The Light We Carry With Us: Part III

(Read Part II here.)

American Literature, Eschatological Humanism, and the Ability to Carry the Fire

I’d like to return to a point that I just touched on above—the assumption that globalization is making us better, kinder, wiser, and that all these qualities are somehow more human than a survivalist kill-or-be-killed mentality, or an Enlightenment-era “rational man” philosophy. Certainly, our pitiless capitalist economy is no proof of this, as Jameson so memorably put it, “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror” (57). And Jameson is right, of course. You can’t drink a latte without contributing to human rights violations taking place the world over. You can’t drive a car without destroying the planet for future generations. But it’s also true that capitalism, globalization, technology, and awareness of a collective future trajectory has allowed for the development of an ideology encompassing human rights as tangible somethings which can be violated. The last bloody half-century has also been shaped—particularly in developed countries—by the civil rights struggle, environmental activism, engagement with the suffering of people who occupy space wildly different from our own, a growing sensitivity to mental health, and an unabashed obsession with teaching the younger generation—before the reality of the world interferes—to be nice to everybody, to be gentle with animals, to share our toys, and to think about how it would feel to be in someone else’s shoes—not for any other reason than because, shoes or no shoes, we are all human. As naively conceptualized or poorly executed as these liberal humanist ideals may be, they do represent a deeply preservation-oriented response to a real fear—the one stemming back beyond the god that comes to separate the wheat from the chaff on judgment day—the fear that humanity is a unique possession, and that it is something we can lose. That we kill or be killed. That survival ultimately comes down to us or them, you or me, that when faced with that decision, I will inevitably choose me, and that therein lies the vanishing point of humanity—both of the species, and of the condition.

In American literature, one of the best expressions of this uniquely eschatological tension can perhaps be found in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in which the private apocalypse of one family stands for the end of an era, and the question of us or them is as simple, at least superficially, as the one of starvation versus survival. “Think Pa’s gonna give up his meat on account a other fellas?” Tom says to Casy when the preacher asks him to join the strike. “Think Ma’s gonna wanta starve that baby jus’ ‘cause a bunch a fellas is yellin’ outside a gate?” (468) And he’s got a point. As much as Steinbeck’s Okies care for each other and despise the great owners, in the end the need to survive robs us all of the desire to engage in any sort of human project other than that of self-preservation.

The story opens with Tom Joad’s release from prison, and the murder he committed sets the tone for the entire novel. “I’d do what I done—again,” he tells the truck driver who picks him up on the way to his father’s farm, “I killed a guy in a fight. We was drunk at a dance. He got a knife in me, an’ I killed him with a shovel that was layin’ there” (29). Instantly, there’s something relatable about Tom’s actions, something that appeals to the survivor in all of us. His actions are not inhuman, or even counter to the basic makeup of a “good person.” “Why shouldn’t a person be able to defend herself?” The reader thinks. “No one expects you to just lay down and die!” And so Steinbeck begins the process of systematically stripping everything away from the Joads. Tom returns to a family whose livelihood has been crushed. They head west with everything they own packed on to a truck, and slowly they lose those possessions as well as members of their tribe. Finally, much as drought did back east, a cataclysmic rain comes to drown the remnants of the family whose ancestors tamed and worked the wild country. But as a part of that same American tradition, the Joads are tough, and they fight for survival with a practical bravery that is portrayed by Steinbeck as both tragic and necessary.

Sixty years later, much has changed as Cormac McCarthy writes The Road—an American fable of post-apocalypse that recalls The Grapes of Wrath in many ways. The journey tale format, the slow stripping away of self and possessions, the itemization of each meal, and most of all, the lyrical prose paintings of the merciless landscape, make The Road the distinct apocalyptic narrative descendent of The Grapes of Wrath. The differences exist in that, for the man and the boy of The Road, the human world really has come to an end. In fact, for the boy, the world as it is today never existed. He knows only the wasteland, and yet, the burden is upon him to carry the last spark of humanity—what McCarthy calls “the fire”—left in a place where Steinbeck’s cruel landowners have become monstrous cannibals and the suffering Okies permanent transients.

In The Road, all the humanistic ideals mentioned above as so distinct to a culture of late capitalism are embodied by the boy, who has never seen them or experienced them but who has become a perfect simulacrum of an ideology so flawless and uncomplicated that it’s original never actually existed. The boy has been burdened, or graced, with nothing short of an absolutely uncompromising humanism, given to him by his very probably one-time liberal, humane, altruistic parents, who—prior to the end of the world—likely shared a philosophy similar to that of most upper-middle class parents in the developed world today. This liberal humanist ideology is also found in The Grapes of Wrath in the form of the preacher, Jim Casy, who has lost his faith in God only to find a deep, and at the time, fairly esoteric, faith in humanity, “’Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?” Casy asks Tom Joad. “’Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent—knew it” (27). “You can’t hold no church with idears like that,” Tom responds doubtfully, but half a century later, the concept is standard in every American kindergarten classroom and corporate team-building weekend. It’s only with the crushing experience of daily social interaction that we begin to develop a sense of how to embrace this ‘heal the world’ ideology by tempering it with a realistic sense of self-preservation. In The Road, however, the boy has little opportunity to interact with others, and so he carries it all, the human project, Casy’s idea of the “one big soul,” and he cannot bear to be part of violence, even against those who threaten his life. He wants to help everyone he and his father meet on the road, no matter how scanty their own supplies or suspect the encountered party. The man has instilled in him the qualities that would earn a gold star for a schoolboy but that seem useless and even dangerous in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic landscape, wherein the post-human—the cannibals who keep slowly butchered live captives in a cellar and roast newborn children on spits—have truly won the day.

In The Road, as in The Grapes of Wrath, it is the humanity of humanity that becomes the crux of the story. In the grimmest of circumstances, our ability to “carry the fire” becomes everything, becomes more important than food, health, and even our own survival. As the preacher takes a killing blow to the head in defense of his cause, as Rosasharn offers her breast to a dying man when the world is disintegrating around them, so the boy—however road-hardened—follows but cannot sanction his father’s kill-or-be-kill instinct:

Just help him, Papa. Just help him.

The man looked back up the road.

He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die.

He’s going to die anyway.

He’s so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared.

The boy didnt answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one (259).

In a way that is both childish and deeply empathic, the boy knows what every other human being left in the wasteland has forgotten, that it’s better to be dead than to be completely outside of humanity. Better to chase the little boy he spots one day into a trap, or allow their meager stores to be taken by another, rather than to reject the basic contacts and collisions that make us human, rather than to become like his father, who, in a horrific but ultimately practical sense, has more in common with the cannibal others than with his own son. As the last and most perfect humanist in a world without humans, the boy is poised at the end of a long chain of signification, the links to which he cannot grasp and therefore cannot contextualize with the temperance of suspicion, wariness, or the instinct for self-preservation that, in the end, can make such others of us all. The man’s greatest terror, throughout the story, seems not to be that he will lose the boy so much as that the boy will lose this eschatological humanism, “the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them” (281). The father, the man, knows that the precious vessel he has created is all that’s left of humanity in a world that has become effectively post-human. And here the man’s fear stands for the cataclysmic terror that I see both as a cornerstone of humanity traceable in narrative visions of private apocalypse throughout history, and as so much a product of globalization and the humanist implication of living in a global culture.