A reflection on McCarthy's terrifying vision and how it has been received and perceived in American culture and what that tells us about the American worldview.
The comments about the lack of female characters are strange to me as I’ve only read three McCarthy novels: outer dark, the passenger and Stella Maris , but all three have central characters who are women. Outer dark has numerous women characters and depicts female society at many levels. The depictions of nature in OD are beautiful and very rich, not a wilderness in any sense. Finally , OD is expressly about community: various people trying to coalesce into groups of support. The two central characters in OD are constantly invited to join families and communities , but the tragedy is that they never do. Having said that, some good points made. I think McCarthy’s work basically lays bare the extreme violence and isolation that US life is based upon. It’s the existential ground for its being. I also find it interesting that McCarthy never seems to tackle issues around race in his work. Or does he do so in any of his other books?
You are correct that his work is overwhelmingly masculine, but Alicia Western has tons of dialogue in Stella Maris and The Passenger. Late career correction if you will.
I have literally just finished rereading _Blood Meridian_ and this video comes out so I listened extra hard and more curiously. I didn't like the novel the first time I had read it because of its wholly gratuitous violence and its dismally stark portrayal of that particular place and time. To me it was way over the top and non-realistic in its descriptions of modern human beings. We all know that the West was a violent and lawless episode in our American history, but I had thought that McCarthy was being too sensationalistic about it for narrative's sake and so I missed the deeper message because I was annoyed by the savage butchery that fills nearly every one of its twenty-three chapters. I had also not enjoyed on my first reading of _Catch-22_ and _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_, two other acclaimed novels of the 20th century. (Some say that _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_ is the greatest novel ever written.) They, in my mind, suffered from the same absurd excess that _Blood Meridian_ had fallen into. _Catch-22_, I felt, was so caught up in irony and satire that I had felt that it stepped all over the message it was trying convey: the utter inhumanity of war and the craven ambitions of all the officers unduly trying to impress superiors in order to get promoted no matter how detrimental that would be to the enlisted men underneath them. And with _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_ I was even more put off because of how even more magical and mythical its characters and situations were. But on a second and closer reading of all these novels, I realized the utter genius in all of them. There is an act of imagination and creativity in each of these that is a thing of beauty to behold. I would say that these authors with their exaggerations, absurdities and nonrealisms are trying to reach beyond the ordinary and give an accounting of human nature that celebrates the artistic role of self-aware individuals and gives that creative power the most important role in the development of civilization and the blossoming future. So, of course, this can very well be a lonely, peculiar and nonlinear series of events. These books aren't easy to read (like say, _The Catcher In The Rye_) because you, the reader, have to interpret the confusing input and put narrative puzzles together. My main takeaway after rereading _Blood Meridian_, is not that it is a book of exposing the violent nature of man in his primeval element (Hobbes), but rather a warning of the destructive/constructive force of Nature in which we are all subject to. All great civilizations have fallen and they have never regained their former glory (Egypt, Greek, Roman, etc). Individuals are just as susceptible to ruin and degeneracy as anything else in the world (Think of the Compsons in Faulkner's _The Sound And The Fury_). Judge Holden is this destructive/constructive prophet in a mass of decadent humanity where The Kid is the novel's best hope. Judge Holden ends up killing The Kid (now The Man) in an implicit act of total barbaric and perverted savagery. The Kid perhaps got what he deserved because while he was the one who saw most clearly the destructive and futile purpose of those savage mercenaries, he did nothing about it in ultimately acts of personal cowardice. And perhaps that is what will befall the mighty American Empire of today. We can be constructive in our lives or we can be destructive. I think that Cormac McCarthy is saying that we humans are mostly destructive people because we really don't care to be all that curious about the nature of our intertwining lives and what that means for our futures and the future of our nation.
Cormac McCarthy was a rad writer.....Love ''Suttree'' & ''Old men''.....W/ PK Dick one of the best American writers of the 20C. Consider doing a video on PKD. Enjoy your work, cheers brother.
Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil, for discussing Cormac McCarthy's great literary works. I have all of his novels. "Blood Meridian" is my favorite. He was an interesting man with great intelligence in various fields. As you also may know, they are doing a film about "Blood Meridian" with Mr. McCarthy's blessing before he passed. This particular director and screenplay writer had done another film of another book of his. He better not screw it up, I dare say. Who cares about historical relevance, it's novel , damn it. As for women, we have always been slaves and second-hand citizens since the Gilgamesh Epic. I am a tortured poet, and alas, we may agree to disagree. What is it that creates violence and chaos? Cultures coming apart, for those who don't learn to think outside of the box. Reality check, welcome to Aldoux Huxley's "Brave New World." TS Elliott, "Waistland" Jacob's ladder with his spiraling staircase? Henry James was an honorable writer. Put this on your book list. Frantz Omar Fanon, "The Wretched Earth," "Black Skin, White Masks." 2 books I have just finished. That be a top of the morning to you. Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil for all I have gained knowledge from you.😊❤
* McCarthy "isn't funny" ?? .... >>> ASAP; you need to read Suttree! FUNNIEST NOVEL EVER WITTEN.... even the ultra-dark and violent Blood Meridian has a few funny moments. McCarthy is very comical, don't ever depict him as some dry nightmare author only, that's DEAD wrong.
"One of the most interesting things about McCarthys writing is his lack of women, and that leads to unrealistic world building." 😂 its a shame how limited the world view of literary critics is. You read about the world, but its always second hand accounts, and never lived experiences. Im a welder in texas, and have worked in west texas in construction and on oil rigs. Truth is, there just isnt any woman around. You can go six months straight without seeing a single one. Not misogyny, just a stone cold fact, and thats now. If you're a gang of scalp hunters traversing the deserts of west texas, in the 1800's. you cant exactly stop at a wendys and flirt with a cashier.😂 its a catch 22 (another book written with only men, because it takes place in an air force base during ww2...go figure) if a man writes a women's perspective hes a misogynist because he has no place speaking for women. And if he doesn't write about women hes a misogynist for not including women😂 damned if you do, damned if you dont... plus hes even said its not his place to talk on women because hes not one AND sutree and children of god both have female lead characters. So you literally couldnt be more wrong on every front, its honestly impressive. People self indulgently read books and they think it absolves themselves of being ignorant. Lmao id say pick up a book, but that clearly hasn't helped😅
Neoliberalism, Cultural Appropriation, and Mythopoetics. I'm curious to see where Wes' latest rabbit hole takes him and keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't end with an Alt-Right looney bin.
This lecture is riddled with unfair mischaracterizations about McCarthy. The section about he wrote a “manly man’s world completely devoid of women” yes women are sidelined but you know what I respect a man who said he wasn’t going to write women because he wasn’t one and he didn’t understand them. I can respect that. There are of course plenty of women in all his novels. They just aren’t assigned this feminist girl boss level of importance and we don’t get to see what’s going on inside them but that’s all his characters. He’s more show don’t tell. Tons of other points in this essay I just don’t really see or agree with.
Blood Meridian is about war, murder, violence, power, a critique and argument against reason, against the enlightenment… So many things. The war of nature and nature of war. Yes very male dominated themes and yes in a world of brute struggle women become commodities as history shows. So that is their place in the world of Blood Meridian. Also his descriptions of nature are beautiful but death and the primordial struggle through violence is all pervasive and ever present which is the true harsh reality of closeness to nature. And the gnostic themes questioning good & evil. Painting a picture that nature may itself be evil and that within us is this alien spark that drives us towards morality even against better judgement. Possibly even to our own detriment. Why do we even bother to love at all in a world so cruel. Is war God or is God moral? Free will vs determinism You missed so much and this lecture is just simplistically dismissive. Thanks for the video all the same.
Long live Wes!!! Can you do a video on John Barth, specifically Giles Goat Boy
Greeting from Czechia Wes. Listening you from your first lecture on Nietzsche when i work as gardener.
This was excellent. Thank you. Reading John Williams' BUTCHER'S CROSSING presently.
The comments about the lack of female characters are strange to me as I’ve only read three McCarthy novels: outer dark, the passenger and Stella Maris , but all three have central characters who are women. Outer dark has numerous women characters and depicts female society at many levels. The depictions of nature in OD are beautiful and very rich, not a wilderness in any sense. Finally , OD is expressly about community: various people trying to coalesce into groups of support. The two central characters in OD are constantly invited to join families and communities , but the tragedy is that they never do. Having said that, some good points made. I think McCarthy’s work basically lays bare the extreme violence and isolation that US life is based upon. It’s the existential ground for its being. I also find it interesting that McCarthy never seems to tackle issues around race in his work. Or does he do so in any of his other books?
Thanks Wes!
You are correct that his work is overwhelmingly masculine, but Alicia Western has tons of dialogue in Stella Maris and The Passenger. Late career correction if you will.
Yeah it was strange to hear this guy say that you couldn't fill 10 pages of McCarthy writing about women when his entire last book is exclusively that
I have literally just finished rereading _Blood Meridian_ and this video comes out so I listened extra hard and more curiously. I didn't like the novel the first time I had read it because of its wholly gratuitous violence and its dismally stark portrayal of that particular place and time. To me it was way over the top and non-realistic in its descriptions of modern human beings. We all know that the West was a violent and lawless episode in our American history, but I had thought that McCarthy was being too sensationalistic about it for narrative's sake and so I missed the deeper message because I was annoyed by the savage butchery that fills nearly every one of its twenty-three chapters.
I had also not enjoyed on my first reading of _Catch-22_ and _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_, two other acclaimed novels of the 20th century. (Some say that _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_ is the greatest novel ever written.) They, in my mind, suffered from the same absurd excess that _Blood Meridian_ had fallen into. _Catch-22_, I felt, was so caught up in irony and satire that I had felt that it stepped all over the message it was trying convey: the utter inhumanity of war and the craven ambitions of all the officers unduly trying to impress superiors in order to get promoted no matter how detrimental that would be to the enlisted men underneath them. And with _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_ I was even more put off because of how even more magical and mythical its characters and situations were. But on a second and closer reading of all these novels, I realized the utter genius in all of them. There is an act of imagination and creativity in each of these that is a thing of beauty to behold.
I would say that these authors with their exaggerations, absurdities and nonrealisms are trying to reach beyond the ordinary and give an accounting of human nature that celebrates the artistic role of self-aware individuals and gives that creative power the most important role in the development of civilization and the blossoming future. So, of course, this can very well be a lonely, peculiar and nonlinear series of events. These books aren't easy to read (like say, _The Catcher In The Rye_) because you, the reader, have to interpret the confusing input and put narrative puzzles together.
My main takeaway after rereading _Blood Meridian_, is not that it is a book of exposing the violent nature of man in his primeval element (Hobbes), but rather a warning of the destructive/constructive force of Nature in which we are all subject to. All great civilizations have fallen and they have never regained their former glory (Egypt, Greek, Roman, etc). Individuals are just as susceptible to ruin and degeneracy as anything else in the world (Think of the Compsons in Faulkner's _The Sound And The Fury_). Judge Holden is this destructive/constructive prophet in a mass of decadent humanity where The Kid is the novel's best hope. Judge Holden ends up killing The Kid (now The Man) in an implicit act of total barbaric and perverted savagery. The Kid perhaps got what he deserved because while he was the one who saw most clearly the destructive and futile purpose of those savage mercenaries, he did nothing about it in ultimately acts of personal cowardice. And perhaps that is what will befall the mighty American Empire of today. We can be constructive in our lives or we can be destructive. I think that Cormac McCarthy is saying that we humans are mostly destructive people because we really don't care to be all that curious about the nature of our intertwining lives and what that means for our futures and the future of our nation.
So badass that Wes Cecil is putting out a Cormac video.
For no reason at all, can we get a lecture on the ethics of protest and of wielding popular power in a democracy?
First like!
Cormac McCarthy was a rad writer.....Love ''Suttree'' & ''Old men''.....W/ PK Dick one of the best American writers of the 20C.
Consider doing a video on PKD. Enjoy your work, cheers brother.
Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil, for discussing Cormac McCarthy's great literary works. I have all of his novels.
"Blood Meridian" is my favorite. He was an interesting man with great intelligence in various fields.
As you also may know, they are doing a film about "Blood Meridian" with Mr. McCarthy's blessing before he passed. This particular director and screenplay writer had done another film of another book of his. He better not screw it up, I dare say.
Who cares about historical relevance, it's novel , damn it.
As for women, we have always been slaves and second-hand citizens since the Gilgamesh Epic. I am a tortured poet, and alas, we may agree to disagree.
What is it that creates violence and chaos? Cultures coming apart, for those who don't learn to think outside of the box.
Reality check, welcome to Aldoux Huxley's "Brave New World."
TS Elliott, "Waistland" Jacob's ladder with his spiraling staircase?
Henry James was an honorable writer. Put this on your book list.
Frantz Omar Fanon, "The Wretched Earth," "Black Skin, White Masks." 2 books I have just finished. That be a top of the morning to you.
Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil for all I have gained knowledge from you.😊❤
McCarthy's world is one of men without women behaving badly and is rooted in the real world.
This was a strange review to listen to because it sounds like you're lamenting the fact that Cormac MaCarthy didn't write Moby Dick.
* McCarthy "isn't funny" ?? .... >>> ASAP; you need to read Suttree! FUNNIEST NOVEL EVER WITTEN.... even the ultra-dark and violent Blood Meridian has a few funny moments. McCarthy is very comical, don't ever depict him as some dry nightmare author only, that's DEAD wrong.
"One of the most interesting things about McCarthys writing is his lack of women, and that leads to unrealistic world building." 😂 its a shame how limited the world view of literary critics is. You read about the world, but its always second hand accounts, and never lived experiences. Im a welder in texas, and have worked in west texas in construction and on oil rigs. Truth is, there just isnt any woman around. You can go six months straight without seeing a single one. Not misogyny, just a stone cold fact, and thats now. If you're a gang of scalp hunters traversing the deserts of west texas, in the 1800's. you cant exactly stop at a wendys and flirt with a cashier.😂 its a catch 22 (another book written with only men, because it takes place in an air force base during ww2...go figure) if a man writes a women's perspective hes a misogynist because he has no place speaking for women. And if he doesn't write about women hes a misogynist for not including women😂 damned if you do, damned if you dont... plus hes even said its not his place to talk on women because hes not one AND sutree and children of god both have female lead characters. So you literally couldnt be more wrong on every front, its honestly impressive. People self indulgently read books and they think it absolves themselves of being ignorant. Lmao id say pick up a book, but that clearly hasn't helped😅
John Wayne 🎉
Keine Frauen.
Was ist mit Katzen und Hunden?
Es beschreibt auch das kommende Szenarium
der Siedler auf dem Mond und Mars.
Neoliberalism, Cultural Appropriation, and Mythopoetics. I'm curious to see where Wes' latest rabbit hole takes him and keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't end with an Alt-Right looney bin.
This lecture is riddled with unfair mischaracterizations about McCarthy. The section about he wrote a “manly man’s world completely devoid of women” yes women are sidelined but you know what I respect a man who said he wasn’t going to write women because he wasn’t one and he didn’t understand them. I can respect that. There are of course plenty of women in all his novels. They just aren’t assigned this feminist girl boss level of importance and we don’t get to see what’s going on inside them but that’s all his characters. He’s more show don’t tell. Tons of other points in this essay I just don’t really see or agree with.
Blood Meridian is about war, murder, violence, power, a critique and argument against reason, against the enlightenment… So many things. The war of nature and nature of war. Yes very male dominated themes and yes in a world of brute struggle women become commodities as history shows. So that is their place in the world of Blood Meridian. Also his descriptions of nature are beautiful but death and the primordial struggle through violence is all pervasive and ever present which is the true harsh reality of closeness to nature. And the gnostic themes questioning good & evil. Painting a picture that nature may itself be evil and that within us is this alien spark that drives us towards morality even against better judgement. Possibly even to our own detriment. Why do we even bother to love at all in a world so cruel. Is war God or is God moral? Free will vs determinism You missed so much and this lecture is just simplistically dismissive. Thanks for the video all the same.