Blood Meridian II

This isn't a particularly long novel, and I would have finished it by now if I had been more excited by it. Thematically it is similar to The Road: it is another road trip in desperate times, but with a different set of circumstances and characters. As in The Road, the language and atmosphere have an archaic, almost biblical quality, suggesting that humans are brutal, inscrutable creatures struggling to survive in an inhospitable world which may or may not be watched over by a God whose intentions, if any, remain unclear. McCarthy's linguistic abilities strangely remind me of Proust, because the strength of both is in the use of language more than in observation. Proust chose to document the lives of the Parisian bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and McCarthy chose, in his later works, to document the lives of soldiers, cowboys, Indians and Mexicans of the Old, Early and recent West. In my view, neither author is particularly good at capturing the essence of his subjects, and their skill resides in the expert depictions of the surfaces that interest them. While Proust luxuriates in describing the material circumstances of the social climbers within his milieu, and his linguistic excesses mirror the material excesses of their daily lives, McCarthy's terse descriptions labor to capture the material conditions of crude, simple people who are attempting to survive in brutal environments.

A reader of fiction is probably better off maintaining a higher level of credulity than I am able to sustain at this stage in my life. I think much of the following that certain authors generate can be ascribed to the social environments of their readers. If an author "speaks to you," he or she is probably speaking to you and your friends. Proust, I think, speaks to multiple generations of critically deficient aesthetes. McCarthy, I think, speaks to laconic male Americans who like the outdoors and read the Bible while they were growing up. When I become sufficiently bored with an author, my mind wanders, and their motivation for writing the book becomes my primary interest. In McCarthy's case, we have a person with exceptional abilities, but, because he is introverted and somewhat misogynistic, he can't write a standard bestseller; he hasn't lived a normal life with a family and he spends most of his time alone. He has found a subject matter that requires little social knowledge and can be presented as something exotic to a narrow group of avid readers. You can probably rule out blacks and women, because he uses the word "nigger" unsparingly, and the women in his fiction tend to die off quickly without expressing themselves. In The Road, the principal female character dies by suicide before the story begins. In Blood Meridian, one of the first women to appear is an old squaw who is shot in the head and scalped by a white man without ever uttering a word. To me, McCarthy is somewhat justified in employing such techniques, because they were probably a necessary part of his development as a writer. Similarly, though I am not enthusiastic about his penchant for gratuitous violence, it may have been the only way that he was able to express his linguistic talent. As it is, in the current literary environment his success is limited by his masculine emphasis, his indifference to female sentiments and his general political incorrectness regarding Native Americans and other minorities. He seems to have a low opinion of mankind in general, which cancels out some of the political incorrectness, but he still loses points for not being upbeat about women and minorities.

The only other Cormac McCarthy work I know is No Country for Old Men. I saw the film, didn't particularly like it, and won't read the book. Thematically it seems similar to the books discussed, with the added twist of a drug deal. Though the Coen brothers tend to ham up their films, I think McCarthy's works are ill-suited to film in general, because the medium doesn't capture McCarthy's strongest skill, language. For the same reason, I felt that the film version of The Road was a failure. In my view, well-written novels shouldn't have film adaptations, because the results are always unsatisfactory, in the sense that film doesn't capture literature and only results in a perverse visual representation of it.

I am going to plug away at Blood Meridian and make a final comment when I finish it.