I finished Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian yesterday, having followed Harold Bloom’s supremely enthusiastic appraisal (‘It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying’); and, overall, I thought it withstood the high-set expectations. McCarthy's descriptive density was impressive, beautiful, and tense: it charged the apparently rudderless narrative with a goading drive. I thought there were some repetitions of metaphors that were likely intentional but not always effective; or, maybe some relief from that lyric vice might have sharpened those more gorgeously sculpted passages and kept the narrative motifs fresh.
Like so many others before me, I’m puzzled by the final fate of The Kid, in the best possible way. I tend to agree with Kitson’s [?] position that ‘The point about Blood Meridian is that we do not know and we cannot know.’ However, I can’t help but think of Edmund Wilson’s reflections on “The Turn of the Screw,” that our minds leap to images of sexual acts despite that they are never mentioned or described explicitly. It may be there, implicit throughout, like a byzantine Rube Goldberg machine.
What struck me most about the ending was it’s stylistic relationship to The Road. In both books, the narrative is full of overwhelming brutality and end in semi- or quasi-spiritual images: the Judge who dances and will ‘never die’; the boy who is taken into the safe heart of the Earth with the stranger and his family. Neither images, I feel, are as straightforward as they are presented. Being the only two of McCarthy’s works I’ve read, I wonder whether this is particular to these books or to his writing.
Clearly there is an element of — the best term is probably either response or revision — between Meridian and Moby Dick; but then, if neither of those two terms fit, then let’s say the books have a fondness of imagination, and that Meridian owes much of it’s bald alabaster Judge to Melville’s whale. I’m wary of claiming too direct a thematic interplay: McCarthy is building upon Melville’s now-archetypal leviathan rather than clarifying or re-staging the tale of Moby Dick. The Judge is the very force of nature, unswayed and unbound by morality as the beast is — beyond that, I'm not sure.
Blood Meridian struck me as being not only a critique of America’s expansionism and relationship to violence, but of American political attitudes as well. The Judge clearly lays out a world-view in which morality and ethics are secondary to the historical movements as expressed in the ability to dominate others — morality / ethics is a realm which exists because force allows it the room to do so, and that if the moral are allowed to rule then the ‘dance’ means nothing. It expresses, to my mind, a common unspoken American opinion of the political realm: that ethical imperatives are fine as long as force and domination come first, as long as ethics don’t interfere with the operations of dominating power.
3 comments:
Hi Daniel, yeah, a great wonderful book, Blood Meridian is.
I think the weight of circumstantial evidence suggests that the judge destroys the kid.
If war and violence are ineradicable features of life, as the judge oracularly pronounces, then the kid's death is required by the story, even if we don't behold his unspeakable end.
In other words, there can only be one dancing bear, etc.
Plus, the use of the word "gather," as in "gathered into his arms," etc., hums with Biblical significance, as when the wheat of human life is gathered into the killing arms of the Lord.
Anyhow, when I read McC., especially Outder Dark, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, and No Country for Old Men, I have this vague sense that there's a world behind the world and McC uses his Biblical-oracular mode to produce a sensual shudder of existence in his readers, at least in me.
The very bizarre ambiguous encounter between the judge and the kid in the outhouse set me thinking for days and days.
As did the epilogue, which in my personal opinion surpasses Plato's allegory of the cave. I read the epilogue as a parable about existence, about life, about leading and following, about authorship and reading, in a word, about everything.
Carriers of light – a recurrent theme in McC – are solitary beings, few and far between. They can be "good" people, moral exemplars, or effective leaders or they can be literary artists like Homer and Shakespeare and McC, etc.
What these fire-producers and spark-throwers have in common is the cold unregenerate darkness from which they issue and the wake they leave in their train as others struggle to comprehend the meaning of their efforts in a silent world.
K
A professor of mine in college taught a course that paired Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian, so you're certainly not alone in finding a relationship.
For my money, Suttree is McCarthy's best book. The prose crackles and grumbles with rhetoric, it's like Faulkner juiced. I just like to pick it up and read passages at random. How could a book about a bum living under a bridge be a great story? Here's how.
Post a Comment