “objective” morality must necessarily follow God into obsolescence. “For there is no longer any ‘ought’; for morality, insofar as it was an ‘ought’, has been just as much annihilated by our mode of thinking as has religion” (Human, All Too Human 34). We must keep in mind, however, that although it is perhaps commonly perceived, moral nihilism was not at all Nietzsche’s aim or conclusion. Rather, he advocated that each individual compose his or her own values and be willing to be held accountable for them. “Knowledge qualifies [man at the highest stage of morality] to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honor and recognition to momentary honor and recognition: he lives and acts as a collective-individual” (Human, All Too Human 94).
And, certainly, this did not entail that one ought to do whatever one “felt” like doing. Instead, in the process of living authentically, what Nietzsche would call being a “free spirit” or “Ü bermensch” (alternately over-man, or less preferably, super-man), one would develop values which would be most likely harmonious with others. Indeed, it is partly through recognizing the mendacity of traditional moral systems, (e.g. Christianity, utilitarianism, etc.) and rejecting these systems that one becomes an authentic individual, a free-spirit.
Easily, one can see some initial similarities between the moral contemplations of Nietzsche and McCarthy’s narrator. Frequently, the man meditates upon not only the godlessness of the land in which he and the boy find themselves but also upon the privation of convenient moral doctrines. Indeed, the reductive materialism which the man continually confronts necessarily leads to negative statements such as these: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledger book? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground” (McCarthy 196).
The man faces a constant uncertainty of how to act in “moral dilemmas”: whom to help, whom to punish, whom to forgive. In the absence of God, morality, and life, the man and boy look to each other for goodness and beauty, to the “fire” of humanity which they carry within themselves. They create their own sacredness: “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 the ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74).
In the final draft I shall address in roughly a page or two Heidegger claims about an authentic attitude towards death and the relation of such to death in The Road. Briefly, Heidegger proposes that one ought feel dread (Angst) in the face of one’s own death: “In Angst, Da-sein finds itself faced with the nothingness of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Being and Time 245). However, society, particularly Western culture for the last few hundred years, in the guise of das Man (“the other” or “the they”, i.e. the character of society, present in the majority of people, which “de-individualizes” the individual), constantly “tranquilizes” each individual about the fact of death. Das Man creates the feeling that death is something that happens at all times to “other people”, and thus is not relevant to me right now. However, Heidegger claims that death should be relevant to the individual at all times, for one, because it forces us to confront our own individual existence. Indeed, he claims that the being in dread of death is a necessary condition for living authentically.
The Road succeeds in making death relevant perhaps as few other books do. Death looms at each moment of the novel and is constantly present to mind for the man and the boy. Nevertheless, they live! It is the man’s care and concern for the boy, and the boy’s care and concern for strangers, that gives meaning to both of their lives. They really live, in a sense which few of us today could understand.
The aphorism at the beginning of this essay is one of many with which it is highly illuminating to view The Road: for is it not an all too vivid depiction of the apparent goallessness of man? But perhaps this goallessness is neither eternally nor universally true, perhaps it is simply the general character of our age. It may be that through books such as The Road, the individual acquires the wisdom necessary to recharacterize our age. Here, perhaps, as Heidegger foresaw, is that “last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline […], and appraise it as such”. Again, Nietzsche is useful in gaining insight into the topic at hand:
Times of darkness. - ‘Times of darkness’ is the expression in Norway for those times when the sun remains below the horizon the whole long: at these times the temperature falls slowly but continuously. - This is a nice simile for all thinkers for whom the sun of humanity’s future has for a time disappeared. (Human, All Too Human 191)
Certainly “the sun of humanity’s future” has gone below the horizon for quite a few in our age. But because The Road so authentically evokes the “fallen-ness“ of our age, the dreadful seriousness of each of our lives, we have gained the means to recognize our plight, which is of course the first step towards reorienting the course of our own lives and the course of mankind. And is that not part of the great power of the feeling evoked by the book, “a feeling beyond all other feelings”? Lastly, is McCarthy not triumphant in his ability to offer consolation in the face of this nightmare of nightmares, in his ability to offer a rebuttal to the squandering of the individual and humanity? The Road offers the only authentic consolation to the death of humanity or the death of the individual: resoluteness and unconditional love.
Works Cited
Canfield, J. Douglas. “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: the Border Trilogy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 256-269.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, SUNY Press: 1996.
---. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York, Yale UP: 1987.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York, Vintage Books: 2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 1996.
---. The Gay Science. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2001.
Woodson, Linda Townley. “De los herejes y hué fanos: the sound and sense of Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction.” Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 201-208.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times. 19 April 1992. Accessed October 31
Works Consulted
Arnold, Edwin T. and Diane C. Luce. “Introduction.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 3-13.
Bell, Madison Smart. “A writer’s view of Cormac McCarthy.” Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Rick Wallach. New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 1-11.
Grossman, Lev. “A conversation between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men.” Time. 18 October 2007. Accessed 01 November 2007
Jaynes, Gregory. “The Knock at the Door.” Time. 06 June 1994. Accessed 03 November 2007
Kennedy, William. “Left Behind.” New York Times. 08 October 2006.
Warner, Alan. “The road to hell.” The Guardian. 04 November 2006. Accessed 03 November 2007
Whitmer, Benjamin. Rev. of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The Modern Word. 23 October 2006. Accessed October 14 2007
Winfrey, Oprah. “Oprah’s Interview with Author Cormac McCarthy.” The Oprah Winfrey Show. Harpo Productions. Accessed 01 November 2007
