Lazy Dog Literary Society, Internet Edition
Posted by TFG on January 29th, 2008
If I may be so bold as to appropriate the name - Otis, KM, Senator, The Roman, Barndog, etc. Kind of…extending the brand.
*ahem*
JD comments on Blood Meridian. You can read my comments there.
I’ll have a book review up soon. Actually, a trilogy review. I even read them in a row.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
I just finished reading Blood Meridian. Difficult read. Not Joyce or Pynchon difficult, but what a slog. Mr. McCarthy’s ability to write is unquestioned and his vocabulary and knowledge of the old West is damned impressive, but I’m less sure about his ability to string together a compelling, completely coherent narrative from start to finish. Each chapter reads very, very well, but there was little to tie them together in anything beyond a strictly temporal sense, as far as I could tell. I think a good editor could probably shuffle the order of the chapters a bit and it would read about as well. Too many unanswered questions for my personal level of comfort, and I’ll admit the epilogue is just beyond me.
I don’t know how anyone is going to make a good movie of this. There is so much that Mr. McCarthy requires the reader to fill in that anyone who reads the book first is bound to disappointed by any cinematic adaption. In any case, it certainly won’t approach No Country for Old Men.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Though I love Blood Meridian, I know most won’t. It has a limited audience. Listen to any recommendation and you’ll hear more than a few hedges.
Also, can we get away from the idea that ‘difficult’ is better? Difficult is just difficult. If you don’t ‘get’ something, it is the author’s fault and not yours. No storyteller should brag about losing their readers.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
What prompted that bit about difficult?
January 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Read 2nd sentence from 1st comment. Plus, from your linked page, things like:
– “I totally lose track of the narrative”
– “I am just too dumb to figure out”
– “anything requiring true intelligence”
– “by far his toughest book” TFG
– “read it three times, too, and I still am not sure what I’ve read” TFG
– “I think there’s a point, somewhere, it’s just that I don’t have the snap to grasp it.”
Not to mention that I reread the ending four times.
January 30th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
If your question was directed at me, I’d offer a couple of things that made it difficult to read:
1) The lack of quotation marks. At times I had to work to figure out which character was actually speaking and a few times I still wasn’t sure. At times I almost felt this was done intentionally to introduce further ambiguity, since the meaning can flip depending on which character says something — please don’t ask me for specific instances though.
2) Lots of words I’m not familiar with. I could just try to interpolate from context, but I don’t. It slows me down to look them up.
3) I don’t speak or read Spanish. See item 2.
4) As Harold Bloom notes, IIRC, the language is archaic at times and that makes me sit and think about the sentence construction. While this undoubtedly enhances the work from a literary standpoint, at my level of reading comprehension this works against a smooth flow from the perspective of readability.
5) I got through No Country for Old Men in two sittings. Blood Meridian took me eight or ten sittings to get through. This may be hard for me to explain, but the narrative didn’t usually compel me to keep reading even though I may be tired or have other things to do, like other novels have. This isn’t a reflection on the quality of the writing itself so much as on the storytelling aspect of the novel. Like I wrote earlier, each chapter is sort of a self contained unit, that doesn’t naturally draw the reader into the next chapter.
6) It is frustrating because I know there are concepts, metaphors, allusions, and wordplay going on that I haven’t quite comprehended. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, I have to read a novel with the reading skills I got, not the ones I would like to have. Not to get too philosophical or post-modern, but it is a problem of interpretation. It is problematic that I seem to need an M.A. in Literature to begin to appreciate what is happening. Of course, Shakespeare is amazingly complex as well but the real magic of Willie’s poetry is you can appreciate it almost regardless of the literary toolkit you bring to the table while realizing that there are always more layers to peel back if you are so inclined. It may not be fair, but it is as though I can see that there are layers in Blood Meridian while not being able to access them or even fully understand how to get to them.
More information than you probably wanted, but don’t take these comments the wrong way. I was impressed with Blood Meridian and I’m glad I read it. I will read it again sometime, but not anytime soon. It’s unfortunate, but time may not permit me to study this as much as necessary to fully appreciate it.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
This is what I was referring to, Charles:
Now, I’ve not read anywhere that any one of us discussing the book has said specifically that difficult = better. I know that there are posers out there who go by this creed - they’re generally known as the LitFic crowd. But I don’t think that any one of us discussing it are of that extraction. And so my comments about the difficulty really don’t have any bearing on whether it’s good, nor should they be construed as such. I found the book to be very excellent, at all kinds of things, and to be difficult, for all kinds of reasons. I was just interested in what made KM make the linkage. Now, Joyce — that’s difficult, and so bloody uninteresting that I’ve yet to finish a one of his books. Ditto Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow, though I’ve read other Pynchon that I liked.
Charles, I appreciate your comments very much - it would be impossible to take them the wrong way. I think your numbered arguments are pretty concise and I agree with them (maybe not about the chapter thing, though.) I believe, though, that those ‘layers’ as you call them are more accessible on subsequent readings. They were for me, and I just considered them different facets or perspectives. Mainly, because I read it with a different purpose…not to get through the story, but to appreciate the characterizations, or look at the prose more closely, or search for metaphors and meaning. I’m no MA, but I think that anyone can do that, if they want to. And I wouldn’t even say that someone should want to — I do, and that’s good enough for me.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
I wish there was something like the Arden Shakespeare volumes for Blood Meridian. That, I could really get into.
Like you, I’ve never finished Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, though just carrying Ulysses around has got me into some interesting conversations in airports.
Here’s five questions I have about Blood Meridian, if anyone wants to take a shot:
1) What is the point of the epilogue and how does it relate to the rest of the book?
2) Exactly what is the Judge? Man? Demiurge (Platonic or Gnostic)? Angel (fallen or otherwise)? Something else?
3) What happened to the Kid in the jakes?
4) Any idea what the Judge meant when he told the Kid he “would have treated him like his son”, and would that have been a good thing?
5) What is to be made of Tobin’s perceptions regarding the Judge, especially as he is an ex-priest?
3)
January 30th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I just knew you’d make me go dig that damn book out of one of the fifteen boxes in the garage. That’s OK — I’m dying to re-read it now that there are at least two new people I can talk about it with.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
MC’s not using quotation marks is pretentious, at best, just lazy at worst. It does make it difficult to read, and I suspect he did it on purpose to make it difficult. Which is pretentious. Totally unnecessary. Shakespeare is so good, all these many years later, because he’s accessible, even with the language problems. He was popular with the mob. He wrote for them, not the upper class, and they made him. I don’t know who MC writes for, but it ain’t the unlettered. Let me tackle the questions, Charles, though it’s been five or more years since I read BM: 1) The point, if you will, is to show that evil goes on, unstoppable. 2) The judge is a demon, risen from the pits of hell. 3) The kid was killed. 4) He meant the kid didn’t wholly buy into his brand of evil and therefore couldn’t be his son. It would not have been a good thing for the kid if he had. He’s better off dead. 5)Tobin is still religious enough to know the judge for what he is, and to be repelled by him.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
OK, Dick, I’m going to get just as picayune as you. You know that man’s name is Cormac McCarthy. We’ve been talking about it all day. Yet you call him MC. Not once, which is just fat-fingering it, but twice. What is your motivation for that?
Point Two: I’m as unlettered as they get, but I sure like McCarthy’s body of work. Bill Shakespeare’s, too, for that matter, but I had to be led to it by someone who knew better. I used that unlettered baloney about not reading or liking Bill for years. It’s no excuse.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Mr. Stanley,
1) I understand that as a theme of the whole book, but still don’t see what that has to do with the epilogue.
2) The Judge certainly has a supernatural sense about him, but could he be killed if he was a demon? I mean, why is Tobin encouraging the Kid to shoot him if he can’t be killed? And why does the Judge worried that he might be shot by the Kid as well? For reasons to numerous to list here, he can’t be a real man, but that still leaves open what he is. I certainly think McCarthy has something other than a conventional Christian demon in mind. Whether he is more like, say, Pazuzu, or some other pagan spirit lost to antiquity is what I’m less sure of.
3) Of course, the kid was sexually assaulted and/or killed, most likely in a hideous manner befitting the more gruesome murders he himslef had witnessed throughout the book. Given that McCarthy wants to be coy about whether it is even the Judge who warns the other men “not to go in there”, can we be sure it is the Kid they find? The Judge’s sexual desire would not seem to have been toward the Kid once he was no longer a kid. I’m really trying to get at why so much is left open to conjecture about the whole incident and why.
4) Generally in concurrence here, but the whole sequence in the jail just muddies the water even more. What a strange time to say such a thing.
5) Generally concur. It seems crucial that Tobin alone sees the Judge the way he does. The Kid looks at the Judge and sees “nothin’.” Tobin looks at the Judge and sees a malevolent force, something much worse than nothing. Oh, and we have no idea what happens to Tobin. Or the idiot.
Couple more thoughts.
a) Men like Brown, Glanton, and even Toadvine are just about as reprehensible as the Judge, but without the, ahem, charm or education. Were these men made worse (however you want to measure it) by their association with the Judge, or just more lethal?
b) Maybe McCarthy’s punch line relates to the quote about there not being a mystery or secret. Maybe he just chuckles to himself over all the LitCrit types layering on interpretations and meaning when he’s worked so hard to ensure there can’t possibly be any.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:54 am
TFG, I didn’t mean to offend you or anybody. Used MC by mistake. Had meant it to be CM, using the abbreviation just to save time in reply, no disrespect intended. I majored in English, took two semesters of Willie’s plays and poetry, so maybe I’m just showing off. Nowadays you need some education to read him–or at least a good dictionary and lots of patience–because the language is so out of date. Not when he wrote it, though. His themes are universal, however, then and now, which is why the (presumably uneducated) merchants and poor (the mob) packed the Globe Theater for his performances. That’s all I meant.
Charles, you plumb this stuff a lot deeper than it occurs to me to go. But ambiguity is one of the goals of the literary. The more the better. They like to lather it on. CM is good enough a writer to be knowing what he’s doing when he’s ambiguous. It’s not an accident. I imagine he wants there to be two to five explanations. 1) just repetition for emphasis, I guess, 2) ambiguity again, 3) ditto, 4) etc., 5) etc.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:14 am
Dang, Dick, I was just pulling your leg about the initials.
So last night I started digging through boxes. So far I’ve found every other CM novel but Blood Meridian in the first five before I gave up (it was 1am). I’m afraid I’m going to get through the other 10 and find that it’s been loaned out. So…I’m headed to the store.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:25 am
Good.
February 1st, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I’m POed. The county library system does not have all the McCarthy books. I’m not gonna be able to just buy one, if I get one, I’ll want them all. That means I have to cull my shelves.
I reckon some of my wife’s books are history. In the other sense of the word. Don’t tell.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Do you happen to have a first edition of All the Pretty Horses?
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:56 am
JD, I wonder what the ratio is for Noam Chomsky vs. Cormac McCarthy.
Quit making fun of me, Otis.