Blood Meridian/ Moby Dick

[Joseph Tracy]

Enjoying the discussion on this. I read 4 or 5 McCarthy novels and a play, I kept reading partly because it was a lesson in what prose can do without elaborate plots, just the drama of a relative innocent entering a moment by moment struggle with death and great cultural forces. Also like many good books there is this sense of more real than real where you hover on the edge of a deeper truth. I have come to feel that no matter how well this is done, it is always something of a trick. More and more I feel that there is something flawed about the personification of evil or good. Ahab is not a tragic hero nor is he a devil. He is delusional. A person gone mad and at war with his or her dreams. 

One German theologian suggested that all authority structures are demonic. The degree to which that premise holds truth seems to have to do with the degree to which the authority of any  individual  is moderated and balanced by the well being of the whole.      The potential for damage of such structures is directy related not so much to the charismatic appeal of an individual as to a collective participation in a shared delusion. The Machivellian fox requires princely immunity and obedience to the authority structures in order to manipulate the collective beliefs, deflect the truth that exposes his rapine and embark on imperial war. 

 True freedom is internal, skeptical of big ideas, and leaves you with a life more on the lines of  raising kind-hearted children, chopping wood, home made music, planting seeds, moving water  and picking plums than spending half your shared wealth on war. There can be no Judge, no King Leopold, no Ahab, no Hitler or Stalin without a belief in the divine right of kings, captains, billionaires. The democratic revolution In the US  never freed itself from the forms of empire, never became democracy in the most fundamental sense of liberty for all members, always caught in the delusion of the current war for freedom from imaginary enemies.  That is Ahab; that is the Judge. But it is very dubious in my mind to cast it as cosmic truth, human nature, etc. 

 I am looking for a different kind of writing that observes social and historical forces realistically but is unhardened into some big truth, knows that everything is part of the truth, everyone and all forms are shaping the world,  and that we talking monkeys  and our symbolic communication sytems really have a limited ability to tell stories that help us understand it or live in it harmoniously.  

One thing I like about Pynchon is that no matter how much he invests his writing with layered connections, powerful observations, warnings,   and  jokes ,   all with an almost Biblical breadth, he refuses to tell us what to think, insisting that the reader puts together meaning out of the rambling  experience, which is more like life. The reason I was done with McCarthy after Blood Meridian and the Road was that it left me in an all too familiar hell where the world is owned by the devil. To me visits to hell are only worthwhile if you come out lighter, the dross skimmed off, the gold intact.-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l