Grapes on the road
The Garden of Earthly Delights
A caped figure hefts a sword behind two nudes. Pipers strike up doom. Two more naked figures fall prostrate, whether in final desperate worship or in abject fear of what last horror is to come. Such images, drawn from one panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted sometime between 1590 and 1610, can rest comfortably alongside those concocted by two more recent masters, John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. Both men cast gigantic shadows that cross and re-cross the landscape of American literature, where the beauty of the world itself stands out the more poignantly for the mingled deeds of its inhabitants.
The example of Bosch recalls that vivid presentations of the macabre are not limited to the aftermath of our most recent century. From the split, gory, phantasmic corpses of Dante’s heresiarchs to the writhing damned of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the Western tradition, both verbal and visual, has left us a violent, often vivisective, view of man and his doing. This is not simply the province of the Christians. Plato’s readers will recall that vivid moment in Book IV of the Republic when “Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.” And in Homer we find an exhaustive catalogue of the means whereby, with sword or bow or spear, we might bleed, behead, disembowel, and brain the enemies amassed against us on the shore.
Nonetheless, it is in the Crucifixion, in the image of a tortured man put to criminal death, whose image hangs across the world in churches, classes, kitchens, and bedrooms, that our habit of gazing on the violent is made salutary. And in Steinbeck and McCarthy, we can, without too much posturing, find a fiction of the Cross, an engagement with the fallen world with glimmers of hope like lightning playing over the face of Golgotha.
While any number of common images populate Steinbeck’s and McCarthy’s novels, it is in the use of particular words that we might most keenly note the latter’s reliance on the former. McCarthy, magpie that he was, often marked his borrowing from other authors quite plainly, as for instance at the beginning of The Passenger, when a hunter “stogged” his rifle in the snow, a word immediately recognizable from Chapter Three of Joyce’s Ulysses: “A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough.”
One such link between McCarthy and Steinbeck lies in their shared use of the word “rachitic.” Here is McCarthy, describing a man who has stepped off the road to relieve himself: “He was lean, wiry, rachitic.” And here, Steinbeck: “The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides.” While it is the children who are subject to rickets in Steinbeck’s dust bowl diaspora, it is a grown man, his teeth claggy with flesh, whom McCarthy describes thus. Steinbeck’s children have grown up, under McCarthy’s care, to form cannibal bands of post-apocalyptic wanderers.
Though The Road is a vision of the end of things, it is also, as the allusion to Steinbeck suggests, a vision of the present. Too often we care too little for the created order and especially for each other. If our teeth are not rotten with each other’s flesh, we are nonetheless, in our greed and our hardness of heart and our usury, devourers of each other’s substance. If children are not paraded in chains down the highways of America, they are nonetheless subject to a vast, discreet sex trade. If clouds have not forever barred the sun its sight of us, we have screened off our local share of the heavens. If the end of the world yet looms in the distant future, the end of my world is but a lifetime away.
What, then, can we do? We can care for our children, guiding them as far as we can, and teaching them to know the good when we can no longer choose it for them. We can learn to work with our hands, whether to repair an engine or to replace the wheel of a shopping cart or to fashion a fire in a frozen wood. We can learn to make music and to share it with one another. We can go out to the poor and the sick and the blind. We can look to the Cross of Christ, allowing the veils of custom and long use to fall away that we might press on along the road, no longer anesthetized, but alive to the agony of grace.
