THE PERSISTING RELIC OF PRAYER IN THE ROAD BY CORMAC MCCARTHY Béatrice Trotignon

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1 Powered by TCPDF ( THE PERSISTING RELIC OF PRAYER IN THE ROAD BY CORMAC MCCARTHY Béatrice Trotignon Belin «Revue française d études américaines» 2014/4 n 141 pages 197 à 209 ISSN ISBN Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse : Pour citer cet article : Béatrice Trotignon, «The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy», Revue française d études américaines 2014/4 (n 141), p DOI /rfea Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Belin. Belin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

2 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy Béatrice Trotignon In Cormac McCarthy s work, the question of the presence of God, his withdrawal from the world or his mere inexistence is constantly broached, with no clear-cut answer ever being provided. The intricate web of suggestive allusions and the complex ambiguity of his work have given rise to a range of critical interpretations that cover extensive grounds, with readings as Steven Frye summed them up neatly in Understanding Cormac McCarthy that pick up threads leading back, in Frye s words to Platonism, neoplatonism, the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard, gnosticism, Nietzschean materialism [ ] as well as symbolic systems and elements of the divine that suggest ancient Judaism, [ ] Yahweh the lawgiver, the Gnostic demiurge [ ] and Elohim (Frye 11). As acutely as in any other of his novels, The Road is haunted by the tension between the hope for some sort of salvation or second coming, and the irremediable exhaustion of all beings and all meaning into nothingness or void. Such a tension is explored through the story of an unnamed, hopelessly sick father and his young son who are walking south down a road that travels through a ravaged American landscape, trying to remain alive and to act ethically eight to ten years after an unspecified catastrophic event changed the world into a barren, dying, futureless wasteland where the only living and reproducing beings left are humans who seem mostly to have teamed up into dangerous bands of scavenging cannibals. Textual evidence for nihilism on the one hand and for a triumphant religious vision on the other has frequently been noted by readers of McCarthy s novel, notably Allen Josephs, who examines the relative evidence for or against God and how they stack up (Josephs 21). Interestingly, much of this evidence can be read two-ways, which is nothing new in McCarthy s work. For instance in one of his early novels, Outer Dark, which The Road echoes or even rewrites in many ways, the desperate journey and the void it promises to its characters could just as well be read as indications of a possible via negativa, according to which as Christopher Metress puts it The darkness and nothingness [ ] do not have to take us down the path of nihilism, but down a path of unknowing Revue Française d Études Américaines 197

3 Béatrice Trotignon that will reveal to us the incomprehensibility, rather than the emptiness, of the divine mystery (Metress 149). Mystery indeed would seem to be a key term in McCarthy s work, a term which pointedly enough is the final word of The Road. Signs of possibly nihilistic, secular or Christian interpretations pepper the text. But if one takes into account Jean-Luc Nancy s arguments about the way Christianity [ ] deconstructs its own religiosity (Van Rooden 189) and carries within itself the germ of its own secularization (190) by its very structure and by the sense of absence a distant, monotheist God can provoke in His worshippers, some aspects of The Road can be read not as conflicting discourses but as a possible rearticulation of a complex relationship to religion, in particular through the relic of demythologized prayer ( prière démythifiée ), which Jean-Luc Nancy considers as one of the instances of Christianity s self-deconstruction as a question of language (190). The Father at the Juncture of Two Possible Visions When exploring the ways religion is in turns voiced and hushed and praised and denounced in contemporary American literature, The Road comes as a striking case in point. The historical, intricate links between the words of American literature and those of the King James Bible are, once more, deeply renewed, as though a contemporary American novel about the end of America (and of the world) had no choice but to go back to the very roots of its early literature, one that is haunted by the Scriptures, its words, cadences and vision to provide the reader with an ultimate chapter in the telling of America s settlement, not as a City upon a Hill but as a deadly road littered with ashes, corpses and debris. The biblical features of The Road s style have been listed in Pen of Iron by Charles Alter, who notes the extensive use of parataxis, a simplicity and phonetic compactedness of diction, the preference for monosyllabic words and clustered stresses, the use of simple nouns and archaic inclusions. All of these traits serve to create a literary and cultural framework, in which to tell the peregrinations of a generation, possibly the final one, comprising an unnamed father and son, who are associated to pilgrims or migrants (McCarthy 3, 24) in a land gone back to wilderness a barren one to boot, where all signs have been engulfed into nothingness: He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glass. (8) When the man indirectly through the narrator can still bring up an aesthetic comparison to describe the city amid the blackness that surrounds 198 n e trimestre 2014

4 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy it, it is immediately pushed aside by his next thought Nothing to see, and confirmed by the boy s own comment: Nothing. There are two constant underlying themes in the novel that are linked to two central issues both in religion and literature: that of seeing and of speaking (and all of the associated notions such as blindness, or breathing, storytelling, prophesying i.e. etymologically speaking before and praying). The previous quote is just one instance among many more that harp on the constant scrutinizing for signs in the dying wasteland, mostly signs of potentially dangerous encounters on the road, signs of food and shelter, and at some level signs of a revelation, or the lack thereof. These issues of seeing and speaking are in fact introduced and linked in the novel through the character of the father with his first voiced, oral statement: He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist, and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke. (5) Such a statement and such a use of He said are remarkable: they echo the very rhythms and wording of a Bible phrase; they are reminiscent of the specific power assigned to divine language, not only in the idea of the biblical text being the very words of God, but also in the way God is said in Genesis to create the world by spoken command, and is, of course, described as Logos itself in the New Testament, in the opening of the Gospel of John. The phrase the word of God is also used in the Bible to refer to Christ, the son of God, through which God is said to speak in the New Testament (Heb. 1:1-2). But this sentence, He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke, also embeds God s speech within the father s own speech. The stakes of such a statement by the father can be fathomed better through a short analysis of the narrative voice. The third person narration used throughout the novel mostly adopts the point of view of the man and can usually be interpreted as a free indirect mode of recounting what the man sees, hears, thinks and does. Quite pointedly the novel opens with the man waking up, followed by verbless statements that can be interpreted as his inner thoughts: When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. (5) The poetic cadence and the use of uncommon similes and words may seem, at first, incongruent with any character s idiosyncratic expression, but rather specific to that of a poetic biblical voice breathing into and inflating Revue Française d Études Américaines 199

5 Béatrice Trotignon the character s language, even adopting an Ecclesiastes-like somberness in such later phrases as The frailty of everything revealed at last (28). And yet, many passages and indications throughout the novel suggest the man is indeed a character large enough to voice such language. Glaucoma, for instance, retrospectively seems more than consistent once it is suggested that the man is a doctor (64). For most of the novel, the third person narration and its highly poetic style fraught with biblical undertones are therefore closely intertwined with the voice (and vision) of the father. And the fact that the father is a doctor is worth noting as such a figure, presiding in the past and present over ceremonies of life and death, has been through the ages associated to religion and sacred ceremonies but also, from the Renaissance onwards, to humanism, secularism and positivist science. And it appears that the father indeed stands at the junction of two possible visions throughout the novel. One is that of the man who tries to keep hope amidst devastation by conjuring up a religious, literary and cultural framework that makes sense of his loss through religious regeneration and revelation. The option that his son might be the living word of God is a hope or delusion maintained by the father throughout the novel. At the very least, God is a reassuring trope that keeps him going: My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God (77), just as his use of a figurative language of divinity enables him to compare the snowflake caught by his son to the last host of christendom (16); to describe the boy as God s own firedrake (31), to imagine him to be a Golden chalice, good to house a God (75), and to tentatively present him as a god (172) to an old wandering man who stated that there was no God (170). Toward the end of the novel, the father imagines his boy to be glowing like a tabernacle (273). Another structuring image that the father keeps harping on is that both him and his son carry the fire, not the fire of destruction that consumes up the world into ashes, nor the fire used by the cannibals, but a Promethean fire symbolizing hope and ethical behavior and which, in the Bible, is also a sign of God s covenant. 1 All the biblical and Christian references offer striking and noticeable images that provide a possible grid of interpretation: one that helps place this 1. Any reader keen to pick up on this possible thread of a religious interpretation of the catastrophe that befell this world will be tempted to read all the aspects of the novel within a religious and biblical framework: ash, fire, darkness, destruction all of this is most familiar. And once this interpretative grid is adopted, the tiniest details may be interpreted in this view. For instance, some have underlined that the only precise indication given about the catastrophic event is its time 1:17, which corresponds in the Book of Revelation to the dream vision of Saint John the Divine, in which he witnesses the second coming of Christ: And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last. 200 n e trimestre 2014

6 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy story of loss within a religious, literary and cultural tradition, which makes for the final revelation of God s presence through the messianic nature of the boy. But as indicated, they are all attributed to the father s vision; they often appear in the form of similes and therefore have a limited and subjective dimension. The wish to keep these images at the level of one of the characters only is further confirmed by McCarthy s decision to replace the original title of the Novel, The Grail, 2 with a less loaded, albeit still heavily allegorical one: The Road. Even at the close of the novel, when the father s religious vision seems to gain weight in his mind, it seems less the effect of revelation than that of fever. He sees his son not only as someone who carries the fire, whether in actual or symbolic form, but as someone that could be one with it. There was light all about him. [ ] He moved away and when he moved the light moved, which leads to the very last thoughts of the father before his death: He lay watching the boy at the fire. He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth s long chronicle who s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right. (277) The novel had opened on the father s doubts and questions, echoing the despair of Job a common figure in McCarthy s work with a desperate prayer: Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God. (12) In a way, the father s despairing call is answered by the end of the novel: he does see the truth of prophets at the end, or at least and this is a most revealing nuance he wants to do so ( He wanted to be able to see ). Again some ambiguity lingers as it is suggested this vision might only be a figment of the father s own literary imagination and personal wishful thinking. As indicated previously, another vision is also voiced through the father, one that is more secular and which actually subjects to intense doubt the very word of God and the father s own capacity to speak. For instance, the destruction of the world is viewed by him as an enactment of a reverse process of Genesis (88-89). The dismantling of divine logos and the entropic nature of the world is brought up again by the father towards the end: 2. In Cormac McCarthy s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative, Lydia Cooper indicates that the earliest sketches for The Road appear as loose-leaf sheets with a penciled, underlined heading The Grail, to be found at the Cormac McCarthy Papers, part of the Southwestern Writers Collection, The Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos. Revue Française d Études Américaines 201

7 Béatrice Trotignon Perhaps in the world s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. (274) With these passages, the man s despair leads him to question the possibility of divine logos within a disappearing nature the loss of nature entailing the loss of the signs of God. The fire that consumes the world is not a purifying fire making for a renewal or second coming, but pure and simple annihilation. The nihilism of this loss may further be seen when the father recalls his visit to the charred ruins of a library: He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. (187) Notice it is not said the world to come, the set phrase in Christian eschatology to refer to life everlasting after death and after the end of the world, but a world to come, an indefinite, not specifically Christian world, a world in becoming through its natural renewal through reproduction, pollenization, regeneration. This world to come, this future on which value is predicated has become unimaginable (273) for the man who can only take in the full consequences of entropy: He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. (130) In such a situation suicide might seem the rational option. This temptation of suicide keeps echoing in the man s head through his dead wife s words words that were the very ones used by Job s wife: Curse God and die. (114) And in his head, her/his words go on, referring to their gun as their means of exit: What if it doesn t fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn t fire? (114) But the father will not fire at his son. Between firing the gun or keeping the fire of trust going, he has made his choice. He will not take the side of suicide and nihilism. He would rather construct a form, that of the fire that they have to carry, no matter what. Earlier in the novel, after narrowly escaping death, the need to conjure up even if only out of air the semblance of a ritual had been asserted (74). So it seems that there are times when it suddenly doesn t matter if referents exist or not, whether any future on which to predicate value lies ahead or not, whether a legacy is possible or not, whether a pre-existing, absolute meaning exists or not. Enacting rituals and breathing life into them seems to suffice, to be actually the only viable way to create value and sense. 202 n e trimestre 2014

8 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy Prayer Demythified As Jean-Luc Nancy translated and commented upon by van Rooden in her commentary of Nancy s Prayer Demythified has shown in his analysis of the way Christianity contains in its heart, or rather at its heart, the absence of its God in principle and the germ of its own secularization (Van Rooden 190), with the absenting of God, when the universe is no longer given, structured and animated but needs to be constructed, invented and created, monotheism and secularism [ ] co-emerge (186). This leads Nancy to consider that sense does not have to be a given; it appears as something that emerges between beings and exists in a relational rather than transcendent manner (186). In The Road, this relational emergence of sense seems to be achieved through the community created by father and son, enacted for instance through the caress the father offers his son after a traumatic event, or through the numerous, lengthy dialogues between them in the novel, 3 and the urge on the part of the father to keep his son talking to him you have to talk to me, he said (McCarthy 267). Just as progressing along the road is one of the primary driving forces of the novel, these dialogues seem to be one of the only loci of the emergence of meaning left in the novel: speaking to one another, creating this space for dialogue this is the space where expectation lies, not the space of a future world to come, but the space of a present and real relationship. This leads to another type of dialogue in the novel, a dialogue in absentia in fact that of prayer which is highlighted at two key moments in the narrative. The first instance, already quoted, is the father s despaired prayer, in which he attempts to give a human or animate figure to God ( throat, neck ), before resorting only to the name of God which he repeats, as an empty signifier for a referent absent in principle. The very characteristics and nature of prayer appear here with its dwindling to the Name of God only. As van Rooden, commenting on Nancy, argues: it is addressed to that which is most hidden, without the guarantee of being heard ; it is both the evocation of God and the affirmation of his absence, the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name (191), a suspense of communication in the form of an addressing without addressee (195), which attests to the obstinacy of language (195). In Prayer Demythified, Jean-Luc Nancy analyses it as one of the instances of the coincidence of religion and its deconstruction, which van Rooden comments and translates in the following words: 3. Many critical articles (Cooper, Hellyer, Hoberek, Josephs, Kunsa, Pizzino, Pryor, Schaub, Snyder, Steven, Wilhelm) about The Road analyze and comment on the dialogues between father and son, sometimes coming to opposed interpretations about them and about the nature of the relationship between the father and his son. Pryor also addresses the form of prayer in the novel. Revue Française d Études Américaines 203

9 Béatrice Trotignon In his commentary of Adorno s phrase, 4 Nancy endows these words with a much broader meaning, indicating that they form an answer to the insistent and ultimately modern problem, of how to give sense, or more simply direction [cours] refraining from making sense not to a painfully revived religion but to the relics that an extinguished religion leaves in its wake such as prayer, faith, the name of God itself, and a few other attestations to an irreducibility of language. (191) Interestingly enough, just as an instance of praying appears at the beginning of The Road, another one, in a somewhat modified form, comes back at the very end of it. It corresponds to the final promise the father makes to his son and which requires from them both a leap of faith. This leap of faith centers on a possible legacy in a world that had otherwise been said to be intestate, in a world in which the father had described himself and his son as aliens to one another 5 : He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child s pleasure the world he d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. [ ] he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. (154) In spite of the dismantling of the divine logos, in spite of the loss of referents, in spite of an entropically dying world, in spite of the growing rejection of the father s stories by the son for not being true (264) and despite the boy s growing refusal to talk to his father as the novel develops seemingly picking up on the mother s despaired comment on the fact that [t] here is nothing left to talk about (56), the promise or word that the father gives to his son just before dying is the promise to keep speaking to one another after he is gone: If I m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I ll talk to you. You ll see. Will I hear you? Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you ll hear me. You have to practice. Just don t give up. [ ] I ve got to stop talking. I m going to start coughing again. It s okay, Papa. You dont have to talk. It s okay. (279) The crucial thing is that the father s promise of speaking back is one that can only be kept if the son keeps it for him, if the son proceeds to this strange 4. Demythologized prayer was originally used as a definition of the language of music by Adorno. 5. The other quote is The boy s candlecolored skin was all but translucent. With his great staring eyes he d the look of an alien (129). 204 n e trimestre 2014

10 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy ceremony of talking and listening to his own imaginary answers made up for his departed father, a ceremony that, interestingly, is never given the name of prayer, but bears nevertheless some of its ritual characteristics i.e. closing one s eyes and listening (280). Talking and listening to someone or something that is lost, gone or absent, such is the legacy of the father to the son. All the visions, metaphors, comparisons linking the boy to God, or a god, had always been restricted to the father s thoughts and there seems to be no instance in the text showing the father transmitting any of its content ( muthos, in Nancy s word) to his son. What he does give him is another key, one in the form of logos the name of muthos retreat from itself (195) or, as Nancy also says of prayer, a gesture, a posture and a postulation according to which language is tensed to its limit, which it exceeds while maintaining itself there (Nancy translated by van Rooden 193). It is even deemed better than, if not equated to, talking to God, as comments the wife of the providential man (or deus ex machina) that saves the son after the death of his father: She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man all of time. (McCarthy 286) The breath of God is reminiscent of the expression the word of God and would seem to reaffirm through the woman the framework of religion and biblical references in which the Holy Spirit has been described as the breath of God Gen. 2:7 or 7:22. If the woman does bring those references, it is not the case for the child: he only talks to his father and doesn t forget or give up. What is emphasized in the last few pages of the novel is the importance of addressing and listening to an absent one, by which the boy opens up from within his own inner world of silence and solitude, uses language that possibly has no referents, and eventually makes up fictional exchanges that might bear their own brand of truth. The expectation on which the father predicated value is not only in the space created by dialogue, but also at the very core of language, in the simple address that opens one up to speaking and listening. This opening up, through listening, is at the core of the possibility of sense, as Jean-Luc Nancy develops in Listening: To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within. (14) [ ] We will thus have established that listening opens (itself) up to resonance and that resonance opens (itself) up to the self: that is to say both that it opens to self (to the resonant body, to its vibration) and that it opens to the self (to the being just Revue Française d Études Américaines 205

11 Béatrice Trotignon as its being is put into play for itself). But being put into play [une mise en jeu], or the referral [renvoi] of a presence to something other than itself, or to an absence of thing, the referral of a here to an elsewhere, of a given to a gift, and always, in some respect, of something to nothing (to the res [thing] of rien [nothing] that is called sense, or meaning [le sens ou du sens]. Thus, the listener (if I can call him that) is straining to end in sense (rather than straining toward, intentionally), or else he is offered, exposed to sense. (Nancy 2007, 25-26) 6 The Road s Final Paragraph If the boy s gesture of listening and praying is clearly described in the last few pages, it nevertheless remains unclear whether the content of his prayers are given or not. In a way, it would only be apt if none of its content were given as the structural form of the address suffices as a trigger for the opening of sense and the exposure to it. Nevertheless, the novel does not end with the mention of the boy promising to keep his word to his father by talking to him. It is followed by one final, cryptic paragraph that closes the novel with a description of brook trout bearing on their backs the maps of the world in its becoming and living in glens where all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery (287). There have been various interpretations of the meaning of the final paragraph and debates about who the narrative instance of this paragraph might be, the father having died. Some argue it is the narrator s voice, still echoing the father s memories and vision after his death, warning the reader who remains in a partly undestroyed world of the unimaginable future of a post-apocalyptic world in which trout would no longer exist (Schaub). Brian Evenson sees it as one of those curious but interesting moments that are produced by McCarthy s simultaneous insistence on using the third person, but his reluctance to attribute it to a source (Evenson 59). I like to think of this last paragraph as creating a parallelism: just as the son addresses the absent father from an unimaginable future, the absent narrator/writer addresses the absent reader through communication in absentia, through the creative, performative power of language (Schaub also offers such a reading). But I would also like to explore another possible reading. Could the last paragraph be the words of the son, either addressing the father or voicing the father s imaginary answer in one of his talks with him, and using some of the words his father had once used? 7 Three elements might confirm this hypothesis: 6. See also the original version (Nancy 2002, 33 et 50). 7. Josephs and Wilhem evoke this possibility, and Schaub explores the importance of storytelling, in relation to the last paragraph of the novel. Evenson examines the ambiguity of the final paragraph in relation to the specific use of the narrative voice. 206 n e trimestre 2014

12 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy it comes right after the mention of the boy talking to his absent father; the text has the form of an address ( you could see them, your hand ), and it focuses on trout, which had already been mentioned twice in the course of the novel as memories from the father s past, from a world gone to ashes. 8 Three words only recur from the father s memories in the novel s last paragraph: trout, current and once. In the memories of the father, the word once served to mark the world he had lost, the time and the life that no longer existed: all that he feared he would end up forgetting, once both things and their names had fallen into oblivion, and once he had died and no one could remember the planet that had existed. If the last paragraph is indeed the boy s own imagined talk in an imagined unimaginable future, in which he ghosts the voice of his father, the word once, echoing his father s tales, would suggest that contrary to his fears, the father has managed to enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own, and that, as the boy had promised, he has not forgotten either the father s memories of the past world or its loss. The son would then seem able to use a language that has no referents anymore ( trout ) in a meaningful manner, in a poetic manner, even. Notice how the word once, as opposed to its place in the father s memories, is put at a strategic place in the syntactic chain, i.e. at the very beginning of the paragraph, evoking the once of storytelling, the word which opens up a world, attesting to the creative, poetic, mythic powers of language, providing moreover not a story about the end of the world and its redemption, but one about its pre-human past, when things were older than men, a story about its ongoing creation and inexorable fall into time and being, a story about its humming mystery : a mystery that can, at least, be listened to. To conclude, I will go back to the father s statement: He said: If he is not the word of God, God never spoke. The fact that God never spoke does not mean that the possibility of words and speaking cannot be maintained. If the child is not the word of God, then God never spoke, but it does not imply that the child is the word of nothing: he still holds the possibility of an address, the potential for opening up and unfolding sense. An old man, Ely, had offered the father this paradoxical insight that could also still make sense: There is no God and we are his prophets. In a way, this also attests to the performative power of language, whether through prophesying (speaking before), or demythified prayer. As van Rooden comments: Prayer is an utterance that creates a state of affairs by the simple fact of being uttered. [ P]raying is nothing more 8. He stood on a stone bridge [ ] where once he d watched trout swaying in the current, tracking the perfect shadows on the stones beneath (30); He d stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool, invisible to see in the teacolored water except as they turned on their sides to feed. Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a flash of knives in a cave. (41) Revue Française d Études Américaines 207

13 Béatrice Trotignon than performing God by calling his name (Van Rooden 196). But what is performed or realized remains in accordance with what Nancy, referring to Blanchot, calls absentheism (196), the notion of an absent sense that makes sense in and by its very absenting, or something which could also be termed an exposure to a humming mystery. Works Cited Alexandrova, Alena, Ignaas Devische, Laurens Ten Kate and Aukje Van Rooden, eds. Re-Treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (with a preamble and concluding dialogue by Jean-Luc Nancy). New York: Fordham UP, Alter, Charles. Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton: Princeton UP, Cooper, Lydia. Cormac McCarthy s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative. Studies in the novel 43:2 (Summer 2011): Evenson, Brian. McCarthy and the Uses of Philosophy in the Tennessee Novels. Ed. Steven Frye. The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, Hellyer, Grace. Spring Has Lost its Scent: Allegory, Ruination, and Suicidal Melancholia in The Road. Ed. Julian Murphet & Mark Steven. Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy s The Road. London: Continuum, Hoberek, Andrew. Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion. American Literary History 23:3 (Fall 2011): Josephs, Allen. What s at the End of The Road? South Atlantic Review 74:3 (Summer 2009): Kunsa, Ashley. Maps of the World in Its Becoming : Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy s The Road. Journal of Modern Literature 33:1 (Fall 2009): Mccarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, Metress, Christopher. Via Negativa: The Way of Unknowing in Cormac McCarthy s Outer Dark. Southern Review 37:1 (Winter 2001): Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Déclosion (Déconstruction du christianisme, 1). Paris: Galilée, À l écoute. Paris: Galilée, 2002 Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell, New York: Fordham UP, Pizzino, Christopher. Utopia at Last: Cormac McCarthy s The Road as Science Fiction. Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 51:3 (2010): n e trimestre 2014

14 The Persisting Relic of Prayer in The Road by Cormac McCarthy Pryor, Sean. McCarthy s Rhythms. Ed. Julian Murphet & Mark Steven. Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy s The Road. London: Continuum, Schaub, Thomas H. Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy s The Road. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 61:3 (Spring 2009): Snyder, Philip. Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy s The Road. Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): Steven, Mark. The Late World of Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Julian Murphet & Mark Steven. Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy s The Road. London: Continuum, Van Rooden, Aukje. My God, my God, Why hast Thou forsaken me? Demythologized Prayer; or, the Poetic Invocation of God. Ed. Alena Alexandrova, Ignaas Devisch, Laurens Ten Kate & Aukje Van Rooden. Re-treating religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (with a preamble and concluding dialogue by Jean-Luc Nancy). New York: Fordham UP, Wilhelm, Randall S. Golden Chalice, Good to House a God : Still Life in The Road. Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): Revue Française d Études Américaines 209