Lecture 9: There’s not a lot of good news on the road. In times like these.*

English 165EW
Winter 2013

Every time a student sits down to write for us, he [sic] has to invent the university for the occasion — invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or Anthropology or Economics or English. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Our perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community. […] I am continually impressed by the patience and good will of our students.

David Bartholomae, Inventing the University

*McCarthy 175

Some reminders

  • Please pass in your papers!
  • Showings of 28 Days Later:
    • Tonight, 5:30 p.m., South Hall 2635
    • Tomorrow, 5:30 p.m., South Hall 2635
  • Tonight is the last night to vote on scheduling for the first optional Douglas Adams discussion (which will be next week sometime).
  • As promised, I will start posting previous lecture slide shows this weekend.
    • However, even once I’ve caught up, these will always be delayed by a week. At least, until the end of the quarter is almost here. In times like these.

Cormac McCarthy (1933–)

  • Born Charles McCarthy.
  • Left school without a degree to focus on his writing career.
  • Has received increasing critical attention since 1992’s All the Pretty Horses.
  • Novels are often set in the borderlands of the American Southwest, and often involve explorations of social alienation through the lens of brutal violence.
a photo of Cormac McCarthy
Promotional photo used for McCarthy's Child of God, 1973.

Signification

The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads […] The teeth in their sockets like dental molds, the crude tattoos etched in some homebrewed woad faded in the beggared sunlight. Spiders, swords, targets. A dragon. Runic slogans, creeds misspelled. (90)

He’d come to see a message in each such late history, a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain and the devoured did prove to be. He woke in the morning and turned over in the blanket and looked back down the road through the trees the way they’d come in time to see the marchers appear four abreast. (91)

In the floor of this room was a door or hatch and it was locked with a large padlock made of stacked steel plates. He stood looking at it.

Papa, the boy said. We should go. Papa.

There’s a reason this is locked.

The boy pulled at his hand. He was almost in tears. Papa? he said.

We’ve got to eat.

I’m not hungry, Papa. I’m not.

We need to find a prybar or something. (108)

He [the boy] had his fists clutched at his chest and he was bobbing up and down with fear. The man dropped the shovel and put his arms around him. Come on, he said. Let’s just go sit on the porch and rest a while.

Then can we go?

Let’s just sit for a while.

Okay.

They sat wrapped in the blankets and looked out at the yard. They sat for a long time. He tried to explain to the boy that there was no one buried in the yard but the boy just started crying. After a while he even thought that maybe the child was right. (135)

He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. (130)

Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books stood in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. (187)

The temporal organization of the world

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you. (McCarthy 54)

Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. (4)

He’d pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world. (182)

He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said.

That’s what you think.

You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot.

Yes they will. But you wont.

How do you figure that?

Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup. (64)

He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let’s just sit here.

It’s because I wont ever get to drink another one, isnt it?

Ever’s a long time.

Okay, the boy said. (24)

Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all. (28)

He stood there thinking about cows and he realized they were extinct. Was that true? There could be a cow somewhere being fed and cared for. Could there? Fed what? Saved for what? (120)

After a while he [the boy] fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in the shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves. (78)

If they came down the drive they would see him running through the trees with the boy. This is the moment. This is the moment. (112)

In relation to the history of organic life on earth, writes a modem biologist, the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

Walter Benjamin, On the Philosophy of History, XVIII

The good guys

You say you cant? Then dont do it. That’s all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. (56)

He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We’re still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay. (77)

The boy lay with his head in the man’s lap. After a while he said: They’re going to kill those people, arent they?

Yes.

[…]

They’re going to eat them, arent they?

Yes.

And we couldnt help them because then they’d eat us too.

Yes.

And that’s why we couldnt help them.

Yes.

Okay. (127)

He rose and took the pistol from his belt. This door looks like the other door, he said. But it’s not. I know you’re scared. That’s okay. I think there may be things in there and we have to take a look. There’s no place else to go. This is it. I want you to help me. If you dont want to hold the lamp you’ll have to take the pistol.

I’ll hold the lamp.

Okay. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up.

Okay. (137)

Well, I don’t think we’re likely to meet any good guys on the road.

We’re on the road.

I know. (151)

There are other good guys. You said so.

Yes.

So where are they?

They’re hiding.

Who are they hiding from?

From each other.

Are there lots of them?

We dont know.

But some.

Some. Yes.

Is that true?

Yes. That’s true.

But it might not be true.

I think it’s true.

Okay. (184)

Media credits