“Nothing to sustain us but the counsel of our fathers” (Part III)
The Counsel of Ernest Hemingway on the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy
This is Part III of a Three-Part Series Exploring the Relationship Between McCarthy and Hemingway (with a nod to Faulkner, as well).
III.
It could be argued that McCarthy provides enough textual support in The Road to validate the connection with the Grail legend. On the first page, the messianic connotation of the boy begins with the “child” leading the father “by the hand.” When the father wakes up, McCarthy writes, “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” Later, McCarthy ties this directly to “Big Two-Hearted River” and Nick when the father holds “the boy close to him” and repeats the phrase “My heart,” “My heart.” This passage is followed shortly after by one that pictures the father standing “on a stone bridge where the waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in gray foam. Where once he’d watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath.” The passage, and others like it, echo Hemingway’s picture of Nick Adams moving back into the burnt over landscape of his hometown and then comes to the river and “looked down into the pool from the bridge.” As Nick looks down, the trout, which are associated with the kingfisher bird, become an objective correlative for the restoration of his heart after the war.
A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle then lost his shadow as he came though the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.
McCarthy establishes a similar sense of redemption for the father through the boy, constantly drawing parallels with the geomoral landscape of “Big Two-Hearted River.” The subtext of the boy as a redeeming grail of the land and the two-heartedness of the journey only magnifies the pilgrimage throughout the novel. For example, just after the father remembers the trout, McCarthy writes, “The boy’s shadow crossed over him. Carrying an armload of wood. He watched him stoke the flames. God’s own firedrake.” And later, when the father washes blood out of the child’s hair and carries him to the fire, he evokes it as “some ancient anointing.”
Both Hemingway and McCarty, though, do not idealize the pilgrimage through the wasteland, in spite of the redemptive allusions. Nick Adams learns this lesson in “Indian Camp” when, after seeing the father of the child kill himself, he asks, “Is dying hard, Daddy?” His father tells him, “No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.” And in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick’s struggles to learn how to live in the world after the war and reconciles at the end that he will live rather than taking the “easy” path of death in the “tragic adventure” of fishing the swamp: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.” Similarly, in The Road, the struggle is to live when there seems to be nothing to live for. At one point, the father and mother discuss this hopelessness when she entertains suicide: “I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it.”
The father’s decision to press on with the son in the world seems to be further evidence of his code and the idea that he once was a soldier. As he does with the landscape, McCarthy peppers the text with small clues of the father’s military background. The following passage, for example, seems to reorder the scene where Nick Adams makes his camp towards the conclusion of “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I”:
He sat in the sand and inventoried the contents of the knapsack. The binoculars. A half pint bottle of gasoline almost full. The bottle of water. A pair of pliers. Two spoons. He set everything out in a row. There were five small tins of food and he chose a can of sausages and one of corn and he opened these with the little army can opener and set them at the edge of the fire and they sat watching the labels char and curl. When the corn began to steam he took the cans from the fire with the pliers and they sat bent over them with their spoons, eating slowly.
In addition, the father’s medical expertise and his ability to handle a weapon might indicate that he has served in the Special Forces. Further indication of this is that the father shoots a gun twice in the book, and both times he does not miss. The first time occurs when he shoots the cannibal after he has grabbed the boy:
He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with the knife at his throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.
The second shot comes with a flare gun when a man shoots an arrow through the father’s leg. McCarthy writes that he “grabbed the flare-gun and raised up and cocked it and rested his arm on the side of the cart. The boy was clinging to him. When the man stepped back into the frame of the window to draw the bow again he fired. The flare went rocketing up toward the window in a long white arc and then they could hear the man screaming.” Shortly after this, McCarthy describes how the father systematically cleans the wound in a manner that parallels the scene where Anton Cihgurh cleans out his wound in No Country. As with Cihgurh, the father “takes no great pains” about cleaning his wound. The correspondence between the father and the code, as remarkably different as their characters are, seems pertinent. In No Country, Carson Wells reveals that he served in the Special Forces with Cihgurh. When speaking of Cihgurh’s code, Wells states that “He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.” The father’s principles in The Road are similar in that they seem to transcend the apparent nihilism of existence on the road. The father’s belief in protecting his son and teaching him to “carry the fire” seems to come from some undefined reserve against self-annihilation.
The father finally bequeaths this reserve to the boy towards the conclusion of the novel when he tells him that he has to continue on and “carry the fire.” When the son asks “Is it real? The fire?” the father says that it is and that “It’s inside you.” The father’s commission to his son brings Faulkner full circle in The Road. Though this essay has primarily explored the influence of Hemingway, Faulkner’s presence can still be felt throughout McCarthy’s prose, and specifically The Road. In addition to being a southern landscape novel, and the first time McCarthy has returned to the South in his fiction (outside of The Stonemason) since the opening movement of Blood Meridian, The Road also alludes to Faulkner through the phrase “Slow water in the flat country,” which was Faulkner’s definition for the name of his fictional Yoknapatapha County. The allusion to Yoknapatapha relates McCarthy’s sense of pyasage moralise in The Road, and through it the central tenets of symbolic landscape in Hemingway and Faulkner merge together in the work. Furthermore, Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech provides a Hemingwayesque type of iceberg to the subtext of The Road in that it can be felt underlying every page of the father and son’s journey, contributing a “dignity of movement,” through their pilgrimage into the oblivion of the world. At the conclusion of the speech, Faulkner gets to the heart of the matter:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting up his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
In The Road, McCarthy not only captures the essence of Faulkner’s speech, but he embodies the life-long artistic visions of Hemingway and Faulkner, respectively. Though this essay has mostly considered Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, it is worth noting that The Road might finally be considered as McCarthy’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Once when discussing The Old Man and the Sea, Faulkner said that the novel was Hemingway’s “best because he discovered something which he had never found before, which was God.” Faulkner elaborates: “There was the big fish—God made the big fish that had to be caught, God made the shark that had to eat the fish, and God loved all of them.” Faulkner offers a compelling reading of The Old Man and the Sea, but as “Big Two-Hearted River” illustrates, the “big fish” Faulkner refers to is present in Hemingway’s fiction from the start, as was God. In the penultimate moment of “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway writes, “He had been solidly hooked. Solid as a rock. He felt like a rock, too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of.” The fish that comes, “By God,” in Hemingway’s prose is one that McCarthy adopts into the heart of The Road: “If he’s not the word of God God never spoke.” In the final movements of The Road, McCarthy juxtaposes the “word of God” with the fish and writes that the boy “tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget.” The passage serves as a fitting conclusion to the novel and the counsel of Hemingway and Faulkner upon McCarthy. As McCarthy writes at the conclusion of the passage, just before the coda with the final image of the trout in the streams, “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”