symploke

Hunger is an especially problematic subject to discuss in theoretical terms as its effects so often seem to fall into the realm of the physical rather than the metaphysical, the ontic rather than the ontological. But it is modernity’s very desire to separate these realms that results in skewed views of complicated problems that do not fit neatly into either category. For example, in a 2008 meeting with United Nations officials to mark World Food Day, former US President Bill Clinton lamented worldwide political attitudes toward food. President Clinton suggested that a significant failure of modern governments has been their lack of foresight in treating food as a commodity in the face of world hunger. Similarly, in his recent work Hunger: A Modern History (2007), James Vernon argues that hunger has become “a category we moderns have used to reflect upon the world we inhabit” and that “through it we have transformed the ways in which we think of ourselves, our responsibilities to each other, and our relationship to the state and the market” (8). But how is this understanding of hunger specific to modernity in the way Clinton, Vernon, and I suggest? The answer to this question becomes clear when understood in light of what Charles Taylor has called modernity’s “malaise” of “instrumental reason” (1991, 5). In this modern mode, reason is drawn primarily from a calculation of the “most economical application of means to a given end” (5). Taylor’s investigation of the effects of modernity suggests that the modern desire to free the individual from some transcendent, sacred, or cosmic order has resulted in the “disenchantment” of the “order of things,” and that without these “old orders,” instrumental reason has become a dominant way of interacting with the world. If we buy Taylor’s argument, then it becomes clear how the effects of modernity have led us to a troubling point in world history, a point in which food can be seen more as commodity than necessity and even hunger falls under the purview of instrumental reason.

As this essay is an investigation of the relationship between hunger and modernity, it might seem odd that it takes as its primary focus a novel typically framed by reviewers and critics alike as “post-apocalyptic.” Nearly every review, note, and scholarly treatment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road [End Page 75] (2006) has figured the novel, as Shelly Rambo does, a “post-world territory,” one that “confronts us with the question of the aftermath: what does it mean to witness to what remains?” (101). James Wood envisions the landscape of The Road as “a future world catastrophically changed or almost post-human” (44). However, what I want to argue in part here is that McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic landscape is not the shade of a prophesied future. Instead, the barren wasteland of The Road is McCarthy’s rendering of modernity. In other words, if we are going to employ the term “apocalypse” at all, we should think of it in terms of its most literal definition, that is, as a revelation or disclosure first, and as a disaster or global cataclysm second. Or, as Linda Woodson suggests in questioning the placement of The Road in the “genre of post-apocalyptic literature,” we might think of “apocalypse” in terms of Wordsworth’s “sense of the heightened vision of the artist” (87). What I want to argue by way of this investigation of the links between hunger and modernity in The Road is that the figural use of hunger in the novel reveals an “order of things” that transcends the realm of instrumental reason. For McCarthy, the satisfaction of hunger uncovers both ontic and ontological answers to fundamental questions about what it means to be human, and, perhaps more importantly, what it means to be human alongside other humans. While most critics eventually turn their discussions to the subject of whether or not the novel is ultimately hopeful, my analysis shifts the nature of this debate by suggesting that the novel is less concerned with building a new world than it is in emphasizing...