No Country for Old Men

You can rant all you want, wolvendancer. But you still come across as the guy complaining about the low light conditions used in THE GODFATHER PART II. The film is arguably less enjoyable as a result, but it moves it from the 99.9% percentile to the 98.7% percentile of film greatness.

I can't believe we are comparing THE ROAD to A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOVITZ. Is this actually happening? I would like to see you have this discussion with China Miévelle.

And good lord, how is every work of fiction not an example of the author's internal sympathetic fallacy? I looked it up, so others don't have to: it's the fallacy of "I feel like this, so everyone feels like this." Isn't that what writing a book is? Or are heading to some weird Platonic realm where books write themselves and the author merely plucks them from the aether as Michaelangelo finds the sculpture in the marble?

I'd take 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' over 'The Road' any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Re: Sympathetic Fallacy. One of the great evils that modern litfic perpetuates is the notion that some particular of modern, Western, middle class life is universal: for prime examples, see the endless parade of Booker Prize nominees in the last twenty years, where angsty moderately-well-to-do white people have affairs and do drugs and suffer through drab mid-life crises, all with the understated but annoying undertone that this is what life is about. These books, like 'The Road', provide utterly tame, utterly mundane shocks and spectacles. They pander with their transgressions. They are about nothing, do not upset previous views of life or love, provide no insight into the human condition - indeed, they actually work to lessen humanities greater understanding of these things, because they tell people that what is must be, and that's all that there is. What you are feeling right now is it. Stay right there.

(We could talk about the Pathetic Fallacy, too, of which 'The Road' is a giant indulgence in.)

One of the things I love about good Speculative Fiction is that it tends to challenge the reader more. Deep in the warp and weft of SF is the basic notion that what is is NOT what must be, that you cannot trust your safe notions of what the world is like, that the world is inherently strange. This is, or can be (Sturgeon's Law), challenging in a way that litfic mostly isn't. '

The Road' betrays this potentiality by giving us an utterly mundane, sentimental father-and-son duo whose only purpose is to mawkishly tug at our heartstrings. The boy - who, as China points out, has known no other world, and so would certainly not behave like some suburban kid - peers up at The Man and says, 'Papa?' Dude, fuck that. It makes me want to punch the author in the throat. It's the literary equivalent of a film which introduces you to The Baby and then procedes to dangle it out a window for two hours. Yes, that's a very scary thing to see in IMAX, but it hardly makes it Art, right? That this baby-dangling happens amidst a world that is utterly unbelievable, a world whose only raison d'être is to be horrible so that our balls reflexively go into our body-cavity from the awful baby-dangling it is a background for, and what are we to think? I'm not nitpicking; I'm saying everything in the book sucks.

Compare this, if you will, to The Scarlet Plague by Jack London. Published 1912. London doesn't have a fraction of McCarthy's facility with the English language, but that short little trifle (about a man who remembers an old world and a boy born into a ravished land) has more substance than everything in 'The Road'. It says important things. It makes you uncomfortable, and makes you think. 'The Road' does none of these things.

'The Road' is a Salvador Dali painting. It's a 'literary' book that everyone, from Oprah's Book of the Month Club readers to genre boyz to readers of the New York Times Book Review, can read and feel literary. It's shocking to me that it could come from the same pen that created 'Blood Meridian'. But life is like that, sometimes.

Your reply here is a good example of the sympathetic fallacy. Thanks for telling me how I don't feel anything while reading THE ROAD, but would totally from a poorly written Jack London novella. Good to know!

I think you might be too far down the litcrit path if you can no longer enjoy a book like THE ROAD or appreciate it as fiction. I think you might like the book a little less because Oprah sicced her army of soccer moms on it, costing it some precious these-books-of-ours cachet.

Thanks to this thread, I just discovered that Jack London wrote a book called The Road. It's his memoir about living as a hobo in the early 1900s. Though there are just 8 reviews, it has a higher average rating than McCarthy's book by the same name. Nearly 20% of the reviews for McCarthy's book are negative, including 208 reviews that complained that they couldn't relate to the characters due to the lack of character development or dialogue.

Given a choice, I would rather read about hobos than a pretentious dad and his idealized son.

wolvendancer wrote: The Road' is a Salvador Dali painting. It's a 'literary' book that everyone, from Oprah's Book of the Month Club readers to genre boyz to readers of the New York Times Book Review, can read and feel literary. It's shocking to me that it could come from the same pen that created 'Blood Meridian'. But life is like that, sometimes.

I heartily disagree with the idea you're pushing which is effectively that all great art must challenge the observer. I've seen this before, and it's a handy way of loftily dismissing anything remotely accessible as being not art. In other words it's a great tool for perpetuating elitism.

Challenge is an important artistic value, but it's just one of many. Dali paintings have value for their imagination and technical merit, even if they don't ultimately cause self-reflection on the part of the viewer. Similarly, The Road has value as a demonstration of its authors unparalleled skill with English, even it is as otherwise vapid as you claim (which I don't believe it is).

I saw The Road as being a clear fable about environmental destruction. That seemed to me its purpose above and beyond "baby dangling". In which case it is challenging the assumptions of a fair number of people who are indifferent to or actively hostile about climate change.

I'll re-iterate something I said earlier because I think it's important. Great art of any kind has to be accessible at a basic level, otherwise it's wasted because only a tiny minority will be able to appreciate its message. Great art allows the observer to engage with it and then encourages them to dig deeper. Many people who'd otherwise remained ignorant of McCarthy's superb prose have read it, and perhaps been lead to reflect on personal and political issues they might otherwise have ignored, as a result of its basic readability.

MattDP wrote: I saw The Road as being a clear fable about environmental destruction. That seemed to me its purpose above and beyond "baby dangling". In which case it is challenging the assumptions of a fair number of people who are indifferent to or actively hostile about climate change.

That sounds reasonable, but I don't recall any environmental explanation for the apocalypse in the movie, just vague bad stuff happened and now everything sucks.

Shellhead wrote: That sounds reasonable, but I don't recall any environmental explanation for the apocalypse in the movie, just vague bad stuff happened and now everything sucks.

There's no mention of climate change in the book, it's clearly set after a nuclear apocalypse. However, McCarthy is fond of allegory and the final paragraph suggests strongly to me that he intends the story to be read as a metaphor for man-made environmental destruction.

It's also quite wonderfully written.

CormacMcCarthy wrote: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Matt, I do like that passage that you quoted. Of all things, it reminds me of the opening paragraphs of The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson.

That passage describes nuclear annihilation, not CO2 emissions. I know that people say it's an important environmental book, "a book about life without a biosphere", but really, it's not. If he wanted to make it about that, he could've simply done the brave thing and made it about what happens after smog has choked the earth's plant life to death and the only CO2 sink left is the oceans.

The Road was a really well written piece of shit. There was no character development, really, just a story plodding along with mostly foreseeable "twists". I really didn't like it, and I saw the movie first, which I really didn't like.

Silent Spring it is not.

What happened (in 'The Road's backstory) is not nuclear annihilation; it doesn't fit. It's certainly not any ecotastrophe we know about. We are never given an explanation. The world is just dying, plants, animals, everything, but slowly, over decades. In fact, not much of it makes sense. Defenders will say this is because it is allegory.

Art should not be obscurantist, Matt, but it should also, must not, pander. It is your, and my, job to aspire to it, not its job to lower itself down to us. If art doesn't challenge, it isn't art. And if we don't stretch towards the good stuff, it's our loss.

jeb wrote: Your reply here is a good example of the sympathetic fallacy. Thanks for telling me how I don't feel anything while reading THE ROAD, but would totally from a poorly written Jack London novella. Good to know!

I think you might be too far down the litcrit path if you can no longer enjoy a book like THE ROAD ...

Dude, do your thoughts continue from one paragraph to the next? I suck because I like a crappy Jack London novella over 'The Road' but I'm too far down the litcrit path to enjoy a book of quality like 'The Road' what I don't even

What are the chances you've read that novella, by the way? Bashing things in general terms you haven't read is poor form, mate. Bad habit.

I never said you didn't 'feel' anything while reading 'The Road'; actually, I said the opposite. Baby-dangling makes you feel things. That's the point of it. But it's shitty and manipulative; we call it 'stacking the deck' in the trade. It leaves no room for the reader to come the material himself, leaves no room for judgement and reflection. Good lit does not tell you how to think, what to think, and how to feel.

Not wanting to derail, I'll bow out of the discussion. I think I've said my piece in any case. If I really wanted to make people angry, I'd talk about how much 'Enders Game' is a manipulative piece-of-shit novel aimed straight at the angsty teenage core experience of 'I'm an abused and misunderstood genius'. Also, it's an apologia for Hitler.

wolvendancer wrote: Also, it's an apologia for Hitler.

No, really, it is.

peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html
www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

(derailing the derail and then running in the opposite direction = winning!!1!)

wolvendancer wrote:

jeb wrote: Your reply here is a good example of the sympathetic fallacy. Thanks for telling me how I don't feel anything while reading THE ROAD, but would totally from a poorly written Jack London novella. Good to know!

I think you might be too far down the litcrit path if you can no longer enjoy a book like THE ROAD ...

Dude, do your thoughts continue from one paragraph to the next? I suck because I like a crappy Jack London novella over 'The Road' but I'm too far down the litcrit path to enjoy a book of quality like 'The Road' what I don't even

Right, you don't even. I called London's novella crappy because you said, "London doesn't have a fraction of McCarthy's facility with the English language." You are the one dogging this hidden gem. And of course I haven't read it--isn't that the point of your bringing it up? To run to some esoteric referent to speak from authority?

wolvendancer wrote: I never said you didn't 'feel' anything while reading 'The Road'; actually, I said the opposite. Baby-dangling makes you feel things. That's the point of it. But it's shitty and manipulative; we call it 'stacking the deck' in the trade. It leaves no room for the reader to come the material himself, leaves no room for judgement and reflection. Good lit does not tell you how to think, what to think, and how to feel.

Yeah, I got that--you tell me how to feel: "It makes you uncomfortable, and makes you think. 'The Road' does none of these things."

wolvendancer wrote: Not wanting to derail, I'll bow out of the discussion. I think I've said my piece in any case. If I really wanted to make people angry, I'd talk about how much 'Enders Game' is a manipulative piece-of-shit novel aimed straight at the angsty teenage core experience of 'I'm an abused and misunderstood genius'. Also, it's an apologia for Hitler.

We can at least agree that Orson Scott Card is a shithead.

Wolfie, I know it is. I read it and was like W~T~F

Kid kills everything, ever, goes to Planet Brazil. Repents. All is forgiven.

Maybe Jesus forgives, but most PEOPLE don't.

Orson Scott Cunt blows.