Seeing with Borrowed Eyes: Joyce and Keats in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
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“The ugly fact,” said Cormac McCarthy in an interview, “is books are made out of books.” For several decades, critics have been seeking out the specific intertextual sources that abound in McCarthy’s works, with Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway considered to be his closest forebears. In the case of The Road, critics have identified a number of romantic and modernist intertexts; no one, however, has investigated the role that Keats’s odes and Joyce’s Ulysses play in McCarthy’s novel, the reason being, presumably, that its engagement with the works of the romantic poet and modernist novelist is not a matter of direct influence or “similar poetics.” Instead, as I argue, McCarthy’s narrative “reads” these works of Anglo-Irish romanticism and modernism and actively works to decontextualize and critically rearticulate fragments of their aesthetic visions. This process reveals profound ambivalence and irresolvable tension: Keats and Joyce are incapable of meeting the demands of the novel’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet McCarthy’s own literary vision is measurably conditioned by these predecessors. In momentarily borrowing their “eyes” at heightened junctures of the novel, McCarthy stylistically forges ways of seeing that both intensify the atmosphere of melancholic despair and proffer a small measure of resistance amidst a “world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.”
Abstract
“The ugly fact,” said Cormac McCarthy in an interview, “is books are made out of books.” For several decades, critics have been seeking out the specific intertextual sources that abound in McCarthy’s works, with Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway considered to be his closest forebears. In the case of The Road, critics have identified a number of romantic and modernist intertexts; no one, however, has investigated the role that Keats’s odes and Joyce’s Ulysses play in McCarthy’s novel, the reason being, presumably, that its engagement with the works of the romantic poet and modernist novelist is not a matter of direct influence or “similar poetics.” Instead, as I argue, McCarthy’s narrative “reads” these works of Anglo-Irish romanticism and modernism and actively works to decontextualize and critically rearticulate fragments of their aesthetic visions. This process reveals profound ambivalence and irresolvable tension: Keats and Joyce are incapable of meeting the demands of the novel’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet McCarthy’s own literary vision is measurably conditioned by these predecessors. In momentarily borrowing their “eyes” at heightened junctures of the novel, McCarthy stylistically forges ways of seeing that both intensify the atmosphere of melancholic despair and proffer a small measure of resistance amidst a “world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.”
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