I have found that existentialism is often conceived popularly as a bleak, cynical philosophy: the dying embers of a lit cigarette, the furrowed brow of a scowling figure in black. A type of hip nihilism, in fact, entirely preoccupied (in a flippant, dry manner) with the notion of mortality. A type of wiser-than-thou smirk that offers the response "we're all going to die anyway!" to every attempt to bring them to consider any other mode of being.

This is all the more worrisome in light of the fact that--for me at least--existentialism is ultimately about how to live, instead of deferring life, shrugging it off with the resigned sigh of a man who is constantly ready to drop into a coffin with nary a care. Existentialism is not about making life valueless because it will eventually come to an end: for is it not about hanging onto life at all costs precisely BECAUSE it will one day be terminated? The word for this idea, I have come to learn, is natality.

Natality emphasizes the opposite end of the process of life. It considers the meaning of being born into the world, instead of focusing on meaning of what it means to die. It does have a slightly old-fashioned flavor--of being born into this world for some purpose (namely: to live) is an idea that we have since become detached from, but it certainly became the crux of the father & son's existence. It enchants the desolate landscape in a singularly powerful way; "living for the sake of life" makes their journey down the road possible, when there is nothing else to live for.

This realization helped greatly to elucidate my reading of the book; as opposed to interpreting their journey as a suicide mission, I could now see The Road as something other than an exercise in pathos, an elegy to the last father on planet earth.

I have here just a small question (which may reveal the sad possibility of my having learned nothing from the book): would it be legitimate for a man to take his own life, given that he believes that he is the last person on earth and thus any possibility of natality (taken in the context of its communality, of interpersonality) was extinct? Would we forgive the last man's decision to extinct the species from earth?

Also, a final thought that I had about The Road was the way it puts into question the idea of "natural law". So many moral arguments are based upon a naturalistic conception of human nature, of how we would and therefore should behave if we were left to our own devices. As far as I understand, naturalistic theses attempt to spark the intuition that good and evil are intrinsic to the human make-up. Does McCarthy then question this naturalism by populating his world with perverse cannibals and mystifying characters like the old man (who is opaque to us as a character--one cannot fathom his motivations, cannot identify with him at all) or does he affirm it by way of introducing the young boy who is a model of ethical conduct despite his having only his father assurance of their "being the good guys" by way of moral education?


More on The Revisionists and politics later. I'm suddenly having to reconsider a lot of things.

 The saddest part is that the man and his boys believe, must believe, that they are "carrying the fire". That they are the "good guys". Yet under what form can goodness even be manifested in their time, when refusal to steal and cheat and bully will almost certainly result in death? The boy, especially, has no one other than his father to learn the notion of "humanity" from--and it seem that he must have made the choice, early on, to trust in his father's empty promises and bland optimism because that was the only alternative he had to the death, decay, and deranged cannibals he saw all around him. In this context, the rather trite idea of the man and his son--like Noah and Lot before them--being the only remnants of virtue in a world gone evil becomes deeply touching. Because it isn't even really the case that they are two lonely do-gooders surrounded by a horde of bloodthirsty maniacs: it is simply that the world has become purged of any system of value, it is devoid of any structure that can support a framework in which good and bad are opposed. So the man's insistence on having his son believe that there is still that proverbial "fire burning within him" is amazingly beautiful in that it is so futile. Sad, too, at the same time, because at times it become clear that the son is lead to question this: he is always powerfully affected when they come upon other people, and it seems that he is often disappointed in his father, or angry at him, for not being the good person he always insisted on being. For example, he stops talking to his father for a while after they leave the lightning-struck old man in the road, and he cries and begs his father to spare the person who stole their cart. When his father defends his actions and says that it's not as though he killed another man, the son solemnly replies that, by taking his clothes and leaving him utterly stranded, they effectively did kill him. But he has to believe his father's platitudes, for what else would motivate him to keep trekking down this desolate road?

(Also, on the interpretations of "godspoke". Does it mean spoken for by god? Or speaking as though one were god, speaking as the alleged mouthpiece of god? I am taken by both the interpretations presented in class--perhaps this is simply slothful evasion, but I don't seem to be able to, or even want to, come down and pronounce my alliance to one reading or another.)

Perhaps we still haven't been able to shake the comforting notion that we do, after all, live in the best of all possible worlds. How seductive to be seduced by the thought that everything happens for a reason, that there are organizing forces in world affairs that put into action comprehensive action plans that are always oriented towards an end--not even a benign end, necessarily. We have grown out of that puerile expectation, we merely hope and dream that events are not determined by erratic chance and are instead the product of concerted agendas. I would claim that, compared to a world in which large-scale decisions are wrenched out of frantic conversations and spontaneous impulses (our world, this world, so to speak), a world that is at the mercy of a syndicate of mysterious cigarette-smoking men is actually the product of a more idealistic mind. Such a world is more pure, more manageable.
In any case, though the process of executing this world-plan be unpleasant, even unbearable to behold, we would be able to withstand such hardship knowing that it is angled towards the ultimate fruition of something or another. We would be able to suffer centuries upon generations of abuse, held fast by such a doctrine.

In this light, it seems to me that is it all the more important to engage with narratives which create contemporaneous alternate worlds. Alternative dimensions and parallel universes are no new gimmick: but to harness these to the realm of recent socio-political issues rather than flights of sci-fi fancy is a distinct move, differentiable even from depictions of dystopic worlds insofar as they are firmly anchored in a time that coincides crisply with our own. As such, they give some kind of plausible reference point for comparison: we can determine, face to face with such alternate worlds, whether our world really is the best of all possible worlds. In the case of Paul Auster's novel Man In the Dark, we are presented with a desolate New York, ravaged by civil war: granted, the first reaction to such a circumstance must be one of horror and sadness. How terrible for the inhabitants of such a world, that they are stuck in the middle of a civil war with no TV and high inflation!
But then again, remember that in this world 9/11 never happened, and neither did the Iraq war. And so we come to realize that we cannot patronizingly pity the citizens of that other America. Their plight is merely different from ours, and it so happens that the decisions of our world come to take on a counterfactual dimension--"what if?" is no longer just a futile question unworthy of being addressed, it is a question that highlights the idea that our history can be constructed just as Auster constructs his fictional worlds.

Islands stand out against a vast embrace of ocean, a negative space, an unconquerable space--therefore unconquered.
An oasis, likewise, blossoms forth from a great arid nothingness that could never mean anything permanent to any human being other than death.
Both are paradigm examples of something in nothing. Islands and oasis are loci of privilege: looking out at the ocean or the desert, the inhabitant feels oneself fortunate, strong, for trees and houses and churches stand at his back as he confronts the emptiness without. And, being within the scope of "something", all the rich ambiguity and subtle tints of somethingness are possible.

An enclave, on the other hand, is enfolded by positive threat: on each side a frowning menace, you feel a grip around your throat at all times, an oppressive clutch that may any minute tighten with throttling finality. You live by repeating the phrase "by the mercy of", you feel smaller, always, keep feeling smaller. Then smaller. Then nothing.
A nothing in something.
Under the shadow of overwhelming somethingness, the inhabitants of the enclave can no longer see beyond the yawning contrast between this nothing, that something. Only yes and no are the modifiers that are left them.

Thomas Schell* has come to see himself as nothing but an enclave: was his wife wrong to have believed that he could have ever become an island again?

*Oskar's grandfather

The most striking comparison that I came across today, during my attendance at the conference, was that made by Derek Penslar: he spoke of Zionism as a kind of colonialism, and, for anyone who ever paid a smidgeon of attention in high school history classes, colonialism is a foul word the very sound of which should set our lips in a curl of the utmost disdain. Given that he did specify that there are many features of the Zionist movement that did set it out as a very idiosyncratic case, the very association of the two notions was--to me--a surprising and illuminating one. The story that I had tended to associate with the founding of Israel was more one of self-determination, of a nation of people gaining the right to exercise self-governance. This is why I was so taken aback by the comparability of Israel and Algeria or South Africa. Evidently, even when we think we are optimally placed as impassive observers (and often precisely because of the fact that we are so complacent in the fact that we could not possibly be held hostage by any specific ideology), the single explanation that we come to designate as the only objective account of facts eventually turns out to be wholly insufficient, to be unfair to some valid viewpoint or another.
On another note, there was a comment made in the aftermath of this presentation that I found very interesting--it was suggested that after five or six generations, the competing claims between Jewish and Arab people to their nativity would become irrelevant and fade away, seeing as everyone is now native. I was initially taken with the remark and felt decidedly more optimistic because of it, but upon reflection it seems to me that there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary that, even if we skip a few generations, the old prejudices do not tend to dissipate of their own accord, especially when the identities in question are so entrenched and so radically opposed. Take, for example, the situation in Tibet and Manchuria--these are regions that Han Chinese people have felt entitled to for several generations, having toiled to develop the land for agricultural and industrial uses, and yet there still exists a sharp demarcation between the ethic Tibetians and the Chinese-who-live-in-Tibet, just as there is a well-understood distinction between the Manchurians/ethnic Koreans and the Han Chinese who have evolved a distinct identity as the "North-Eastern Chinese". That is to say, both the Manchurians and the Han Chinese have occupied the same land for decades, and both have firmly established identities--any attempt to bestow primacy upon one or the other would surely end in great displeasure.

The village anecdote that was appended to the black dogs really threw me off, or at least it pushed me towards a greater degree of engagement with their symbolism.

On one hand (if we take the Mayor's story to be true), to learn that the black dogs were owned by the Gestapo and trained to commit horrible deeds is to come to terms with the realization that human nature is inhabited by malevolence, that humans are capable of doing terrible things. But it is important, nonetheless, to note that this realization is specifically focused towards other people. It is the acknowledgement that yes, some people--such as the Gestapo--can be genuinely evil. But we appraise them as entities that are at an inconceivable distance from ourselves: they have undergone some horrific indoctrination, have been brain-washed or were simply born bad apples. This realization is saddening and frightening, but nevertheless it does nothing to tarnish the view that we have of ourselves. To impugn the Gestapo makes no footprint on our self-conceptions--after all, this is the Gestapo we're talking about here, not just Tom down the street or Jon the grocer.

On the other hand, one must also not close one's eyes to the notion that this account may not be factual. It may have been, as Madame the innkeeper insists, a vicious fabrication of men who harbored no good will towards the woman involved in the story--a spot of malicious village gossip, fueled by jealousy and perhaps spurned desire. So, the other layer of the "black dogs" concept that is highlighted by the fact that the anecdote itself may have sprung from malevolence (petty though it may seem in comparison with large-scale tragedy): it reminds us of the fact that all of the people around us, with whom we share a bottle of wine or laugh about old memories, respected neighbours and cherished friends...All these people are, and by inference ourselves, are capable of malice and misdeed. We have not had circumstance impose upon a set of conditions that forced us to employ this malice as part of a large, orchestrated, systematic exercise of violence, but nevertheless in the case that such circumstances were to impose themselves upon us we should, by no means, feel ourselves exempt in any way. People commit terrible deeds while all the while holding onto the notion that they are intrinsically good people, not at all like those really evil people who exist out there in the world: for they are only acting out such violence, that they have to perform such violence due to this reason or another, it's nothing like what they would have wanted to do had fortune not imposed itself so cruelly. But it seems to me that, when it comes to violence, there is little difference between enacting violence and having committed a violent act. The validity of the following justification:" But surely, I'm not one of those genuinely awful people--I just did what I had to do!" is something that this passage of Black Dogs refutes, for it asserts that those same dogs (bigger or smaller, thinner or meaner) are not just in the selective echelon of great evil-doers,  but in every one of us.