Is there voice without law? On The Road

Using Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalytic novel, The Road (2006), as a sort of a map, this essay sets out to examine the relationship between voice, conceived as autonomous self-expression, and law by considering the question of whether voice is dependent on law. This question is obviously different to the question of the extent to which law should protect the manifestations of voice because it aims to investigate whether the presence of law is a fundamental requirement for voice. In doing so, it confronts a series of questions to which it has no good answers. Questions such as: What does it mean to be “without law”? Is a place without law a place of silence? Is voice merely the absence of silence? In the absence of law, what structures the absence of silence? Maybe love or poetry? Or is it just that voice is different without law?