Broken Mirrors

Representations of Apocalypses and Dystopias in Popular Culture

Joe Trotta, Zlatan Filipovic, Houman Sadri, Joe Trotta, Zlatan Filipovic, Houman Sadri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000753981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella fantascienza

Dystopian stories and visions of the Apocalypse are nothing new; however in recent years there has been a noticeable surge in the output of this type of theme in literature, art, comic books/graphic novels, video games, TV shows, etc. The reasons for this are not exactly clear; it may partly be as a result of post 9/11 anxieties, the increasing incidence of extreme weather and/or environmental anomalies, chaotic fluctuations in the economy and the uncertain and shifting political landscape in the west in general. Investigating this highly topical and pervasive theme from interdisciplinary perspectives this volume presents various angles on the main topic through critical analyses of selected works of fiction, film, TV shows, video games and more.

1 A Light That Never Goes Out

Bare Life and the Possibility of Ethics in McCarthy’s The Road

Zlatan Filipovic

Introduction

In Homo Sacer, Agamben (1998) identifies “bare life” as a life deprived of all protection provided by political and constitutional rights. Tracing its genealogy to Roman juridico-political traditions, Agamben notes that bare life of a sacred man (homo sacer) could “be killed but not sacrificed” (p. 133), according to the Roman criminal law. It was thus excluded from “both human and divine law” (Agamben, 1998, p. 73), and it retained its significance only in virtue of its capacity to be killed, its radical exposure to death at the hands of anyone without sanction. Life thus reduced to the mere exposure of its vulnerability is also what, for Agamben, constitutes an irreducible limit point of political existence, a zone of indistinction between zoē, seen as natural or biological life, and bios or the qualified life of the polis. In bare life, there is a constant elision of the distinction that has qualified political existence in the West, “a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion… and [of a] continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (Agamben, 1998, pp. 105, 109). McCarthy’s novel The Road could, in these terms, be seen as a theatre of bare life or the very inscription of zoē in the polis. In a world where all certainties have come apart, where warrants of law and trappings of morality seem to have been unmasked by life’s own metabolism and where anomie or life has become the law, everyone is homo sacer to everyone else. This is the very departure point for McCarthy’s dystopian vision that burns to cinders all residues of the polis to reveal life in its brutal sincerity. However, he does not stop there but, in the midst of ashes that cover the Earth and that keep on falling, reminding the reader of the immense legacies of human history that have been rent and incinerated, he plots an intrigue of ethics, a buried infrastructure of ethical relation that constitutes the very meaning of who we are. Indeed, in spite of its apparent defeat, humanity in McCarthy’s novel, I will argue, is buried alive as a resilience of ethics. The Road, considered as an eschatological road that reveals to us the messianic aspects of our humanity, revels them, however, as a movement of immanence, more ancient than the distinction between zoē and bios as the instituting foundation of the polis.

Using Agamben’s notion of bare life and Levinas’ writing on the absolute primacy of ethical relation, I intend to consider the significance of McCarthy’s ontological categories, revealed only when humanity is backed up against its limit, and their transformation into ethical terms as the main intrigue of the novel. The modern paradigm of bare life, for Agamben, is the concentration camp, where there is no longer any distinction between law and life, where anomie is nomos. The breakdown of the social contract this implies and the crisis of the political existence it creates in general could be seen as the conditions that allow McCarthy to consider the implications of extreme materiality that, like a tyrant, reigns absolute when humanity is abandoned to the threshold of its presuppositions. When life is cut back to what appear to be its intrinsic terms, the absolute value seems to be life, yet life that in its perseverance or conatus is pure zoē or life abandoned to death. In these dark, liminal regions of the human landscape that McCarthy persistently seeks out, however, another topography of what makes us human, can yet be traced. It flickers in the ashes along the road to show the way and retains its power to illuminate in virtue of the very darkness that surrounds it. For McCarthy, as we shall see, the call of goodness is the gravity of being whose pull remains stronger than its fear of death. The question of being, far from being the first and final question that concerns me, does not exhaust the meaning of being. Its meaning, as Levinas would say, resides in the justice of my being-for-the-other.¹ The meaning of who we are is thus revealed not in the conatus or the vitalism of the Ego to persist that dominates McCarthy’s world but in the emotional unease and ethical vigilance that liberates it from its narrative of auto-affection and to which the Ego is awakened by the extreme exposure of the other whose vulnerability calls its naïve rights in question. “It is in the laying down by the ego of its sovereignty,” says Levinas (1989), “that we find ethics and also probably the very spirituality of the soul, but most certainly the question of the meaning of being, that is, its appeal for justification” (p. 85). This, I will argue, is the will left behind in McCarthy’s intestate world, a light that never goes out; but, to find it, everything first must turn dark.

In the Darkened Underpass

As Steven Frye (2013) argues in “Histories, Novels, Ideas: Cormac McCarthy and the Art of Philosophy,” McCarthy’s work elicits “the deepest philosophical and religious questions” and although

philosophy in McCarthy’s vision is broader and perhaps more fluid than it is conceptualised in an academic context, he has demonstrated a deep interest in Western and non-Western philosophical and theological traditions… and as such he is a ‘philosophical’ novelist in the most profound sense.

(pp. 4–5)

The Road, in this respect, is perhaps the most philosophically significant work in McCarthy’s oeuvre since it seems to break away not only from his previous regional work, rooted in the Southern Gothic tradition and its ambiguous relation to the complicated layers of southern history, but also from the pastoral elegies of the Western tradition evident in his Border Trilogy that includes All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). While both of these traditions are notably characterised by the importance of time and place, The Road opens up a new frontier that seems to look beyond historical and cultural contingencies that determine our realities.

Neither time nor place that shadow all our honest attempts to rid the world of its signifiers and establish its certainties on a cocksure axis of metaphysics is indeed integral to McCarthy’s narrative. It is rather the persistent disavowal of their significance that takes on meaning. This, however, is not only due to the ubiquity of the apocalypse and the loss of signification in general that the novel portrays but also to McCarthy’s attempt to reveal the flesh of the world, the charismatic inside of signification that is no longer situated by temporal contingencies or articulated by productive spatialities. This is a posthistorical frontier, “[t]here is no past,” this is “later,” as McCarthy’s austere prose reveals, with “no lists of things to be done” that chime the passing of our days. “The day [is] providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later” (McCarthy, 2006, pp. 55, 56). Timeless, history has become brutally emptied of its legacies with nothing to bequeath apart from the convulsions left in the wake of its horrors. “The clocks stopped at 1:17,” as the narrator parsimoniously imparts. “A long sheer of light and then a series of low concussions… A dull rose glow in the windowglass” (p. 54). No further account of the apocalypse is provided and no attempt is made in the novel to reveal its causes. Causality is, indeed, futile when there is only “later.” Nothing can be learned from it to avert another disaster since there can be no other. McCarthy establishes thus an irremissible, physical world early on that is without beginnings in which to find a sentimental refuge or which to idealise and reappropriate as a mythogenic fantasy of new existential projects. What the apocalypse reveals rather is the frailty of all projects, the impossibility of the polis to keep zoē at bay and the fantasies of all categories and structural hierarchies that articulate our social relations:

“The frailty of everything revealed at last. 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” or, in fact, “no time at all.”

(p. 28)

In the “everness” that remains, history can thus no longer be considered as the constitutive aspect that arbitrates judgement and robs us of our epistemological certainties. McCarthy abrogates time in the novel in order to look beyond its relativising aspects and its particularisms.

The same could be said about the anonymity of the place that remains unavowed throughout the narrative, carrying only the full weight of the blast that cauterised everything that could be used to identify it:

they [father and son] stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.

(p. 13)

The significance of the place, along with the accumulated landmarks of its heritage and the assignations of identity it often articulates, have all been suspended and the place seems to have receded back to assume the oppressive foreignness and objective veritability of a landscape, refusing any attribution. However, this is not only a dislocation or disruption of place, a spatial discontinuity that, as Doreen Massey (1994) argues in Space, Place and Gender, characterises our times, giving traction to sentimentalised obsessions with once supposedly homogenous space and reactivating a desire for its reappropriation (p. 147).² This is rather a total dislocation that displaces the very notion of place, of localised spatialities and their distinct topologies. A “feverland,” recolonised by placeless “shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants” (McCarthy, 2006, p. 28), except that there is no place or border to welcome or turn them away. The entire place has become a border, “peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing… sitting in their rags by the side of the road” (p. 28). The distinctions between the refugee and the citizen, between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion have thus all been seared away along with the notion of place upon which they rest.

This atomic tightening of the world in temporal and spatial terms, “[t]he world shrinking down,” as the narrator observes, “about a raw core of parsible entities” (p. 93), is, by the same token, the opening up of the world to the absolute conditions of its possibility. Analogous to the phenomenological or eidetic reduction, McCarthy’s extreme economy burns away the world to the limit point of its constituents in order to enable its presuppositions to emerge. When the world finally quivers like a taut skin, what still sustains it is what constitutes the material conditions of its possibility. Considered in these terms, The Road is not just a road, leading father and son through the shredded fragments of our realities towards the ocean, where life, indeed, may find its origins yet again, but an artery of humanity that reveals what is required for its heart to beat. It is the concrete, foundational road of metaphysics. McCarthy is thus mapping out the absolute constituents of humanity, whose materiality precedes our historically and culturally contingent experience of the world.

By the same token, the subject in the novel is also attenuated and tied back to the anonymity of its material conditions of existence, to the traumas and vitalisms of the body alone. Without history or place, the subject is thus emptied of its regimes of reference and desubjectivised. No longer situated or attached to its identity categories, it is abandoned on the moving threshold between zoē and bios. The subject itself, one could say, recedes to the banality of existence, its coincidence with its own mortality manifested in the daily pain of the flesh constantly seeking relief:

He thought there had to be something overlooked but there wasnt. They kicked through the trash in the aisles of a foodmarket. Old packaging and papers and the eternal ash. He scoured the shelves looking for vitamins. He opened the door of a walk-in cooler but the sour rank smell of the dead washed out of the darkness and he quickly closed it again. They stood in the street. He looked at the gray sky. Faint plume of their breath. The boy was exhausted. He took him by the hand. We have to look some more, he said. We have to keep looking.

(McCarthy, 2006, p. 84)

In McCarthy’s post-discursive world, there is thus nothing any longer to tether subjectivity, apart from what is left when everything has been stripped away, which is to say, bare life. With ruthless sincerity, the qualified existence of the political order or bios that Agamben (1998) has identified as the privileged category of life in the Western tradition has been reduced to precisely that which this life excludes in order to constitute itself as political existence. The Road articulates, in other words, what Agamben (1998) posits as the new political paradigm or the fact that “today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man… because we are all virtually homines sacri” (p. 115), potentially deprived of our constitutional rights and abandoned naked outside the polis. What “characterizes modern politics,” Agamben argues, apart from “the inclusion of zoē in the polis,” is

the decisive fact that… the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.

(p. 9)

McCarthy’s narrative itself constitutes this “zone of indistinction,” making its significance and its terrifying implications explicit. When “fact” becomes “right” or rather when anomie or life coincides with the law, the state of exception becomes the rule and it is no longer possible to distinguish whether a state of law or total anomie prevails. This also implies a complete breakdown in the normative terrain of regulatory structures and regimes that participate in subject formation and legislate for social and political existence. Life is finally loose, one could say, liberated from its social constrains and sincere in its necessities, its insistence and its arrogative demands, but McCarthy also reveals the implications of life’s liberation and, by the same token, unmasks any misplaced romanticisations regarding its disavowal in the polis:

[There] were signs [along the road] in gypsy language, lost patterans… common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell… Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

(pp. 192–193)

The pilgrims, representing the pioneers forging the possibility of a new dawn with extinc...