Cormac McCarthy
Katabasis
in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood
Meridian
EAAS Conference, Prague, April 2004
The oeuvre of Cormac
McCarthy is crucial for the re-imagining of the conquest of the
American West.
Novels such as Blood
Meridian (1985) present
violent and grotesque images of the West and the people involved in
settling
and resettling the frontier. McCarthy’s representation of the frontier
shows a
story world where the conventional distinctions between heroes and
villains are
meaningless, since all human actors in the drama of the West are
motivated by
greed and selfishness. In the presentation of such a story world we are
reminded of mythographic genres such as the epic, and intertextualities
with
Greek and Judaeo-Christian narratives are endemic. In particular the
reader is
invited by McCarthy’s use of paratext, such as chapter titles, to see
the novel
as an instance of katabasis, i.e. a
mythographical descent into Hell, for the protagonist. This paper
proposes to
read McCarthy’s novel as having the dual function of de-mythologizing
and
re-mythologizing the American West, showing that in order to read the
West with
fresh eyes we must first read it through the old lens of classical
literature.
Cormac McCarthy