I’ve been thinking lately about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I criticized Harold Bloom a while back for underplaying the anticolonial bent of the book, and also commented on the misguided focus on the Bible and William Faulkner as primary influences on the novel. That’s not to say that the Bible and Faulkner aren’t influences, but there’s a huge hole in the discourse, in that almost no one bothers to mention American writing about American Indians, except to laud McCarthy’s accumulation of documented historical detail.
A few years back I had the opportunity to teach an American Indian studies class about representations of Indians in American literature, focusing on the cultural work the texts performed and the historical context in which they were produced. Everything in that class ended up pointing to Blood Meridian, and I quickly realized that it was my capstone text, in that most of the themes we were addressing were also being commented on–intentionally or no–in McCarthy’s novel. It was a blast, and I ended up with a ton of notes. I don’t have much interest in a career in academia, and burning a couple of years of my life to produce an academic text puts me in a mind to start crying. So I was thinking I’d just start cleaning said notes up a little and posting them here.
They’re gonna be rough, they’re gonna be scattered, they’ll trail off to nowhere, but hopefully there will be some value in them. To be honest, I’ve got a long-term project in mind that it’d help for me to start thinking about this stuff again. I’ll tag everything in this vein The Metaphysics of Indian Hating for easy tracking, and try to post something new every week or two.
I’ll start with this quote from Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, which, along with Slotkin’s other two books in his frontier trilogy, The Fatal Environment and Gunfighter Nation, were, in large part, my guides during the class.
In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who (to paraphrase Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness — the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness. Their concerns, their hopes, their terrors, their violence, and their justifications of themselves, as expressed in literature, are the foundation stones of the mythology that informs our history.
To understand Blood Meridian you have to be willing to read against the writing about Indians that has been passed down as historical, anthropological, and mythological truth since the country’s inception. That’s one of the things the judge tells us over and over again: that all knowledge about Indians is and has been a confidence game. Next I’ll post some notes on one of our foundational confidence men, John Smith, that’ll hopefully shed a little light on what I mean.
Update: The savvier among you won’t be surprised that I’m a little obsessed with Blood Meridian.
