/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20078867]

Do I have to be American or a stoic manly-man to understand this book? I liked The Road but Blood Meridian isn't clicking for me. The prose is often difficult to follow and I don't care about anything that's happening, so I find myself drifting off pretty often. I like the imagery but I don't care about America, cowboys, the old west or reflections on masculinity and stocism.

What do?

[Anonymous No.20078910]

>>20078867
>Do I have to be American or a stoic manly-man to understand this book?
no. if anything, if you are a twink you should be able to relate the demoniac elements in the book..

[Anonymous No.20079383]

>>20078867
>I don't care about America, cowboys, the old west
It's not really about that

>reflections on masculinity and stocism
It's sort of about that

>Prose hard
That's what makes a book fun, if you struggle that means you're learning, but yeah for me it's all about the poetic imagery of violence as we contemplate the unknowable

[Anonymous No.20079868]

I'm a eurofag and I'm also reading this book. I've already read Faulkner (who's my favorite author) so I'm kind of used to this alien-sounding southern mutt dialect, however so many words in this book are totally new to me and at this point I've given up on googling their meaning, so I just let my imagination run wild. I find the plot pretty engaging though.

[Anonymous No.20080736]

>>20078867
Is this really supposed to be the most gruesome work of american literature?
Lol it doesn't even have the balls to describe the kids getting raped, why are Americans so weak minded?

[Anonymous No.20080805]

>>20079868
>>20078867
Big Burger here. the key point of the novel, at least for me, was this fundamental idea of a witness. like Holden's harness maker story, sons get fucked up because they have no past or father to draw from and understand meaning. This is a more superficial American problem that might be harder to understand for euros where their western ideology led to slaughtering all the native americans. the most clear manifestation of this is racism. if you read absalom absalom, faulkner addresses this issue directly at the end where shreve roasts quentin and points out that Mr Compson uses incest as a gigacope to hide his racism and points out that being racist is fucking stupid in america because there are no pure races--you realize everyone is a mutt, everyone is mixed if you go far enough back in history. the glanton gang is the same shit: when glanton cuts off the indians head and asks holden if he'll pass for mexican, the judge tells glanton that the indian is pure indian and that pure mexican is pure mongrel. the irony here is that glanton, an amerimutt, calls himself white--this is just race but this concept, this idea of being superior when you have no historical reference of youself makes you mankiller like the traveler's son becomes a man killer. keep this idea in mind. so, when the kid becomes the man, he becomes a mankiller and is illiterate but carries a bible. at the beginning of the book, the kid does have a drunk dad who quotes dead poets but the kid doesn't remember that shit and it's just said he is violent. so...
if the man is illiterate he doesn't understand words. if he doesn't understand words, did the kid really ever understand what his dad was saying? yes. like race, if you trace back language you find that language has an oral origin. mccarthy knows this and is why the prose sounds so fucking weird. he is playing with fundamental concepts of the anglophone and how it relates to thought structure.

[Anonymous No.20080840]

>>20080805
to expand on that, the inability to communicate between indians, americans and mexicans is the cause of so much violence. the judge, who speaks infinite languages and knows so much about the world is the such a charismatic guy is also the only character who does not die at the end of the book. his knowledge of language is the source of his power

[Anonymous No.20080852]

>>20080805
sounds very interesting. i think I'll buy it with my next paycheck.
thanks for the rec anon, you made it sound incredibly nice!

[Anonymous No.20080901]

i didn't like this book at all.

[Anonymous No.20080952]

>>20080736
Try Naked Lunch

[Anonymous No.20081080]

>>20080805
Great reading
Relating to the idea of a witness - by one account, Samuel Chamberlain was an artist stationed as a soldier in Tucson. He was being punished for drawing too much at his post when the Glanton gang found him and picked him up. (picrel)
Given that the kid is sort of a stand-in for Chamberlain, how might we relate this idea of witness to McCarthy's role as an artist crafting an entry to the American canon. Does this point to the reason why McCarthy chose to focus on perhaps the most violent and depraved agents of a centuries long genocide? (So depraved that the Federal Gov supposedly considered sending a contingent of soldiers to capture the Glanton Gang, because of how badly that Gang had soured relations between the US Gov and the Indians/Mexicans.)

Also backing up your point is the backstory that John Joel Glanton supposedly was a pretty normal guy before his wife was raped/killed/scalped in an Apache raid in Texas. This inspired in him a hatred for nonwhites. At points, the Glanton gang dressed in Apache costumes when they slaughtered Mexican villages for scalps.

[Anonymous No.20081086]

>>20081080
Sorry. Wrong Image.

[Anonymous No.20081092]

>>20078867
>I like the imagery but I don't care about America, cowboys, the old west or reflections on masculinity and stocism.
Then don't read it? If you don't care about the book how can you expect to enjoy reading it? Are you retarded?

[Anonymous No.20081342]

>>20080736
I know this is probably a bait comment but its for the same reason that he glosses over an entire massacre in three sentences sometimes. Because this book was obviously made with some shock value in mind, he really only describes what are relevant. Once the kids get raped they aren’t in control of their own actions on the stage of life, which the judge explicitly says is the point of his lessons, that you only matter if you are actually deciding to dance, and that if your movements are made for you, like if you’re getting raped, you failed at life.

This is also why time is taken to describe those babies getting used as flails to have the contents of their heads spill out over the rocks. Because McCarthy fucking hates how easy it is to accidentally unroll all the contents of toothpaste tubes when they’re unopened and they get all over the fucking ground and you just know that this is another reason to add to the note of whoever finds your corpse

[Anonymous No.20081728]

>>20078867
You have to post on reddit to understand this book.

[Anonymous No.20082367]

>>20081092
Maybe I have the wrong idea about the book. I'm asking what type of person it's supposed to appeal to. Can you not read? It's in the first sentence.