A brainstorming list of Susan Brind Morrow’s jotted down in blue ink and her papyrus-like handwriting on an otherwise blank old envelope is as follows: “Color in The desert -The penetrating light -the destruction of mankind” (Box 3 Folder 4). These are the additions to her list of topics to include in The Names of Things. They are three of the four points written vertically along the edge of the envelope, standing out in contrast to over 30 other points written horizontally in typical bullet-pointed list format. This list foreshadowed what I would find while sifting through her boxes in the Sowell Collection. If the world of The Road is taken to be a desert in the apocalyptic sense, this is a brief summary of it as well.
Tessa Mussman
Upon reading Cormac McCarthy’s crown jewel, The Road, I felt compelled to look into sources that might hint at the psychology of the family dynamic in survival situations like the one in the book. Pulling thick manila folders from boxes in Texas Tech’s Sowell Collection, I skimmed through Susan Brind Morrow’s notes, drafts, and even worn and smudged postcards surrounding the topics of her book, The Names of Things. In these boxes, I found next to nothing on the struggles of families and how survival in nature might bring them closer, but what I found hooked me into the pages and sparked connection after connection between her work and McCarthy’s.
McCarthy’s use of words, language, and names is a central area of focus for many when reading his works, but tying it to The Names of Things brings an interesting twist to it. Morrow’s book and the related notes talk of the origin of life and language. How both were birthed in the desert and colors were without meaning until they were mentioned (Box 4 Folder 4). How words are used is born from their creation. What is so important that it must be given a name? And what is much too important to be given one? “Pay attention to what is unnamed”, Morrow writes to herself in her notes, reminding me to do the same (Box 4 Folder 4). What goes mentioned and unmentioned, named and unnamed, ties into the story of The Road and sews the two works together, bringing new meanings to each in turn. Glancing between the origin and the end, side by side, there is a mirror of connections found in the juxtaposition. “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made”, the final pages of The Road echo through my mind, tying the knot on these associative strings (McCarthy 275). Perhaps in the creation of life—and language—as we know it, we can find meaning in its destruction.
The rarity of color tells a story in itself. In a world so devoid of it, the presence of color is highlighted, drawing attention to itself and making it ever more important to notice. Where color appears, what colors appear, and when they show up all become details of intrigue in the fading light.
The world of The Road is gray. It is gray 80 times. Black and white fill in the gaps. White as bone and black as “ancient dark” (McCarthy 181). This pushes readers toward the idea of a dying earth, but also one returning to its beginning: darkness, a void from a time before colors had been invented. In Morrow’s notes, she writes of a friend from the desert she travelled in, someone familiar with the landscape and the origins of colors’ names. “Black is a color that does not exist in nature.” He told her. “Black is the absorption of all colors. Black occurs when color itself disappears” (Box 3 Folder 11). This is indeed the truth found in The Road.
The darkness, the gray, and the black, show the fading light and the disappearance of color. The return of the world to its beginnings. To “the silence” (McCarthy 275). For without life, there is no color. Without color and life, there are no words. Just the memory of them. “The names of things slowly” follow those “things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true” (McCarthy 89). But in the introduction to The Names of Things, Morrow states that words are coined to give us the ability to call on memories. When a name is bestowed on something, it is to pin down its meaning, and once that thing is gone, the name is the only thing left to keep it alive, and “that is what a word is worth” (Box 2 Folder 13). So, while McCarthy’s writing might seem to show us that words lose their meaning as the things they are named for disappear, this may be the flawed, hopeless idea of the father. In the end of The Road, there is a clear sense of Morrow’s notion in the boy. His repetition of his father’s name is to keep the father alive in a world where he is no longer. A word only loses meaning if the name itself stops falling from the tongues of the living. The power of words, in the end, is that they keep things alive, even in a world where life is fading.
Upon reading Cormac McCarthy’s crown jewel, The Road, I felt compelled to look into sources that might hint at the psychology of the family dynamic in survival situations like the one in the book. Pulling thick manila folders from boxes in Texas Tech’s Sowell Collection, I skimmed through Susan Brind Morrow’s notes, drafts, and even worn and smudged postcards surrounding the topics of her book, The Names of Things. In these boxes, I found next to nothing on the struggles of families and how survival in nature might bring them closer, but what I found hooked me into the pages and sparked connection after connection between her work and McCarthy’s.
McCarthy’s use of words, language, and names is a central area of focus for many when reading his works, but tying it to The Names of Things brings an interesting twist to it. Morrow’s book and the related notes talk of the origin of life and language. How both were birthed in the desert and colors were without meaning until they were mentioned (Box 4 Folder 4). How words are used is born from their creation. What is so important that it must be given a name? And what is much too important to be given one? “Pay attention to what is unnamed”, Morrow writes to herself in her notes, reminding me to do the same (Box 4 Folder 4). What goes mentioned and unmentioned, named and unnamed, ties into the story of The Road and sews the two works together, bringing new meanings to each in turn. Glancing between the origin and the end, side by side, there is a mirror of connections found in the juxtaposition. “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made”, the final pages of The Road echo through my mind, tying the knot on these associative strings (McCarthy 275). Perhaps in the creation of life—and language—as we know it, we can find meaning in its destruction.
The rarity of color tells a story in itself. In a world so devoid of it, the presence of color is highlighted, drawing attention to itself and making it ever more important to notice. Where color appears, what colors appear, and when they show up all become details of intrigue in the fading light.
The world of The Road is gray. It is gray 80 times. Black and white fill in the gaps. White as bone and black as “ancient dark” (McCarthy 181). This pushes readers toward the idea of a dying earth, but also one returning to its beginning: darkness, a void from a time before colors had been invented. In Morrow’s notes, she writes of a friend from the desert she travelled in, someone familiar with the landscape and the origins of colors’ names. “Black is a color that does not exist in nature.” He told her. “Black is the absorption of all colors. Black occurs when color itself disappears” (Box 3 Folder 11). This is indeed the truth found in The Road.
Morrow writes that animals “belong to their environments” and “are inseparable from the processes that drew them”. An animal taken from its natural environment is likely to lose its natural color over time. The lesson she draws from this is that “color is a defining principle of place” (Box 2 Folder 17). If an animal loses the color of its origin by being taken from it, the parallel found in The Road is that the place itself loses color, loses meaning, when the inhabitants are taken from it. Color is place; it defines it. So, without color, does a place lose its meaning entirely? A world fading to black, its color lost, the light fading away, surely is the end. The exact location of the journey on the road is never mentioned, perhaps because it is without meaning. It is no longer a place anymore, not as places were defined in the past—by their inhabitants, by the life they held. We follow the boy and the father because they are the life, the light, the place. They are carrying the torch. Morrow states in her notes that the people who survive in the harshness of the desert wilderness are the “tentposts of life”. So long as there are people, there is still life, and the people kept alive in such conditions must be paid close attention to, for they are the miracle of survival (Box 4 Folder 4).
As Morrow states that language came out of the desert, she explains that colors were some of the first words, even if they were not named as colors yet. They were coined as most words are: to capture something. Morrow likens this to the words of the ancient poets, “trying to pin a thing down with a metaphor, something alive” (Box 2 Folder 13).
Red and green are the natural extremes of Egypt’s desert, the opposites of the color spectrum, but originate from the same place. These are the first colors that are named. The desert is red, the water and plants around it are green (Box 2 Folder 17). The Red Sea’s hieroglyphs translate to “The Great Green” (Box 4 Folder 4). Two very opposite colors, representing two very opposite things, find their origin in one place where they are equivalent. In Egypt, green is the color of life, represented by the papyrus that once grew in the Nile River, but no longer does. The original hieroglyph for green survives in the land without its origin (Box 2 Folder 17). The bitter irony in this makes the pairing of red and green even more appropriate.
Much like in The Road where red marks fire and blood, and life and death—both of which can be listed under fire and blood—red, according to Morrow’s notes on its origins, is as blood, representing life and death. Its symbol is the flamingo. The fire sustains the father and son, keeping them from freezing, while the forest fire consumes, blackening the earth. Blood red is both the birth of the boy and the coughs that lead to the father’s death. The Road holds green as the color of growth, provisions, and food. Like in the desert of Egypt, green is a rarity, appearing “in isolated forms” amid the natural bleakness and emptiness (Box 4 Folder 4). Where the boy and his father come across the few jackpots of food, there is green. The green of the brass ring-pull on the floor where the sweet water is buried and of the lanter’s shade in the bunker (McCarthy 122, 171). In McCarthy’s work we see the joining of meanings of red and green, but never so clearly as the combination of “green beans” and “red peppers” in the cabinet stocked full of food jars, where both sustain life (McCarthy 206).
In ancient Egypt, gold was outranked by emerald in worth, despite both finding meaning in that “which contains light”. Green was the color of plants, which were life, and golden white was the color of wheat: that which bestows life, or holds life within it (Box 4 Folder 4). In The Road, gold is the boy himself. Gold is only mentioned once outside of the boy, but the gold rings on the ‘bad guys’ are not naturally bestowed. They have taken life to sustain them, crowned themselves gods, but the boy was chosen for this purpose. He is the gold of the good, the gold of true gods on this godless wasteland of an earth. He holds within him life and bestows life on others. True, pure life, lacking selfishness and providing strangers with food even when he himself is starving on the road.
Other colors are present in this dying world as well, but the most important and most common seem to be the ones that tie into their origin in the desert. Yellow is next in order of mentions, being the color of survival and the past. The yellow of the hearth in the father’s old home, and of the slickers, flashlights, and survival supplies left behind. Blue is the color of the sea that they make their way toward but never find because the water is not blue. Blue is the apology of the father when they never find this color where it was looked for. It makes sense that blue would be the first color that disappears, for blue was the last color to arrive in the eyes of ancient people. The color rose is mentioned only around the boy’s mother, a faded red of a faded life already gone.
The use of color in the apocalyptic desert landscape of The Road is sparing, but that sparsity gives an enhanced, brightened meaning to the places where colors do appear. It is important to dig into the meanings of these usages, and The Names of Things and related notes from Susan Brind Morrow were an incredible place to discover the symbolic meanings of colors that tied the plot of the book to its meaning and also tied the end of the world to its beginning. Looking at the origins of language as color in the deserts of Egypt brought a new eye to the pages of The Road and the unravelling of language and life as color seeped from the world. The penetrating light of the boy, the face of humanity carrying the torch into what future is left, is shown through the gold of his hair and the light that constantly bathes him. He is the future, the one with life inside him and the one giving life to others. The destruction of mankind in a post-apocalyptic world is the setting of The Road, but it does not define it. For, so long as language exists, so long as the light of life exists, the memories of the past and the humanity that remembers them can exist as well. The power of a word, of a name, is in remembering and calling upon its past.
Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage International, 2006.
Susan Brind Morrow Papers, 1925-2005 and undated, Southwest
Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock,
Texas. Box 2, Folders 13-17. Box 3, Folders 4-11. Box 4, Folders 4-65.