(no subject)
To page 150 in Blood Meridian. Have been consciously looking out for:
Skies
Stones
Fires
Cards
Coins
Cups
Wolves
Started out drawing little margin symbols for these but that grew time-consuming.
More common than several of those combined are Entities, not quite human figures that aren't animals either. Some are analogous to the Judge, but more are like people, or what happens to people because of war (as broadly defined in the book).
I've also been trying to scan for differences between human and animal-caused violence. He sometimes seems to want there to be, but the descriptions can't really bear this out; might be a case where honesty is in conflict with scheme? Or just further proof that he questions even his two pre-Road ideals (mason/farmer, wolf/hunter).
I'm appreciating how rereadable it still is, and how much of this is due to both ceaseless stylization and overstuffedness. The latter is as crucial as the former: you can't make sense of what you can't put into remembered order, and the feeling that you haven't yet made sense of something is necessary to keep fear and enchantment alive and fused. Both Shakespearean/Dantesque lessons, partially transmitted by Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, who understood them quite well. Or maybe ultimately Homeric ones? Hence conceivably accident: combined strangeness of form and content perhaps a result of inevitable Renaissance misreadings of once-sensible classics. Maybe to some extent anticipated by the relation of one or two Homers to the older epics.
Skies
Stones
Fires
Cards
Coins
Cups
Wolves
Started out drawing little margin symbols for these but that grew time-consuming.
More common than several of those combined are Entities, not quite human figures that aren't animals either. Some are analogous to the Judge, but more are like people, or what happens to people because of war (as broadly defined in the book).
I've also been trying to scan for differences between human and animal-caused violence. He sometimes seems to want there to be, but the descriptions can't really bear this out; might be a case where honesty is in conflict with scheme? Or just further proof that he questions even his two pre-Road ideals (mason/farmer, wolf/hunter).
I'm appreciating how rereadable it still is, and how much of this is due to both ceaseless stylization and overstuffedness. The latter is as crucial as the former: you can't make sense of what you can't put into remembered order, and the feeling that you haven't yet made sense of something is necessary to keep fear and enchantment alive and fused. Both Shakespearean/Dantesque lessons, partially transmitted by Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, who understood them quite well. Or maybe ultimately Homeric ones? Hence conceivably accident: combined strangeness of form and content perhaps a result of inevitable Renaissance misreadings of once-sensible classics. Maybe to some extent anticipated by the relation of one or two Homers to the older epics.