American Wasteland

In the final lines of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald situates the condition of man in a primordial experience of wonder. Imagining the first arrival of European explorers to North America, he writes:

“For a transitory, enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (Fitzgerald 189).

Fitzgerald’s understanding of wonder contains an emancipatory potential, realised by the American Revolution and the radical modernity inherent in the construction of a new system of being untethered to the burdens of nature and the sins of the past. Implicit in this is also a shared experience of natality that positions that figurative rebirth of the New World as a mechanism for beginning anew. Thus, to hold one’s breath in the presence of the continent is, at once, to be lost in man’s ability to create above and beyond himself, and, through the exercise of reason and its regenerative contingency, to enable his transcendence into limitless possibility.

It is poignant, then, that Fitzgerald professes the “discovery” of America as the experience of wonder “for the last time in history,” because what followed this foundational experience was the suppression of modernity’s promise through some of the most abhorrent forms of violence ever sanctioned on the Earth (189). From the ashes of industry, war, atrocity, and disenchantment arose the American Wasteland. By cross-reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, I seek to construct a genealogy of the Wasteland as it is experienced in these texts, from Hemingway’s violence to McCarthy’s spiritual degradation. I will then explore how the texts employ universal human experiences of natality and creativity to resurrect life from desolation and reignite the promise of modernity, such that man might once again fashion something “commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (189).

The American Wasteland, as a narrative construct, is particularly confronting for its tacit recognition that man alone bears the responsibility for its creation. Unlike the Genesis flood narrative or natural disasters, it is impossible, in a humanistic, modern age, to attribute the desolation of the Wasteland to the wrath of God or the forces of nature. Ultimately, the Wasteland, in American modernism, is the product of man’s liberated reason and the thanatic expression of its potential through industry, war, atrocity, and spiritual disenchantment. As such, man has only himself to blame. Both McCarthy and Hemingway experience the Wasteland as the fallout of human activities, but they approach it from distinct perspectives.

 In The Road, the Wasteland is experienced as the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” a condition that implies two interrelated dimensions: violence and anarchy (Hobbes 74). While violence is a recurring feature, it is anarchy, experienced as the marked absence of a higher absolute (or, in Hobbesian terms, a “Leviathan”), that best embodies McCarthy’s Wasteland. Specifically, the father conceptualises this anarchic condition as a spiritual nihilism removed from ideas of God or a fundamental human spirit.

“In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell. On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?” (McCarthy 32).

McCarthy’s tone here is one of grief, experienced by the father first as failure, then as contempt for those “godspoke men” of the past, and finally as a lamentation for a stifled future (32). His recurring dreams force him to ruminate ceaselessly on the death of his wife, which he internalises as self-blame for failing to protect her or prevent her death. By asserting that “there is no other tale to tell” and denying the possibility of a higher purpose, such as the dream’s “look of sacrifice,” the father shoulders the full burden of her death and strips himself of the possibility of forgiveness (32). This is, in essence, an anarchic experience, because the father lacks the conceptual structures to make any transcendental sense out of his experience of tragedy beyond his capacity for self-blame. In the absence of God, nature, or any other absolute, the nihilistic self becomes the sole moral agent capable of reckoning with the experience of tragedy.

This spiritual absence does less to emancipate the father and more to imprison him. As the disenchanted modern subject, he is unable to conceptualise his guilt in terms larger than himself. Nevertheless, he desires the peace experienced by the “godspoke men,” who are at least comforted by the belief in a presence beyond themselves (32).

“Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the 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” (McCarthy 12).

McCarthy’s Wasteland, however, is so laden with senseless violence, tragedy, and despair that religious reasoning becomes inaccessible to the father, who is too preoccupied with guilt to recognise good and beauty amidst the chaos. This is symbolised by the thick, grey ash that obscures McCarthy’s world, presenting a spectrum of human existence that is at best mediated and at worst malevolent. What remains of modernity is roamed by cannibals, murderers, and hunters looking to take life for its own sake. It is interesting, then, that the father’s prayers are not cries for mercy or repentance, but rather desperate calls to merely experience life with a figure that, literally and figuratively, possesses a neck, heart, and soul (12). Thus, though the novel uses religion, or the lack thereof, to embody a search for transcendence, the religious content of that salvation is irrelevant in comparison to the search for a shared existence in common humanity.

Like McCarthy, Hemingway recognises the Wasteland as a negative, or death-driven expression of an emancipated human spirit, one that sustains a Hobbesian state of nature. His Wasteland, however, is less concerned with the absence of transcendental spiritual authority than with the experience of primal and all-encompassing violence, filtered primarily through the lens of the First World War. For instance, at the beginning of his first story “On the Quai at Smyrna,” Hemingway offers an image of the violence wrought by an unashamedly modern Wasteland.

“The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming, We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick … The worst, he said, were the women with the dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies” (Hemingway 11).

Hemingway’s use of concise, conversational language here casts a stark contrast to his brutal subject matter. He does not attempt to obscure the experience of violence with euphemistic language or emotionality. This distinguishes Hemingway’s Wasteland as one that is fundamentally and inescapably modern, in which even violence, arguably the most primaeval of all human actions, is disenchanted. Stripped of its mysticism, the soldier’s terror and the mother’s grief are reduced to an ordered, mechanised articulation, one can be silenced by the imposition of man’s constructed systems of being, embodied in the Geist of the searchlight.

In this hyper-rational Wasteland, all measure of human experience is scarred by the turmoil and brutality of war. In such a condition, the experience of life itself becomes mediated, a sentiment voiced by Nick in “The End of Something” when he professes that “it isn’t fun anymore. Not any of it” (34). Naturally, death in Hemingway’s Wasteland, is equally disenchanted, stripped of its honour and dignity.

“While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. ‘Be a man, my son,’ said one priest. When they came toward him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been holding him up both dropped him. They were both disgusted. ‘How about a chair, Will?’ asked one of the guards. “Better get one,” said ta man in a derby hat.” (Hemingway 143)

The priest beckons Sam Cardinella to confront death with the stoicism and dispassion that epitomises modernity’s ego-ideal. Instead, Sam loses control of “his sphincter muscle” and flails about violently, a death far removed from the composure and restraint demanded of the modern man (143). This portrayal illustrates one of the central themes of Hemingway’s Wasteland. Man, worn down by the harsh realities of the world his emancipated reason had wrought, is incapable of facing death with the honour of the ancients. Instead, he meets a senseless end, requiring “a chair” just to tolerate his demise (143). In a world where religion and God, crystallised in the priest, offer little solace, men like Sam Cardinella experience death in its utmost horror. The priest’s admonition to “Be a man, my son” reflects the Wasteland’s tragic inversion that, though the modern man creates the world for himself, the product of his reason is precisely that which subjects him to an end that he possesses no prospect of controlling (143).

In McCarthy’s figure of the child, however, we see, in contrast to the father’s anarchy, an unconditional inclination to love and to do good. The child is described as a quasi-divine figure. Even the father, in his spiritual abyss, recognises that “if he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). The boy represents the condition of natality: the idea that the human capacity for birth contains the inherent possibility to begin anew, and thus restore the promises squandered by generations past. The father, in part to preserve the boy’s innocence, but also in tacit recognition of this renewal, constructs a moral system of good-versus-evil through “carrying the fire” (83). The father is unable to believe in this moral code himself, but he nevertheless maintains it for his son. Over time, though, the selfless and creative act of maintaining this epistemology for his son, who contains a natal, generative potential that he lacks, keeps the father from falling into despair.

Implicit in the idea of “carrying the fire” is a recognition of generativity because it instils a will-to-action oriented on the maintenance of life for its own sake (83). The father’s stoicism is also life-sustaining, operating on the assumption that to be alive is better than to be dead because only the condition of life contains the potential for renewal and the possibility for improvement.

“Are we going to die now?
No.
What are we going to do?
We’re going to drink some water. Then we’re going to keep going down the road.
Okay.” (McCarthy 88).

This recognition, which can be understood as a Freudian life instinct, is what finally propels the father towards transcendence, which is fully actualised when he and his son reach the end of the road and wander the coast. In its final form, the life instinct manifests as the capacity for wonder, symbolised in the novel when the father shoots a flare, an object whose functional purpose is to alert others to one’s position, into a part of the sky where he recognises it will not be visible to anyone.

“He cocked the gun and aimed it out over the bay and pulled the trigger. The flare arced up into the murk with a long whoosh and broke somewhere out over the water in a clouded light and hung there … He looked down at the boy’s upturned face.
They couldn’t see it very far, could they, Papa?
Who?
Anybody.
No. Not far.” (McCarthy 246).

In this instance, the flare serves solely as the object of wonder. To shoot the flare merely to observe its spectacle is, in essence, to surrender to the mystery and the wonder of the human experience. This capacity for wonder is echoed at the end of the novel, where McCarthy offers a vivid description of the evolutionary features of brook trout, including the “vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming” on their backs and how “all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (287).

There exists an evident parallel here to the final words of In Our Time, which ends with Nick recognising that “there were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (Hemingway 156). Unlike the father in The Road, Nick experiences Fitzgerald’s “capacity for wonder” not as a single peak experience but as a gradual renewal, towards the realisation of inner peace (Fitzgerald 189).

“The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs, it was all back of him … Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter. It could not all be burned. He knew that” (Hemingway 134-135).

Hemingway’s straightforward descriptions of how Nick’s “muscles ached” and the “day was hot” incite an immediate vicarious reaction in the reader (Hemingway 134). Yet despite this pain, “he felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs” (134). In this pastoral retreat, where Nick is free to be with nature, he reaches a state of transcendence. In the wilderness, he has the room to breathe and reckon with his past traumas. Though these traumas have not disappeared, evident in the nightmarish vignettes inter-spliced throughout the novel, Nick, at least momentarily, has the space and time to rejoice in the majesty of being alive. As such, he can grow and recognise that perhaps his mind “could not all be burned” (135).

Throughout “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” Nick reckons with the burdens of his existence by taking pleasure in fundamentally life-creating practices such as setting up a shelter or fixing himself a meal. The simple pleasures he derives from a particular way of making coffee or how he “liked to open cans” are what propel Nick to the point of self-actualisation and enable him to surrender to his capacity for wonder, even in the face of the most mundane situations (141).

“Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. … Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. … There had been this to do. Now it was done … He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp” (Hemingway 139).

It is in this “homelike” tent, experienced as the childlike “good place,” that Nick reaches a transcendental, if momentary, state of peace. Svetlana Boym, in her book The Future of Nostalgia, writes that:

“Nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Boym xv).

The nostalgic quality of Nick’s experience is conveyed by the playful quality of the tent reminiscent of a children’s fort and the instrumental role that the pastoral domain played in Nick’s early life, as revealed in “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (Hemingway 139). By opening himself to the full spectrum of affective experience, induced by a practice as simple as setting up camp and crawling into the tent, Nick surrenders to an all-encompassing joy and wonder at being alive. In so doing, he crystallises the role of Boym’s nostalgic, because his experience of wonder actively rebels against the traumas of his past. Moreover, it is the strength of that feeling of wonder, and of the revolutionary contingency it inspires, that provides him with a licence to surrender to the experience, because the act of surrendering commits Nick’s capacity for wonder to an immutable, yet forever accessible past. Thus, he can liberate himself from the tyranny of violence and trauma, enabling his transcendence into inner peace.

The American Wasteland, as is revealed in McCarthy’s The Road and Hemingway’s In Our Time, witnesses the human condition laid bare against a backdrop of profound desolation and violence. Taken together, McCarthy’s spiritual anarchy and Hemingway’s genealogy of violence witness the eradication of modernity’s potential and the enslavement of humanity by the same tools that once enabled its liberation. Nevertheless, both authors offer glimpses of hope and transcendence, which crystallise around shared human experiences of natality and creativity. The possibility for transcendence, then, short of exorcising the demons of the Wasteland, might at least afford man the immutable potential to create something ‘commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’ The journey towards the renewal of the human condition, however, must first begin with a recognition of forgiveness, echoing T.S. Eliot’s famous proclamation of armistice and peace at last: ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih’ (Eliot 43).