Text and Memory in "The Road"

“Memories, like an old cassette, get hazier with every play.” That’s a line of mine, one I hadn’t thought about for some time when this poignant passage on memory from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” dragged it to the forefront:

“Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

My words are pulled from a song, literally a piece of a record, captured on magnetic tape and then vinyl, with the intent of posterity. I wanted to name the record “Ancient History,” but we called it “Historical Fiction” instead; in the end it was the more fitting title. The record sounds strange to me now, almost unfamiliar, a moment in time encoded in sounds and words.
Memory and text are concurrent themes in “The Road,” a reflection of their relationship in life. One can’t really exam to process of reading and writing, the roles of symbolism and significance in the written word, without considering the part they play in attempting to preserve recollections. Nor can one really set out to discuss the act of remembering without considering the ways we use words to construct fixed forms out of moments in time. Of the many passages in “The Road” which carefully weave these two themes together, two in particular stand out for me, both from the last few pages of the novel.

“He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

“She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”

Both passages allude in some way to our collective literary traditions, but the first stands out in form as well as content. Not only does it include a dialog tag, all but unseen in the rest of the text, but also an abundance of apostrophes and my beloved commas, whose absence I found almost torturous my first time through the book. McCarthy’s brief incorporation of these conventions, absent or elusive throughout the rest of the novel, call to mind the role formal structure can play in shaping ideas into text, but also the malleability of language. Juxtaposed against the style of the rest of the novel, this passage highlights the ways in which the text succeeds despite the absence of those conventions, bringing into focus the notion that it is not the method but the purpose which defines a text.