I Looked For Blackness, Holes In The Heavens: Blood Meridian
I just finished Blood Meridian about ten minutes ago. I need to think about this; times like this I wish I were still in a university community so that I could get access to JSTOR, because I'd rather like to read some criticism right now. I'm curious about scholarly impressions, but there are also some issues of interpretation; I know there's a minority opinion that attempts to question the common understanding of what happens to the kid at the end of the book, but that's not really the most important thing. For one, I have no clue what's happening in the epilogue. Literally no clue.
I first started reading the book when I was 20 or 21, but put it down after about thirty pages because I wasn't prepared for the unrelenting violence. I fought past that initial impulse this time and found it repelling yet entrancing. The detailed portrayal of violence is diminished by the novel's midpoint and nearly gone towards the end (which is why I think the elision of what precisely happened to the kid isn't a notable stylistic choice: it's the logical conclusion of the novel's growing refusal to detail scenes of violence), which is a brilliant choice: it reflects the growing unremarkability of horrific violence to the members of the Glanton gang, who were never horrified by their works but can be imagined to, at one time, have a (by our lights) morbid interest in them, yet that fades over time into dullness, and there's no more interest in the details of a man's death. It also reflects and engages our own inevitable desensitization: the most distressing passages, if I recall correctly, happen in the first half and even the first third of the book, when the reader can still be shocked by them. Then, rather than continuing to feed us images whose effect is dulled (and, perhaps kindly, wishing to spare us from learning the extent of our own desnsitization?) the novel becomes calmer even as the bodycount escalates. (I haven't read No Country For Old Men, but the film at least seems to replicate this strategy: after showing us a number of death scenes, we know what they look like, and the final acts of perpetrated violence are off screen.)
And then there is of course the judge to consider. Briefly here I'll only say that his insane terrifying philosophy of life makes for captivating prose: indeed, not having read other McCarthy I can't compare this book to his others for prose style, but the presentation and syntax are so perfect for the expression of the judge's psyche that the rest of the book's voice is as though it were molded around that form. One passage of many:
The truth about the world, [the judge] said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
I first started reading the book when I was 20 or 21, but put it down after about thirty pages because I wasn't prepared for the unrelenting violence. I fought past that initial impulse this time and found it repelling yet entrancing. The detailed portrayal of violence is diminished by the novel's midpoint and nearly gone towards the end (which is why I think the elision of what precisely happened to the kid isn't a notable stylistic choice: it's the logical conclusion of the novel's growing refusal to detail scenes of violence), which is a brilliant choice: it reflects the growing unremarkability of horrific violence to the members of the Glanton gang, who were never horrified by their works but can be imagined to, at one time, have a (by our lights) morbid interest in them, yet that fades over time into dullness, and there's no more interest in the details of a man's death. It also reflects and engages our own inevitable desensitization: the most distressing passages, if I recall correctly, happen in the first half and even the first third of the book, when the reader can still be shocked by them. Then, rather than continuing to feed us images whose effect is dulled (and, perhaps kindly, wishing to spare us from learning the extent of our own desnsitization?) the novel becomes calmer even as the bodycount escalates. (I haven't read No Country For Old Men, but the film at least seems to replicate this strategy: after showing us a number of death scenes, we know what they look like, and the final acts of perpetrated violence are off screen.)
And then there is of course the judge to consider. Briefly here I'll only say that his insane terrifying philosophy of life makes for captivating prose: indeed, not having read other McCarthy I can't compare this book to his others for prose style, but the presentation and syntax are so perfect for the expression of the judge's psyche that the rest of the book's voice is as though it were molded around that form. One passage of many:
The truth about the world, [the judge] said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Labels: Fiction
posted by medrawt at
22:09
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