Cormac McCarthy's The Road As Apocalyptic Grail Narrative

Abstract

I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing. --Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men The Holy is a standard symbol the English language for an object of search far-off, mysterious, out of reach. --Dhira B. Mahoney, The Grail: A Casebook Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), with its ashen, post-apocalyptic landscape, seems a striking departure from the realism of earlier novels. Inspired part by grim images of wanderers biohazard suits or wearing masks and goggles like ruined aviators (The Road 51, 24), many critics identify the unnamed catastrophe that precipitates the novel as a nuclear holocaust (see e.g., Christman). McCarthy himself imagines the disaster to be a meteor strike, although he claims that his money is on humans destroying each other before an environmental catastrophe sets in (Kushner). Yet few critics have explored just how unusual the fantastic and futuristic landscape of The Road is. In an interview regarding the Coen brothers' film of 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, McCarthy claims that he prefers literary realism over more magical genres. [I]t's hard enough to get people to believe what you're trying to tell them without making it impossible, he says. You have to make it vaguely plausible (Grossman 63). While The Road does bear McCarthy's typical attention to accuracy all the minutiae of descriptions, the excesses of carnage and apocalyptic horror its pages may stretch the limits of credulity. In fact, one critic finds the world of the novel so sublimely damaged that it must have a cause, and he therefore concludes that The Road is a retelling of the Book of Revelation (Grindley 12). The fantastic elements the novel, however, are not supernatural allegory, but mythological motif. The novel's title an early draft was The Grail, (1) a title illustrative of the narrative arc which a dying father embarks on a quest to preserve son, whom he imagines as a chalice (McCarthy, The Road 64), the symbolic vessel of divine healing a realm blighted by some catastrophic disease. The motifs of the Waste Land, the dying Fisher King, and the potentially unattainable healing balm the cup of Christ provide particularly apt metaphors through which The Road examines pervasive apocalyptic fears order to explore if and how the human project may be preserved. It may be useful first to establish common grail motifs before investigating their application The Road. The principal early Grail texts fall into two general categories: chivalric romances about King Arthur's knights encountering the grail and histories of the grail from the time of Christ to its removal to Britain. The first category has been the most influential terms of those stories' impact upon subsequent literature. This category includes Chretien de Troyes' Conte del Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and the Queste del Saint Graal (Loomis 1). (See Loomis 2-4 and Weston 12-15.) The first two of these texts particular have as the quest hero the Arthurian knight Perceval, as well as the most common and consistent narrative tropes (Weston 15). In this storyline, Perceval is a young boy raised the wilderness by mother after knight-father's death battle. The wild, untrained boy one day sees some of Arthur's knights riding the woods. Captivated by the sight, he follows them to Arthur's court, leaving mother grief-stricken; she later dies of her grief. During journey, Perceval finds two men fishing a boat. One of the men is the Fisher King, who offers the boy hospitality for the night. At the Fisher King's castle, Perceval sees an older king dying of a grievous wound. Perceval fails to ask the right (a question relating either to what ails the older man, who is usually the Fisher King's father, or whom the grail serves). …