Blood Meridian discussion - This is a terrible place to die in

[Big Miss Steak]

I was referring to the boy finding other people. Readers I know were conflicted by the ending because it seemed to good to be true.

The final sentences you're referring to
are describing an image of life from a world that is gone forever. I think he put that in to "soften the blow" of the "happy" ending: oblivion has merely been delayed, and the most tragic events might be coming, because now the boy has even more to lose in a dying world. .. but that's how life is, isn't it?

I remember this now. Yeah, it's an ending that has a little bit of hope for the boy himself, but ultimately is still bleak. Even if the boy survives for a while, humanity and the world at large is done for.

The Road is a hard book. McCarthy's books always threatened to hurt me when I read one for the first time, but they don't hurt that much less the second time. I've found The Road deeply affecting every time I've read it, and I always find more in it.

I think I would have felt differently if I read it when I was in my early 20s. I found Blood Meridian affecting but not The Road. Probably something to do with more overall "going on:" characters, themes, plot, etc. The Road just seems sparser to me.

The movie by John Hillcoat is, by the way, decent. Not great, but a competent version of the story. The ending anyways gets me.

I do plan to see it. Big fan of Viggo.

I have no hope at all for the planned film version of Blood Meridian. There's talent behind it, but I don't think it's filmable, and not just because of the violence.

It's totally filmable if they have the right approach and a lot of talent. But those are big maybes. IMO they can't hope to translate it 1-to-1 to the big screen so they shouldn't be afraid to take some liberties. Nothing that affects the themes/meaning/broader plot. The best film adaptations aren't afraid to bring their own creativity to the material.

Honestly, I love how he wrote dialogue without quotation marks. It forces you to pay closer attention and to process what you're reading in a different way. It might be self-indulgent to some, but art is self-indulgent.

Has to be my biggest pet peeve with McCarthy.

Spoiler

Writing your work in such a way that it is often confusing if people are talking are not, and who is talking, is a cheap way to get people to "pay more attention." If I have to flip back a couple paragraphs because I didn't realize I was reading dialogue, that's on the writer. If I can't tell who is saying what because everyone talks with the same vocabulary and cadence, that's on the writer. Compare a passage where two of the gang members are talking to each other, without dialogue tags, to a scene where the Judge is speaking without dialogue tags. The Judge has a distinct way of speaking that is immediately identifiable, so the lack of dialogue tags doesn't pose any difficulty. There are many areas of Blood Meridian (and his other works) where this is not the case. Classic example of something that would get you reamed in a writing workshop/mentorship/class but that McCarthy gets away with because he's "an artist."

Run-on sentences are completely different, McCarthy uses them well to build tension, frenetic energy, or weariness. The lack of dialogue tags and quotation marks makes me legitimately tilted.

I phrased that rather poorly lol. To me reading McCarthy's Tennessee books is like having a famous author describe your hometown, the surrounding area, and the people that inhabit it. Those "See Rock City" barns I was talking about are only in one very small portion of the country and I saw many of them when I was young. I've been to "Rock City" lol.

Oh descriptive and knowledgeable about the geographic areas he writes about. Yes I agree 100%, he's great at that.

I think the issue with a lot of the discussion around Blood Meridian is that it is so easy to discuss the obvious stuff and ignore the more interesting bits.

https://youtu.be/pU8MwGGqUqs?si=aBornml_dua3aXBq
This specific section has so many layers I can't even begin to explain why I love it so much.

This is a great passage and fantastic monologue but it's another example of my point. Men are inherently evil. As long as there are people, there will be war. Surely this is not news to anyone who has studied history or taken a single philosophy class. The Judge thinks this is great because he's an evil person (whether he's Satan, Death, some other form of evil incarnate, or just a really awful person is up for debate I suppose).

Honestly Blood Meridian is the single best audiobook I've ever heard, as the way the book is written lends itself really well to an audio format.

Given my above seething about dialogue tags, I bet I would really like this as an audio book.

 

[darknation]

Just finished this book. Currently very thunkful.

Was thinking about Holden, expansion into the West, manifest destiny and all that shit, trying to figure out that the hell Holden *is*... a giant, larger than life, a killer with feminine features (hairless, tiny hands and tiny feet), and I remembered this image...

Dunno, maybe I'm fucking crazy.

 

[Bataille-m Le Tired]

I just finished Blood Meridian for the first time a few weeks back. I reread it immediately. The book was stressful and made me feel like I needed to take a shower but it was so exciting and the prose is like something out of a religious text from a different past. Anti-biblical.
There are very different ways of reading and understanding the book and the writing was so oppressive and surreal that to me it felt like the whole story took place in a kind of hellscape or in a gnostic sort of prison planet. I love the surreal moments in the book like the judge stepping through the fire “like a great ponderous jinn” during the magic show.
I really liked how the kid would just disappear for large portions of the book and while we have to assume that he’s taking part in these atrocities we never know to what extent. We are constantly guessing about where the kids heart lies or what it is that he’s looking for. The ambiguity of the ending is a lot of fun as well.
One other thought I had while reading was that the violence in the story is so horrific and unrelenting and the Glanton gang is so terrifying and irredeemable to us reading, but if there’s one thing that someone like Glanton is truly afraid of it would be the threat of softening and domesticating into someone like a modern “civilized” man.

 

[Bataille-m Le Tired]

Just finished this book. Currently very thunkful.

Was thinking about Holden, expansion into the West, manifest destiny and all that shit, trying to figure out that the hell Holden *is*... a giant, larger than life, a killer with feminine features (hairless, tiny hands and tiny feet), and I remembered this image...

View attachment 7646517

Dunno, maybe I'm fucking crazy.

Very cool! I wouldn’t have thought to describe the Judge as feminine but that image sure does look like a “giant baby” as he’s described haha.
Manifest destiny was a borderline religious movement in the US and I don’t think the Judge is aligned with religious forces or even with civilization at all. I’m not sure what to make of all that but the image is striking for sure. I think you might be onto something.

 

[frozen_runner]

Manifest destiny was a borderline religious movement in the US and I don’t think the Judge is aligned with religious forces or even with civilization at all. I’m not sure what to make of all that but the image is striking for sure. I think you might be onto something.

When people use the term "revisionist Western," they almost always mean "the white man was actually evil while the red man was a perfect, innocent victim." That is clearly not what Blood Meridian is (McCarthy makes sure we know how insanely violent and cruel the natives are), though it's been called that. The Western setting is important in the book, but I don't think the book is about America at all. It's about something much grander, about our entire species.

I'm reminded of a particularly out-of-touch "review" of The Road that said it's about climate change. (The origins of the apocalypse in the book are not specified, and the devastation is so total that no one explanation could suffice.) People just project whatever they want to see onto the stories they read.