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The Cormac McCarthy Journal

The cannibalism prominent in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) significantly places the novel in conversation with depictions of cannibalism in earlier literatures and portrays an imagined end of capitalism linked with other manners of unbridled consumption. Critics and reviewers examining the novel have addressed religious symbolism, relationships between trauma and storytelling, the novel's status as extrapolative science fiction, and its importance as a predictor of impending environmental doom, many of which broach the notion that the gruesome, explicit cannibalism in the novel is a metaphor for blind consumerism.1 However, they do not explore at length the prevalence of other kinds of consumption and even consumer decisions in the novel, a theme present in terms of the visible remnants of a landscape consumed by some manner of ecological disaster and the somewhat less visible, but surviving, apparatus of consumer society. The Road envisions a United States resulting from an utter drive to consume and can be read as a grim, extreme parable warning of an entire globe commodified and converted to waste (a literal dust heap of history), advising that this end could be difficult to avoid, and that even such an end does not spell the termination of consumerism. Connecting The Road more readily to critiques of consumerism, the novel evokes imagery of insatiable anthropophagy that scholars have identified in earlier literatures- colonial travel narratives and British abolitionist writings, for example-that sensationalize cannibalism, use it to define civilization, or critique imperialism and excessive consumption.2 While it is true that the most recognizable ethics to which the father and son adhere revolve around their adamant stance against cannibalism-consuming other individuals-the father and son are consumers nonetheless. The real challenge left facing the son at the novel's end is whether or not he will be able to retrieve nature, objects, and even human beings and their experiences from the realm of commodification and consumption for which the wasted civilization serves as a metaphor. Whatever ethics or moral code rules the postapocalyptic society of The Road, it revolves around consumption literally and figuratively: what matters to the man and especially the boy as they continue on their journey southward on the road is whether they, the things, and the individuals they encounter become objects consumed and cordoned off from further use (through destruction or possession) or subjects of the commons.The Road follows a long tradition of literal and symbolic depictions of anthropophagy in both fiction and nonfiction writing. The topic has garnered scholarly debate for the last three decades, beginning with anthropologist William Arens's assertion in his 1979 book, The Man Eating Myth, that ritualistic cannibalism was a creation of imaginative European colonizers. Sensationalized accounts of cannibalism have appeared with frequency since the travel writings and captivity narratives of the first European visitors to North America during the sixteenth century, through historical tales of survival, such as the ill-fated Donner Party, and even in news and novels about serial killers of the late twentieth century. Surveying literary and cultural criticism on cannibalism reveals it as a trope operating in two ways: as a way to emphasize the difference between European civilization and racially different barbarism and as a metaphor or tool to emphasize the greed of consumer capitalism, a trend that comes about with the emergence of widely available luxury goods and the flourishing middle class. Charlotte Sussman demonstrates within the context of eighteenth-century British imperialism how accusations of cannibalism were used to reinforce differences between cultures, in particular the cultures of west African and Caribbean slaves and the cultures of the white plantation owners who enslaved them (14-15); Europeans who were absorbed into the culture of Native Americans were said by commentators of the period to have been eaten by those tribes that accommodated them (88). …

Cannibalism, Consumerism, and Profanation: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the End of Capitalism