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11372195 No.11372195 [Reply] [Original]

Was this McCarthy's best work?

>> No.11372202

I think so, but I also think it might come down to what kind of story you like. Blood Meridian seems like the book that required the most preparation to write though, given the amount of biblical and gnostic references, and the arcane language used.

>> No.11372207

Yes

>> No.11372236

>>11372195
Regarding Holden : while re reading blood meridian 8 years laters, it came to my brainlet mind that Judge Holden might just be an expression of true brute force of civilisation. So far he keeps saying that man must extract itself from Nature and master its environment (besides killing puppies and children). He also express himself in the words a divinity would : asked why does he capture birds and draws eveything on his scrapbook, he states that things that exist without his knowledge do not have his permission to do so. So is he the impersonated divinity of the western mind ?

>> No.11372245

What books would you recommend to read after this? Looking for something in a similar vein.

>> No.11372266

>>11372245
Obviously there is nothing like it. But if you're looking for something similar, same period, with plenty of stuff going wrong, then

The Diezmo, Rick Bass

>> No.11372272

>>11372236
He's the dialectic of enlightenment personified.

>> No.11372296

>>11372245
Why don't you try All the Pretty Horses ?

>> No.11372318

>>11372272
So is he just a fraud pretended to be enlightened, or are his actions the consequences of his enlightenment ?

>> No.11372321

No, Suttree or Orchard Keeper was.

>> No.11372322

>“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” ...
Was the Judge the human embodiment of Manifest Destiny?

>> No.11372324

>>11372322
More like the personification of war.

>> No.11372666

>>11372245
Blood Meridian is a self admitted knock off (and a little tryhard) version of Moby Dick

>> No.11372797

Suttree

>> No.11372833

>>11372195
This or The Crossing

>> No.11372982

>>11372797
Good answer

>> No.11373064

>>11372236
>>11372272
>>11372322
>>11372324
The Judge is all these things and more, that’s why it’s sich an interesting book and so well-lauded. One-to-one allegories and symbols are shallow and easy. The Judge is not just the personification of war, not just the personification of Manifest Destiny, not just the personification of the Enlightenment mindset, not just the personification of the Western attitude of dominating nature and finding out as much as possible, not just the Devil, not just the terrifying warlord Jehovah of the Old Testament (as per the Gnostic interpretation). He’s all of these and a character in his own right. It’s like asking what Moby Dick represents (as per >>11372666, a good recommendation and nice and fitting trips). He can represent many things but, ultimately, is also something irreducible, elusive, and meaningful in its own right, like all good symbols. Moby Dick isn’t JUST the personification of the wildness of nature and everything we can’t have and know, he’s Moby Dick.

>> No.11373374

>>11372195
ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

>> No.11373562

>>11373374
Fuck off

>> No.11373600

I loved Suttree too

>> No.11374178

>>11372236
>why does he capture birds and draws eveything on his scrapbook
He's also denying God by this. One of the commandments says not to make a graven image of literally anything, because in recreating what God has already created, you're assuming the position of God himself.

>> No.11374186

>>11373064
I think it's great that the Judge and Moby Dick were both based on an actual person and whale.

>> No.11374191

>>11373562
It’s one of the better and more effortful pastas on this board.

>> No.11374461

>>11372833
All the Pretty Horses is the best of the border trilogy.

>> No.11374587

>>11372797

Only real answer here.

>> No.11374593

>>11372195
No, although it is good. Suttree is autobiographical and cuts right through most of what's easiest to criticize about Blood Meridian: nobody feels like this, nobody identifies with this, nobody recognizes this. It's by far more difficult to take something recognizable and make it seem novel than to invent something and make it interesting. Admittedly Blood Meridian has some of the former (and the first drafts much more), but it's at its best when it's the least like itself. By contrast, Suttree is about a fictitious person so real and so human that it's nearly impossible not to like and dislike him at the same time, as one would a real person. It's southern gothic, amplified and rejuvenated in so many ways it's difficult even to start naming them. The book just abounds with a wry observationist humor (that, admittedly, may be McCarthy's own) that never appears in his other work. Most importantly, its textual richness is grounded in a literary personality that doesn't appear at all in Blood Meridian. But it's still a very good book.

>> No.11374605

Later the gang nears some ancient Anasazi ruins, riding through a gorge full of “old bones and broken shapes of painted pottery and graven...pictographs of horse and cougar and turtle and the mounted Spaniards helmeted and bucklered and contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself” (145). The gang is thus afforded af vision of an extinct culture’s attempts to document nature and history, up to and including the arrival of conquistadors. The Spaniards’ total contempt mirrors the gang’s, who ride “autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god” (145). They both evince an ambition to outstrip the ineluctable encroachment of geology (“stone”) and history (“time itself”). Once they have made camp, the Judge goes about collecting artifacts and sketching them with the same “practiced ease” (146) revealed in Jackson’s story, with no “pursing of those oddly childish lips” (146). The reminder of the Judge’s childish appearance in the description of this activity suggests that they may be related. His documentation and subsequent destruction of artifacts possibly allows the Judge to stave off mortality. Alternatively, the Judge’s appearance may intimate that his efforts to translate reality into representation and thereby control it are childish. After he finishes sketching and burning, the Judge “seem[s] much satisfied with the world as if his counsel had been sought at its creation” (146). The Judge, collecting images and discarding their originals (which are themselves only decayed and partial versions of what they once were), feels he has attained mastery over these objects by recasting them in his sketchbook. He moreover precludes others from this same mastery by destroying the originals. By always expanding his monopoly (his suzerainty) over the material world, he believes himself to be simultaneously directing its course and freeing himself from it. He is a master of symbols whose psychical correlate has been destroyed.
Webster, as mentioned previously, sees the Judge doing this. He says to the Judge: “them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so” (147). Webster grasps the basic error underlying the Judge’s strivings, viz. that recording the world is not to control, possess or even understand it. However, Webster is still wary of being drawn, and asks that the Judge not put him in his book. The Judge avers that it does not matter whether he personally draws Webster for he will in a sense be “drawn” somewhere: “What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all”. Where previously the Judge argued that books lie

>> No.11374627

>>11374605
>The reminder of the Judge’s childish appearance in the description of this activity suggests that they may be related. His documentation and subsequent destruction of artifacts possibly allows the Judge to stave off mortality. Alternatively, the Judge’s appearance may intimate that his efforts to translate reality into representation and thereby control it are childish.
my alternate take on this is a reference to the kid's face, about 140 pages prior:
>He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent.
Page 4.

>> No.11376077

Bump for explaining all what Holden is. A character or a divinity or just an ectoplasm

>> No.11376224

>>11374605
Where does this extract come from ?

And isn't there a far relation between the drawings and Platon Theory of Forms (I know I know) ?
The Judge would be some sort of an old demon who's memory is lost, brought down to earth after ages of nothingness, and he's trying to catch up with things ? And his book would be the book of everything that exist ?

>> No.11376250

>>11372195
Yes, however Suttree & the boarder trilogy aren't discussed here near enough.

>> No.11376441

The Blood Meridian copypasta and due to the fact that The Road was dogshit. I can't seem to give this author another chance. Seems like a thesaurus tier book