Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Originary Translation in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

2014; Routledge; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2014.868220

1545-5866

James Corby,

Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes Dana Phillips has argued that to call The Road apocalyptic is misleading, as "in The Road there has been no apocalypse: the end of the world is simply the end of the world" (188). Here I, and I suspect most commentators on The Road who resort to this term, use "apocalyptic" less in the sense of "revelatory" or "prophetic," and more in the sense of "relating to, or characteristic of a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale" ("Apocalyptic"). "The last instance of a thing takes the class with it" (McCarthy 28). Quotations from The Road will follow McCarthy's idiosyncratic use of punctuation. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, the question of how gender bears upon the possibility of a future in The Road is intriguing. How might women in general and mothers in particular fit into the schema of ethical domesticity that the man and the boy establish during the course of the novel? This is not simply a question of procreation, since procreation alone, divorced from ethical commitment, is no guarantee of a future worth living, as evidenced by the novel's cannibals. Although the fine detail of any potential answers to such questions must necessarily remain undecided, it seems reasonable to think that women would play a similar role to the men, cultivating the sort of ethical translation that, I argue, might be considered a condition of future life. I am using "chronotope" (literally, "time space") in the way Bakhtin defined it: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (84). The implied reference is, of course, Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge.". This is evident throughout, but McCarthy is explicit: "There is no past.…The hour. There is no later. This is later" (55–56). For Bakhtin, the chronotope of the road is a chronotope of encounter and "in such a chronotope the temporal element predominates" (243). "Time," Bakhtin writes, "fuses together with space and flows in it (forming the road)" (244). This is "empty … adventure-time" (91). For a schematic overview of the chronotopic function of the sea in the history of the novel, see Cohen 647–66. The hints are not obvious, but they are there. The most important one is when the boy fleetingly encounters another boy and is left disturbed and upset. This happens just after the man felt "sure they were being watched" (88). A day earlier they had the unusual experience of hearing a dog, the very existence of which suggests that there might be people—good people, of course—caring for it (86). The boy worries that the "little boy doesnt have anybody to take care of him" and his father reassures him: "There are people there. They were just hiding" (89). As his father is dying, he urges his son to find "the good guys" (298) and shortly afterwards the boy asks: "Do you remember that little boy, Papa?" His father again reassures him that the little boy is "all right" (300). His father then dies and the boy encounters a friendly stranger who tells him that he has a little boy and girl and that he does not eat people. In John Hillcoat's film adaptation of The Road, the connection with the earlier encounter is made clearer: the boy meets the whole nuclear family at the end and the boy of the family is clearly the "little boy" of his earlier encounter. The family even has a dog, though in the film there is no barking dog preceding the boy's glimpse of the other boy. Charles Rice, the architectural historian and theorist, writes: The very emergence of the interior in conditions which were often antagonistic to architecture as discipline and practice points to a certain non-commensurability between architecture and the interior. This means being able to conceive of the interior's spatiality and its particular conditions of enclosure in ways beyond the stasis and structured internality architecture had conventionally provided the domain of the domestic. ("Inside of Space" 188). Rice goes on: "What is most remarkable about Semper's claim is the way in which his definition of space comes about through the suppression of what is conventionally architectural. Architecture as structure has no role in the definition of space, except that it allows for a more primary sense of enclosure to be produced" (187). Rice explores this idea more fully in The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity, where he suggests, "The interior was articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell' with soft 'stuff' of furnishing" (3), and that this emergence of the interior as distinct from, but related to, architecture is in a sense "constitutive of modern domesticity" (4). Michael McKeon, in The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge, links the interior space of domesticity to modernity even more strongly, suggesting that "[i]n 'modernity' the public and the private are separated out from each other" (xix) and that "the coalescence of the category of domesticity is perhaps [the] most visible and resonant expression" of this division (xx). Arguably, it was recognition of the importance of the interior space that paved the way for the emergence of purely functionalist architecture, where the building is made to serve the lived interior in a way that attempts to reestablish commensurability between the two. Exploiting the basic architectural conditions of domesticity became the ambition of certain proponents of extreme functionalism in the early twentieth century, including the avant-garde artist and architectural theorist Karel Teige. Teige hoped to solve the contemporary housing crisis suffered by the European proletariat through the development of what he called the "minimal dwelling," which he saw as "the most pressing architectural problem" (234). For a contemporary reevaluation of the legacy of Teige's The Minimal Dwelling, see Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (particularly 78–79). On the development of the specifically "American" domestic interior, see Elizabeth Cromley, "Domestic Space Transformed, 1850–2000.". "Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed" (Bachelard 8). Oikos candidates, besides the roadside gas station and the old batboard smokehouse, include the house on page 21; the supermarket on pages 21–23, where they find a can of Coca Cola; the man's childhood home on pages 24–27; the abandoned house of page 28; the "camp by the river pool at the falls" of pages 41–44, which as we will see later they agree is "a good place"; the impromptu den under a fallen tree of pages 102–03, the "once grand house" with a ghoulish surprise in the basement of pages 111–17; the house, barn, and garage of pages 124–31; a house on pages 137–38 where they find a candle; the house with an underground bunker of pages 139–65; the shed with the concrete floor of pages 194–97; the house and outbuildings of pages 219–28, where they "made a nest … in front of the hearth," and, perhaps finally, the boat, the Pàjaro de Esperanza of pages 239–56. I will comment in more detail on a number of these locations later on. For a more general exploration of the theme of unhomely houses, see Vidler 17–44. Lefebvre remarks on the "nostalgic aura" that has grown up around the house in "art, poetry, drama and philosophy", and it is worth reminding ourselves that "nostalgia" is, properly, the mental distress provoked by memories of a now spatially or temporally distant home (120–21). "Cultural translation" is a term often associated with Homi Bhabha. He develops the term as a way of understanding cultural hybridity in a postcolonial setting (226–29). Judith Butler explores the notion of "cultural translation" in the context of universalism (11–43). This might rather roughly be understood as similar to the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis, an obscure and difficult to translate term that implies rendering things oikeion (approximately, familiar) to us. Referring to oikeiôsis Tad Brennan comments: "Etymology tells us that the process-word, adjective, and related verbs all come from the word for a house or household, oikos, so we might expect the adjective oikeion to mean 'having to do with the household'; and so it does" (154). Hermeneus is one of the earliest Greek words for a translator; it carries the sense of "an intermediary labouring between two distinct languages or speakers" (Kearney xiii). See also Jervolino, "Hermeneutics of the Self" 63. The messianic overtone here is unmistakable. Its full exploration is beyond the scope of this essay, but a couple of points ought to be made with regard to the boy as a religious figure. Early in the novel we are told that the man "knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke" (3). "Warrant" here has the sense of "one who or something which protects or authorizes" ("Warrant," def. I). Yet, one might also bear in mind warrant's now-obsolete significance as "a place of refuge, shelter" ("Warrant," def. I.3.a). This becomes particularly significant when, later in the novel, the boy is described as "Golden chalice, good to house a god" (78). Later still we are told that the man looks at the boy "glowing in that waste like a tabernacle" (293). The boy, then, is being figured as a particular type of oikos in his own right. In Latin, tabernāculum signified "tent, booth, shed" ("Tabernacle"). Its primary meaning according to the OED is still "A temporary dwelling; generally moveable, constructed of branches, boards, or canvas; a hut, tent, booth" ("Tabernacle," def. 1). An improvised oikos, one might say. Recalling its more familiar religious definition serves to recast in a strongly religious light the man and boy's claim to be carrying the fire along the hostile road for the sake of a coming community: "The curtained tent, containing the Ark of the Covenant and other sacred appointments, which served as the portable sanctuary of the Israelites during their wandering in the wilderness and afterwards till the building of the Temple." In biblical phraseology, tabernacle can also indicate "A dwelling-place. spec. The dwelling-place of Jehovah, or of God" ("Tabernacle," def. 3). See also Jervolino, "Translation as a Paradigm" 68–69; and Bottone, "The Ethical Task of the Translator in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.". A brief sample of the way oikeion is understood in the appropriate scholarship: "one's own" (Ludwig 208); "roughly 'appropriate' " (Whiting 279); "familiarity" (Eden 246); "appropriate to us" (Annas 189); "that which is our own" (Remes 90); "the noun oikos 'household' or 'family' is cognate with the adjective oikeion 'belonging with' or 'akin to' " (Rudebusch 193). One might wish to question the orthodoxy that this view seems to echo. McKeon comments: "Half a century ago scholarly consensus conceived the distinction between the public and the private in the classical world as … a fundamental separation.…In recent years this paradigm has been questioned on a number of grounds. The putative antithesis between polis and oikos draws strength, it has been argued, from a confusion of two distinct "family" categories: the oikos, the household of persons and property; and the genos, the cult-oriented blood kin or clan. When the tension between ancestral genos and the emergent polis in preclassical Greece is taken to bespeak also a historical estrangement of polis from oikos, the ongoing correlation of the latter two entities becomes obscured" (7). Although a full exploration of this is beyond the scope of this paper, my present argument aims to trouble, at least implicitly, the distinction between oikos and polis by suggesting that they both emerge to consciousness through a process of "cultural translation" and that they thus remain tied to each other in manner that does not permit "fundamental separation." That fuller exploration would also have to examine closely Agamben's appropriation of the Aristotelian terms zoē and bios, about which he makes claims that are, Finlayson contends, "either straightforwardly false or at very least unwarranted and misleading" (107). Also relevant here would be Esposito's suggestion that today, more than ever before, the role of technology needs to be taken into account in any attempt to understand the relationship between zoē and bios (15). I take Hayles's How We Became Posthuman to be the standard example of what I am here referring to as posthuman posthumanism. An example of the more cautious and sober sort posthumanist scholarship that is sceptical of the desire for a technological transcendence of biological life would be Wolfe's What is Posthumanism? Callus and Herbrechter's "What's Wrong with Posthumanism" articulates the broad division within the field thus: Posthumanism, as the name of a discourse, suggests an episteme which comes 'after' humanism ('post-humanism') or even after the human itself ('post-human-ism'). Implicit in both these articulations is a sense of the supplanting operations wrought by time, and of the obsolescence in question affecting not simply humanism as displaced episteme but also, more radically, the notion and nature of the human as fact and idea. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJames CorbyJames Corby is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Malta. His current research focuses on post-romanticism and on the literary and philosophical significance of indifference.