The Frame

Scott Esposito on Cormac McCarthy's Paradox of Choice

Scott Esposito at the Quarterly Conversation recaps Cormac McCarthy’s career, focusing particularly on how McCarthy has “prob[ed] the fence-posts lining the borders of free will and develop[ed] his own distinctly postmodern view of identity, plot, and country.” The review is enlightening—especially the part on The Road because I have been able to find very little criticism on it.

Here’s a highlight:

Such profound and sincere engagement with his writing bespeaks an author who has very much struck a nerve with all kinds of readers. I think this can be traced to his lifelong obsession with the search for identity: no one thing has been as consistent in McCarthy’s work over his forty-year career as his insistence that we are only offered certain moments to really influence our identity, though we may not know them when we see them and we may be illusioned as to what the choices represent. Furthermore, his most financially successful books and his avowed masterpiece have powerfully stated this idea while also arguing for a distinctly revisionist idea of American identity. Yet what is noteworthy about the latter is that McCarthy has not revised using the typical subversive agents of literature; rather, he has made his revisionists cowboys, the very representatives of the rugged West that first gave birth to the myths McCarthy subverts.

A nice feature of this essay is that it traces this thesis through McCarthy’s ten novels, making a mini-argument for each one. In his section about Blood Meridian, Esposito points to the judge’s “typically convoluted” view on free will that informs the philosophy of many of McCarthy’s other novels:

This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation… .

The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Esposito explains the paradox of the judge’s logic:

Essentially, the judge argues that knowledge and willful action are only possible once all the facts of a life are known, but the problem is that the only way to make these facts known is to live a life. Thus, as the judge says, life is an already-woven “tapestry”; merely tracing one thread through it, a person will have “taken charge” of his life. But again, the paradox: this is only possible once the tapestry is woven, once a life has been lived and all choices are already made…

Is there a point in which a person can preview the tapestry whole-formed, and thus be in a position to truly choose his course in the world? Or must we always be in the dark as to what form our life will take when all is said and done, and therefore not truly be in a position to make choices that will define our future?

Blood Meridian: Open Yale Lectures

To further understand the novel Blood Meridian, I watched the first of two lectures on it from Yale’s History of the Novel Since 1945.

Yale’s Amy Hungerford shows how Blood Meridian references Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth. Apparently the second video (which I haven’t watched yet) wraps it all up, but in this first video she makes an insightful observation about a passage on page 4:

There is a lot of anxiety about origin, right here in these couple pages. We’re told, “Only now is it”—as he goes to Texas—“only now is the child finally divested of all he has been.” And you note, at the beginning, that he is, and his folk are known for, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” These are the traditional adjectives given to the sons of Ham, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Ham’s crime against his father, Noah, was that he saw his father, Noah, naked in his tent. Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, and I guess he was naked in his tent while he was passed out. Ham happened to peep in and saw his father naked. His two brothers covered the father. The two brothers are therefore blessed; Ham is cursed. Why is this a curse-worthy action? Why is this a curse-worthy mistake? I think it’s because, in seeing the father naked, you see the mystery of your origin. And so, the kid is likened to someone cursed for looking upon their origin. There is a sense in which he can almost understand it. This is meant to be mystery, and yet by looking, somehow, he is closer to it than he should be. The problem for the kid is to divest himself of origin, to forget it, so if Ham is cursed because he saw his origin, the kid’s curse lies, in part, in the divestiture of all origin. He forgets it. It’s not that he sees it; he forgets it.

And then you can get a sentence like this: “His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrain so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”

Here is the full video (part 1). It runs about 50 min (and is too wide for this column):

Blood Meridian: Final Thoughts

I write about books I am reading for my own benefit and enjoyment, but I will be posting my book notes here in hopes that I might start a discussion.

Naturally, McCarthy leaves me with more questions than answers, which is a good thing. Here are a few half-baked thoughts about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:

The Judge
•    He is not simply insane, but seems to be operating under a different set of principles and priorities. His talk about war as god suggests he sees the world as innately competitive, Darwinian in a survival-of-the-fittest way. Viewing war as “forcing the unity of existence,” the judge sees war as an instrument of natural selection.
•    I read something that compares Holden to Kurtz in Hear of Darkness. A major difference between the two is that Kurtz is somehow admired; Holden is not, even thought they both generate a lot of curiosity and don’t seem to fit into the world around them.  the judge is the “one man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance” (331). The judge transcends the “false dance” of society and remains the “true warrior,” at least in his own head.
•    The judge is outside of mortality: “He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die” (335). And outside of history.

Writing Style
•    I found the book challenging in its vocabulary but very enjoyable to read. The best thing about McCarthy’s prose is that it reads like poetry; its rhythm is nearly as important as its content. There were many words that I didn’t know but didn’t look up because rhythmically, they worked. I found myself not wanting to stop and look up the word because it would interrupt the flow. His style has a nice subtlety, but also a vastness. His prose is simultaneously simple and complex, trivial and grave. After getting into its rhythm, I could not put the book down for several chapters.

The Western Genre
•    I am not familiar enough with Westerns that I could pick out where it is mimicking, mocking or deviating from the genre. During the part where the kid hides from Holden, I sense that it is closely following form. Holden appears to be a “bad guy” plain and simple. Of course, I know it drastically deviates from convention in its characterization of Indians and cowboys. It does not establish a good guys vs. bad guys dichotomy. Both Indians and cowboys are at times offenders and victims.

The Kid
•    In the end, the judge asks the kid, “was it always your idea that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” This was the story of the kid, but he didn’t play much of a role. I guess a better question would be, How does the presence of the kid influence my reading?

The Dance

•    When the judge talks about the dance as “false,” when war “becomes dishonored,” it sounds like society, the artificial mores and boundaries of society. They have set a limit on something (war) which is, for the judge, natural for man. If society is the dance, and the dance is a “ritual,” which “includes the letting of blood,” this would suggest that war is a part of life, of the dance. This might help epxlain why the dance is the “warrior’s right” (331), and why only the “one who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war” is the only “true” dancer.
•    Dancing and war seem to be opposites. To name the most relevant difference between them, dancing is cooperative and war is, well, war.
•    At other times, the dance sounds like the accident of life, fate. It “contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale.”
•    How does the bear’s dancing relate to this?

The Landscape
“Each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heard but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone” (330).

Writing about this book, I feel like I am trying to analyze a madman. In writing these notes, I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything to “get” about this book—which is part of the book’s greatness. It’s hard to nail down.

If you have read this book, tell me what you think.

Blood Meridian: Singling Out the Thread

We learn a lot  about the judge in chapter XIV from his dialogue with Toadvine (pg. 198-199). He apparently keeps his ledger as a way to control nature, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198). And later, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will be properly suzerain of the earth” (198). The judge acknowledges “creation” and a ruler besides himself—he defends his use of the word “suzerain” by explaining that it differs from a “ruler” because it “rules even when there are other rulers” (198).

The judge apparently imagines his work of documenting objects of nature as making them “stand naked” (198), perhaps by stripping them of their context in nature, or in his words, “singling out the thread of order from the tapestry” (199()? Could this relate to scalping where a vital part of a human being is removed from its context, and becomes merely a receipt of a kill?