Christ-Haunted: Theology on The Road1

Abstract

Where's the road to the place where light dwells; darkness, where's it located? Can you take it to its territory; do you know the paths to its house? Job, Common English Bible (38: 19-20) The Road is a novel that seems to dwell entirely in darkness. It begins after some planetlevel devastation has long ago reduced the world to ash. The protagonists, a man and his son, are in a struggle for their lives. They encounter cannibalism, slavery, cold-blooded acts of violence. Cormac McCarthy's narrative is as stark and cold as is his plot; this is fiction that cuts to the bone. Engaged so elementally with matters of life and death, The Road makes a case for itself as a classically naturalistic novel. The environment thwarts the characters. Chance dictates almost every encounter. Characters beg for God with no expectation that he will show up. The bleakness of this novel, keeping step as it does with other recent American novels, is in part what prompted Paul Elie to argue that fiction has "lost its faith." For a country where millions of people profess faith in Jesus Christ, he argues, our literary fiction is strikingly and incongruently post-Christian. In our fiction, Christian belief figures "somewhere between a dead language and a hangover." There's language that echoes the transcendent, but has no confidence in it. McCarthy and Don DeLillo feel like prophets, "but Christianity in their work is a country for old men" (Elie). Elie is not alone. Amy Hungerford, in her book Postmodern Belief (2010), reads McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) as a prime example of a larger trend in American fiction of drawing on biblical language to give the book the feeling of scripture's moral authority, when the book's actual authority is merely aesthetic. "We are left," says Hungerford, "with the presumptuous creation of a prose that sounds like scripture, tempts one to read (for metaphysical structures) as if one were reading scripture, and yet withholds all but the aesthetic and sentimental effects of scripture. In this sense, McCarthy has written, in Blood Meridian, a sentimental novel of the highest order" (95). The Road fares no better.