Thanks to all of you who let me know you're reading. I know dialogue can be a hard thing to foster, but join in whenever you can.
This time tomorrow, I will have completed my second year of grad school. My own teaching is over, and I have some final revisions on some essays. It's a good feeling.
I have some thoughts on Blood Meridian as a novel for not only always but particularly today.
Deleuze and Guattari have this theory of plateaus which lends itself to bastardization. Essentially, reality can be understood as a concentration of forces, which they call plateaus, or intensities. These plateaus are constantly coming in contact with one another, dissolving, merging, redissolving. We don't see one history, we see many historical intensities; not one politics, multiple political forces; not one literature, many literary forces playing on one another.
Or doing battle. What fascinates me about the thousand (and one) plateaus is the the border between them, the in-between plateaus. The friction between two intensities. More than the thing itself, this is where contact is made, sometimes pleasurable and sometimes violent, and sometimes a violence which seems, inexplicably, pleasurable, precisely because of the rupture between beings that the violence designates.
McCarthy may have read D&G, but he didn't need to. His novel excells beyond their theorization into the viscerality of bodies in the universe which cannot help but confront the terror of this passage between elevations. As Judge Holden, the brutal center of Blood Meridian declares, "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage." The residual namelessnes, the unsignified force which you see only in the contact between otherwise invisible and all-powerful plateaus: this is the vision that charges McCarthy's novel. The dark half of mannicheanism, perhaps, or a negative agnostic theology which claims to see God's face not in the symbolism of a sacrificial lamb but the viscera of Holden's "holy war." Not a call to jihad, a war which is made holy by the proclamations of some law giving Deity, but war holy as itself, in itself, the impossibly paradox of a fully imminent transcendental sign which signifies nothing outside itself.
The story, in its utter simplicity, could not be more compelling. Its movement back and forth between the new borders created by the Mexican American war highlights the permeablity of the geographic and political boundaries which accompanied the emergence of North American nationalism. But these new nations are built upon the ruins of earlier civilizations which do not recognize those lines, and the story follows a group of bounty hunters hired by local governments to hunt down Apache raiders. The result is a repitition of battle, aesthetic, at times darkly comical, banal:
spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos. . .
McCarthy's battle is akin to Faulkner's "blood" and Melville's white whale. It is internal, affective, inescapable. . . and defies feeble attempts to contain it in a frame, an ethic, or a language. It can only be sought after, and only at an unthinkable cost.
Posted by pjaussen at June 7, 2006 05:41 PM | TrackBack