JOURNAL
BLOOD MERIDIAN, the title is a little mystifying to me. As I read 'around' the novel and listen to class readings, I begin to develop bias. I am repulsed. Totally? Not yet but close.
Still 'struggling' with how to 'dive in'. Like jumping naked into a cold stream. Anticipating a shocking evil coldness?
I must stop 'skirting the edges', delaying the inevitable I must dive in!
Is any truth to be determined in the complex and confusing alleged plotlessness of this novel?
Trying to find some 'tools' with which to begin a 'critical' examination of the text I find some seemingly significant details about the author Cormac McCarthy. He had a son. He was thrice married. He lived in Texas, at least for a while. He is considered a recluse by some.
As I 'take the plunge' into McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN I take the mindset not of a judge to return a verdict but as an advocate; examining his 'though stream' to discover purpose and meaning in the seeming violent madness of his novel.
I must carefully and dispassionately search for clues. Tracking allusions to their source. Noting and de-mystifying odd detail. I must get to the "historical kernel".
I must lay aside the simple notion that "books beget books". I must find "foundational thought" and the "cosmic structures" undergirding the novel. I must find some useful "truth". I must overcome my bias.
=======================================
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy was born in
Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He is the third of six children (the eldest son) born to Charles Joseph
and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy (he has two brothers and three sisters).
Originally named Charles (after his father), he renamed himself Cormac after the Irish King (another
source says that McCarthy’s family was responsible for legally changing his
name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles”).
In 1937, when he was four, the family moved to
Knoxville, and his father became a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority
(legal staff 1934-67; chief counsel 1958-67). In 1967, the McCarthys moved from Knoxville to
Washington, D.C., where Charles was the principal attorney in a law firm until
his retirement.
Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He
attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, then went to the University of
Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy joined the U.S. Air
Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he
hosted a radio show.
his 1985
novel "Blood Meridian," a tale of American mercenaries
hunting
Indians in the Mexican borderland.
Interview 2014
Harold Bloom - How to Read and Why4 - Blood Meridian
Faulknerian Melvilian https://youtu.be/1cuccco2umo
Cormac McCarthy, 76, talked about love, religion (THE
PERIOD 1849,50)
Nov. 20, 2009 he was 76 yo
BLOOD
MERIDIAN (background)
McCarthy's
fifth book, published by Random House ** (writings form the mid-1970s) a 1985 epic Western(or anti-Western ** the bulk of the
text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a
historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Native
Americans and others in the United
States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and
eventually out of sheer compulsion.
With frequent religious
references, McCarthy's writing style involves many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to signal most
contractions. McCarthy conducted considerable
research to write the book. Critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even
brief and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood
Meridian rely
on historical evidence. The Glanton gang segments are based onSamuel Chamberlain's
account of the group in his memoir My
Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, which he wrote
during the latter part of his life. Chamberlain rode with John Joel Glanton and
his company between 1849 and 1850. The novel's antagonist Judge
Holden appeared in Chamberlain's account, but his true identity remains a
mystery. Chamberlain does not openly appear in the novel. Some critics[who?] have
suggested that "the kid" is a fictional stand-in for Chamberlain.[citation
needed]
Elements
of the novel are also widely believed to have been at least partially inspired
by the writings of T. R. Fehrenbach, specifically his authoritative and
highly original[clarification
needed] histories
of Texas, Mexico, and the Comanche.[citation
needed]
THE STORY
The novel follows an adolescent
runaway from home with a disposition for violence, known only as "the
kid," who was born inTennessee during
the famous Leonids meteor shower of
1833. In the late 1840s, he first meets an enormous and completely hairless
character, Judge Holden, at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas.
There, Holden shows his dark nature by falsely accusing a preacher of raping
both a young girl and a goat, inciting those attending the revival to
physically attack the preacher.
The
kid carries on journeying alone on his mule through the plains of eastern
Texas, and he spends a night in the shelter of a recluse before arriving in
"Bexar" (the county that includes modern-day San Antonio). After a violent encounter with a
bartender which establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party
of ill-armed U.S. Army irregulars, led
by a Captain White, on a filibustering mission to
claim Mexican land for the United States. Shortly after entering Mexico, they are attacked, and many killed, by a band
of Comanche warriors.
Arrested in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his cell neighbor
and prior acquaintance, the earless Louis Toadvine, tells the authorities that
the two of them would make useful recruits for the state's newly hired scalp
hunting operation, led by John Joel Glanton.
Toadvine
and the kid consequently join Glanton's gang. The bulk of the novel is devoted
to the detailing of the gang's conversations and depraved activities. The gang
encounters a traveling carnival,
and, in untranslated Spanish, each of their fortunes is told with Tarot cards. The gang originally contracts with
various regional leaders to exterminate Apaches and
are given a bounty for
each scalp they recover. Before long, however, they murder any in their path,
including peaceful agrarian Indians, unprotected Mexican villagers, and even
Mexican soldiers.
Judge
Holden, who re-enters the story as a fellow scalp hunter, is presented as a
profoundly mysterious and awe-inspiring figure; the others seem to regard him as
not quite human. He[6] is
strongly implied to be a child-killer though almost no one in the gang
expresses much distress about this. According to an ex-priest gang-member
named Ben Tobin, the Glanton gang first met the judge while fleeing from the
onslaught of a much larger group of Apaches. In the middle of the desert, the
gang found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting
for them all. He took them to an extinct volcano, and improvised gunpowder from
natural materials, enough to give them the advantage against their Apache
pursuers. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin explains
that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before
joining Glanton's gang—though he ends his tale by stating that he first met
with the judge in the desert with the others. This suggests a potentially
disingenuous quality to the refrain "the priest doesn't lie" uttered
by several characters throughout the course of the novel.
After
months of marauding, the gang crosses into U.S. territory, where they set up a systematic and
brutal robbery operation at a ferry on the Colorado River near Yuma, Arizona. Local Yuma (Quechan)
Indians are approached to help the gang wrest control of the ferry from its
original owner, but Glanton's gang betrays the natives, using their presence
and previously coordinated attack on the ferry as an excuse to seize the
ferry's munitions and slaughter the Yuma. Because of the new operators' brutal
ways, a group of U.S. Army soldiers sets up a second ferry at a ford upriver to
cross—which the Yuma briefly appropriate until their ferryman is decapitated
and thrown in the river. Eventually, after the gang had amassed a fortune by
robbing the settlers using the ferry, the Yumas suddenly attack the gang and
kill most of them, including Glanton.
The
kid, Toadvine, and Tobin are among the few survivors who flee into the desert
though the kid takes an arrow in the leg. Heading west together, the kid and
Tobin again encounter Judge Holden, who first negotiates, then threatens them
for their weaponry and possessions. Holden fires a non-fatal shot to Tobin's
neck and Tobin, and the kid hide among bones near a desert creek. The judge
delivers a speech advising the kid to reveal himself. Tobin and the kid
continue their travels independently, passing each other along the way.
Although the kid has several opportunities to shoot the judge, as Tobin
advises, he only attempts so once and fails.
Both
parties end up in San Diego, but
the kid gets separated from Tobin when he is caught by local authorities and
imprisoned. Holden visits him in jail, stating that he told the jailers "the
truth": that the kid alone was responsible for the end of the Glanton
gang. The kid declares that the judge was responsible for the gang's evils, but
the judge denies it. After reaching through the cell bars to try to touch the
kid, Holden leaves the kid alone, stating that he "has errands." The
kid then tells the authorities where the Glanton gang's fortune can be found,
and he is released to go seek a doctor to treat his wound. Under the influence
of medicinal ether, he hallucinates that the judge is visiting
him, along with a curious man who forges coins. The kid recovers and seeks out
Tobin, with no luck. He makes his way to Los Angeles, where he witnesses the
execution of the last remaining members of the Glanton gang—Toadvine and David
Brown—leaving now only Tobin (assuming he is alive), the judge, and the kid.
The
kid again wanders across the American West, and decades are compressed into a
few pages. In 1878, he makes his way to Fort Griffin, Texas and is now referred to by the
author as "the man." The lawless city is a center for processing the
remains of the American bison, which have been hunted nearly to
extinction. At a saloon, the man yet again meets the judge, who does not seem
to have aged in the intervening years. Holden calls the man "the last of
the true," and the pair talk on equal terms. Holden describes the man as a
disappointment, stating that he held in his heart "clemency for the
heathen." Holden declares prophetically that the man has arrived at the
saloon for the dance. The man tells the judge, "You aint nothin" and,
notes of a trained bear at the saloon that is performing a dance, that
"even a dumb animal can dance."
The
man hires a prostitute, then afterward goes to an outhouse under
another meteor shower. In the outhouse, he is surprised by the judge, naked,
who "gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible
flesh." This is the last mention of the man, though in the next scene, two
men from the saloon approach the outhouse, open the door, and gaze in awed
horror at what they see, stating only, "Good God almighty." The last
paragraph finds the judge back in the saloon, dancing in the nude and playing
fiddle wildly among the drunkards and whores, claiming that he will never die.
A
brief epilogue features
an unspecified person auguring a row of holes across the prairie. The worker
sparks a fire in each of the holes while an assortment of passionless wanderers
crosses the row. The line of holes is described as "a validation of
sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to
the one before it there on that prairie." FROM WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian
US HISTORY The 1800's
1800-1809 - Exploration
1810-1819 - The War of 1812
1820-1829 - A Decade of
Compromise & Doctrine
1830-1839 - Conquering the
West
1840-1849 - The Mexican War
1850-1859 - Expansion &
the Looming Divide
1860-1869 - The Civil War
1870-1879 - The Nation's
Centennial Decade
1880-1889 - America Invents
1890-1899 - The Age of
Immigration
Most
Westerns from the 1960s to the present have revisionist themes. Many were made
by emerging major filmmakers who saw the Western as an opportunity to expand
their criticism of American
society and values into a new genre. The 1952Supreme Court holding in Joseph
Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson,
and later, the end of the Production
Code in 1968 broadened
what Westerns could portray and made the revisionist Western a more viable genre
He is described as seven feet tall
and completely bereft of body hair. He is massive in
frame, and enormously strong, capable of holding and wielding a howitzer cannon
much like a regular gun. His skin is so pale as to have almost no pigment. This strange appearance, as well as his
keen, extremely fast reflexes, strength, apparent immunity to sleep and aging,
and other abilities point to his being something other than a conventional
human being.
In
the final pages of the novel, McCarthy makes more direct reference to the Judge
as a supernatural entity,
or even as a concept, personified.
In
his essay "Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy",
literature professor Leo Daugherty argued that McCarthy's Holden is—or at least
embodies—a gnostic archon, a kind of demon. Harold Bloom declared that
McCarthy's Holden is "the most frightening figure in all of American literature" [3] and compared him favorably with Shakespeare's Iago.
Major characters
·
The kid:
The novel's anti-heroic protagonist, the kid is a Tennessean initially in his
mid-teens whose mother died inchildbirth and who flees from his father to
Texas. He is said to have a disposition for bloodshed and is involved in many
vicious actions early on; he takes up inherently violent professions,
specifically being recruited by murderers including Captain White, and later,
by Glanton and his gang, to secure release from a prison in Chihuahua, Mexico. The kid takes part in many
of the Glanton gang's scalp-hunting rampages, but gradually displays a moral
fiber that ultimately puts him at odds with the Judge. "The kid" is
later, as an adult, referred to as "the man," when he encounters the
judge again after nearly three decades.
·
Judge Holden, or
"the judge": An enormous, pale, and hairless man who often seems
almost mythical or supernatural, Judge Holden is a dedicated examiner and
recorder of the natural world and a supremely violent and perverted character.
He rides with (though also remains largely independent from) Glanton's gang
after they find him sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert and he saves
them from an Apache attack using his exceptional intellect, skill, and nearly
superhuman strength. It is hinted at that he and Glanton have forged some
manner of a pact, possibly for the very lives of the gang members. He gradually
becomes the antagonist to the kid after the dissolution of Glanton's gang,
frequently making brief reunions with the kid to mock, debate with, or
terrorize him. He is the most philosophical of the scalp hunters and appears
remarkably well-educated; however, he perceives the world as fatalistic and
liable to an endless cycle of bloody conquest, with human nature defined
by violence; he asserts, ultimately, that "War is god."
·
Louis Toadvine: A seasoned outlaw the kid originally encounters
in a vicious brawl and who then burns down a hotel, Toadvine is distinguished
by his head which has no ears and his forehead branded with the letters H, T,
(standing for "horse thief") and F. He later reappears unexpectedly
as a cellmate of the kid in the Chihuahua prison. Here, he somewhat befriends
the kid, negotiating his and the kid's release in return for joining Glanton's
gang, to whom he claims dishonestly that he and the kid are experienced scalp
hunters. Toadvine is not as depraved as the rest of the gang and opposes the
judge's methods ineffectually, but is still a violent individual himself. He is
hanged in Los Angeles alongside David Brown.
·
Captain White, or "the captain": An ex-professional
soldier and American
supremacist who
believes that Mexico is a lawless nation destined to be conquered by the United
States, Captain White leads a ragtag group of militants into Mexico. The kid
joins Captain White's escapades before his capture and imprisonment; he later
discovers that White has been decapitated by his enemies.
·
John Joel Glanton:
Glanton is the American leader (sometimes deemed "captain") of a band
of scalphunters who
murder Indians as well as Mexican civilians and militants alike. His history
and appearance are not clarified, except that he is physically small with black
hair and has a wife and child in Texas though he has been banned from returning
there because of his criminal record. A clever strategist, his last major
action is to seize control of a profitable Colorado River ferry, which leads
him and most of his gang to be killed in an ambush by Yuma Indians.
·
Tobin, or "the ex-priest": A former novice of
some unspecified order, Ben Tobin instead turns to a life of crime in Glanton's
gang, though remains deeply religious. He feels an apparently friend-like bond
with the kid and abhors the judge and his philosophy; he and the judge
gradually become great enemies. Although he survives the Yuma massacre of
Glanton's gang, he is shot in the neck by the judge and seeks medical attention
in San Diego. His ultimate fate, however, remains unknown.
·
David Brown: An especially radical member of the Glanton band,
David Brown becomes known for his dramatic displays of violence. He wears a
necklace of human ears (similar to the one worn by Bathcat before his
immolation). He is arrested in San Diego and sought out by Glanton personally,
who seems especially concerned to see him freed (though Brown ends up securing
his own release). Though he survives the Yuma massacre, he is captured with
Toadvine in Los Angeles and both are hanged.
·
John Jackson: "John Jackson" is a name shared by two
men in Glanton's gang— one black, one white— who detest one another and whose
tensions frequently rise when in each other's presence. After trying to drive
the black Jackson away from a campfire with a racist remark, the white one is
decapitated by the black one; the black Jackson later becomes the first person
murdered in the Yuma massacre.
Minor characters
·
Reverend Green: a Christian preacher whom the judge falsely
accuses of debauchery and is murdered as a result by an angry mob.
·
Ángel Trías: the governor of the state of Chihuahua
·
Sergeant Aguilar
·
Speyer: an arms dealer described as a Prussian Jew
·
The jugglers: a family of Mexican entertainers
·
General Elias
·
Colonel García
·
Magistrate of San Diego ("el alcalde")
·
Members of White's gang: Sergeant Trammel, the Corporal, the
Texan (the "second corporal"), Earl (the Missourian), Clark,
Candelario, Sproule, the Georgian
·
Other members of Glanton's gang: Doc Irving, Juan
"McGill" Miguel, the Delawares, "Grannyrat" Chambers (the
"veteran"[7]), Samuel Tate (the " Kentuckian"), Bathcat (the "Vandiemenlander"), Shelby (a Kentuckian
who attended Transylvania University), Marcus "Long" Webster (another
Tennessean), Henderson Smith (a Missourian), John Dorsey (a Missourian), John
Gunn (a Missourian), Thomas Harlan (a Texan), John Prewett, Wilson, Miller,
Carroll, Sanford, Sloat
·
The Idiot: James Robert, a mentally handicapped freak who is
kept in a cage by his brother, the showman Cloyce Bell. Later in the book he is
kept by the judge as a kind of pet. His fate is unknown.
Major themes
Violence
A major
theme is the warlike nature of man. Critic Harold Bloom[8] praised Blood Meridian as one of the best 20th century
American novels, describing it as "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,"[9] but
admitted that he found the book's pervasive violence so shocking that he had
several false starts before reading the book entirely. Caryn James argued that
the novel's violence was a "slap in the face" to modern readers cut
off from the brutality of life, while Terrence Morgan thought that, though
initially shocking, the effect of the violence gradually waned until the reader
was bored.[10] Billy J.
Stratton contends that the brutality depicted is the primary mechanism through
which McCarthy challenges binaries and promotes his revisionist agenda.[11] Lilley
argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use
violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions… In McCarthy's work,
violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else."[12]
Epigraphs and ending
Three epigraphs open the book: quotations from French
writer Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic Jacob Boehme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological
excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have
been scalped. The themes implied by the epigraphs have been variously discussed
without specific conclusions.
As noted
above concerning the ending, the most common interpretation of the novel is
that Holden kills the kid in a Fort Griffin, Texas outhouse. The fact that the
kid's death is not depicted might be significant. Blood Meridian is a catalog of brutality, depicting,
in sometimes explicit detail, all manner of violence, bloodshed, brutality and
cruelty. For the dramatic climax to be left undepicted leaves something of a
vacuum for the reader: knowing full well the horrors established in the past
hundreds of pages, the kid's unstated fate might still be too awful to
describe, and too much for the mind to fathom: the sight of the kid's fate
leaves several witnesses stunned almost to silence; never in the book does any
other character have this response to violence, again underlining the
singularity of the kid's fate.
Patrick
W. Shaw argues that Holden has sexually violated the protagonist. As Shaw
writes, the novel had several times earlier established "a sequence of
events that gives us ample information to visualize how Holden molests a child,
then silences him with aggression."[13] According
to Shaw's argument, Holden's actions in the Fort Griffin outhouse are the
culmination of what he desired decades earlier: to rape the kid, then perhaps
kill him to silence the only survivor of the Glanton gang. If the judge wanted
only to kill the kid, there would be no need for him to undress as he waited in
the outhouse. Shaw writes,
When the
judge assaults the kid in the Fort Griffin jakes… he betrays a complex of
psychological, historical and sexual values of which the kid has no conscious
awareness, but which are distinctly conveyed to the reader. Ultimately, it is
the kid's personal humiliation which impacts the reader most tellingly. In the
virile warrior culture which dominates that text and to which the reader has
become acclimated, seduction into public homoeroticism is a dreadful fate. We
do not see behind the outhouse door to know the details of the kid's
corruption. It may be as simple as the embrace that we do witness or as violent
as the sodomy implied
by the judge's killing of the Indian children. The kid's powerful survival
instinct perhaps suggests that he is a more willing participant than a victim.
However, the degree of debasement and the extent of the kid's willingness are
incidental. The public revelation of the act is what matters. Other men have
observed the kid's humiliation… In such a male culture, public homoeroticism is
untenable and it is this sudden revelation that horrifies the observers at Fort
Griffin. No other act could offend their masculine sensibilities as the shock
they display… This triumph over the kid is what the exhibitionist and homoerotic
judge celebrates by dancing naked atop the wall, just as he did after
assaulting the half-breed boy.
Yet
Shaw’s effort to penetrate the mystery in the jakes has not managed to satisfy
other critics, who have rejected his thesis as more sensational than textual:
Patrick
W. Shaw's article . . . reviews the controversy over the end of McCarthy's
masterpiece: does the judge kill the kid in the 'jakes' or does he merely
sexually assault him? Shaw then goes on to review Eric Fromm's distinction
between benign and malignant aggression – benign aggression being only used for
survival and is rooted in human instinct, whereas malignant aggression is
destructive and is based in human character. It is Shaw's thesis that McCarthy
fully accepts and exemplifies Fromm's malignant aggression, which he sees as
part of the human condition, and which we do well to heed, for without this
acceptation we risk losing ourselves in intellectual and physical servitude.
Shaw goes in for a certain amount of special pleading: the Comanches sodomizing
their dying victims; the kid's exceptional aggression and ability, so that the
judge could not have killed him that easily; the judge deriving more
satisfaction from tormenting than from eliminating. Since the judge considers
the kid has reserved some clemency in his soul, Shaw argues, that the only
logical step is that the judge humiliates him by sodomy. This is possible, but
unlikely. The judge gives one the impression, not so much of male potency, but
of impotence. His mountainous, hairless flesh is more that of a eunuch than a
man. Having suggested paedophilia, Shaw then goes back to read other episodes
in terms of the judge's paedophilia: the hypothesis thus becomes the premise.
And in so arguing, Shaw falls into the same trap of narrative closure for which
he has been berating other critics. The point about Blood Meridian is that we do not know and we cannot
know.
Gnosticism
Various
discussions by Leo Daugherty, Barclay Owens, Harold Bloom and others, have
resulted from the second epigraph of the three which are used by the author to
introduce the novel taken from the "Gnostic" mystic Jacob Boehme. The quote from Boehme reads as follows:
"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and
lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is
swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the
darkness." No specific conclusions have been reached concerning its
interpretation and the extent of its direct or indirect relevance to the novel.
These
critics agree that there are Gnostic elements
present in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise
meaning and implication of those elements. One of the most detailed of these
arguments is made by Leo Daugherty in his 1992 article, "Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy." Daugherty
argues "Gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian"
(Daugherty, 122); specifically, the Persian-Zoroastrian-Manichean branch
of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic
'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenic tragedy by
means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of
what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence
gets introduced to fate."[16]
Daugherty
sees Holden as an archon, and the
kid as a "failed pneuma."
The novel's narrator explicitly states that the kid feels a "spark of the
alien divine". Furthermore, the kid rarely initiates violence, usually
doing so only when urged by others or in self-defense. Holden, however, speaks
of his desire to dominate the earth and all who dwell on it, by any means: from
outright violence to deception and trickery. He expresses his wish to become a
"suzerain," one who "rules even when there
are other rulers" and whose power overrides all others'. In 2009, Bloom
did refer to Boehme in the context of Blood
Meridian as, "a very specific
type of Kabbalistic Gnostic".
Daugherty
contends that the staggering violence of the novel can best be understood
through a Gnostic lens. "Evil" as defined by the Gnostics
was a far larger, more pervasive presence in human life than the rather tame
and "domesticated" Satan most Christians believe in. As
Daugherty writes, "For [Gnostics], evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of bits
of spirit imprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian."[17] Barcley
Owens argues that, while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel,
Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful,"[18] because
Daugherty fails to address the novel's pervasive violence adequately and because
he overstates the kid's goodness.
Theodicy
Another
major theme concerning Blood
Meridian involves the subject
of theodicy. Theodicy in general refers to the issue of
the philosophical or theological attempt to justify the existence of that which
is metaphysically or philosophically good in a world which contains so much
apparent and manifest evil. Douglas Canfield in his essay "Theodicy in Blood Meridian" (in his
bookMavericks on the Border, 2001, Lexington University Press) has made
the assertion of the centrality of this theme throughoutBlood Meridian.
James Wood in his essay for The
New Yorker entitled "Red
Planet" from 2005 took a similar position to this in recognizing the issue
of the general justification of metaphysical goodness in the presence of evil
in the world as a recurrent theme in the novel. This was directly supported by
Edwin Turner on 28 September 2010 in his essay on Blood Meridian forBiblioklept. Chris Dacus in
the Cormac McCarthy Journal for 2009 wrote the essay entitled,
"The West as Symbol of the Eschaton in Cormac McCarthy," where he
expressed his preference for discussing the theme of theodicy in its
eschatological terms in comparison to the theological scene of the last
judgment. This preference for reading theodicy as an eschatological theme was
further affirmed by Harold Bloom in his recurrent phrase of referring to the
novel as "The Authentic Apocalyptic Novel."
Literary significance and reception
While Blood Meridian received little initial recognition
when it was released, it has since been recognized as one of the great
masterpieces of American literature and of Western literature in general. It is
widely held as one of the Great American Novels as well as one of the best
novels ever written by Cormac McCarthy. Many claim it to be McCarthy's
magnum opus.
Aleksandar Hemon has
called Blood Meridian "the greatest American novel of
the past thirty years." In 2006, The
New York Times conducted a
poll of writers and critics regarding the most important works in American
fiction from the previous 25 years;Blood Meridian was a runner-up, along with John Updike's four novels about Rabbit Angstrom and Don DeLillo's Underworldwhile Toni Morrison's Beloved topped
the list.[19] Novelist David Foster Wallace named Blood Meridian one of the five most underappreciated
American novels since 1960[20] and
described it as "[p]robably the most horrifying book of this century, at
least [in] fiction."[21]
Academics
and critics have variously suggested that Blood
Meridian is nihilistic or
strongly moral; a satire of
the western genre, a savage indictment of Manifest Destiny. Harold Bloom called
it "the ultimate western;" J. Douglas Canfield described it as
"agrotesque Bildungsroman in
which we are denied access to the protagonist's consciousness almost entirely."[22] Comparisons
have been made to the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Sam Peckinpah, and of Dante Alighieri and Louis L'Amour. However, there is no consensus
interpretation; James D. Lilley writes that the work "seems designed to
elude interpretation."[12] After
reading Blood Meridian, Richard Selzer declared that McCarthy
"is a genius--also probably somewhat insane."[23] Critic Steven Shaviro wrote:
In the
entire range of American literature,
only Moby-Dick bears
comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in
scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language,
exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both
manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony.
Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny (sic)
of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy
writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville.
American
literary critic Harold Bloom praised Blood
Meridian as one of the 20th
century's finest novels.[25] Time magazine
included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923
to 2005".[26]
================
English 101 - Toolkit
The focus of this course is to develop critical
thinking skills and apply them to literature.
"We will learn to 'speak the language of the academy.' The Academy is the corpus of scholars and students throughout the world. The primary mode of communication is the written word. Students must master the ability of writing." - THE PROF
Course Focus: the problem of evil and chaos in society as an inherent faculty of humanity
FOLLOW THE TEXT HERE
In this first of two lectures on Blood Meridian, Professor Hungerford walks us through some of the novel's major sources and influences, showing how McCarthy engages both literary tradition and American history, and indeed questions of origins and originality itself. The Bible, Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost, the poetry of William Wordsworth, and the historical narrative of Sam Chamberlain all contribute to the style and themes of this work that remains, in its own right, a provocative meditation on history, one that explores the very limits of narrative and human potential. SEE IT HERE
The focus of this course is to develop critical
thinking skills and apply them to literature.
"We will learn to 'speak the language of the academy.' The Academy is the corpus of scholars and students throughout the world. The primary mode of communication is the written word. Students must master the ability of writing." - THE PROF
Course Focus: the problem of evil and chaos in society as an inherent faculty of humanity
FOLLOW THE TEXT HERE
In this first of two lectures on Blood Meridian, Professor Hungerford walks us through some of the novel's major sources and influences, showing how McCarthy engages both literary tradition and American history, and indeed questions of origins and originality itself. The Bible, Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost, the poetry of William Wordsworth, and the historical narrative of Sam Chamberlain all contribute to the style and themes of this work that remains, in its own right, a provocative meditation on history, one that explores the very limits of narrative and human potential. SEE IT HERE
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Blood Meridian Study Guide
John Pistelli
https://johnpistelli.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/cormac-mccarthy-blood-meridian/
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Week 3
Judge Holden and evil.
Is evil real ? What is evil
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INTRODUCTION to Nietzsche
Most of us at some point in our lives have lost someone very close to us. Whether it was a sudden death or one that you had time to prepare for, the pain is never easy to deal with. Though this pain may be hard, according to some 19th-century philosophers, this pain is actually a good thing. The pain and the feelings associated with that suffering assure us that we are alive, and those experiences are the only thing life is truly about. These ideas were first posited by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's early life was fraught with tragedy. His father, a local Protestant minister, died when Nietzsche was only five years old. His younger brother died six months later. Without his father's connection to Röcken as the town minister, Nietzsche and his mother moved in with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and aunts in Naumberg an der Saale.
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NIHILISM
a philosophical doctrine that suggests the lack of belief in one or more reputedly meaningful aspects of life. The Greek philosopher and Sophist, Gorgias (ca. 485 BC–380 BC), is perhaps the first to consider the Nihilistic belief. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
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