Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is constantly beset with
death. Death is perhaps the one reliable
thing encountered in every chapter of the book.
This phenomenon of death in the narrative is analyzed by Ursula K. Heise
in Chronoscisms. She says, “Benjamin, Kermode, and Brooks all
see human time as crucially shaped by mortality” (361). So this has become a problem of time (which was learned last week, is a
very important problem in modern literary theory). Heise continues, “Narrative time, in their
view, is a way of confronting death through the movement toward the ending,
understood as a moment of closure that retrospectively bestows meaning on the
plot.” Here is a small sampling of
McCarthy from the end of Chapter 4: “The scalped who with the fringe of hair
below their wounds…lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and
everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.”[1] Confronting death and the violence
immediately prior to death is something that the reader must constantly do as
they read Blood Meridian. Intuition seems to spark here, and the reader
might think that the author had greater intention than a fantastic show of gore
in mind. Though Heise would later go on
to overlook and ultimately regard the quotes above as old hat, it is worth
considering these statements in light of the omnipresent death in the present
novel. Death is perhaps a way of
communicating. Perhaps it is a way to
center the reader in the wanderings of an undetermined narrator. Certainly there is a greater power afoot
here.
Consider how
despite the many difficulties that are encountered within this book, especially
thirst, only death seems to be so glorified.
Heise completes her explanation of this theory in saying: “Readers live
through the one moment in time that they cannot experience in their own lives:
the moment just beyond death, which reveals life’s final pattern” (361). Though there is death all over the place, the
reader is still waiting for a particular death – that of the narrator. This death does not come. Therefore, despite the constant confrontation
with the dead, the reader is not given the satisfaction of the narrator’s
demise. The reader is only teased with
it, time and again, as the kid wanders through the desert once more, seemingly
about to succumb to the elements. There
are several fights and battles where the kid escapes, always surviving. Even the confrontation with the judge at the
conclusion would seem to mark him for death, or else the death of the judge
(being the other reliable character still alive in the story). Cruel and vulgar as it is, the reader is
looking for death. In particular, the
reader is looking for the closure of death and the wisdom that would be
expected from the event. The reader is
never given this, only teased with it.
To think of how many times that the kid should have died but managed to
survive – it’s absurd! It must have been
a dozen or more different occasions. And
then the ending lines of the Novel read: “He is dancing, dancing. He says he will never die.”[2] Goodness. There is so much more to this, but for
brevity’s sake, this harangue must end.
No comments:
Post a Comment