Abstract
In a perhaps naïve but ultimately relevant question that recurs throughout McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, the boy asks for his father’s reassurance that despite the mean actions that they must undertake on the road to survival, they are still “the good guys.” As father and child roam the desolate landscape of America after an unknown cataclysmic event, they encounter a variety of potentially harmful and violent strangers on the road. Hence the need to constantly draw and redraw the lines separating themselves, the good guys, from other unknown and presumably evil strangers. Although they fear “there’s a lot of them, those bad guys” (2006, 97) neither father nor child can know what they look like, which translates into the impossibility of trusting anyone. Everyone is a stranger and a potential enemy in this landscape where the lines between civilization and savagery, citizens and strangers, have been erased. McCarthy seems to unfold the Hobbesian homo homini lupus est across the land as the State, once “the fount, the guardian and the sole guarantee of orderly life,” in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms (1997, 18), has disappeared, thus rendering a barren landscape with no law and no politics. Initially imposed by modernity, and associated to the creation of nation-States in the nineteenth century, those stable lines between inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, identity and difference have been recently questioned by Bauman, among others. For Bauman the presence of the stranger in contemporary societies has come to “befog and eclipse” those boundary lines between diametrical opposites (1997, 18). The post-apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road refracts this present context of globalization and the multiplication of border crossings across the globe, where the traditional spatial-temporal logic of citizens and strangers, them and us, good and evil guys, no longer captures the full complexity of the encounter.
Are we still the good guys, he said
Yes. We’re still the good guys
And we will always be-
Yes. We will always be.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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Notes
- 1.
Recent social theory has seen a renaissance of the analysis of the stranger, taking its cue from George Simmel’s celebrated essay, “The Stranger,” resurfacing in Bauman’s theory of strangerhood. Harman (1988), and Diken (1998) have furthered the analysis of the critical role of strangers in contemporary societies.
- 2.
In his “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson introduces the notion of the individual lost in postmodernist space and unable “to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (1984, 83).
- 3.
This is another definition of the “e pluribus unum” ideal that Mateos-Aparicio deconstructs in his chapter.
- 4.
In his description of McCarthy’s postapocalyptic dystopia, Benito Sánchez’s words recall Manzanas Calvo’s definition of the camp—now uncannily occupying the totality of the state.
- 5.
The extreme popularity of zombie shows in the twenty-first century testifies to the anxieties and fears over the arrival of strangers who threaten the very life of the national host. The zombie may appear as the alter ego of the immigrant or refugee, a visitor who not only endangers the physical life of the host society, but perhaps more importantly, who threatens to dissolve the very identity of those it enters in contact with.
- 6.
There are numerous studies (Gray 2011; Ibarrola-Armendariz 2011; Araújo 2015) that have analyzed the connections between The Road and the War on Terror. Most of them agree with David Halloway’s claim that “The Road’s grounding in apocalyptic trauma, in the ruins of an American civilization buried in ash, made the novel’s many poetic resonances with 9/11 and the war on terror explicit and unavoidable” (2008, 110).
- 7.
The novel is regularly interpreted to portray a Hobbesian “state of Nature,” defined by Hobbes in De Cive (1642) as “the state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all.” There is, however, a clear perception in the novel that the few remaining individuals are in a state of war only in the effort to survive, and that their inclination to mutual aid and concord is as natural (though hardly realized) as their aggressive tendencies. These concepts are closer to Kant’s status naturalis before the formation of the state (status civilis).
- 8.
Levinas contends, “[t]o shelter the other in one’s own land or home, to tolerate the presence of the landless and homeless on the ‘ancestral soil,’ so jealously, so meanly loved—is that the criterion of humanness? Unquestionably so” (in Derrida 1999, 74); Levinas is commonly considered to have overlooked questions of Politics under the primacy of the ethical relation to the singular other. It was Derrida that, in his Adieu, sets out to imagine how a Levinasian ethics “would be able to found a law and a Politics, beyond the familial dwelling, within a society, nation, State, or Nation State” (1999, 20).
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Benito, J. (2024). Strangers in the Homeland: Dystopic (in)Hospitality in McCarthy’s The Road. In: Barba Guerrero, P., Fernández Jiménez, M. (eds) American Borders. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30179-7_10
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