Myth, Legend and Dust: Cormac McCarthy and the loss of the vernacular

Abstract

In this paper, I will examine Cormac McCarthy's latest novel The Road (2006) and the 2009 film adaptation for their depiction of the loss of the everyday and the threat of mass extinction. 1 Although we are all faced with loss throughout our lives, we are generally able to find a way of coping with personal tragedy and trauma. Natural resilience and optimism helps us move on. In many ways, this emotional and material recovery is made possible by the retention of hope and the belief that things will get better. However, the outlook that McCarthy constructs in his novel is a postapocalyptic nightmare of death, and decay into nothingness. The novel and the film both depict the aftermath of an undefined disaster; this turns the surviving humans into feral animals reduced to violence and cannibalism to survive. This paper considers critical and scholarly response to the works to help us decide whether the final destination of the road is a metaphor for despair or hope. Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 in Rhode Island. However, at the age of four his parents and family moved south to Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy is today, at the age of eighty, one of the most famous and accomplished of American writers now considered in the tradition of Twain, Melville and Faulkner. McCarthy has also become recognised for his stage plays, and for adapted and original screenplays. However, widespread fame and recognition did not come quickly for McCarthy. In 1965, when his first novel The Orchard Keeper was published, McCarthy was little known outside of a small group of local Southern writers and subsisted on a number of literary VOLUME 5 NUMBER 2 SPRING 2015 TOM HENDRY'S research and academic background spans the study of history, literature and film studies. After gaining a degree in history at Queens' College, Cambridge, he had a long career in Information Technology. Tom later did a Masters course with the Open University combining the study of modern English Literature and film studies. His final-year dissertation was a comparative study of the intertextuality of films and literature with reference to the filmic adaptations by Ken Russell of D.H. Lawrence's major novels. Tom is now a second year MPhil/PhD candidate with FMACS, Birkbeck College, London studying adaptation and the novels of Cormac McCarthy.