Utopia At Last: Cormac McCarthys The Road as Science Fiction1

Christopher Pizzino

When I the old see, I know how much the new I need. Samuel Delany

To read The Road as science fiction is to read against a daunting critical consensus. Since the publication of Cormac McCarthys latest novel in the fall of 2006, reviewers and critics have approached it as a significant addition to the Euroamerican literary canon, sometimes with a glance at its science-fictional premise: the apocalyptic destruction of the world. Although the relationship between paraliteratures such as science fiction (hereafter sf) and literature is flexible at present, claims about the literary nature of The Road have tended either to be rigidly exclusive or to allocate a portion of sf for McCarthys use. The latter tendency is sharply observed by Michael Chabon, who notes that many reviewers, if they have not chosen to bestow on The Road the dispensation of calling it a fable or a parable, seem to have read The Road as the turn toward science fiction that any established literary writer may reasonably be permitted (24). Having noted this prescriptive critical tendency, Chabon himself approaches The Road not as sf, but as an epic in the mode of horror. Linking the respected tradition of the epic to horror fiction might productively trouble a different boundary between the literary and the paraliterary, but like many critics of the novel, Chabon suppresses generic concerns in favor of moralizing. He turns The Road into an exercise in guilt; it evokes the contemporary fear
Extrapolation, Vol. 51, No. 3 2010 by The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College

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of knowingas every parent fearsthat you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited (26). In this view, McCarthys novel possesses significant moral impact as a horror story with a conscience, which it somehow would lose if taken seriously as sf. In the case of The Road, even a critic sympathetic to paraliteratures in general seems to feel that reading it as sf is bound to damage or confine its significance, collapsing its moral valences. The more faithfully we read The Road using the dominant critical logic, the more science-fictional approaches might seem not merely unproductive but repugnant. The novel is, admittedly, deeply concerned with the erasure of moral significance. The protagonist, named simply the man, fights to preserve a sense of morality in the face of social breakdown encompassing widespread theft, suicide, rape, murder and cannibalism. For the man, there is a clear link between these specific depredations and the loss of moral truth in general; he thinks of a cannibal he is forced to kill as one Who has made of the world a lie every word (75). Both the goal and the means of the mans struggle against this multifarious lie is the protection and nurture of a son, referred to as the boy, for whom the man tries to [e]voke the forms (74) of decency and social order. Evoke the forms is among the most frequently cited lines in critical discussion, and has come to figure the man himself as the novels primary evocation of goodness. Isolated by his wifes suicide, threatened by increasing ill health, filled with longing for the world he has lost and steeled against despair by love for his offspring, the man seems to be an ideal cornerstone for a character-based examination of moral conflict. It is certainly difficult to justify a science-fictional reading of The Road if we see it as a portrait of selfless parental love (or, following Chabon, overwhelming parental guilt). In this view, to shift the focus away from the man, or to critique his struggle, might finish what the apocalypse started and snuff out the last remaining source of morality in the novels world. As it happens, The Road offers the possibility of moral and social order outside the father-son relationship. Neither the man nor most of his sympathetic readers take this possibility seriously, even though, as we will see, the boys survival depends on it. Further, the novel works to critique the man through a scheme at once deeply sympathetic and systematically ruthless. McCarthy ultimately reveals the mans efforts as insufficient, both for their immediate endsthe physical and moral nurture of the boyand for the larger work of asserting order in the face of anomy. Approaching the novel as canonical literature suppresses, without resolving, its deepest and most productive tensions. Though its plot concerns survival in the face of deprivation and terror, its most abiding questions have to do with narrative valueindeed, with the question

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of narrative itself as a producer of values. Reading The Road as sf confronts us with radically different questions about where value lies in the text, and about the dynamic ways the category of narrative operates in McCarthys vision of apocalypse. If the critical consensus has thus far posited the novel as a tale of simple, desperate human virtue, The Road itself expresses utopian impulses that complicate the framework in which virtue is defined. By describing The Road as utopian, I want to evoke a temporally inflected sense of the concept that is frequently visible in contemporary discussions of sf. In its early usage, descended from Thomas More, utopia is most obviously a spatial term naming a place where social, moral or spiritual goodness and health prevail. In contemporary uses, including those associated with sf, the term has acquired more and more temporal valences, and recent efforts to theorize sf have likewise given priority to the category of time in relation to utopia.2 In The Road, we see utopian impulses expressed less as concrete planning for ideal space than as an expectation of salutary, even redemptive events. The novels ruined world certainly forecloses the possibility of a good place resembling any traditional model of a utopia. However, this does not authorize a reading in which all virtues belong to a vanished past, with the man as their lingering representative. There is still the possibility that life can be lived on other terms than those of murder and cannibalism, and that this life can come not from remembrance of the past but from an ethical commitment to futurityin the words of sf theorist Michael Pinsky, an acting for the future and from the other that arrives from the future (188). It should be noted that the mans goals seem spatially organized but not utopian. The father hopes that by travelling south (from what is now the northeastern US), he and his son will find a place where they can safely survive, but there is no expectation of an actual change in the nature of their lives. The boys hopes, meanwhile, are for new experiences and encounters, and they connect the text to sf that anticipates the advent of difference, specifically the arrival of new forms of social being. An understanding of sf as temporally inflected utopian narrative will be crucial to my reading of the boy, who tries to bridge the gap between the stories the man tells him, which encourage responsibility for the world at large, and the way the man acts, which gives primacy to himself and the boy only. To open up this gap and see it as meaningful demands a critical view of the protagonist, who has won the sympathy of most readers and critics. The mans efforts to provide safety and well-being for his son are usually read under the headings of biology and ethics; the novel is assumed to be about the drive to provide for ones offspring and about fundamental values that fuel or complement this drive. Benjamin Kunkel, in an essay on contemporary apocalyptic narratives, dismisses The Road as typical of fantasies of a social

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situation radically simplified and ennobled by the imperative of survivala life in which good-versus-evil is all that can be said to remain of either politics or morality (91). While I see the novel as far more complex, Kunkels description, intended as a critique, accurately captures the dominant attitude among the novels many admirers. The blurb featured on the front cover of the first paperback printing of the novel claims it is a tale of survival and the miracle of goodness (Villalon n.pag.). Notable here is the conjunction and linking two kinds of tales not traditionally thought of as a natural pair. There is certainly no given connection between them in the world of The Road, where starving people abandon morality to the extent of cannibalizing others, including (in at least one case) their newborn offspring. This is only the most obvious way in which survival and goodness are in conflict. As the novel unfolds, the opposition between survival, as the father defines ithis sons life as the ultimate priority, his own life as valuable only in the service of that priorityand a larger sense of goodness becomes unmistakable. The link between moral certitude and mortal struggle often seems clear in the novels early chapters, especially when the third-person narrators voice flows seamlessly into and out of the mans perspective. As in his other works, McCarthy dispenses with quotation marks, and this stylistic choice helps to authorize the mans attachment to his son: He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke (5). These lines invite the reader to affirm what narrator and protagonist seem already to know with certaintythat the boys existence is an unequivocal good, and that anything done in the service of this good has divine warrant. Given that the man and the boy are isolated, each the others world entire (6), the mans utterance is effectively a kind of reader address, interpolating us in a trinity of moral certitude. However, this interpolation quickly becomes unstable. In fact, there is no one other than the reader to whom the father can declare his certainty, because he is either too fearful or too cautious to connect himself to a larger community. When his son sights a boy and encourages his father to seek out the group to which the boy must belong, the father refuses. He claims the risk is too great, and a number of the novels incidentsnear-capture by cannibals, for instanceshow that the fathers caution is grounded in common sense. Yet common sense might also suggest that a living child is evidence of parents or guardians who are not cannibals, and the mans refusal to follow his sons suggestion is a choice to define both goodness and survival in narrowly familial terms. The warrant the child provides is exclusive, and the man interprets his sons interest in some other child as both impractical and wrong. This incident is the first significant clash between father and son, exposing a gap between survival (as the father conceives it) and goodness (as the son

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understands it) that becomes more visible as the novel progresses. The boy starts to object to the mans insistence on keeping away from other people, particularly as this insistence bears on the problem of resources. Whatever destroyed the world has had the effect of a nuclear winter; plant and animal life are almost entirely dead, and food supplies are accordingly limited and dwindling. The boy requests that his and his fathers food be shared with others, but the father either refuses or allows grudging and minimal sharing, underscoring the difference between his own understanding of goodness and his sons. When the son urges his father to seek out the other child he has spotted, he volunteers to give up half his food so that the boy can live. His suggestion is risky in conditions of near-starvation, but it does not exactly justify the mans conviction that his sons interest in the boy is tantamount to suicide: Do you want to die? Is that what you want? (85) he demands. Most relevant to the science-fictional qualities of The Road are the sons increasingly probing and skeptical questions about the values his father has been imparting to him. We are told that the father has tried to communicate a sense of moral order to his son through the telling of old stories of courage and justice (41). These stories, we assume, provide the background for the narrative the man fabricates in the present, which is that he and his son are carrying the fire, a phrase that recurs throughout the novel. The mans vague formulation seems an attempt to [e]voke the forms (74) of morality without saying exactly what it might be. The son demonstrates an increasing desire to specify the meaning of his fathers words, and to test that meaning against the reality of his fathers actions. After the father kills a cannibal to protect his son, the boy asks, Are we still the good guys? (77). In this instance, the question leads to an affirmative liturgy shared by father and son, who assure each other that they are the good guys and always will be (77), but this mutual agreement does not persist in the latter half of the novel. At one point, the boy asks whether he and his father might meet other good guys on their journey; the father replies, I dont think were likely to meet any good guys on the road (151). The sons equivocal retort, Were on the road (151), suggests a skepticism about both the fathers assurance of his own goodness and the fathers universal fear of other travelers. The clash between father and son comes to a head when the son doubts the worth of the narratives his father has been conveying to him. Of particular importance is the following conversation, in which the father speaks first:
Do you want me to tell you a story? No. Why not? The boy looked at him and looked away. Why not?

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Utopia At Last Those stories are not true. They dont have to be true. Theyre stories. Yes. But in the stories were always helping people and we dont help people. (26768)

The father changes the direction of the conversation instead of addressing his sons final objection, which suggests that it is valid, not simply a matter of a childs inability to distinguish harsh fact from inspiring fiction. The child perceives that the function of the stories is more troubling than the father will admit. The latter tells old stories of courage and justice not to show the son how to live, but to mirror an idealized image of the father himself. It is crucial that the father actually does tell the son stories that imply a larger obligation to the world; apparently he does not tell stories that have actually happened to the two of them, which would all involve his acting for his son alone. It is equally crucial that the more the child reflects on these stories, the more glaringly they differ from the reality of the fathers behavior. Two things are clarified in this passage. Most immediately, we see the sons growing adherence to a larger set of ethical obligations encompassing others besides himself and his father. However, and importantly, this adherence is directly inspired by the fathers teachings. If the difference between what the father practices and what he preaches is the catalyst for the sons convictions, this difference is nevertheless produced, if unintentionally, by the father himself. Passages like the above invalidate Benjamin Kunkels critique of The Road as a book that pits family values against the cannibal universethe good guys versus the bad guys, in McCarthys unironic terms (94). The Road shows how narratives of the good guys versus the bad guys, taught to the son by the father without a hint of conscious irony, ironically push the son toward a new position different either from his fathers or from that of the cannibalistic bad guys. The fullness of this irony is revealed when the man succumbs to injury and illness without committing his son to the care of others. As he dies, the man converses with his son about the boy he sighted earlier in the novel. The son wonders who will find [the little boy] if hes lost, and the father assures him, Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again (281). Notably, the man gives utterance to temporal expectationas opposed to his usual spatial planningand in what follows, his seemingly nave vision of goodness in a bad world becomes real. A stranger approaches the boy and informs him that he is part of a group (including two other children) who are willing to take him in. The connection to the earlier incident, and the earlier boy, is unmistakable, and creates a narrative symmetry that allows us to describe the novels events thus: A man traveling alone with his son avoids contact with all other persons, even though his health is failing. Rather than seek out a boy

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his son has spotted, he chooses to remain apart and focus solely on his sons well being. Later, when the man himself has died, another man makes the opposite choice and approaches the mans son with a sincere offer of care and community, revealing that the man had, from the first, been mistaken not to risk contact with others. Most critics have taken little account of this final turn. In the case of those who affirm the father as the moral center of the story, this is certainly understandable, since the conclusion undermines his privileged position. Also understandable, from a different angle, is Kunkels insistence that hopeful endings do not alter the fundamentally limited stance of contemporary apocalyptic fiction, The Road included: This final hopeful glimpse of a vague pale radiance such as dying people are said to see seems intended to signify something like the immortal resilience of the human spirit rather than any possibility of a decent earthly politics (94). But if the adoption of one child into an existing community (which has the shape of a nuclear family) is not a complete program for a decent earthly politics, neither is it merely an expression of humanist sentimentality. Given the precise narrative symmetry McCarthy establishes, the novels final turn transforms the meaning of what has gone before; survival and goodness are not connected in the restrictive way the man imagines, at least up until the moment of his death. The conclusion also reveals what Chabons reading of The Road as an exercise in horror ignores: the expansion of scale that is crucial to McCarthys narrative design. Aesthetics of scale have long been understood as important to sf in all media (most frequently under the heading of the sublime), but the way scale distinguishes sf from horror is perhaps most readily grasped in the context of film.3 Vivian Sobchack argues that horror film tends to center on moral conflict, traditionally within an individual struggling between different aspects of his or her self. Some newer horror trends have tended to keep the conflicts external; the star villains of slasher films rarely seem to have any internal qualms about their actions. The question of morality has nevertheless remained central, even when, as in recent torture-porn films, the issue is the total absence or perversion of moral order. Extending Sobchacks point, we might note that the nadir of morality in horror films is usually revealed in confined scenarios (secluded cabins, caves, basements, etc) that simplify moral questions, while sf film tends to present its conflicts, moral or otherwise, from multiple points of view that allow for dynamic critical evaluation. In Sobchacks phrasing, The passion and human hunger of the horror film is replaced by the satisfactions of objectivity. Terror is replaced by wonder (38). Frequently, a shift of scale is part of this replacement; a single, confined narrative is revealed, through an enlargement of perspective or a change of setting, to be only one narrative possibility among others. The Road certainly feels like a confined narrative at several moments, not least when the

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man discovers a hellish basement where cannibals keep living people as a food source. The sense of confinement is nevertheless undone in the conclusion, when a point of view initially announced as a source of fundamental truth, seemingly guaranteed by our trinitarian linking with the man and the narrator, turns out to be a contingent perspective not shared by other good guys. What first advertises itself as an archetypal story of goodness in a post-apocalyptic world becomes a story that exists alongside viable, even superior alternatives. This does not entirely dispel the note of horror that dominates earlier portions of the novel, such as the wrenching scene where the mans wife, just before committing suicide, insists, Were the walking dead in a horror film (55). However, McCarthy does invalidate the idea that the entire business of living, outside of the mans efforts to keep himself and his son alive, is a damned enterprise. Further, we see that alternatives are made possible because people other than the man follow narratives different from the one he accomplishes. Indeed, his utopian declaration that Goodness will find the little boy is fulfilled only because others enact a kind of goodness the man has refused; he speaks a collective truth despite the fact that he has participated in its making in a limited way. And yet, the father does play a key role in preparing his son to live in the community that adopts him by encouraging an expectation of care and mutual aid. In an interlude at the center of the novel, when father and son are resting in a bomb shelter they have discovered, the son, taking a hot bath, suddenly remarks, Warm at last (147). The father is both pleased and bemused, asking, Where did you get that? (147), but the source of the remark is clearly the fathers genuine care for the boys physical well being. A sense of protection, however threatened, has created in the boy the expectation of physical comforts and pleasures he has not yet experienced but may experience at last. The location of this scene, resonant with Cold War xenophobia, might reasonably make us skeptical of the boys satisfaction, but it does not come at the expense of anyone else. Indeed, the boys satisfied hope is not phrased in terms of expense or even expenditure. Shorn of the trappings of commodity fetishismthe boys desire has not been shaped by advertisements, pre-packaged narratives of luxury, or window shoppingand absent any sense of earned or deserved reward, this hope for shelter and sustenance is one kind of utopian expectation in its naked form, made possible by the fathers care. More broadly, the fathers stories of carrying the fire, however little they may fit his own conduct toward the world, nevertheless shape the boys encounter with his new community. This is especially evident in the following exchange, in which the boy speaks first, followed by the man who will adopt him:
Are you carrying the fire? Am I what?

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Christopher Pizzino Carrying the fire. Youre kind of weirded out, arent you? No. Just a little. Yeah. So are you? What, carrying the fire? Yes. (283)

This conversation echoes the liturgical rhythms that animate earlier exchanges between the boy and his father. The fact that the phrase carrying the fire, while unfamiliar to the new guardian, yet serves as the basis for an understanding between him and the boy, shows that the stories the father tells, in exceeding the ethical valences of his own conduct, construct an anticipatory bridge between the boys present and future. When the boy connects himself to an actual community by referencing values he has so far encountered primarily in narrative, we see that the fathers nurture has unintentionally functioned, to return to Pinskys phrasing, as an acting for the future and for the other that arrives from the future (188). This formulation derives from an understanding of sf as attuned both to an ethics of difference and to the unfolding of concrete processes. For Pinsky, sf oscillates between the two, attending both to the horizon of alterity (the Other as approached by Levinas) and to the specific material and textual forms in which it manifests as we apprehend it (techn as articulated by Heidegger).4 This enactment is fundamental to the structure and purpose of The Road. At the sentence level of textual comprehension, it demands meticulous attention to the details of the protagonists lives. Never has McCarthys well-known focus on particulars of setting and actionless an aesthetic interest in surface than a concern with the specificity of experiencebeen more fully and urgently elaborated, and never have the particulars more strongly challenged us to interrogate what we see. Weighing the details seriously, we might be led, like the son, to question the mans actions. If he is dedicated to his sons survival, why does he avoid all others when it seems likely his own health will fail before his son is old enough to fend for himself? If he wants to show his son how to carry the fire of care for the world, why does he not seek out the boy his son sees, when he is a viable indicator of a good community? It is precisely in asking such questions that we begin to glimpse the horizon beyond the father-son relationshipa horizon both blocked and anticipated by that relationship.5 We are certainly prompted to distinguish the fundamentally backward looking nature of the father, who imagines his son sees him as an alien ... [a] being from a planet that no longer existed

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(154), from the orientation of the text as a whole, which sees the fathers care for his son as a partial instantiation of an ethics that will be more radically and fully realized later. Simultaneously, the lavishly rendered specifics of the mans daily struggle to feed, protect, and instruct his son become a prolepsis, pointing toward the very future the man consciously denies. The narrative dynamic I am describing makes The Road an unusual instance of sf; it explores the workings of utopian energy in a way that is intimate yet transformative. Of particular interest is the fact that the novel insists on the difference between the fathers values and the sons while also tracing the connections that bind them. The possibility of human care defined in new (non-familial, non-individualistic) terms is asserted as a fundamental reality that makes utopian thinking and feeling possible. Further, utopian possibility is defined as decisively different from the fathers narrowly focused warrant; the novel refuses the idea that the sons values are simply the same as his fathers, only wider in scope. The fathers care for his son is taken over by a community that cares for more than its own children, so that the novels initially narrow notion of goodness must be transformed in order to sustain any meaning (if all adults acted as the man acted, his child would not survive into adulthood). At the same time, the sons utopian expectation of the possibility of a larger communityone in which people other than the boy and his father carry the fireis created precisely by his fathers stories, which, in their effect on the boy, exceed the fathers own ethical boundaries. When the son points to the difference between the values the father narrates and the values he lives by, he is, doubtless, pointing to the fathers shortcomings. His own ability to point out these shortcomings, however, is itself linked directly to what his father has told him. If, as he asserts in an argument with his father, he is the one who has to worry about everything (259), the urge to worry, to register the larger world as a subject of care, comes from his fathers directive to carry the fire, to be counted among the good guys. The details of the father-son exchange are sparse; we know far less than we might wish about exactly what kinds of stories the man tells his son. What we know for certain is that goodness only finds the boy because it takes forms other than the fathers own, even as the sons ability to anticipate and enact goodness is made possible by the care the father undertakes.6 Insofar as the fathers stories, derived from a vision of the past, enable a grasp of futurity for the son, The Road is a novel about the origin of sf narrativesabout where we get them, in the fathers terms. This raises the question of how The Road can be situated against the larger background of sf as a body of literature, and here I want to use the novel as a vantage point from which to distinguish two avenues for theorizing sf. One tendency, to which I have already alluded, promotes

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sf as a utopian discourse. This tendency is not new; it was implicit in several major attempts to define sf in the 1970s, especially in Suvins Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). As is well-known, Suvin argues against critics who see sf as primarily a genre of extrapolation, claiming instead that its main function is analogical. What sf does most productively, according to Suvin, is reflect on the problems of its own time and place in a way that does not simply predict future effects from present causes, but transforms our understanding of the present itself. At certain moments, Suvin goes beyond the horizon of analogy and grants that sfs analogical tendencies indicate an at least initial readiness for new norms of reality, for the novum of dealienating human history (84). In the past decade of sf theory, there has been increasing emphasis on the transformative, utopian elements that contribute to a readiness for new norms. In Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), Carl Freedman has argued for sf as explicitly political writing that does the same work as critical theory and is privileged with regard to critique and utopia (86), while Fredric Jameson has offered a view of sf as a species of negative dialectics in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). To these well-known works should be added Pinksys Future Present (2003), discussed above, which mediates between the materialist emphasis typical of much Euroamerican sf criticism and an ethics of Otherness. Whatever the differing terms and emphases of these arguments, they all shift the ground of definition away from analogy proper, and even further from prediction/extrapolation, toward sf as a necessarily utopian narrative mode that points beyond what is currently known (or can be accurately predicted) to radical difference and the challenges of encountering or fostering it. This emphasis in recent sf theory has scarcely banished all interest in prediction or extrapolation; abiding critical interest in cyborgs and in the category of the posthuman has kept these squarely in view, though with an eye to radical, possibly utopian transformation as well.7 Nevertheless, a second interest has also become increasingly strong in the last decade: sf as a form of culture that serves as the nexus of fandom.8 This interest is not necessarily antithetical to the utopian, but it does raise the very different question of sf as a set of shared and recognizable conventions, which connect sf texts to one another and connect communities of readers and viewers as well. In the realm of sf theory as such, Damien Brodericks Reading by Starlight (1995) articulates the approach most appropriate to this question. Broderick sees sf as defined by a web of conventions, motifs, and thematics, a mega-text (xiii) that makes sf works inherently intertextual. This definition does not automatically exclude any consideration of the utopian aspects of sf. Broderick is at some pains to finesse how sf conventions operate, and to emphasize their transformative and destabilized qualities; he wishes to argue that sf, at its most energetic, can be

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animated by its conventions without thereby being conventional.9 However, there would seem to be an irreducible tension between a notion of sf defined by its openness to difference and anticipation of otherness, and a notion grounded in the sameness of shared conventions, no matter how dynamic those conventions may be. Decidedly utopian but not strongly intertextual, The Road demands that we acknowledge the possible limitations of an sf-as-culture approach. McCarthy is deeply familiar with many landmarks of the Euroamerican literary canon into which he has been welcomed, and he has made little attempt to conceal his influences, once remarking that books are made out of other books (Venomous 31). The Road is obviously intertextual in this broad sense, and informed readers will be able to place the novel in dialogue with a host of earlier texts, not to mention with McCarthys own work. In the more narrowly science-fictional sense, however, the novel proceeds without a necessary or intrusive megatextual apparatus. While readers may feel less disoriented if they are familiar with other sf narratives of apocalypse, there is no need for such familiarity. McCarthy writes the apocalypse afresh, with minimal intertextual dialogue (the wifes mention of horror film is one of a very few references to pre-existing narrative conventions). From these beginnings, The Road tells the story of a readiness for new norms (Suvin 84) emerging in the boys consciousness through his fathers nurture. The fact that the boys expectation is prompted by old stories of courage and justice (41) presents us with a choice. If a connection to the mega-text is necessary for sf, then it is possible to say that McCarthy is poaching on paraliterary territory using the conservative thematics of adventure narratives, or the elevated style of high-literary writing, or both. It is more fruitful, I believe, to say that The Road stands or falls as an important sf novel regardless of its indifference to existing conventions. In fact, I see it as a novel that succeeds as sf partly because of its indifference. The fact that the father spurs his sons utopian expectations through traditional stories that would seem, in themselves, to have no particularly utopian (or science-fictional) content only strengthens the dynamic quality of the father-son relationship, and the radical way values are transformed from one generation to the next. The mans beliefs, intended to counterbalance the destruction of the world, must themselves be destroyedat least in the limited forms through which the father understands themin order to reach fulfillment, and this dynamic of destruction and fulfillment unfolds in the novel itself without the advantages or impairments of precedent. As much as The Road frustrates a belief that sf is perforce intertextual, it also disrupts key assumptions in criticism of McCarthys previous work. As we know from an interview given in 2005, McCarthy has a number of unpublished

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manuscripts near completion, and he claims that their order of release has no thematic design; this should chasten any claim that The Road by itself indicates commitment to a new direction (Cormac Country 104). Nevertheless, to approach The Road from the angle I am suggesting is to depart from a critical consensus about the category of history in McCarthys work. The consensus has been partly obscured by two intermittent debates concerning McCarthys orientation as a writer. First, there is the question of philosophy: is McCarthy a historically informed writer who conceives of humanity in temporally and culturally specific terms, or a universalist, committed to a transhistorical grasp of human nature? Second, there is the question of purpose: does McCarthy conceive of his work as redemptive, capable of ameliorating the ills of the world, or is he merely an able but disinterested historian? Despite these points of contention, there is a general critical assumption that history and desolation are linked for McCarthy. Whether it shapes human nature or merely provides circumstances for its expressionand whether McCarthy writes redemptively or otherwisehistory is almost always assumed to bring bad news, either the destruction of specific forms of value by worse forms or simply the cancellation of value altogether. In the standard critical view of McCarthy, historical experience causes humanity to be cruelly torn from its innocence, drained of its strength, misled into indulging its worst impulses, or simply given various opportunities to discover its isolation, insignificance or iniquity.10 One powerful recent articulation of this consensus is Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (2008), in which John Cant argues: McCarthy deliberately sets out to give his texts mythic form and ... he does so in such a way as to point out the destructive consequences of structuring the consciousness of individuals by means of powerful mythologies which they are not in a position to live out (9). This argument might well be a gesture of critical reconciliation. For Cant, McCarthy is both a cultural universalist who believes in a transhistorical human nature containing the potential for good and evil, and a historicist who sees specific cultural developments as either causing or failing to prevent specific historical wrongs. He is, likewise, both a mythographer and a deconstructor of myth. Though I am not prepared to differ with Cant as regards McCarthys work in general, I do find this approach inadequate to The Road. Cant stresses the virtue and nobility of both the father and the son, who represent the inherent vitality of the ardenthearted (270), and the worthlessness of a broader culture that has destroyed itself, or at least has been unable to prevent its own destruction.11 But despite the stark realities of its apocalyptic scenario, The Road ultimately rejects such binaries as innocence and the Fall, vitality and enervation, myth and its deconstruction. The father-son relationship is not as innocent or as closed as Cant suggests; it neither transcends myth

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nor is destroyed by it. Borrowing Cants language, I would argue that the man structur[es] the consciousness of [the boy] by means of powerful mythologies which [he is] not in a position to live out. The mans teaching, however, does not have destructive consequences in the expected sense. The boy absorbs and re-forms his fathers myths as he steps into a new history. What the boy takes from the father is what readers might take from The Road: a commitment to broader ethical horizons and a hope, however fraught, that the future will bring new forms of care and community. It is unfortunate that the manfor McCarthy a vehicle of transformation within historyhas become simply the measure, adequate or not, of narrative and human possibility. It is likewise unfortunate that The Road is read as terminating discussion of historical transformation when it gives form to more utopian aspiration than any of McCarthys previous works. I suggest, finally, that many critics and readers energetically subscribe to a decidedly literary and humanistic reading of The Road not because it isnt sf, but precisely because it is, and in a way that demands both a thinking-through and a thinking-beyond the categories of value associated with accepted literary canons. At the same time, the novel usefully disrupts an overly narrow sense of what counts as sf. It bypasses conscious or overt conversation with the tradition of sf, and it offers us an instance of utopian anticipation rooted in (yet moving away from) more traditional narratives. Sf has continually struggled with its links to various pre-existing generic conventions, from the adventure-romance models underpinning much early magazine fiction to the hard-boiled clichs that characterized the achievements of cyberpunk. In The Road, we have an sf narrative that embraces and foregrounds this problem, both at the micro-level of the two central characters and at the macro-level of the narrative as a whole. The novel enacts the emergence of the utopian through what initially appears to be a conservative exercise in bomb-shelter ethics. What should strike us as wondrous about McCarthys story of father and son is not the capacity of individuals to be good in a bad world, or to choose good myths over bad ones, but the possibility that utopian energies can arise from limited forms of good. This reading usefully chastens a sense of sf as a closed enterprise, practiced by specialists in coded language to the exclusion of untutored outsiders. The failure of sf critics to seize The Road as a significant instance of utopian writing suggests that the problem of exclusivity operating between sf and literature has, at last, begun to work in both directions. In his 1996 essay Science Fiction and the Question of the Canon, Carl Freedman was right to observe that The danger will always exist that science fiction canonizing may repress much that is genuinely new and critical within and beyond the genre (119). That a key instance of this repression is itself concerned with the dangers of exclusion might sharpen

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our desire to keep sf criticism open to the arrival of valuable new narratives, whatever their origins.

Notes
1. I would like to thank Channette Romero and Aidan Wasley for their invaluable suggestions. Thanks also to Dale Knickerbocker for generous editorial support. 2. It is important to note a long-term shift of priorities toward the category of time within science fiction as a whole since the early modern period; see Suvin 72-75. However, an increasing sense that temporal categories are crucial to utopia can also be observed in recent decades. See for instance Jamesons Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Essays, in which the new material comprising the first half of the text is much more temporally oriented in its conception of utopia than the earlier material collected in the latter half. Carl Freedmans articulation of Blochian hermeneutic utopianism is likewise strongly inflected towards the temporal; see Critical Theory and Science Fiction 63-86. See also my discussion of Pinsky below. For a contemporary treatment of utopianism that gives more or less balanced attention to both space and time, see Wegner. 3. For a general discussion of sf aesthetics of scale, see Roberts 54-59. For an admirably comprehensive treatment of sf and the sublime, see Csicsery-Ronay chapter 5. 4. For Pinskys elaborations of these concepts, see chapters 1, 2 and 8. 5. The view I am suggesting, prompted by Pinskys understanding of sf, offers a much different sense of The Roads ethical scheme than that suggested by two previous critics. Through a prescriptive use of Schopenhauerian ethics, Euan Gallivan sheds a largely positive light on the father and a sceptical light on the novels conclusion, contracting its ethical horizons. Philip Snyders reading of The Road, like my own, considers its relation to a Levinasian ethics of the Other. However, Snyder avoids what I believe is McCarthys radical critique of the father. For Snyder, the son himself is the chief focus of the mans ethical obligations, the source of the fathers most essential and infinite call to responsibility (75). Snyder does not make clear how the biological bond, the one the man feels most naturally to the exclusion of all others, also occupies the space of Otherness. It is worth noting that in his catalogue of encounters between the two protagonists and other characters, Snyder leaves out the sons sighting of the other boyan omission which disturbingly repeats the fathers own discounting of the sons values. 6. The recent film adaptation of The Road, directed by John Hillcoat, provides a useful contrast with the intergenerational story the novel develops. Placing the film and the novel side-by-side, we see immediately that McCarthy possesses stylistic tools as a writer for which Hillcoat possesses no counterparts. In particular, the seamlessness of McCarthys prose, its power to strike and sustain particular narrative notes, contrasts sharply with the jump-cuts in Hillcoats rendering. Based on this film and his earlier feature The Proposition, it would seem that Hillcoat does not encourage his cinematographers to shoot for the editing room, and (in addition

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Utopia At Last to creating a choppy narrative quality about which some critics have complained) this reduces the films capacity to connect changes in the father-son relationship to identifiable causes and effects. Three other elements move the film further from the novels view of intergenerational conflict. First, and most obviously, the key exchange in which the boy points out the difference between the fathers stories and the fathers actions is excised, obscuring a sense that the sons desire to find the boy, and to be with other good guys, stems from the teachings and stories of his father. Second, Viggo Mortensens portrayal of the father conveys an emotional instability, occasionally verging on hysteria, that underscores his untrustworthiness; it is difficult to imagine him as a teller of convincing stories. Third, there is a slight but significant change in the sons age. The novel makes clear that the boy is under ten years old, and his mistrust in his father is clearly an effect of his earlier trust. In the film, the boy is slightly older, adolescent or on the verge of adolescence, and this makes it possible to see his conflicts with his father as result of his age, or even as a difference of personality or character. The effect of these changes is to unbalance the mans role in the boys development, neutralizing the subtle dynamic whereby the fathers stories motivate rebellion in his son precisely because he believes them. Turning from the film back to the novel, we gain a renewed sense of the complexity of its design, and of the utopian vector of its intergenerational narrative. 7. See for example Bukatman (1993), Hayles (1999), Foster (2005) and Clarke (2008). 8. Histories of sf fandom are not new; see Moskowitz (1954) and Warner (1969 and 1976). However, the past twenty years have certainly seen an increase in critical academic studies of sf fandom, along with studies of fandom as a whole that give significant attention to sf fandom in particular. For a sampling see Jenkins (1992) chapter 6, the volume edited by Sanders (1994), MacDonald (1998), Bacon-Smith (2000), and Bury (2005) chapters 1 and 2. 9. For Brodericks discussion of sf convention see 19-20, 57-63. 10. Two figures differing sharply from the typical view of history in McCarthys work are Phillips (1996) and Parkes (2002). I value Parkes, in particular, for his insistence on the performative aspects of McCarthys Blood Meridian, which suggest that the script of American history remains open to rewriting (120). 11. Cants use of the term ardenthearted is derived from McCarthy himself; see All the Pretty Horses 6.

Works Cited
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Print. Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

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Christopher Pizzino Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print. Cant, John. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Chabon, Michael. After the Apocalypse. Rev. of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The New York Review of Books 54.2 (2007): 2426. Print. Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphoses: Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Print. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Print. Delany, Samuel. Nova. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Print. Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2000. Print. . Science Fiction and the Question of the Canon. Science Fiction and Market Realities. Ed. Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and Eric S. Rabkin. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996. 111121. Print. Gallivan, Euan. Compassionate McCarthy?: The Road and Schopenhauerian Ethics. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): 98106. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Print. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Kunkel, Benjamin. Dystopia and the End of Politics. Dissent 55.4 (2008): 8998. Print. MacDonald, Andrea. Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication. Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity. Ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1998. 131152. Print. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. 1992. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print. . Cormac Country. Interview by Richard B. Woodward. Vanity Fair August 2005: 98104. Print. . Cormac McCarthys Venomous Fictions. Interview by Richard B. Woodward. The New York Times 19 Apr. 1992: SM28+. Print. . The Road. 2006. New York: Vintage, 2007. Print. Moskowitz, Sam. The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1954. Print. Parkes, Adam. History, Bloodshed, and the Spectacle of American Identity in Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Ed. James D. Lilley. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico Press, 2002. Print.

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Utopia At Last Phillips, Dana. History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian. American Literature 68.2 (1996): 433460. Print. Pinsky, Michael. Future Present: Ethics and/as Science Fiction. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. Print. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. Perf. Guy Pierce. First Look Pictures, 2005. Film. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. The Road. Dir. John Hillcoat. Perf. Viggo Mortensen. Dimension, 2009. Film. Sanders, Joe, ed. Science Fiction Fandom. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Print. Snyder, Philip. Hospitality in Cormac McCarthys The Road. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): 6986. Print. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987. Print. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Print. Villalon, Oscar. In a Time of War and TrickeryThe Years Best Books. Sfgate. San Francisco Chronicle, 17 Dec. 2006. Web. 07 Jan. 2010. Warner, Harry Jr. All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties. Chicago: Advent, 1969. Print. . A Wealth of Fable: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1950s. Van Nuys, CA: SCIFI Press, 1976. Print. Wegner, Phillip E. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Print.

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Contributors

Christopher Pizzino is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches comics, science fiction and contemporary American literature. He is currently working on a book entitled Arrested Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Jessie Stickgold-Sarah is a doctoral candidate in the department of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. She is completing a dissertation on genetics in post-DNA American literature. She has taught literature and writing in both the English and Biology departments, and is the director of the Brandeis Writing Center.

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