
let's throw a few more dead babies on that cactus
Over at the AV Club it’s BLOOD MERIDIAN month. I cut and pasted a long comment I made in a talk back over there down below, but you guys should head over and join the discussion yourselves. At the very least you can read other people’s analysis. And if you haven’t read BLOOD MERIDIAN (you know, Cormac McCarthy’s violence ridden gore-filled epic deconstruction of the Western) then get off the fucking internet and go read it. Now.
My comment:
The Nietzschean Patriarch in American Literature
Blastodon
8 JUNE 2009 | 5:03 AM CDT
I’ve always seen Blood Meridian as a novel that fits into the tradition of American literature that deals with a male patriarch who is trying to establish himself outside the bounds of society.
This idea, which heavily parallels Nietzsche (although it probably started with Melville and Moby-Dick many years before Nietzsche) is a tradition firmly established in American literary canon. Blood Meridian is as much a commentary on this tradition as it is a stand alone epic.
In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest to defeat the whale is essentially a drive to rid himself of control – to be free the bounds of God / Society / Anything. Moby Dick represents a control, a lack of freedom, and Ahab destroys himself and the pequod in an attempt to free himself of this control. It is a quintessential and extremely American conflict: to establish yourself anew, free to make your own destiny. Radical individualism, though, has its price.
Similarly:
Thomas Sutpen, in Faulkner’s (arguably greatest novel, and most difficult) Absalom! Absalom!, attempts a similar quest, albeit through different means. He hopes to establish himself by creating a dynasty under his name, and, in so doing, ensure himself immortality and power. Of course, like Ahab, he fails again and again and again.
The key question of Blood Meridian, is whether or not the Judge has succeeded in creating, in himself, this post-moral American Super Man. Has his violence transcended all boundaries of judgement and consequence? I see McCarthy as arguing that he has.
While Ahab and Sutpen fail epicly (really really epicly!) The judge has succeeded in completely divorcing himself of the shackles of control; he has completely actualized the embodiment of American freedom. We, the readers, are force fed violence upon violence in a way that shows a world totally free, totally devoid of morals, totally ripped from the context of feeling, judgement, love, humanity.
The judge’s world, though not the world that Ahab and Sutpen longed for, is a world where there is no a priori, where action is apropos of nothing.
What McCarthy says, is that to gain our total freedom, this is the result. If god exists in Blood Meridian, then God is giving yourself up to that control.