It’s not at all usual for me to abandon an article at the writing stage, but today I’m giving myself permission. I’m sharing this misadventure in case you’ve also fallen down a rabbit hole and can’t climb out. Forgive me in advance for the long tale, I’m sort of exorcising this unfinished article from my to-do list and it hurts. So far, I’ve published everything I’ve written one way or another, and only abandoned projects when I just had notes and a bibliography, but abandoning a half written paper is new for me. Perhaps it’s more habitual than I think. I wonder.
Last October, the research group I currently belong to, Beyond Postmemory, held the seminar “Nature Remembers: War, Trauma and Environmental Postmemory,” in which we discussed how not only human beings but also nature can suffer from PTSD, so to speak, and show signs of trauma long after a conflict. Postmemory, a concept coined by Marianne Hirsch, refers to how subsequent generations inherit the trauma associated to conflicts they may never have lived. An example would be the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a conflict that is still leaving a significant trail in current Spanish society, politics, and culture, even though fewer and fewer persons directly involved survive today. I chose to discuss nature in the novel by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), a text I thought I knew well. I focused my presentation on what I called ‘zero ecology’, that is to say, a situation in which the biosphere has been lost to such a degree that recovery seems impossible.
The idea was to turn my seminar presentation into a chapter for a collective book which the group intends to publish next year. One thing, however, is to offer a twenty-minute paper, and quite another to familiarize myself with the theoretical background in postmemory and ecocriticism that the future chapter and the book’s editor require. You might ask at this point why I have joined this research project if the group doesn’t use bibliography I know well. That is a pertinent question. I have joined the project because in Spain you’re expected to work within a group with a financed project. I’ve been attached to diverse research groups since 1998 and although I have done research in very interesting areas, the tasks carried out have always distracted me from my main research. This is the reason why formally I’m only a part-time researcher as far as the Beyond Postmemory group is concerned. I’ll leave for another post why I have never led a research project.
Anyway, I told myself that since I would have to eventually write the projected chapter on The Road, a novel I like but I’m not passionate about, I might as well write something else about using the tons of bibliography accumulated. Since I’m also editing a book on the role of production design in film adaptation, I decided to write about the 2009 film directed by John Hillcoat, based on the script by Joe Penhall and with production design by Chris Kennedy. I made that decision in November and soon I came across the excellent graphic novel La route (2024) by French artist Manu Larcenet, another adaptation of McCarthy0s novel. Since in the book I’m editing we’re comparing the original source and two film adaptations, I thought that I could compare in a separate article McCarthy’s worldbuilding with Kennedy’s production design and Larcenet’s (re)design of the post-apocalyptic world of The Road. This is where the rabbit hole opened up beneath my feet and down I fell.
I’ve been doing many different things in the last three months, but the projected article about the double adaptation of The Road has taken plenty of my time and energy. I soon found bibliography for the film and the graphic novel, enjoying in particular the many interviews. I intended to submit the article to Adaptation, a top quality Q1 journal by Oxford UP, which I’ve had in my sights for a while. The Road, however, happens to be a very slippery text and I found myself taking lots of notes about its worldbuilding and trying to make sense of its episodic nature. I drew endless lists of scenes and locations, and I did the same for the film and the graphic novel. The film, it turns out, significantly alters the order of the episodes (except the last segment), whereas the graphic novel more or less keeps it. Both are faithful adaptations.
I finally managed to write a 7000-word draft only to realise that whereas comparing two film adaptations makes sense, comparing a film and a graphic novel does not work so well. Since the word count was growing at an alarming rate, I decided to split the article in two: one about the film, the other about the graphic novel. I did finish about ten days ago the article about the film adaptation; surprisingly, there are not many similar articles and my approach based on foregrounding production design has not been used yet. I’ve submitted this article to the journal Science Fiction Film and Television, by Liverpool UP, the fourth most important in the field of SF. I’m now crossing my fingers and hoping to pass peer reviewing.
I have found myself, however, unable to finish the article on Larcenet’s graphic novel, for two reasons. One is that I can’t reproduce what I say in the article about the film adaptation about the worldbuilding of McCarthy’s The Road without incurring in blatant self-plagiarising. I may have re-used some lines, perhaps one paragraph, in similar texts, but re-using 3000 words seems plain wrong. I felt, however, too lazy to thoroughly re-write, or paraphrase, what I had already written and, besides, at this point, I was beginning to be fed up with The Road.
The other problem has to do with my inexperience in dealing with graphic novels, a genre I like but I’m not really familiar with. I’ve spent, then, a few days reading basic bibliography and more advanced research about which literary works have been adapted in this format. A major obstacle, of course, is that I’ve never felt confident enough to discuss Larcenet’s artistic achievements in La route. I can explain how he has (re)articulated McCarthy’s narrative, but I lack the vocabulary to discuss his art. I have even used (the horror, the horror…), ChatGPT to make a list of the colours Larcenet uses, thinking that his singular palette of coloured greys could be the centre of my article.
A few days ago, I got nervous about whether Adaptation would welcome an article about a graphic novel and I emailed them. They said yes, no problem, but the article must make a theoretical point about graphic novels in adaptation, and not be limited to a case study. I could make the point that Larcenet was attracted by McCarthy’s ‘sets’ (this is the word he used) above the storyline, but I’m not equipped to turn this idea into theorization for most graphic novels in the context of adaptation. So, I quit. That’s it. What’s more, I’ve already started looking for another novel to replace The Road in the chapter about postmemory and ecocriticism for the projected book. I have decided that The Road has already received (too) much attention, and I’d rather work on a less famous text, such as Robert McCammon’s Swan Song or Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, both 1980s post-apocalyptic novels dealing with nuclear warfare.
So, I’m out of the rabbit hole but fretting about my fall. The article on the film adaptation of The Road might have a chance to be published, but right now I deeply regret having chosen McCarthy’s novel to work on. Larcenet’s graphic novel has been a wonderful discovery, and I don’t think I have wasted the hours spent learning about graphic novels, but that’s a road (ha, ha…) I won’t be taking now.
I think that I have fallen into the rabbit hole because my motivation to explore The Road was always spurious. It came out of wish to please my colleagues rather than from genuine interest in the text. The joint article about film and graphic novel also came from shaky motivation: I want to publish a few articles as quickly as possible so that I can be done with the requirements for my sixth and last assessment research exercise (due in 2029) and be free to work on my books. This plan, however, is backfiring because it’s leading me to articles, like the one on La route, which force my hand in directions I don’t usually take.
I’m too senior to be making this kind of mistake, I know, but I assume that this happens to all of us. I don’t know how many articles Literature scholars abort in the course of their careers, but I’m sure that there must be a few. As I write about scholarship, I realize that there are whole areas of our professional experience we never discuss. Abandoned articles are one. Anyway, I am not going to destroy the files for the unfinished article. This morning I have got rid of a few digital folders with preliminary work for articles I will never write. Yet, I still keep quite old folders with material for the articles that I didn’t bring myself to write but that still appeal to me. I think that the folder for La route is one of those. I might care to write that article one day, but the fact is that nobody will miss it if I never write it.
Let me add a coda about the last nail in the coffin. McCarthy refused to explain intra or extradiegetically what causes the catastrophe that destroys the biosphere and human civilization in The Road, which has unleashed endless speculation. The nameless protagonist, simply called ‘the man’, recalls a violent event that takes place at 1:17 am, when the clocks stops. Commentators are divided between supposing this is the start of nuclear war or the fall of a meteorite, though currently the focus falls on the radical climate change that follows the mysterious event.
I was going to write about that for the chapter but I found a very brief academic article, “The Setting of McCarthy’s The Road” by Carl James Gridley, which stunned me. Gridley explains that in fact McCarthy narrates the aftermath of actual Apocalypse. He argues that 1:17 is an allusion to “Revelation 1.17, which introduces Christ’s theophany to John the Divine.” He notes that if McCarthy’s novel is read “as a document of the so-called Tribulation of Judeo-Christian mythology, many interpretive issues become readily resolved.” Indeed they do, though I’m not falling into this theological rabbit hole. I have a certain suspicion that McCarthy has made fools of us, his non-religious readers… Nuclear war, meteorite, climate change, ha! and ha!
So, goodbye The Road, time to explore other paths. And sorry La route, I was not up to standard.