(no subject)

[proximoception]

Blood Meridian is a great book but it hasn't left me very happy. I feel I'd better read some more McCarthy for triangulation: He seems to be at least half in love with his Judge Holden, whose perspective is left unopposed--but how could he be? His prior novel Child of God seemed to me essentially compassionate, valuing the humanity even in a murderer. The judge, though, identifies murder as humanity's value. The desire to object to this is briefly noted, but no objection is given. Another midlife crisis book? I saw and liked very much the All the Pretty Horses movie, where there was a way out, but wonder if the book concurs.

Particularly dismaying and admirable was how purely The Faerie Queene's mode was channelled, doubtless entirely through Moby-Dick, BM's overt model. "In the afternoon they came unto a land..." (Tennyson) and the land is hell. He channels it to hell.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I wonder what you'll think of "No Country for Old Men."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Just picked it up, actually.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Here's what I think:

At first it seemed like he was trying to rewrite BM into something that could be successfully adapted as a movie: spelling out actions and dialogue scenes, acknowledging awareness of a moral compass through the italics. Handholding the mass audience and jerking them into the vortex.

But of course he's revising himself: For one, there's Chigurh (based on chigger? those things that burrow into your feet in the South?). Chigurh's main differences from Holden are his lack of a sense of humor and his obsession with chance (he's also more humanly plausible I suppose). Actual and repeated experience with death presumably made these aspects of it clearer to McCarthy. The spirit of death in man and history becomes something less ironic and more personal, how I will die rather than how people die.

And there's something one can do, in this book. You may go down by chance, or by your own mistakes, and certainly will when you get old enough. But meanwhile you've done something, promised something that others may pick up where you dropped it. And here you can get married and get some joy out of life.

New also is a constructive role for death, however one feels about that. Living in the face of it spurred the settling generations to necessary works and noble acts, as well as some to savagery. Bell is presented as rare in his own generation, but his act of cowardice (self-interpreted) makes him a throwback. People get safe and lax by the time of the novel, and in places that breaks down order, and death walks back in as Chigurh. And basically makes more Bells--that kid at the end who's shaken he's helped cause deaths. So the gap is closing back up, but never will entirely--there's that other kid at the end who doesn't care. Hence Bell's shuttling between things are going to hell/it was always like this perspectives in his commentary. A Manichaean, two-force view of life, but that's an improvement on Blood Meridian's.

The father at the end--does McCarthy always conclude with a prose poem?--was a shoddy person ethically but also did his job and knew how to do it, i.e. shared McCarthy's practice of keeping one eye on death, thus knowing what to do in life, thus is apparently the engine of civilization. He's out ahead, Whitmanlike, and will be caught up with by others now and then, when Chirurgh hounds them forward enough. And, as to the title, the father dies young. Bell slips into uncertainty (except about his wife) as much because he's older as because he's later. Not thoroughly untangling older and later probably multiples the poignance of the book, and diffuses the conservatism and anti-Romanticism enough to assuage some of my irritation. Which would have been fury if I'd read this before Blood Meridian; but, again, this is preferable. And awfully well done, no?