One of the smartest comments ever made about Cormac McCarthy, by Harold Bloom in a discussion about Blood Meridian (via Maud Newton): “He tends to carry his influences on the surface, quite honestly.”
That’s about the long and the short of it, whether McCarthy’s pulling lines straight from William Faulkner, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings, or exploding the tropes of nineteenth-century scientific imperialism, his books are great pastiche amalgamations of their sources.
Of course, then Bloom goes on to say one of the dumber things he’s ever said in his career: “I don’t think McCarthy was interested, at least at that point in his career, in moral judgments, any more than Melville was involved in moral judgments.”
Melville wasn’t interested in moral judgments? Has Bloom ever read Typee? Omoo? Certainly not White Jacket, which was instrumental in changing the navy’s policy on flogging. That’s a profoundly stupid thing to say, and it negates the majority of those influences to which Blood Meridian owes itself: the literature and propaganda of the declaredly imperial US western expansion. The reason this is never brought up vis-à-vis Blood Meridian isn’t because it isn’t there, or, as Bloom meaninglessly opines, “Blood Meridian is too grand for that” — whatever the hell that means — it’s because there are very few literary scholars who know much about the subject. Unlike McCarthy.
This isn’t to reduce Blood Meridian to some kind of anti-imperialist tsk-tsking, but McCarthy does wear his sources on his sleeve,and there’s no way of disentangling those sources from a commentary on imperialism. An example? Here’s a big one: Regeneration Through Violence, the first volume of literary historian Richard Slotkin’s frontier history trilogy. It was published in 1973, and unless Cormac McCarthy is directly channeling Slotkin’s worldview through some metaphysical means, he read it. Hell, the title’s even evoked by Michael Herr in the blurb that’s graced the front cover of the Vintage International Edition for as long as I’ve been aware of the book: “A classic American novel of regeneration through violence.”
I’ll post more on this later. If you’re seriously bored in the meantime, I have a review of The Road over at The Modern Word which touches on some of the pastiche stuff. I’ll also have an essay about Blood Meridian in this book about art and genocide sometime in the fall.
Update: A big RIGHT THE FUCK ON to the Onion for their discussion of Cormac McCarthy, by the way. Best news on the planet, and some of the best books coverage, too.
Update II: For more on this, start here.
