Hey, look, a blog post.
I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian lately, and like the previous novels of his that I’ve read – Child of God and The Road – it aggressively underlines the fact that McCarthy is a genius. I’d rank him along with Faulkner as one of the greatest American novelists, and probably the greatest living American novelist. I don’t include Pynchon as competition because, try as I might, I cannot stand Pynchon. Many critics would roll their eyes and stop reading right here.
But yes – McCarthy is a genius. I don’t use Faulkner’s name at random, of course – McCarthy’s hyper-violent, disturbingly grim depiction of a geographical, ethical, and metaphysical wasteland in the American south is too reminiscent of Faulkner to not mention. “Wasteland” is a loaded word when discussing literature, too, ever since Eliot’s poem, and there would be much to examine in the parallel between “The Waste Land” and Blood Meridian. McCarthy’s novel has also been compared to The Iliad, The Inferno, and Moby Dick - a combination which suffice remarkably well, as a whole, to describe the novel’s character. It’s a work of genius because it is beautifully written; the prose is rich and heavy and delicious. But it’s also full of layers to appreciate. The plain narrative itself, the characterization, the standard surface-level readings are perfectly satisfying and fascinating. Thematically, it works on all sorts of levels as well; a high school student could analyze Blood Meridian and come up with something interesting, and so could a seasoned academic critic of literature.
But what I’d like to talk about is the quotation marks, or rather their absence.
