Through the Ruins of an Orchard: The Fertility Myth in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Summary

In 2003, the literary critic Harold Bloom famously stated that four of the greatest living American writers were Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy (Bloom 2003). For many readers, however, Bloom's verdict might come as a surprise, especially regarding Roth's frequently scandalizing work, or Pynchon's and McCarthy's tendency to reject interviews, which by no means made them household names. And although the mystery of Pynchon's recent appearance or place of living has gradually become a popular subject of literary investigations, and his novels are eagerly awaited, if not among mass audience, then at least by literary critics, not so long ago was Mc- Carthy still said not to be known even for the fact that he is unknown.

Brought up in Tennessee, Cormac McCarthy began his career with The Orchard Keeper, a novel set in the South that was accorded the William Faulkner Foundation Award in 1966. McCarthy's early works, often fitting in the Southern Gothic style and abundant in biblical themes, quickly gained him the title of Faulkner's apprentice. However, beginning with his own relocation to Texas, and later to New Mexico, as well as with the publication of the violent Blood Meridian in 1985, McCarthy started to move his stories from the South to the direction of the American-Mexican border, writing several novels that might be described as anti-westerns.

McCarthy's most recent accomplishment is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road published in 2006, which on the one hand develops themes present in his later texts (Josephs 2009: 21), while at the same time referring to McCarthy's early work, including even The Orchard Keeper. One critic claims that The Road is “a culmination of Cormackian wanderings” (O’Connell 2012: 13), but McCarthy's latest novel is also a peculiar departure from its predecessors – especially since it belongs to the post-apocalyptic genre, which marks yet another shift in McCarthy's work as a whole. The Road tells the story of a nameless father and his son traversing the barren wasteland of what used to be the United States.