/lit/ - Literature

rip baneposting and the genius behind it sean f kay

>>12197531
No one cared who he was until he packaged the bombs

I have to head out for a bit, but I'll leave a prompt here: whether it's Judge Holden, or Bane, or whoever, we have - on /lit/ or elsewhere - a kind of collective preoccupation with violence. In TDKR, there's a happier ending; Batman saves the day. In Blood Meridian, not so much; War is Holy and some very dark shit goes down in the outhouse.

Obviously we don't like this. But violence, yo. Violence and desire. Maybe it's because we worship this stuff.

Now a smart guy like RG will say that in a true masterwork, such as Blood Meridian (or, in my vastly less important opinion, the recent Batman films) you have in *great literature* an understanding of violence that goes beyond the superficial, and really digs down into the meaning of this stuff. Great authors rarely valorize violence, because they see in it it's essentially tragic dimension: even Homer does this, and in Homer the violence is legitimately awesome. And may it ever be.

Blood Meridian disturbs us because are horrified to think that somehow this *makes sense* in ways we don't really want to believe. And McCarthy doesn't make things easy for us.

Bane is all violence, in this way, but he lacks *faith* - and this is why he never climbs out of the pit. He lacks that one extra component that Batman possesses.

What if we looked at this the way the East did? What if violence was just a component of a much larger process, and desire was overrated?