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| 1 |
ID:
107895
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the portrayal of frontier conflict in American writer, Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. It argues that McCarthy's work is one of the most profound American literary meditations ever composed on the subject of irregular conflict. The article traces the novel's literary antecedents and historical background and analyses its use of language, its structural narrative, and its lyrical descriptions of bloodshed and extreme guerrilla violence on the Texas-Mexican frontier in the mid nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to McCarthy's development of a philosophy of war, which is related to the Counter-Enlightenment ideas of Joseph de Maistre and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is suggested that McCarthy employs the experience of irregular conflict on the American frontier as a philosophical lens to articulate the idea of war as a form of divination - an approach that is based on a mixture of Maistre's theory of redemptive violence and Nietzsche's cult of the existential warrior. The article concludes that McCarthy's blending of irregular conflict with a philosophy of war - empowered as it is by some of the most sumptuous of all twentieth-century American literary prose - endow this classic novel with a timeless and transcendental quality. McCarthy's unflinching representation of the anatomy of irregular conflict thus emerges not only as a searing portrayal of America's past frontier experience, but also as a powerful metaphor for understanding the endemic violence of twenty-first century insurgency in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan.
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| 2 |
ID:
110134
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay explores the suggestion that many American narratives are supplementary, correcting narratives - alternatives to the main story on offer. The guiding thought is that of Henry James's "possible other case," and the chief example is Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," in which one story after another fails to cope with the ongoing mystery it faces. The novel may imply, then, that narrative itself, rather than any individual report or fiction, is in crisis or has come to the end of its road. A coda to the essay proposes the option of nonnarrative understandings of the world in those extreme situations where storytelling is no longer the sense-making activity we so often take it to be.
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