Aug
7th
Fri
7th
The father and his words may be the only sources of meaning for the
boy, but they are only one element in the dramatic indirection the reader
encounters. Several pages before the father dies he and the boy converse
about stories and storytelling. This conversation makes explicit the indirect
way in which the novel functions. Storytelling constitutes one of the
devices available to the father for raising his child to become a man and
as such concerns the passing on of values from one generation to another.
The boy is an apt pupil because he betrays a spontaneous if indiscriminate
empathy for any vulnerable creature they encounter along the road: a little
boy, a dog, even the man they catch in the act of stealing their meager
means of survival. At this point, the boy is in no mood to hear another story
from his father because he says “those stories are not true.” In the stories
of “courage and justice” the father has been telling, his son complains,
“we’re always helping people and we don’t help people.” The stories affront
the boy’s naïve expectation that art have an objective basis in a correspondence
to reality. Readers can’t help thinking that the novel they are reading, though untrue, is worth reading for its account of courage, if not justice, and its affirmation of the living spirit, even if within the terms of the novel that spirit is near extinction…In The Secular Scripture Northrop Frye closes his discussion of the “Themes of Descent” on the theme of memory: “The only companion who accompanies us to the end of the descent is the demonic accuser, who takes the form of the accusing memory… . It conveys to us the darkest knowledge at the bottom of the world, the vision of the absurd, the realization that only death is certain, and that nothing before or after death makes sense.” Frye describes here what he takes to be one of the structures of romance. In the midst of this realization of certain death, the characters of descent “are fighting a battle against death, with some dim understanding that the telling and retelling of the great stories, in the face of accusing memory, is a central part of the only battle that there is any point in fighting.”
Frye gives us the examples of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise and Scheherazade’s use of storytelling to prolong her life. “Once upon a time,” Frye suggests, is “the formula [that] invokes, out of a world where nothing remains, something older than history, younger than the present
moment, always willing and able to descend again once more” (124-26).
boy, but they are only one element in the dramatic indirection the reader
encounters. Several pages before the father dies he and the boy converse
about stories and storytelling. This conversation makes explicit the indirect
way in which the novel functions. Storytelling constitutes one of the
devices available to the father for raising his child to become a man and
as such concerns the passing on of values from one generation to another.
The boy is an apt pupil because he betrays a spontaneous if indiscriminate
empathy for any vulnerable creature they encounter along the road: a little
boy, a dog, even the man they catch in the act of stealing their meager
means of survival. At this point, the boy is in no mood to hear another story
from his father because he says “those stories are not true.” In the stories
of “courage and justice” the father has been telling, his son complains,
“we’re always helping people and we don’t help people.” The stories affront
the boy’s naïve expectation that art have an objective basis in a correspondence
to reality. Readers can’t help thinking that the novel they are reading, though untrue, is worth reading for its account of courage, if not justice, and its affirmation of the living spirit, even if within the terms of the novel that spirit is near extinction…In The Secular Scripture Northrop Frye closes his discussion of the “Themes of Descent” on the theme of memory: “The only companion who accompanies us to the end of the descent is the demonic accuser, who takes the form of the accusing memory… . It conveys to us the darkest knowledge at the bottom of the world, the vision of the absurd, the realization that only death is certain, and that nothing before or after death makes sense.” Frye describes here what he takes to be one of the structures of romance. In the midst of this realization of certain death, the characters of descent “are fighting a battle against death, with some dim understanding that the telling and retelling of the great stories, in the face of accusing memory, is a central part of the only battle that there is any point in fighting.”
Frye gives us the examples of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise and Scheherazade’s use of storytelling to prolong her life. “Once upon a time,” Frye suggests, is “the formula [that] invokes, out of a world where nothing remains, something older than history, younger than the present
moment, always willing and able to descend again once more” (124-26).
—
http://www.marquette.edu/renascence/
Article on McCarthy’s The Road
