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Back around...Friday, I think, I said I'd post something about finishing Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness In The West, so I'm going to do that, though without much of the finer detail it deserves. This is because, frankly, the book is a crazily epic tome, superconcentrated and difficult to digest; it pulls you along by virtue of McCarthy's beautiful, arcane language, but "plot" is not its true concern, so you end up with a torrential cascade of events that you keep hoping will add up to something, husband you towards some grand revelation, only to watch those hopes be frustrated time and time again. This, I believe, is entirely intentional on McCarthy's part.
When people write about Blood Meridian, many seem to agree that its vision of the universe is Gnostic in nature (ie all flesh is trash, the Devil made the world while God was sleeping, souls struggle to extricate themselves from the mire of their own bodily concerns but mainly fail, etc.), as well as highly existentialist and nihilist. Our protagonist, "the kid" (later "the man"), is a nameless pistoleer from Tennessee who flees his initial trinity of loveless home, dead mother and useless father, exploding out into the West. He keep on going off like a bomb, questing aimlessly and creating amazing displays of violence wherever he goes, which other men witness and think they may be able to harness. As a result, he finds himself caught up in a series of useless skirmishes, penetrating into Mexico in the train of commanders who mask their lust for Indian scalps and the gold those can bring on the market with the hypocritical jargon of "crusade". Incredible cruelty results, ostensibly racially motivated (though really, all brands of humanity come off looking equally crappy here), interrupted with almost slapstick moments of self-destructive revelry and cyclical rout.
Right at the beginning of the book, the kid meets a huge, hairless man named Judge Holden who will follow him like a shadow, eventually (this is not actually a spoiler, so much, as thesis statement) engulfing and outliving him, along with everyone almost else the kid encounters. It's very easy to see the Judge as a demonic figure--he's a linguistic polymath, literate and extraordinarily familiar with the law, scientifically educated (at one point he makes gunpowder while under fire, explains the history of the Anasazi, and disputes on various fossils they find), fond of telling stories aimed at destroying listeners' faith in creationism, religious sanctity, moral certainty, the possibility of redemption, themselves. He plays the fiddle and likes to dance, almost as much as he likes cannibalism, sexual abuse, randomly killing children and animals. He says that war is man's only legitimate art, and that he will never die.
Overall, nothing which happens in the book really seems to disprove these points, though it's possible that the kid's continued refusal to share in the Judge's world-view--perverse and reflexive as it seems (hmmm, familiar much?)--may allow him to escape this charnel slaughterhouse all the characters seem stuck in, though not with his body intact. McCarthy doesn't really speculate on whether or not there's "something else" after the flesh, because the flesh alone is his provenance, crammed with weird delights and startling awfulness. In his descriptions of landscape and the natural world, we catch echoes of a sort of stunned grace; in the behaviour of almost all this landscape's human inhabitants, however, we see a Hell of our own making at eager, febrile work: An instinct towards self-destruction that begins in the destruction of others, destruction of all things beautiful and hopeful--destruction only for destruction's sake, leaving nothing at all behind except memory's brief candle-light.
Anyhow. It's a pretty amazing achievement, best read in smallish increments, with time to absorb its latest horrors in between; its incidents are incredibly specific, its scope incredibly vast. And while I'm flattered that people have drawn a comparison between my work and McCarthy's, I have to say, I can't completely see it...he's playing from a philosophy that I don't share, though I can sample it, and I'm considerably more mired in the sad constraints of linear storytelling. Glad I read it, though, and even if I won't be able to revisit it for a bit, I will come back.
On a final note: Ben Nichols, lead singer of the band Lucero, wrote an EP called The Last Pale Light In The West which is explicitly based on Blood Meridian, and well worth your time. I've been listening to it while writing this--check it out.
When people write about Blood Meridian, many seem to agree that its vision of the universe is Gnostic in nature (ie all flesh is trash, the Devil made the world while God was sleeping, souls struggle to extricate themselves from the mire of their own bodily concerns but mainly fail, etc.), as well as highly existentialist and nihilist. Our protagonist, "the kid" (later "the man"), is a nameless pistoleer from Tennessee who flees his initial trinity of loveless home, dead mother and useless father, exploding out into the West. He keep on going off like a bomb, questing aimlessly and creating amazing displays of violence wherever he goes, which other men witness and think they may be able to harness. As a result, he finds himself caught up in a series of useless skirmishes, penetrating into Mexico in the train of commanders who mask their lust for Indian scalps and the gold those can bring on the market with the hypocritical jargon of "crusade". Incredible cruelty results, ostensibly racially motivated (though really, all brands of humanity come off looking equally crappy here), interrupted with almost slapstick moments of self-destructive revelry and cyclical rout.
Right at the beginning of the book, the kid meets a huge, hairless man named Judge Holden who will follow him like a shadow, eventually (this is not actually a spoiler, so much, as thesis statement) engulfing and outliving him, along with everyone almost else the kid encounters. It's very easy to see the Judge as a demonic figure--he's a linguistic polymath, literate and extraordinarily familiar with the law, scientifically educated (at one point he makes gunpowder while under fire, explains the history of the Anasazi, and disputes on various fossils they find), fond of telling stories aimed at destroying listeners' faith in creationism, religious sanctity, moral certainty, the possibility of redemption, themselves. He plays the fiddle and likes to dance, almost as much as he likes cannibalism, sexual abuse, randomly killing children and animals. He says that war is man's only legitimate art, and that he will never die.
Overall, nothing which happens in the book really seems to disprove these points, though it's possible that the kid's continued refusal to share in the Judge's world-view--perverse and reflexive as it seems (hmmm, familiar much?)--may allow him to escape this charnel slaughterhouse all the characters seem stuck in, though not with his body intact. McCarthy doesn't really speculate on whether or not there's "something else" after the flesh, because the flesh alone is his provenance, crammed with weird delights and startling awfulness. In his descriptions of landscape and the natural world, we catch echoes of a sort of stunned grace; in the behaviour of almost all this landscape's human inhabitants, however, we see a Hell of our own making at eager, febrile work: An instinct towards self-destruction that begins in the destruction of others, destruction of all things beautiful and hopeful--destruction only for destruction's sake, leaving nothing at all behind except memory's brief candle-light.
Anyhow. It's a pretty amazing achievement, best read in smallish increments, with time to absorb its latest horrors in between; its incidents are incredibly specific, its scope incredibly vast. And while I'm flattered that people have drawn a comparison between my work and McCarthy's, I have to say, I can't completely see it...he's playing from a philosophy that I don't share, though I can sample it, and I'm considerably more mired in the sad constraints of linear storytelling. Glad I read it, though, and even if I won't be able to revisit it for a bit, I will come back.
On a final note: Ben Nichols, lead singer of the band Lucero, wrote an EP called The Last Pale Light In The West which is explicitly based on Blood Meridian, and well worth your time. I've been listening to it while writing this--check it out.
