Professor Amy
Hungerford: Okay.
I'd like to begin.
Welcome back.
It is good to see you all.
It's a bit startling.
I don't know where those two
weeks went.
So, tell me:
I asked you to read Blood
Meridian over break;
was this a happy Spring Break
task for you?
Was it good "beach reading," as
I promised?
No?
No.
I'd like, before I begin my
lecture today,
just to hear a little bit from
you,
just so that I know what you're
thinking about as I talk to you
about this book.
Who liked this novel?
Okay, a good,
maybe, half of you.
Someone tell me why they liked
it;
someone, someone,
someone tell me why they liked
it.
Okay.
Now you're getting all quiet.
Someone can tell me one
sentence why you liked this
novel.
Yes.
Thank you.Student:
I like how creepy the judge
is.Professor Amy
Hungerford: You like how
creepy the judge is.
It is impressive how creepy he
is, yes.
Okay. Why else?
Yes.Student:
I actually like how kind of
quickly and bluntly some of the
atrocities happen in it.
So, you'll be reading a passage
where there are pretty mundane
things, and then all of a
sudden, slaughter.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: And you liked
that?
That was good. Yeah.
It certainly is a kind of
virtuosic representation of
violence, yes,
absolutely.
What did it remind you of?
Well, yes, yes.Student:
I liked how ambiguous the
ending was.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah.
The ending is very strange,
and we'll talk about that.
What else?
Yes.Student:
I liked that it read like a
nightmare.Professor Amy
Hungerford: It read like a
nightmare.
What does that
mean?Student:
I just remember,
reading it, it felt like a
nightmare.
It was very,
sort of, jumbled,
and just very sensory,
and it felt like a
nightmare.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah.
It is very sensory.
This prose concentrates so much
on the material of the world,
absolutely, and it does have
that feeling of drawing you into
its world very completely.
I think, also,
that sense of nightmarishness
is heightened by the fact that
the plot is not very strong in
this novel.
That's not what's driving this
novel.
You're laughing.
Why do you laugh?
Why do you laugh about that,
about the plot?
Yes.
You're still smiling from the
laughter, so I'm going to ask
you.
Student:
Just because yes,
that is true.
That's part of the reason that
I found it difficult to continue
reading, just maybe be
interested by the- I guess the
dry,
sort of emotionless way of
presenting violence.
It was sort of interesting,
but the fact that there didn't
seem to be a point,
or a place that they're going,
it made it really hard to not
just be, like.
"oh, this is going to be
disgusting."Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah.
It can produce this aversion in
readers.
How many were averse to this
novel?
Okay, a few of you, at least.
Yeah.
I think, - when I first tried
to read this novel,
I failed twice.
I'm a sensitive soul.
So, I failed twice to read this
novel because of its violence,
and then I persevered.
But it can get,
actually kind of boring,
sometimes, I think,
because of the plotlessness.
So, unless you're really
interested in how the story is
being told in that language,
it can be repetitive and can
numb you as a reader,
I think.
These are all aspects of the
novel that I will try to account
for over the course of my two
lectures today and on Wednesday.
There are two other things I'm
going to do in these two
lectures.
One is, today,
to think hard about what it
means to track allusions in a
novel.
So, that's going to be one
thing that I do today.
Allusions appear in most of
the things that we read,
dare I say all of them,
but one never quite knows what
to do with them,
once you have identified them.
Now, the sense of literature as
an art with a history depends on
our being able to do something
with allusions or to have
something to say about them.
What does it mean that one
novel speaks to a novel or a
poem or another kind of writing
from the past?
How are we to make sense of
that in the evolution of the art
form?
This is a foundation of what
English literary study looks
like pretty much at any
university.
At any university,
if you're an English major,
you're asked to study a
historical range of texts.
You're asked to master,
in some portion,
or to some extent,
the literary tradition in
English.
What does it mean that we're
asked to do that?
Cormac McCarthy's novel
gives us the opportunity to take
a case study.
What does it mean,
in this day,
in this time,
for this writer to be writing
in a tradition?
So, allusion is one thing I'll
focus on that's of general
interest in literary studies.
The second thing,
in the second lecture,
that I will focus on is what to
do with detail,
what to do with that odd detail
that you notice in the novel.
It could be anything.
Is there a way of making an
argument that will radiate out
from that detail into some more
holistic understanding of a
novel?
My second lecture will be a
demonstration of that and an
argument for that as a literary
technique,
and I hope that this will be
useful to you in writing the
next paper, which will be coming
up fairly shortly.
So, I want to begin,
then, with this quotation from
Cormac McCarthy.
This was his first interview,
1992.
Many of you probably know he's
gotten a lot more press since
Oprah's Book Club chose his
latest novel,
The Road.
He's sort of been out and
about.
He gave her an interview.
He's given an interview since
then for a magazine.
Before that he was a very
reclusive writer,
and he had been writing since
the late '60s and by 1992--up
until that point--he had refused
all interviews.
He usually refused readings,
even when he had zero money.
He lived out of hotel rooms,
even when he was married and
had a son, when he was a young
man.
He's on his third marriage now.
He would turn down invitations
to read even when they were down
to their last dollar.
His ex-wife tells some amusing
stories about this.
He'd get an invitation to read,
he'd turn it down,
and they'd eat beans for
another night.
So, that's her take on what
that life was like.
He says in this interview:
"The ugly fact is books are
made out of books.
The novel depends for its life
on the novels that have been
written."
So, this is my invitation to
take seriously allusion in
Blood Meridian.
Did anybody on their own
recognize some of the sources of
Blood Meridian?
Did you notice any allusions?
Yes.
Student:
Oral history,
storytelling.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yes,
absolutely.
Yeah.
The oral tradition is very
powerful in McCarthy's writing.
The sound of the prose is very
important to him.
Yeah.
What else?
Yes.Student:
Along those same lines,
when he frequently talks about
the sun coming up or going down,
there is a lot of that in
The Odyssey,
when the sun's fingers are
coming
out…Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah.
A lot of that cosmic imagery,
I think he does take from the
great epics of our language.
Yes.
What else?
What else did you notice?
Yes.Student:
I noticed a lot of
references to the Bible:
the burning bush and other
things.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah,
absolutely.
The Bible is peppered
throughout this,
and I'm going to have a lot to
say about that--some to say
about it,
today, but I have a whole
argument about that that I'll
get to on Wednesday.
Yeah, absolutely.
What else?
Anything else you noticed?
Well, I'm going to start,
actually, a little bit closer
to home, in the American
tradition.
I'm going to start with
Moby-Dick.
This is my lineup of texts
that I am going to use today to
talk about Blood
Meridian. So,
I want to start with Moby
Dick.
This is probably the single
most important book for
McCarthy, beside the Bible,
as a source for both language,
character, ideas,
moral questions.
All kinds of things come from
Moby-Dick.
And, if you want to begin
in the easiest way,
the first thing is to think
about Ahab.
Ahab is known for his
monomaniacal evil,
his evil quest to take on the
white whale.
As a character who is
loquacious, charismatic,
threatening,
violent, he is very much a
model for Judge Holden.
So, in that simple,
general way McCarthy owes a
debt to Moby-Dick.
There are many specific
ways that this novel owes a debt
to Moby-Dick.
One, that I'll joint point
out, is from the prophet chapter
in Moby-Dick.
That's chapter 19.
If you've read the novel,
you can recall that before
Ishmael and Queequeg get on the
Pequod they are accosted by a
beggar in the street.
And his name is Elijah,
and he warns them in very
cryptic language about what
they've actually signed away,
when they signed the papers to
board the Pequod.
And he suggests that what
they've signed away is their
souls, not just the couple of
years of their life.
The version that we get in
Blood Meridian can be
found on page 40 and 41.
It actually starts on 39.
The kid has joined up with
Captain White's gang of
filibusters, and they are in a
bar and there they find--this is
on 39--an old,
disordered Mennonite in this
place.
And he turns to study them,
"a thin man in a leather
waistcoat, a black and
straight-brimmed hat set square
on his head, a thin rim of
whiskers."
And, if you look at the
Moby-Dick version,
I just want to point out how
closely he's following the cues
here.
"Queequeg and I had just
left the Pequod and were
sauntering away from the water,
for the moment each occupied
with his own thoughts,
when the above words [shipmates
have ye shipped in that ship]
were put to us by a stranger
who,
pausing before us,
leveled his massive forefinger
at the vessel in question.
He was but shabbily appareled
in faded jacket and patched
trousers, a rag of black
handkerchief investing his
neck.
Just the way that description,
the very brief description of
his outfit, what he's wearing
around his neck,
his hat: they match up,
in these two little paragraphs.
The Mennonite,
however, is much more dire,
much less playful than
Melville's Elijah.
He says to the assembled men:
"They'll jail you to a man"
This is on 40:
"Who will?"
"The United States Army,
General Worth."
"The hell they will."
"Pray that they will."
He looks at his comrades.
He leans toward the Mennonite.
"What does that mean, old man?"
"Do ye cross that river with
yon filibuster armed you'll not
cross it back."
"Don't aim to cross it back.
We goin' to Sonora.
What's it to you, old man?"
The Mennonite watches the
enshadowed dark before them as
it is reflected to him in the
mirror over the bar.
He turns to them.
His eyes are wet.
He speaks slowly.
"The wrath of God lies sleeping.
It was hid a million years
before men were and only men
have the power to wake it.
Hell ain't half full.
Hear me.
Ye carry war of a madman's
making into a foreign land,
ye'll wake more than the dogs."
But they berated the old man
and swore at him until he moved
off down the bar muttering.
And how else could it be?
How these things end,
in confusion and curses and
blood.
They drank on and the wind blew
in the streets and the stars
that had been overhead lay low
in the west and these young men
fell afoul of others and words
were said that could not be put
right again,
and in the dawn the kid and the
second corporal knelt over the
boy from Missouri who had been
named Earl and they spoke his
name but he never spoke back.
He lay on his side in the dust
of the courtyard.
The men were gone.
The whores were gone.
An old man swept the clay floor
within the cantina.
The boy lay with his skull
broken in a pool of blood,
none knew by whom.
A third one came to be with
them in the courtyard.
It was the Mennonite.
A warm wind was blowing and the
east held a gray light.
The fowls roosting along the
grapevines had begun to stir and
call.
"There is no such joy in the
tavern as upon the road
thereto," said the Mennonite.
He had been holding his hat in
his hands and now he set it upon
his head again and turned and
went out the gate.
He offers them these portentous
sayings, like this last little
epigram about the tavern and the
road thereto,
and he uses this archaic
language.
Moby-Dick's
prophet, who occupies the
same structural spot,
accosting the main characters
as they go out on their journey,
is much more playful.
He is berated by Ishmael for
pretending to have a big secret,
for speaking as if he had a
secret to tell,
but not telling it.
So, McCarthy takes the model
and transforms it slightly,
brings it into a realm where
sincerity and depth and fear
replace the inklings of fear
around a core of good will,
irony, playfulness.
The reason there is that
difference, I think,
is that McCarthy has decided
not to give us an Ishmael.
Ishmael is an incredibly
charming narrator.
He is thoughtful;
he's funny;
he is a little self-mocking;
he can wax both grand and silly;
he can recognize his own
silliness.
There's a vast interior of
Ishmael's mind that we see in
this narrative.
We never see the like of this
from the kid,
never.
This is one way in which
McCarthy has revised Melville,
so this is one of those
observations I'm going to,
sort of, put up on the shelf.
What does it mean that this is
the way he has revised Melville?
This is one of the questions
that my two lectures,
together, will answer.
What does that revision mean?
Another specific scene in
which McCarthy is revising
Melville comes when Toadvine
almost kills the judge.
Do you remember the scene?
The judge has been dandling the
little Indian boy on his knee.
The men around the campfire are
delighted.
They laugh.
In the morning the judge has
killed the boy,
and scalped it,
and is wiping his hands on his
pants.
And Toadvine puts his revolver
to the judge's head,
and the judge says,
"Shoot that thing or put it
away."
And Toadvine puts it away.
This is the direct echo of a
moment when Starbuck stands
outside Ahab's cabin.
Ahab's maniacal quest for the
whale has been made apparent to
the whole ship.
Starbuck, that wise and
deliberative man,
understands that the fate of
the whole ship has now been
recruited to Ahab's maniacal
cause.
He knows that if he takes the
musket and shoots Ahab in his
bed he will save the whole ship
of men.
He does not do it.
So, both Toadvine and Starbuck
are presented with a moral
problem: Do you murder the
leader of an immoral,
ill-fated, violent quest?
Both men decide not to.
This is a scene I'll come
back to next time,
on Wednesday,
and I'll have more to say about
it.
But, for now,
one thing that we can say about
it is, once again,
the lack of interiority for
these characters makes a crucial
difference.
It's a crucial point of
revision.
Starbuck, we know,
is deliberative.
We know he is a wise man.
He gives counsel to Ahab over
the whole course of the novel:
to abandon his quest,
to go home to his wife,
at the very end of the novel.
In a crucial moment,
Starbuck gives an impassioned
plea to Ahab,
reminds him of his wife and
child and says,
"Leave off chasing that whale.
Let us live and go home."
We have no such history for
Toadvine.
What do we know about Toadvine?
Well, he wears a scapular of
ears that he's cut off.
He has tattoos from his
criminal past on his face.
He wears the evidence of a
criminal life,
not the furrowed brow of
Starbuck's thought.
He is a very different kind of
character, and that leads us to
wonder how we need to understand
his failure to shoot the judge.
Is it that moral complexity
yields lack of decisiveness,
as we might say for Starbuck,
that moral complexity is
presented as a kind of weakness?
Or, is that far too much to say
about Toadvine?
Is Toadvine a morally complex
character?
Do we have any basis upon which
to say such a thing?
So, this is another kind of
question we want to ask.
Now I'm going to move to my
second in line,
here, and that's Paradise
Lost.
McCarthy rings the changes
on the great voices of American
literature, but also of world
literature in English.
You were talking about The
Iliad and the epic
tradition.
In this case,
he is entering the great realm
of poetry.
Now he gives a specific
revision of Paradise Lost
in Blood Meridian,
if you recall.
How many of you have taken a
Milton class,
or have read Milton in class?
Okay.
Okay, a good number of you,
so probably a bunch of you
realize this.
When the judge makes gunpowder,
do you remember this scene?
The men are out of gunpowder.
They find the judge in the
desert.
They're being hounded by the
Indians they've been chasing all
this time.
They're at their mercy.
They know they're going to be
massacred.
They find the judge sitting on
a rock in the middle of the
desert.
Who knows how he got there?
Glanton takes him up.
He rides with them,
and he takes them to a volcanic
cone, a dead cone,
and there he instructs them how
to make gunpowder.
He takes brimstone from the rim
of the cone, he mixes it with
charcoal and other things,
and then he has them piss on
it.
And from this he makes
gunpowder, and they use that
gunpowder to defeat the Indians
who come after them.
Well, this is taken
directly from Paradise Lost.
Satan instructs his fiends
in how to make gunpowder,
and I'm going to read you a
little bit from Book 6 of
Paradise Lost.
So, the fiends are down in
Hell strategizing,
somewhat in despair over their
chances against God's angels.
The fallen angels are standing
around Satan,
and they're taking turns making
speeches,
and they've just heard a speech
from a fallen angel who says,
"We really need a better
weapon.
Otherwise we're never going to
win this war."
And here is what Satan has to
say.
Whereto with look
composed Satan replied.
Not uninvented that,
which thou arightBelievest
so main to our success,
I bring.
Which of us who beholds the
bright surfaceOf this
ethereous mould whereon we
stand,
This continent of spacious
Heaven, adornedWith plant,
fruit, flower ambrosial,
gems, and gold;
Whose eye so superficially
surveysThese things,
as not to mind from whence they
growDeep under ground,
materials dark and crude,Of
spiritous and fiery spume,
till touchedWith Heaven's
ray,
and tempered,
they shoot forthSo
beauteous, opening to the
ambient light?
These in their dark nativity
the deepShall yield us,
pregnant with infernal flame;
Which, into hollow engines,
long and round,Thick
rammed, at the other bore with
touch of fireDilated and
infuriate,
[that's very much a McCarthy
word, infuriate]
shall send forthFrom far,
with thundering noise,
among our foesSuch
implements of mischief,
as shall dashTo pieces,
and o'erwhelm whatever
standsAdverse,
that they shall fear we have
disarmedThe Thunderer of his
only dreaded bolt.
So, there Satan's saying,
"Look at the world.
You look at all these plants.
The chemicals we need are in
this earth."
So, this is what the judge
says, for his part,
in like circumstance.
This is on 129,130,
and this, remember,
is told by Tobin,
the ex-priest:
In all this time,--[as
they were riding across the
plain without gunpowder]
In all this time the judge had
spoke hardly a word.
So at dawn we were on the edge
of a vast malpais and his honor
takes up a position on some lava
rocks there and he commences to
give us an address.
See, there is that same
structural position.
The judge occupies the place
that Satan does in Paradise
Lost and gives a speech:
It was like a sermon but
it was no such sermon as any man
of us had ever heard before.
Beyond the malpais was a
volcanic peak and in the sunrise
it was many colors and there was
dark,
little birds crossin down the
wind and the wind was flappin
the judge's old benjamin about
him and he pointed to that stark
and solitary mountain and
delivered himself of an oration
to what end I know not,
then or now,
and he concluded with the
tellin us that our mother earth
as he said was round like an egg
and contained all good things
within her.
Then he turned and led the
horse he had been ridin across
that terrain of black and glassy
slag,
treacherous to men and beast
alike, and us behind him like
the disciples of a new
faith.
So, the oration urging them to
see in the earth all the things
they need: exactly out of
Paradise Lost. And
then,
a little further down the page,
you see that Tobin speculates
about the volcanic terrain
they're crossing - "where for
aught any man knows lies the
locality of Hell."
He even speculates that this is
where Hell's entrance might be.
So, what does McCarthy do when
he invites us to see the judge
as the parallel of Satan?
I think this is one of the most
powerful allusions driving
readings of this novel.
Lots of readers have taken
Judge Holden as heroic evil,
on the model of Milton's
Satan.Remember,
the famous problem about
Paradise Lost is that,
here was Milton writing it to
justify the ways of God to men,
justifying how good God was,
and yet Satan is this
incredibly compelling character.
Milton writes Satan to be
irresistible,
and in particular he is,
rhetorically,
incredibly gifted,
and so he makes all of these
wonderful speeches that Milton
writes for him that we get to
listen to.
So, McCarthy sets up a similar
problem in Blood Meridian.
Here is the judge.
He has this compelling language
that we want to listen to.
It's very sonorous.
There is that debt to the oral
tradition, and yet he is this
incredibly evil man.
So, there is a problem,
here, of moral valence.
Can we condemn,
or does the book condemn,
this figure?
It's the problem in Paradise
Lost.
It's the problem,
also, in Blood Meridian.
If you find the violence in
Blood Meridian simply
gratuitous, then you've answered
that, in a certain way,
by saying, "No.
The character is not so
compelling that I can put up
with the graphic representation
of violence.
It doesn't make it worth it."
But there is another school of
thought that says the aesthetics
of the violence,
the aesthetics of the judge,
do make it worth it.
So, that is a kind of debt.
The other way this sheds
light on the novel is to say
that the novel is concerned,
like Paradise Lost,
with the great cosmic
structures of the world.
Now, this is another element,
too, of its use of the Bible,
and I'll talk about that in a
minute.
But it gives,
for the novel,
a certain kind of weight.
It makes us read it looking for
those big, cosmic structures and
statements about those big,
cosmic structures.
It lends it weight unleavened
by the kinds of delightful
playfulness that we see from
Ishmael.
Melville is full of the Bible,
and full of portentousness,
too, but always Ishmael's voice
is there charming us.
What we have here,
instead, is sheer
portentousness--some say
pretentiousness--weighing on
every sentence.
The allusions to Paradise
Lost are part of that
portentousness.
Now, let me move to
something smaller,
moving a little later in the
poetic tradition:
Wordsworth.
In the opening lines of this
novel, we see the line on page
3, "All history present in that
visage,"
the face of the kid,
"the child, the father of the
man."
That phrase,
"The child, the father of the
man," comes from a short,
little poem by William
Wordsworth.
It's called "My Heart Leaps up
when I Behold."
My heart leaps up when I
behold / A rainbow in the sky:
/ So was it when my life began,
/ So is it now I am a man,
/ So be it when I shall grow
old / Or let me die!
/ The child is father of the
man: / And I could wish my days
to be / Bound each to each by
natural piety.
This is a lovely little snippet
of a poem.
The point of it is to say that
the child, delighted by the
rainbow, gives you the man,
delighted by the rainbow,
and he says,
"Let me die if I'm no longer
delighted,
if I get to be so old that that
childlike delight in the rainbow
is gone."
The rainbow comes freighted
with its own biblical literary
history: that is,
it's the sign of God's promise
to the world,
to humankind,
that God will no longer send a
flood to wipe out the human race
as He did in the days of Noah.
So, it is a hopeful sign for
the fate of humankind,
and it reflects well on God's
intentions towards us.
McCarthy's child,
father of the man,
is a very different sort.
Just read that sentence right
prior to the allusion:
"He can neither read nor write
and in him broods already a
taste for mindless violence."
What McCarthy announces here,
in his revision of Wordsworth,
is that, although to invoke
Milton's Satan is already to
project us into the realm of
Romantic figures,
he is rejecting the later
Romanticism of the early
nineteenth century which found
in humankind,
especially in the child as the
epitome of pure humankind,
a kind of great hopefulness.
This is not what McCarthy sees
in humankind.
This is not what the kid gives
to us, even though we are told,
a little later on,
on page 4, the child's face is
curiously untouched behind the
scars, the eyes oddly innocent.
What does that innocence mean?
Is it, here,
an innocence like Wordsworth's
child, who can behold the
rainbow with joy and a pure
relation to the world and to a
caring god?
Is it that kind of innocence?
Is it the innocence simply of
not knowing something?
Is it that kind of innocence?
Is it an absence of guilt?
Is that what the innocence is?
These are questions,
again, I'm going to put up on
the side.
What is the quality of the
kid's innocence?
This is something I'm going to
answer on Wednesday,
but I want you to think about
it.
The allusion to Wordsworth
causes us to ask that kind of
question.
The revision tells us we are in
a much darker world.
Now, I'm actually going to skip
over some of the biblical
allusion and trust you to read,
in the first couple of pages,
just in that first section.
I'd like you reread it and
think about how the Bible is
woven in there.
You see lots of Garden of Eden
imagery there.
You see a parricide,
the image of the murdered
father.
There is an echo there of Cain
and Abel, even though they are
brothers.
There is a sense that this is a
world in which violence and
murder has already entered.
So, you can think about that.
I want to go,
now, to my last in the pile of
books.
This is an historical source
called My Confession,
and it is by a man named
Samuel Chamberlain.
Chamberlain fought for the U.S.
in the Mexican War,
and after the war was over he
joined up with the Glanton Gang.
The Glanton Gang is a
historical fact,
as far as we know.
It was a gang of scalp hunters
that operated around the border
right after the Mexican War in
the 1840s and '50s.
Sam Chamberlain--I want to show
you--he was quite a remarkable
guy.
He was from Boston,
born in New Hampshire,
grew up in Boston.
At sixteen he left Boston and
went out West,
taking a sort of circuitous
route.
He went to find his fortune and
to find adventure,
but he also went with a box of
paints.
And he produced these amazing
watercolors everywhere he went,
and he wrote this testimony of
his adventures called My
Confession.
It reads like a picaresque.
It's full of his own heroism,
all the senoritas that he
romances, all the great battles
he fights in,
but he really gives us an
amazing set of paintings.
You can just see these.
I'm going to show you a couple.
While I'm waiting for this
to come up, I'm going to show
you something you can't see on
this web site.
This is the Texas State
Historical Society where these
documents are kept.
The pages are written-- I don't
know if you can see this.
This is a reproduction.
See, he writes in this gorgeous
hand, and he embellishes all the
pages with little drawings.
And this is hundreds of pages
long, with hundreds of
watercolors in it.
My bet is that McCarthy
actually saw this manuscript in
the Texas State Historical
Society.
That's where he lived.
That's where he was living when
he wrote this book.
And it just is amazingly visual
and gorgeous.
He ended up making three copies
of this with all its paintings.
When he got back to New England
he married and he had three
daughters (which he named after
various senoritas that he had
romanced) and he made a copy of
My Confession for each,
so there are three of them.
One is at Annapolis;
one is at the Texas State
Historical Society,
and I think one is with the
family.
All right.
So, this isn't giving you
the paintings that I want,
and I'm going to--These are two
that I took up.
This one on the right-- Well,
we'll do the little one on the
left.
The one on the left is his
drawing of the Grand Canyon,
and he claims that it was the
first ever painting of the Grand
Canyon (and I think this is
probably false).
That's them crossing through,
the gang.
This is Judge Holden,
here, discoursing on evolution
in a very Judge Holden-ly way.
So, we actually hear about this
sermon on evolution in the
novel.
Well, here it is in
Chamberlain's Confession.
Now, I want to read to you
a little bit from the
Confession.
The second in command,
now left in charge of the camp,
was a man of gigantic size who
rejoiced in the name of Holden,
called Judge Holden of Texas.
Who or what he was no one knew,
but a more cool-blooded villain
never went unhung.
He stood six foot six in his
moccasins, had a large,
fleshy frame,
a dull, tallow-colored face
destitute of hair and all
expression,
always cool and collected.
But when a quarrel took place
and blood shed,
his hog-like eyes would gleam
with a sullen ferocity worthy of
the countenance of a fiend.
[I'm going to skip a little
bit.]
Terrible stories were
circulated in camp of horrid
crimes committed by him when
bearing another name in the
Cherokee nation in Texas.
And before we left Fronteras,
a little girl of ten years was
found in the chaparral foully
violated and murdered.
The mark of a huge hand on her
little throat pointed out him as
the ravisher as no other man had
such a hand.
But though all suspected,
no one charged him with the
crime.
He was by far the best educated
man in northern Mexico.
He conversed with all in their
own language,
spoke in several Indian lingos,
at a fandango would take the
harp or guitar from the hands of
the musicians and charm all with
his wonderful performance,
out-waltz any poblano of the
ball, plum centre with rifle or
revolver, a daring horseman
acquainted with the nature of
all the strange plants and their
botanical names,
great in geology and
mineralogy, with all an errant
coward, but not that he
possessed enough courage to
fight Indians and Mexicans or
anyone where he had the
advantage and strength stealing
weapons,
but where the combat would be
equal he would avoid it if
possible.
I hated him at first sight and
he knew it.
The intellectual beast saw fit
to patronize me in the most
insulting manner,
lecturing me on the immorality
of my conduct in drinking and
gambling.
This was shortly after the
murder of the muchacha,
and when I made an angry reply
he said, "Come,
Jack.
Don't bear ill will.
Shake hands and make up."
I replied, "No.
I thank you.
Your hand is too large and
powerful.
It leaves its mark."
Holden gave me a look out from
his cold, cruel eyes and quietly
said, "You are there,
are you?
Well, look out where my hand
may squeeze the life out of you
yet, my young bantam."
I felt like trying my revolver
on his huge carcass,
but prudence forbid bringing
matters to a deadly issue at
present.
There is that same
Toadvine-Starbuck moment.
It's right in My
Confession, as is
that particular strange
description of Judge Holden as
huge and hairless.
Now, in the nineteenth century
hairless just meant that he
didn't have a beard,
but McCarthy takes that and
makes it into this really
freakish character.
It's almost like he's a giant
infant.
What does it mean that McCarthy
gets the most powerful character
in the novel so directly from
this source?
That's one question.
Second question is:
what does it mean that he's
actually taking an historical
fact,
the Glanton Gang and their
adventures, and using these as
the kernel of his novel,
when--as my little pile of
books here has
demonstrated--he's totally
absorbed in the novel's
relationship to literary
history?
So, what's he doing by
doubling the literary history
with an American history?
He's pursuing two sets of links
back through time:
one in the realm of art,
one in the realm of history.
What's the relationship between
the two?
When I first read this,
I will say, I was extremely
surprised.
Are you surprised,
too, to see that it takes so
directly from Chamberlain's
manuscript?
The problem is the problem of
originality.
This is a problem that,
I think, McCarthy's quotation,
that I wrote up on the board,
points towards:
"The ugly fact is that books
are made out of books."
Why is that an ugly fact?
What's ugly about that?
"The novel depends for its life
on the novels that have been
written."
Is it ugly because it calls
into question the very principle
of originality?
This is what someone,
a reader like Harold Bloom,
might say.
Harold Bloom argues that it is
the "anxiety of influence" that
shapes many writers in the
tradition.
As they take on the great
writers of the past,
they feel that they are ever
belated,
that there is no room yet in
the world to push the art form
further.
Is that why it's an ugly fact?
Is its ugliness,
or the way that word is used in
this quotation,
is it registering McCarthy's
anxiety about his own
belatedness?
Can he really be original?
Can he really answer the
portentous, cosmic aura that he
invokes over and over again in
the very style of this novel?
The style keeps telling you,
"Come and look for a deeper
meaning."
Now, I want to point out
one last thing for you,
since I do have just the couple
minutes that I will need.
This is on 4 and 5.
At the top of 4,
as the kid moves from Tennessee
down to New Orleans,
and then out to the West,
he moves through the South:
He sees blacks in the
fields lank and stooped,
their fingers spiderlike among
the bolls of cotton,
a shadowed agony in the garden.
[There is some of that Eden
imagery I was going to point out
to you at more length.]
Against the sun's declining
figures moving in the slower
dusk across a paper
skyline.
The landscape itself is already
an artifact;
it's paper.
It's as if it's of McCarthy's
own construction.
But if you look just across the
page, on 5, this is a tiny
thing, and probably it didn't
register to you at all.
A week on he is on the
move again, a few dollars in his
purse that he's earned walking
the sand roads of the southern
night alone,
his hands balled in the cotton
pockets of his cheap coat.
Do you notice the way the words
are repeating there?
"Spiderlike among the bolls of
cotton," "his hands balled in
the cotton pockets of his coat."
It's a tiny, little thing.
I would argue,
however, that what we're seeing
here is the way the very style
and tone perpetuates itself,
out of itself.
So, I want to add a final layer
in my excavation of allusion,
and here say that he's alluding
to himself,
that there is a constant
re-layering that takes the
language and the repetitiousness
of that language builds within
the text.
There is a lot of anxiety
about origin,
right here in these couple
pages.
We're told, "Only now is
it"--as he goes to Texas--"only
now is the child finally
divested of all he has been."
And you note,
at the beginning,
that he is, and his folk are
known for, "hewers of wood and
drawers of water."
These are the traditional
adjectives given to the sons of
Ham, the hewers of wood and
drawers of water.
Ham's crime against his father,
Noah, was that he saw his
father, Noah,
naked in his tent.
Noah planted a vineyard,
got drunk, and I guess he was
naked in his tent while he was
passed out.
Ham happened to peep in and saw
his father naked.
His two brothers covered the
father.
The two brothers are therefore
blessed;
Ham is cursed.
Why is this a curse-worthy
action?
Why is this a curse-worthy
mistake?
I think it's because,
in seeing the father naked,
you see the mystery of your
origin.
And so, the kid is likened to
someone cursed for looking upon
their origin.
There is a sense in which he
can almost understand it.
This is meant to be mystery,
and yet by looking,
somehow, he is closer to it
than he should be.
The problem for the kid is to
divest himself of origin,
to forget it,
so if Ham is cursed because he
saw his origin,
the kid's curse lies,
in part, in the divestiture of
all origin.
He forgets it.
It's not that he sees it;
he forgets it.
And then you can get a
sentence like this:
"His origins are become remote
as is his destiny and not again
in all the world's turning will
there be terrain so wild and
barbarous to try whether the
stuff of creation may be shaped
to man's will or whether his own
heart is not another kind of
clay."
I want you to read the sentence
several times before Wednesday,
and ask yourself if you can
figure out what it means fully,
all of it.
Parts of it are more clear than
others.
Think about the balance between
the rhythm of that sentence and
its content,
the tone, what its tone says to
you, what its diction says to
you, and what the sentence
itself actually says to you.
So, that's what I'd like you to
think about.
And on Wednesday I'm going to
take this discussion of
allusion, and I'm going to sort
of ball it up and it'll become
part of another argument,
and that'll stem from one tiny
detail I'm going to take out of
the novel.
So that's where I'm going.
