Reading The Road with Paul Ricoeur and Julia Kristeva: The Human Body as a Sacred Connection

INTRODUCTIONThe chillingly desolate, post-apocalyptic world of Cormac McCarthy's The Road confronts readers with a question: what is there to live towards in a barren, forsaken world? McCarthy locates his protagonists, and his readers with them, in a grim setting, breathing air tinged with ash. The main characters, an unnamed father and his son, journey south seeking food, water, and a warmer climate. Possessing little, they confront death and destruction upon the road, coming upon a newborn infant roasted on a spit and male and female captives being gradually harvested as food. An - nihilation is certain: the father moves closer to death throughout the text, and readers never come to know the mother, already dead from having committed suicide. Even in the wake of cataclysm, the tender relationship between the father and the son remains, and they proceed on a mission, as McCarthy puts it, ?carrying the fire? (24-25). Feeble and dilapidated, their bodies hold this fire, which marks them as ?good,? or as not susceptible to alleviating their hunger by eating other human bodies.This essay will consider The Road in terms of its treatment of the body as a sacred connection. In the analysis, Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic approach will help to explore what is sacred.1 In addition, their works elucidate the body as a present site of human connection and sacredness while calling attention to what is glaringly absent yet hauntingly present in McCarthy's text: the mother. The essay will then illustrate how, in the aftermath of destruction, primitive, sacred connections become available through the sensual body, through sight, smell, sound, touch, and through breath. What is at stake in the novel, the connection of body and spirit, emerges through corporeal sensations and connections. Primary paternal and maternal relationships will serve to illustrate this connection. For instance, the tender compassion in the father and son pair illustrates what occurs when sacred bodies meet. Lastly, the essay will attempt to show how McCarthy rejects a redemptive framework, or hope in an otherworldly reality. Instead, he shrouds spirit in physicality symbolized by the fire carried by the body. This spirit offers another kind of hope, one based on the body's potential to feel and connect to the other. The body carrying fire is a sacred, incandescent body that connects to and with the world and the other, unifying human and divine. The thought and works of Ricoeur and Kristeva will broaden a reading of McCarthy's novel, especially as a statement about the unification of body and spirit, contributing to a multi-dimensional view of a contemporary problem: what sustains humanity with no past and no future?The dire predicament posed by The Road forces the characters to face the idea of ultimate destruction, questioning the method and teleology of living after apocalypse. The question turns back on the reader: what are you living for and how are you living? The book does not give an unequivocal answer; it only shows the body containing a fire, serving as a connection, and seeking a mother. McCarthy concentrates on the body, keeping readers in the present. His protagonists are two human bodies, bodies among bodies, fighting, moment by moment, to stay alive in a world where cannibalism represents an option for living.THE SACREDIn The Road, the sensual is sacred. Simple moments like eating canned peaches and bathing disrupt and unite distinctions between divine and human: finding peaches is so rare that eating them is venerated, and immersion in clean water is a form of rebirth. In the novel, mundane experiences grounded in the body become sacred. Further, McCarthy hallows and makes indispensible the body even when it is threatened, injured, or dying. He transposes the traditional view of holy, meaning whole and perfect, to associate holy and sacred with those "carrying the fire." The fire carriers regard all bodies, even injured ones, as sacred and view cannibalism as blasphemous. …