Scribbling with a Purpose-A Romance with Nathaniel Hawthorne

Creative writing means taking risks! My favorite pieces do just this; they challenge the bland, garden-variety essay with something different. The piece below is one of those because I chose to take on Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrative voice from The Blithedale Romance to spice up this essay:

It was between the sheets of his most delightful novel, The Blithedale Romance that I recently had the very distinct pleasure of getting to know Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne on a rather (I think if he were here he would agree) intimate level. Our interaction, as a matter of course, was that of a singular direction: I, the reader, and he, of course, the famed writer. And it was through Mr. Hawthorne, in a matter of speaking, that I was introduced to another fine writer, Marianne Noble, whose insight into our common acquaintance persuaded my sympathies toward a more firm belief that The Blithedale Romance was Mr. Hawthorne’s experiment with manipulating his readers’ moral sense, in order to achieve their dissatisfaction with meaningless sentimental mush in favor of something of a higher order, even while working within the genre. Ms. Noble made me privy to Mr. Hawthorne’s deeper concerns quite elegantly when she commented on his other famous work, The House of Seven Gables. Her words, precisely, were:

Hawthorne shares with many of his contemporaries the anxious suspicion that the spectacle of human suffering that one observes in sentimental fiction merely gratifies the reader’s base lust for stimulation rather than leading him or her to a more humanized-because genuinely intersubjective-stance, such as real encounters with suffering are supposed to produce (275).

Her insight into Mr. Hawthorne is quite fitting for The Blithedale Romance as well, for that novel concerns itself with the suffering of its characters, Priscilla, Zenobia and Mr. Coverdale. I assert that the concern about sentimental fiction which drove him to write The House of Seven Gables, is expressed throughout Blithedale’s sentimental style in the suffering of its characters as well, such that this story not only aims at a more worthy goal than mere textual stimulation, but also critiques the use of sentimental fiction to meaningless or dubious ends during his time.

If Mr. Hawthorne’s concern lies with portrayals of suffering that are mere spectacle, then Priscilla is a prime candidate for characterizing the type of writing that he despises: empty, unsubstantial, and dehumanizing. As I observed the goings-on of Blithedale from my distinct vantage point veiled behind the pages of the book, I ascertained that it is Priscilla, whose suffering seems of exceptional interest to the narrator, Mr. Coverdale. This point is slightly confounding when we consider that he portrays her as doomed from the start: a “slim and unsubstantial girl” (Blithedale 26). If we take up the cause of this suffering girl throughout the novel, we soon discover that, indeed, there is little substance to her at all, with the peculiar exception of her silken purses. By the end of the novel, Priscilla is reduced (if nothing can really be reduced to anything less) to an unthinking decoration on Hollingsworth’s arm.

However insubstantial she might appear, Priscilla’s character is shrouded in mystery. Mr. Coverdale is fancied with the belief that the silk purses she knits are a possible “symbol of Priscilla’s own mystery” (Blithedale 35). Their presence, indeed, feels almost as ethereal as fine wisps of silk from a silk worm. They remind me of the idiom: “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” I conjecture, with reasonable cause, that Mr. Hawthorne’s aspirations for this little common flower of his extend beyond mere representation of the cheap sentimental novel, though comprehending what her mystery is appears so complex that it seems “an impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the aperture” (Blithedale 35). The uninitiated are those who are unaware of Mr. Hawthorne’s keen concern with the sentimental novel. It is my opinion, after investing a good portion of time with the Blithedale Society, that within the character of Priscilla lies Mr. Hawthorne’s suspicion that nothing valuable can come out of something as unsubstantial as base-minded writing.

Priscilla is barely capable of maintaining personhood within the story as she progressively falls into the hands of Hollingsworth. Tragically, his character most clearly stands out as a symbol for narrow-minded philanthropy and the masculine ego at its worst. At first, Priscilla worships him without his notice; and later after Zenobia’s tragic fall from his graces, Priscilla (what a dramatic anticlimax!) becomes a mere decoration on his arm. She masks his singular philanthropic aim with a human face, “the soft reflection of a more powerful existence” (Blithedale 123), when, in truth, all his aspirations are tragically detached from the reality of the humans who might benefit from him most nobly. I am persuaded to believe that Mr. Hawthorne envisioned their union to be a picture of the disquieting and futile marriage between sentimental fiction and philanthropic ideals.

Zenobia’s suffering is magnified, and thoroughly overshadows Priscilla’s, as a consequence of the height from which she falls, and suitably represents the most tragic thread of the novel. Her figure, exquisitely complex, is both a reflection of America’s Statue of Liberty, dressed “in an American print…but with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was one glimpse of a white shoulder,” and at the same, a reflection of romanticism, with a single, exotic flower constantly adorning her hair, as well as progressive feminist ideas with her heroic speech. I witnessed Zenobia’s romantic heroism as she called out against the injustices that have been brought against women, exclaiming atop Eliot’s Pulpit, “If I live another year, I will lift up my own voice in behalf of women’s wider liberty” (Blithedale 120). However, the poor woman wilts like the exotic flower in her hair when Hollingsworth rises up and vehemently denies all women the place of equality in which Zenobia has just claimed, with words of astonishing defeat: ”Well; be it so…I, at least, have deep cause to think you right. Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only too ready to become to him what you say” (Blithedale 124). Zenobia’s defeat is as complex as her character, for if we are to read her as the heroine of a sentimental novel, the lesson Hollingsworth taught her should have freed her in some narrow respect, but instead, it has stripped that liberty from her which she has unequivocally claimed as her right, thus piercing at the heart of that genre’s purpose; and if we read her as a heroine of the romantic ideals of feminism she has just lost the battle for all women in this moment.

What must Mr. Hawthorne wish us to think, then, of the next moment, when Zenobia clasps Hollingsworth’s hand to her breast? Nothing less than bitterness towards the man (in unison with Mr. Coverdale) for his casting off a weaker ally in Priscilla, in exchange for what he deems a more powerful one in Zenobia: a formidable “monster” that he has conquered and brought under his power (Blithedale 122). Not only is Zenobia a dishonorable match, with her true liberty stricken from her, but Hollingsworth will later discover that she is useless to him in her poverty as well, and herein lies the final blow to Zenobia’s few moments of illusive happiness. In Mr. Hawthorne’s chapter entitled, “The Three Together,” it is evident to the reader’s own eyes, that “Zenobia and Hollingsworth were friends no longer” (Blithedale 216). The short-lived friendship between the two is at the heart of Mr. Hawthorne’s concern with the potential for romanticized idealism to be coupled, not with a truly humanitarian endeavor, but, rather, with “a cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism” (Blithedale 218), as Zenobia poignantly exposes Hollingsworth’s true nature to be. So disturbing is this thought, that it becomes imperative that the pseudo-heroine be stripped of her illusory wealth, and rendered utterly useless to Mr. Hollingsworth. My little peep into Zenobia’s sordid entanglement and tragic ending through Mr. Coverdale’s eyes persuaded me to sympathize with the belief that wedding idealism with unthinking power leads to the breakdown of society and human suffering.

Mr. Coverdale (Mr. Hawthorne’s nearest relative to a mouthpiece in the novel) suffers in a rather different way than the two women, and it is his suffering one would hope contains Mr. Hawthorne’s resolution to his conflict with sentimental fiction. Of course, his suffering is of the most derisory sort from the beginning. His complaints are chiefly discomfort at having to give up his more than affluent lifestyle for what he deems a heroic aim. There is no doubt, that Mr. Coverdale purposefully highlights his particular sacrifices for the sake of heroism, “whose greatest obstacle…is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool” (Blithedale 10). Mr. Coverdale’s sacrifices, however, amount to very little, and at every opportunity, he avoids labor and spends much of his time ill and a burden to his fellow heroes. There is only one notable place in the novel where we get a glimpse into the actual work that was done on the farm in Chapter XV. However, it may be to Mr. Hawthorne’s sacrificial heroism we might look to in order to understand Mr. Coverdale’s bloated whining, for it makes more sense when viewed in light of what the intellectual writer is sacrificing for this novel that parallels what Mr. Coverdale is suffering. For this novel is steeped in the sentimental tradition, however altered. Mr. Hawthorne does not spare himself the possibility of proving himself a fool by avoiding the wailing and unrealistic character sketches of sentimental fiction. In this way, he suffers to lower his status as a writer dredging through this genre, in parallel with Mr. Coverdale, who lowers his socio-economic status to join the Blithedale Society. But to what heroic end does Mr. Hawthorne subject this man to such base circumstances?

I observed Mr. Coverdale’s perspective on the Blithedale experiment as a probable revelation about Mr. Hawthorne’s expectation of his reader: He anticipates that his “blithe tones of brotherhood” (tokens of sentimentalism) will be received by us more intellectually than the Society’s were received by travelers to Blithedale, whose “lack of faith in [their] cordial sympathy…was one among innumerable tokens how difficult a task [they] had, in hand, for the reformation of the world” (Blithedale 12). The reader is expected to recognize a higher purpose in Mr. Hawthorne’s efforts to subdue sentimental fiction by engaging its base themes in a satirical fashion. In the case of his relationships with the citizens of Blithedale, Mr. Coverdale’s sentimental posturing serves to highlight the preposterous notion that one can intimately know another person’s thoughts and attitudes from an observer’s perspective. The ridiculous made manifest through satire effectually negates Mr. Coverdale’s affectation of sentiment in those matters that require a much more intimate sort of relationship than the one in which he has established with them. Once again, the parallels with Mr. Hawthorne’s concerns with sentimental fiction materialize: the sentimental writer affects emotional connections with no more purpose than to manipulate the emotions of its readers with no true humanity behind its efforts at the reformation of the world. Mr. Hawthorne heroically seeks to rework sentimental fiction to liberate its dehumanizing end to the level of serious, politically meaningful literature.

The Blithedale that Mr. Hawthorne crafts serves as his best attempt to create a “Faery Land” through which “the inhabitants have a propriety of their own” (Blithedale 2). His fictional world uses sentimental tropes to a more humane and political purpose than contemporary popular culture, a purpose which critiques the inhumanity of making a spectacle of human emotions: Where the heroine of untouched sentimental fiction should find her place, paradoxically liberated by her submission to the needs of larger society, Mr. Hawthorne’s heroine, Zenobia must sacrifice her life to submit to a higher calling: that of protecting his Faery Land from inauspicious uses of power; where the weak belle of unreformed sentimentalism would end in tragedy, Mr. Hawthorne casts his Priscilla as a pathetic façade for an even more pathetic futility on the arm of Hollingsworth; and where the narrator’s touching emotional reactions to the tragic plot of popular sentimental novels are evoked for the sole purpose of hitching the reader’s sympathy for dehumanizing purposes, Mr. Hawthorne creates, in his stead, an unreliable narrator, whose every word tips the intellectual reader off to his satire of sentimental fiction’s ignoble purpose of manipulating human emotions.

Now, dear reader, permit me to indulge in the engagement of the last few words I have to acquaint you with myself, if only briefly. I am certainly aware, that were Mr. Hawthorne to glance over my shoulder as I write this, that he would number me with the “mob of scribbling women” (“Hawthorne’s 1855 Letter) he so despised; for my attempt to assume an intimately sentimental tone here has no intellectual satire, no higher purpose, other than to an affectation of a particular voice for your base pleasure. What I do here has no kinship to the exquisitely refined romance with words Mr. Hawthorne has engaged himself in when penning The Blithesdale Romance. His fine skills as a writer of the American Renaissance affect my intellect on behalf of my emotion, such that I am of the belief that there is no finer way to write a romance than to appeal to both the reader’s reason in combination with their emotion. It is through emotion, that philanthropy finds a human face, and it is through reason that we discern how to dispense our sympathy for the cause of humanity. And I find that as I conclude, I am dabbing the last few teardrops from my overflowing eyes with the thought that I-I myself-am in love-with-Nathaniel Hawthorne!

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. 1852. Introduction Annette Kolodny. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Hawthorne's 1855 letter to his publisher William D. Ticknor,” quoted in Pattee, Fred L. The Feminine Fifties. NY: Appleton-Century Co., 1940. p. 110.

Noble, Marianne. “Sentimental Epistemologies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the House of Seven Gables.” Separate Spheres No More-Gender Convergence in American Literature 1830-1930. Ed. Monika M. Elbert. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2000. 261-281. E-book article.

An Author’s Best Friend is His Fiction: Poe and the Life-Giving Power of Stories

Julie Lybarger

3/22/2011

Eng 441-Studies in an Author/Poe

Final Paper

In both Edgar Allan Poe’s book, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and Yann Martel’s book, Life of Pi, the narrators, as writers, create fiction out of facts. While Poe’s, narrator, Pym, blurs fact and fiction with an eye to artistic aesthetics and authenticity, Martel’s narrator, Pi, invokes an emotional appeal to that blurring of fact and fiction for the “better story”, regardless of its veracity(63). Analyzing Poe’s book in light of Martel’s adaptation (one that gives the reader two distinct stories to choose from), reveals that Martel clarifies the necessity for a writer’s artistic license by revealing how stories have the ability to sustain humans with life-giving power. This concept has been expressed by other writers as well, including Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko, in her book Ceremony. She puts it this way: “I will tell you something about stories;/[he said]/They aren’t just entertainment./Don’t be fooled./They are all we have, you see,/all we have to fight off/illness and death” (Silko 2). Non-Western perspectives of storytelling often grant stories an element of sacredness. In order to see how Martel’s book illustrates this non-Western perspective and clarifies our understanding of Pym as a book about the life-giving power of stories, it is necessary to assume that Pi’s second story about the cook is the factual story, as it will be made clear later on.

Pi’s first story, without a doubt, is the more powerful one. He fills the vast majority of the text describing the life-sustaining qualities of nature (including the ocean) in the preservation of his life. The descriptions maintain an uncanny resemblance to that of a fetus within its mother’s womb, where the rope tied to the lifeboat becomes the umbilical cord, the raft itself containing Pi becomes the fetus, the ocean becomes the bag of waters and the lifeboat that the rope is affixed to combined with the tiger symbolizes mother nature. Pi describes in detail his efforts to save himself from the dangerous Bengal tiger that has been capsized with him. He builds a raft and in a moment of fear, “hitched the long rope to the raft [so that] lifeboat and raft were now tethered” (153), and launches himself onto it, just as night overcomes him (155). His description resembles that of a fetus attached to the womb of its mother when he concludes chapter 53 with these words: “Night crept up. My surroundings disappeared into pitch-black darkness. Only the regular tugging of the rope at the raft told me that I was still attached to the lifeboat. The sea, inches beneath me yet too far for my eyes, buffeted the raft. Fingers of water reached up furtively through the cracks and wet my bottom” (Martel 156). The imagery here conveys a picture of a helpless human surrounded by the immensity of the ocean, “soaked to the bones” (156), curled up on a small raft. Pi’s regression continues with his constant exposure to sun and water. He says that, “My clothes disintegrated, victims of the sun and the salt. First they became gauze-thin. Then they tore until only the seams were left. Lastly, the seams broke. For months I lived stark naked…” (192). Pi survives 227 days at sea (that is, about as old as a baby would be if he was born one month premature); most of that time he is naked, wet, and exposed, and yet, the sea sustains his life like an expectant mother. The illustrator of the cover of Martel’s book, Andy Bridge, captures this fetal imagery well, showing Pi as a black, unidentifiable human figure tightly curled in a fetal position, although there is no raft at the moment that the illustrator captures. Pi’s slow regression into an almost fetus-like state, naked, floating helplessly in the ocean is congruent with the larger image of him being reliant upon nature to sustain him.

Another place where this nurturing imagery is even more vivid is when Pi discovers the lifesaving use of the solar stills. He attaches all of these “stills together, tying one end of the flotilla to the lifeboat and the other to the raft, which meant that not only would I not lose any stills should one of my knots become loose, but also that I had, in effect, a second emergency rope to keep me tethered to the lifeboat” (173). Like an umbilical cord, Pi strings out the life-giving stills from boat to raft. When his water supplies run low, he further emphasizes this nurturing imagery when he checks the stills for water: “’My sweet sea cow!’ I exclaimed to the solar still. ‘You’ve produced, and how! What a delicious milk” (187). The production of fresh, life-giving water from natural saltwater by the stills adds nutrient-giving to Mother Nature and the larger image of Pi as a fetus in her womb.

If we look at the nurturing imagery Pi uses throughout the narrative, we can see why his other story–the “dry, yeastless factuality” at the end of the book–upholds the necessity for telling “better story” (63). In order for Pi to survive the real events with the murderous, cannibalistic cook, it is absolutely vital that he maintains a religious-like faith in the fiction he has created about nature as the source of his survival. Pi alludes to this when he tells of coming to understand that the tiger (a representation of Mother Nature, like the ocean) must be a part of his survival. He makes his confession of faith in nature very clear when he says, “It was Richard Parker who calmed me down. It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness“ (162); and again a few pages later: “It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story” (164). Describing himself in terms of the tiger, as the Japanese later assess he has done (311), allows him to separate himself from the regressive self he had to assume in order to overcome extreme circumstances. The link between Pi’s fiction about the tiger and his survival becomes inseparable. The blurring of fact and fiction, that Pi was afloat with wild animals, not people, is life-giving to the narrator. The “better story” is better because it keeps the story-teller alive.

If we understand Life of Pi as an adaptation of Poe’s book, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, then we might expect to find some kind of connection to the life-sustaining abilities of fiction in Poe’s imagery as well. In fact, others have claimed to have found this very thing in some of Poe’s other short stories. For example, in explaining Poe’s story, “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Jerome D. Deruccio pens an essay entitled “Fact, Fiction, Fatality: “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” in which he describes the nature of Poe’s philosophy on fiction in that story as “a self-generating process, an imaginative enterprise that pursues its own logic and creates the conditions for its own preservation and continuity. By means of this process, author, text, and textuality itself perpetuate themselves” (Deruccio 368). This is highly congruent with what Martel expresses in Pi’s maternal/fetal relationship with nature as a metaphor for the blurring of fact and fiction. It seems even more likely in a long book, that Poe’s text might concern itself with the preservation and continuity of the author and his text. Just as in Life of Pi, a first-person survival narrative written by an author already concerned with this topic begs to explore the capacity for a story to “self-generate.” Poe does not let the critical reader’s expectation down.

In Pym’s second and long adventure in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he stows away in the pitch black hold of a cargo ship, awaiting the right moment to reveal his presence to Captain Barnard. His wait takes much longer than he anticipates and eventually Augustus sends Pym’s dog, Tiger, down to Pym with a message written on the back of a letter to him. Pym feels the note affixed to Tiger, but he cannot, at first, read it due to the intense darkness in the hold. It is important to note here that Pym has had no water or food for a long time, nor any communication with Augustus, and he succumbs to “the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded upon [him] as the prominent disasters to be encountered” (Poe 32). In other words, the narrator’s health and morale are flagging, and it is at this point that he discovers the paper on Tiger’s neck. Without even being able to see the words on the page, he knows that Augustus has sent him a message, but in such intense darkness, without the ability to read the text, the unreadable note seems more likely to cause him emotional upset, “by disquieting to no purpose [his] already enfeebled and agitated mind” (Poe 36). The text on the paper only becomes valuable when he is able to narrate the words it contains; that is, the story it contains remains an element of his imprisonment in the hold until he manages to light the paper up temporarily by means of rubbing it with phosphorous. Until he is able to tell us that the last few words on the page are, “’blood—your life depends upon lying close’” (Poe 39), Pym’s planned response to his “premature interment” (making as much noise as possible to have his location discovered) is also bound to bring him a much worse fate. As he will later discover to us, the murderous crew has committed mutiny and seized control of the ship during the trip. The enlightenment of Augustus’ story, even just the small fragment of it Pym can read, becomes life-saving to Pym. Just as in Life of Pi, the story preserves the story-teller’s life. If we assume that Poe does not make a mistake in later having Augustus recount that he wrote his message to Pym on “the back of a letter” (56), Pym’s preservation becomes an even more powerful example of this; Pym claims to have searched both sides of the page and only discovered writing on the second side (37). Thus, the message on the note is a true fiction; it is not real.

Pym revisits this concept of fiction again later in the book when he and Augustus join with the mutiny’s opponent, Peters, in a plan to overthrow the mutineers. By luck, one of the crew, Rogers, has died a horrible death that Pym suspects was due to poisoning; his body becomes bloated and turns a ghastly shade of white with red spots on his face shortly after death (Poe 77). Pym disguises himself in the fictitious appearance of the bloated corpse, and the men charge the mutineers cabin, with Pym’s startling appearance as the main affectation upon which they hope to overthrow the mutineers. They are successful because, as Pym puts it, “in the minds of the mutineers there was not even the shadow of a basis upon which to rest a doubt that the apparition of Rogers was indeed a revivification of his disgusting corpse…” (Poe 83). The basis for their life-saving siege is the highly successful fiction that Rogers is avenging his death upon the mutineers for being poisoned. In fact, the fiction is so convincing that the captains mate drops dead from fright, and four of the seven remaining “sat…the most pitiable objects of horror and utter despair” (Poe 84). Had Pym’s disguise not been so effective, we might expect that the discovery of his presence on the ship would have lead to great disaster for the narrator, but, by means of the fiction, they overtake the ship and the narrative continues. In this case, as in the letter, fiction perpetuates the narrator’s life.

The partial sinking of the ship later on provides another setting for the rejuvenating effects of fiction to take place. Once again, Pym links the concept with his survival and morale. The drifters are afloat on the rolled side of the cargo ship, and their first attempts to descend into the steward’s cabin to retrieve sustenance fail, and they are in great despair and desperately hungry. It is at this moment that the most remarkable appearance of a ship sailing towards them occurs, and produces such overwhelming joy in them all that they “poured out [their] whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand” (Poe 101). What is so remarkable about this incident is, that all the while that the ship is approaching they remain joyous and are filled with hope of rescue that had seemed completely lost only just moments before in the previous chapter. That is, while they believe in the fiction that the ship is coming for them, that belief sustains them. It is only after their sense of smell and sight discover that the ship is full of dead people–when the fiction is replaced by tangible fact–that they can no longer realize a rescue is at hand. It is only after the ship has passed them by that it occurs to Pym that they “might possibly have found means of boarding her, had not [their] sudden disappointment, and the appalling nature of the discovery which accompanied it, laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body” (Poe 103). In this case, fact renders them helpless to take advantage of the fiction; so in a sense, Poe has shown by an inversion of circumstances, the life-sustaining possibilities of fiction. Nevertheless, even the short elevation of their spirits caused by the belief that their rescue is near seems to lift them from their slump, for the narrative continues and they survive their shipwreck. Just as in Life of Pi, when Pi has to produce “dry, yeastless factuality” for the Japanese (Martel 63), Poe shows that fiction has the power to rejuvenate the writer even when placed side-by-side with the horrible facts.

Looking at Poe’s book in light of Martel’s more obvious interpretation of stories as life-preserving in Life of Pi, we can see that the two authors write this philosophy into their texts. For Martel, this philosophy of preservation of his narrator occurs through the creation of one long, sustained fiction and eventually becomes explicit near the end when he faces the Japanese and must explain the factual story to them. For Poe, this philosophy is implicit in his texts as his story bounces from one part of the sea to another. Poe never gives the reader a moment of clarification like Martel does, but leaves it up to the critical analysis of his reader to make the discovery. Even the note at the end of Poe’s book only seems to add more clues to the puzzle, and is not a definitive narration of the real facts such as Martel offers. Life of Pi becomes an eloquent vehicle through which we can more clearly see how one of Poe’s lesser known philosophies of fiction is implicitly imbedded in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym such as Jerome D. Deruccio says exists in Poe’s other works. Poe’s book carries the message in Pym’s many brushes with death that fiction provides the author with a means to perpetuation. Without fiction, a writer has no means to save himself from premature interment.

Works Cited

Denuccio, Jerome D. "Fact, Fiction, Fatality: Poe's 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade'."Studies in Short Fiction 27.3 (1990): 365-370. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 20 Mar. 2011.

Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi. Orlando: Harcourt, 2001. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838. Ed. Richard Kopley. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Print.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1977.

Literary Criticism of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Murk of the Future

It is almost maddeningly hypnotic. Like one of those crazy dreams you have when you have overworked yourself with a mundane task until you are completely exhausted and then all you can do in those dreams is the same mundane task you were trying to rest from, over and over again. Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road, is a tormenting post-apocalyptic journey through the South East portion of the U.S.; a journey taken by a father and his young son over an agonizingly long period of time. In true McCarthy style, the two meet with spine-tingling danger and witness the gruesome horrors committed by small bands of other survivors, and there are enemies and the gray unknown constantly haunting them. If you got some sort of morbid pleasure from reading the grisly scene in McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses where John Grady used the barrel of his pistol to cauterize the bullet wound in his leg (274-75), then you will not be disappointed by the gruesome scenes in The Road either.

From the moment the story begins, the narrative is highly disorienting, the language is often obscure, and the dialogue between “Papa” and the boy (which is the only name we ever know the son by) sounds hollow and stilted, and not only that, but because McCarthy does not use quotation marks and both main characters are male, “he” is a common pronoun shared by father and son throughout the novel, so that it is often difficult to tell for sure who is being quoted in conversations, and their voices flow from one to the other with minor distinction.

Can I ask you something? he said. Yes. Of course. Are we going
to die? Sometime. Not now. And we’re still going south.
Yes. So we’ll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what?
Nothing. Just Okay. Go to sleep. Okay. I’m going to blow
out the lamp. Is that okay? Yes. That’s okay. And then later
in the darkness: Can I ask you something? Yes. Of course you
can. What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die
too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay (10-11).

Actually, the dialogues are reminiscent of the kind a father and son might have on one of those old-fashioned “telephones” that you make out of a string and two paper cups; as if each word were uttered, not really for the meaning, but for the sound of language itself, with strained moments in between of listening for the other’s voice.

We are thrust straight into the post-apocalyptic nightmare with one of Papa’s. He is startled awake by one of a creature in a dark cave, where the only light emanates from the boy and himself (3-4). Unfortunately, he wakes from one nightmare into another one. He is lying near the road, in filthy rags, with his hand over his small charge. Grayness colors everything, the sky is dark with smog, the sun never comes out, and there is the constant taste of ash in the air. The narrator is as murky gray as the sky and rivers in The Road. There is a strong sense that the third person narrator is Papa and that he is often addressing the reader in an oblique sort of way because of how the narration flows straight into Papa’s dialogues with no white space or breaks: “He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? He whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God” (11-12). The language is eerie; though we sense this moment is supposed to be some Job-like supplication/curse to God, the first sentences almost plea straight off the page to the reader. (Note that I am applying quotation marks, however, McCarthy does not use them.) The third-person narration is used in novels primarily to indicate that the story is happening at the moment it is being read, whereas a first-person narration is usually used to retell a story, as from memory, with the 20/20 vision of revelation (Sontag 17). McCarthy’s third-person narrator tells us the story “as it is happening,” with a murky awareness that he is being listened to, and although the narration is in past-tense, the dialogue lifts off the page in the present to prick the reader’s ears: “I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back” (210). In return, we understand Papa and the boy “through a glass darkly” (KJV 1 Cor. 13:12).

Taking this perspective while reading the novel helped me to empathize with all parties involved. Papa is a representative from our world into the strange, new and hopeless world of post-apocalyptic horror who must try to digest the fact that the old world is gone, and with it, all the things that define what he knows to be language and life, thus, we identify mainly with his illusory experience; the boy is a representative of the new world, born into the chaos and knowing nothing about the old world except for the nearly meaningless stories and facts his father tells him, accepting the world as it has always been for him and adapting to it as he walks through it. Even the boy’s body does not reject the high ash content in the air like his father’s does as they continue their journey southward along the charred piedmont; the man is constantly coughing (237). We never hear the boy cough.

There are hints at other things that may be going on with the narration scattered through the story though. As Papa contemplates the strangely orange morning light of a forest fire burning the remains of the old world away above them, he remembers a ritual from the world that has passed away: “Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember” (31) he says. In a sense, the whole book is a litany of things that the father remembers from the old world. At one point in the story, father and son meet a member of a “bloodcult” that is stalking helpless stragglers on the road, and when Papa tries to convince the man that he will shoot him if he will not cooperate and allow himself to be taken hostage, Papa reveals his knowledge of technical names for parts of the brain, “colliculus and temporal gyrus” (64), for instance. But the litany of technical words used in the novel goes beyond specialized knowledge, of which there is plenty. Pampooties (243), mae west (225), lampblack (261), firedrake (31) and slutlamps (7) are but a few of the many words this man, who is a stranger to the new world, brings from the world that has passed. It is as if he senses that this is the last time these words will ever be used, a sort of negative-Adam of the post-apocalyptic world, taking the names of things back, one by one in his long “litany.”

Papa also seems very comfortable with creating language as they travel the road, describing hagmoss (274), renaming bog people “bogfolk” (24), eliminating dashes in compound words, leaving out commas, speaking the presumably Southern colloquialism (Even More Southern Expressions-II), “in the floor” instead of “on the floor” (79), and describing the world in fragmented sentences. McCarthy is known for this style of writing. He does the same type of thing in All the Pretty Horses, introducing the reader to the world of the Mexican vaquero with words like nopal fruit (88), candelilla wax camps (73) and gachupines (230), as well as writing in the slang of the southwestern cowboy. McCarthy uses his specialized language in John Grady’s world, though not with such intensity and mystifyingly discordant purpose as in Papa’s. He is one of those kinds of esoteric writers the likes of James Joyce and William Faulkner, who uses language with a very deliberate and sometimes misunderstood purpose (Woodward).

McCarthy’s writing, then, pits itself willfully against the modern reader’s expectation for shallow plot and dialogue. The very style that might make you shake your head after a few pages or so and dismiss The Road as another garbage novel is the work of an ingenious author. The language, narration, point-of-view and dialogue all have deep significance that, although mystifying, deserves scholarly examination and a serious approach for years to come.
Even with Papa’s intensely personal dialogues interjected in the story, it becomes more and more difficult to read The Road with the assumption that Papa is the sole third-person narrator. At the end of the book, after caring for his son through years of hardship, constant struggle for food and terrifying close calls with cannibals, Papa dies, but the narration does not end with his death, and the very last entry is narrated in a voice that flows as if it is still coming from the father, including cultured vocabulary like “wimpled” and “vermiculate” (286-87). The boy has to go on without his father, carrying with him all the things he learned from being raised by him, because, although Papa pledged that he would never leave him throughout the novel and often mentally psyched himself up to kill his son if their capture by the “bloodcult” became imminent (11), in the end, he tells the boy that he cannot take his life. It is here, in one of the last conversations the boy has with his father, that we find a clue as to who might become the narrator after Papa’s death.

You said you wouldn’t ever leave me./I know. I’m sorry. You have my
whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always
were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me
and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see./Will I hear you?/Yes. You
will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll
hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up. Okay?
Okay (279).

Approaching the story as an oral one, passed from father to son goes a long way to explaining some of the mystifying tactics McCarthy employs in The Road such as using short, separated entries to move the story from scene to scene much like Native American writers N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko use in their works, House Made of Dawn and Ceremony, respectively. In those novels, Silko and Momaday use disorienting, segmented narration to draw the reader into the disoriented experiences of the main characters who are both struggling with the impact of the white man’s wars on their traditional Native American upbringings, and the narrations are patterned after oral stories and the traditional Native American understanding of time as circular.

The boy’s experience in The Road, and the style of the novel, might be compared to the experiences of Momaday and Silko’s main characters and their novel’s formatting in several ways. After all, books are presumably all destroyed in The Road, either by fire or water (187), and words themselves struggle to maintain meaning after McCarthy’s apocalypse. Trees, that is, the source of wood pulp to make paper, are seemingly extinct (72 & 190), at least for a long time to come (one does have to wonder about trees and plants that use fire to re-seed themselves for example). The future of stories for the boy and other survivors, if not given up entirely (267-269), will likely be in the manner of oral stories much like the indigenous people of America. Papa and the boy, and through them, the reader, are caught up in a perpetual cycle of survival, from meal to meal, fire to fire and shelter to shelter, that is reminiscent of the Native American cycle of time. The disorientation Papa and son experience translates to us through the odd dialogues, ambiguous narrators and the choppy, chapter-less style of the novel itself.

One other thing that cannot be dismissed is that traditional Native American stories are often told as if they are happening as they are being told. One example is the creation myth, “The Word of Kyaklo” from the Zuni tribe (Tedlock). The Native American understanding of the emergence (creation) of that tribe is that each time they tell the story, their emergence is being happened again, and their tribe’s survival depends on the retelling of the story. Is it then possible that the story of The Road is an oral one that is not really happening for the first time as we read the story, but falls under the same genre that “The World of Kyaklo” does, an oral emergence narrative re-enacted by survivors of the apocalypse after Papa dies? The answer could very well be no, but The Road is certainly worthy of this sort of comparative question.

There is one other peculiarity in McCarthy’s tale that might be explained by reading it as if it were being told in this re-enactment style. The boy sees another little boy playing near the road, but when he runs after him, the little boy disappears(84), and just prior to that there is also mention of a dog barking (81, 83). But only a few entries later in the book, the narrator, whomever they may be, interrupts the flow of the third-person narrative to correct what the boy really remembers, saying, in first person, that there never was a little boy and that the dog had been following them when the boy’s mother (Papa’s wife) was still alive, when there was still “three cartridges in the pistol.”(87). The narrator’s interjection is a direct commentary to the reader on the boy’s memory. Dennis Tedlock wrote an essay called “The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in American Indian Religion” about “The Word of Kyaklo,” in which he asserts that storytellers who “happen” the story again are not merely storytellers, but interpreters as well and that this interpreter “does not merely play the parts, but is the narrator and commentator (italics mine) as well…[and] may even improve upon [the story]…or answer a question which it does not answer” (236). Although it is unclear why it is important for us to know that there never really was a little boy, the text here does give us a clue to what happened to the third bullet, which is yet another enigma in a book full of them. This is one particular place in the story where the narrator’s voice and Papa’s are difficult to distinguish. If we were to read The Road as an oral story then this correction would be flowing directly from the narrator as they “play the part” and comment on the story.

The language, narrative style and dialogue are not the only reason that The Road is a difficult one to travel with McCarthy though. He deals us some really tough issues in this post-apocalyptic tale. As the two make their way on the road you begin to get a sense that the story is nauseatingly cyclic: there is almost always a fire to be made, empty stomachs to be fed and the words they always rise to (as a poor substitute for the sun) are: “we have to go” (260). The Road, of course, is ultimately a story about a journey; a story we have read in various versions, many times over in literature. The protagonist’s ostensible purpose is survival: “He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here” (4). But rather quickly we are privileged with the thoughts inside Papa’s head that tells us, “he said that everything depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was empty and no substance to it” (29).

This becomes a point of contention between Papa and the boy as the two progress through towns and landscape that appear at least somewhat more hospitable than the open road where the “bloodcults” travel in slave trains and carry long lengths of pipe to bludgeon their captives (91-92). They come upon a pleasant waterfall and feast on a nearby cache of morels and the boy remarks, “This is a good place, Papa” (41). The siren call of the waterfall does not escape the man, in fact, he struggles with the awareness of it because the falls and swirling water remind him of a time in the departed world when the rivers were alive with fish, and the fish inevitably remind him of his nightmare that began the tale, and there is something about the creature in his nightmare that he is adverse to that is difficult to work out (41). The fish imagery is likely a reference to fertility (Cepulkauskaite), and therefore, creativity, and perhaps it is here at the waterfall that Papa faces the finality of the boy’s mother’s death as the end of the creativity that embodies life and which was once in him. Regardless, it is very apparent that the waterfall is a turning point in the book, a place where Papa makes a conscious choice to leave behind “a good place”, and this example is not the most provocative one, but a mere foreshadowing of another, more crucial (and to the reader, more bewildering) choice he makes later in the book when they happen upon a house and discover a well-stocked bunker hidden in the yard at a crucial moment when both of them are on the verge of starving to death (137).

What is so distinct and suspenseful about this second, found blessing is that at this point in the book father and son have already been through a treasure hunt that is so similar to the way in which they discover this miracle bunker (i.e. a wooden door in the floor, locked with a padlock, on someone’s property that has to be pried open with a shovel) that the boy is terribly frightened and does not want the father to open it, and yet the father insists: “I know you’re scared. That’s okay. I think there may be things in there and we have to take a look….This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” (137). The boy’s previous experience with his father’s treasure-digging had opened up a cellar in which the bloodcult had kept prisoners alive in squalor, presumably for later consumption (110).

But this time the man and his son had uncovered a hidden cache of food, clothing, fresh water, a chemical toilet and other necessities that would have lasted both of them a very long time (138). The bunker is such an incredible find in the middle of the story that we are as awed as Papa is as he descends into the ground and finds their deliverance from death. Later on, after they had eaten and slept is when the narrator cruelly tells us, “they weren’t going to be here that long” (144). Of course we know full well that we are holding almost half of the book in our right hand and so this moment of redemption is not the end of the story for the travelers. That is what makes the scenes in the bunker so poignant. I had to ask myself as I was reading what could possibly come after this and why would they ever leave? But, of course, they have not reached the coast yet. Can the plot really be this simple?

I am reminded, here, of the frenzied travels of The Beats of the 1950’s, Jack Kerouac and his friends, back and forth across the United States from New York to San Francisco and down to Mexico as they are fictionalized in Kerouac’s famous book, On the Road. That wild journey was Kerouac’s attempt to make sense out of the senselessness he and his friends felt, as much as it was a book about life: high speed, noise, erratic stops and starts, and intense, soul-seeking conversations. In both McCarthy and Kerouac’s novels, the destination is irrelevant; it is the journey that is important.

However, in The Road there is a strange tension posed by the slow, repetitive motion of the journey to the ambiguous southern coast that Papa and the boy take, and is in direct opposition to the frenzied speed at which Kerouac’s novel progresses. We are made aware of time progressing mainly by the subtle changes in scenery and the gradual shift of responsibility for the journey from father to son; that is, where Kerouac’s frenzied speed conveys to the reader life, McCarthy’s suspension of time suggests the feeling of death. The moment when the balance of responsibility seems to shift decisively towards the boy is in a scene on the beach, where the two have already reached the coast and they have all their worldly belongings stolen from them by a scrawny outcast from one of the surviving “communes.” The shift of power occurs in a vivid way because the storyline carries the reader’s loyalty with the shift as we read the vengeful reaction Papa has to the singular thief’s act of survival. Papa forces the man to strip to complete vulnerability and leaves him for dead (255-259). The shock at this callous, inhumane response, coupled with the boy’s pleas to his father for mercy on the thief’s part bring about a resolute change of power as we read with a sense of satisfaction the next entry and find the two backtracking to the point where they left the thief, to return him his clothing (259-260). From here on out in the book, the boy slowly takes on increasing control until Papa finally dies, leaving the boy to carry on his father’s legacy (281). Despite the scope of time the novel suggests takes place, and the distinct shift in responsibility, we are left keenly aware at the moment Papa dies that his son is still a vulnerable child. He stands helplessly on the road as a stranger approaches him and puts his trust in the stranger without much resistance at all (281-286). Papa’s journey, as an attempt to make sense out of the new world’s senselessness, ends with his discovery that the will to live is out of his control, and his son, as our representative of the new world, is capable of making it where Papa could not.

The final scenes between father and son are about as heart-wrenching as the story gets, and perhaps the only scenes that could have brought tears to my eyes, but it was a flood of tears that I had expected, that never came. The rest of the scenes that my conscience told me should have provoked an emotional reaction fell with a thud. I was completely unmoved. Cannibalism, a baby being spit-roasted over a fire, humans kept like livestock in a cellar, nothing McCarthy wrote about shocked me or moved me to tears. For this reason, McCarthy’s attempt to use his well-researched vocabulary and draw the reader into the peculiar place between two worlds was just about overlooked the first time I read it through, and I will admit, blushingly, that I wanted to toss the book in the trash. I do not think McCarthy would be a bit surprised. Thirty-five years ago, Robert Coles wrote a review about one of McCarthy’s early books, Child of God, in which he noted in McCarthy’s writing a “stubborn refusal to bend his writing to the literary and intellectual demands of our era,” and that his “fate is to be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted” (qtd. in Woodward). I believe this is an understatement, and that Virginia Woolf would heartily agree.

In 1929, Woolf wrote a little essay about writing in which she pinpoints the authorial quality that makes a piece of literature (as opposed to books in general) “fountains of perpetual life” (100). She happened upon Samuel T. Coleridge’s statement that “a great mind is androgynous” (qtd. in Woolf 97). She boldly goes on to define an androgynous mind to mean one that “is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided” (97). This passage from A Room of One’s Own, occurred to me late at night as I searched for some way in which to rescue The Road from its certain “disappearance” into my trashcan as soon as this paper is finalized and graded. Because, despite all that I have purposed about The Road, despite my attempts at literary comparisons on my journey with Papa and the boy, there still remains the intuitiveness with which my first impression was made of the book that I cannot ignore, and that is, that something is grimly pretentious (or is it portentous?) in McCarthy’s design that utterly kills my emotional reaction to it. The oppression of it was almost unbearable. Strangely enough, the zenith of this oppression came not as a response to the narrative or dialogues, but it occurred when I asked a couple men (both fathers) to read the most obvious dialogues that epitomized this pretense, such as the first one I quoted in this paper. The unanimous answer to the question, “Would you talk this way to your son?” was “yes.” I candidly admit to my overreaction: I went home and wept, for the end of the world had already arrived, in my mind. I lost sleep over it, but in my insomnia I finally remembered what Virginia Woolf had said. It was then that I realized the self-effacing (dare I call it literarily suicidal?) genius of Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy’s style in The Road is unfalteringly and divisively masculine, and for him it can be written no other way because Woolf’s androgynous author could not craft a world in which the last civilized woman, in Papa’s estimation, had destroyed herself. The boy’s mother had presumably killed herself with a sharp piece of obsidian before the story even begins, (58) and with her dies Papa’s creative will: “Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad” (53-54). Even if we assume that at some points in the story Papa is the narrator who uses obscure language with ease, that obscure language rarely comes out in the dialogues Papa speaks throughout the book, and the “deadness” of Papa’s dialogues, as a representation of our viewpoint, weighs the heaviest, and causes his words (and with it our emotions) to fall “plump to the ground—dead” (Woolf 100). With Woolf’s words I finally resolved to accept that The Road was one of those books that not only “celebrate[s} male virtues, enforce[s] male values and describe[s] the world of men; it is that the emotion with which [this book is] permeated is to a woman incomprehensible….and lack[s] suggestive power” (Woolf 100-101); this is precisely the kind of book she categorized as not being a “fountain of perpetual life” (100).

McCarthy’s form so precisely molds to his content that his authorial “creativity” and “incandescence” are ultimately snuffed out along with Papa’s. Unfortunately, his unwavering steadfastness to his principles of writing make The Road come off tinny, impervious, unimaginative, dull and divisive to the casual reader, most especially, the female one; in writing this book, I am convinced that McCarthy has, in effect, noosed himself for the sake of his latest book. I can hear McCarthy laughing darkly at my suggestion: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed…I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea” (qtd. in Woodward). It is up to literary criticisms of the sort I began with to cut the rope and resuscitate the brilliant author of The Road.

Works Cited

Cepulkauskaite, Ieva. “What Do the Symbols Hide?” 1998. Sociumas.lt. 6/14/2009. <http://www.sociumas.lt/Eng/Nr15/simboliai.asp>

Coles, Robert. “The Stranger.” The New Yorker. August 2, 1974. 87-90.
“Even More Southern Expressions-II.” 5/27/2009. USASouthmouth.com. 2001-2009. http://usads.ms11.net/evenmoresouthmouth2.html

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Group, 1955.

KJV. BibleGateway.com. 5/27/2009. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013;&version=9;

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York, NY: Harper and Row, Publishers Inc, 1966.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1977.

Sontag, Susan. “Where the Stress Falls.” Where the Stress Falls. New York: Picador USA, 2001.

Tedlock, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 233-246.

Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” 4/19/92. New York Times.com. 5/20/2009. < http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html?_r=2>

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Florida: Harcourt, 1929.