#lit crit
The pointlessness of Boris Johnson being ousted stems from the obvious fact that every British politician is essentially an interchangable blob of colonial malignacy and depravity, like Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. One of their number will simply carry on the same murderous work, ad infinitum. ‘He says that he will never die’.
A comparison between Boris Johnson and the Judge is frankly ridiculous and hysteric. It is the pure affectation and feminine hyperbole of a censorious market wench. The fact that you read Blood Meridian as a simple tale condemning colonialism means the epigraphs went over your head. The ultimate practitioner of the ultimate trade is not the Judge. It’s the Comanches.
Alrighty? The Judge’s luciferian qualities, in line with the novel’s overall Miltonian thrust, weren’t lost on me, so I think you’ve read a bit too much into my comparison. But as you’ve raised the point, it’s moronic to pretend that McCarthy didn’t use the senseless and irrational brutality of Manifest Destiny as a key manifestation of the all-consuming thanatotic force that Holden embodies. Blood Meridian’s depiction of genocidal colonialism as America’s founding story is intertwined with the novel’s more philosophical focus, and not contrary to it.
Agree on the Luciferian qualities of the Judge (the title he gives himself is really all you need to make the connection although there’s plenty more), but the brutality McCarthy writes of predates Manifest Destiny by millennia (remember the epigraph of an anthropological article about a human remain in Ethiopia showing evidence of “having been scalped”). Holden never states or maintains the doctrine of manifest destiny, the character who does, the captain that recruits the Kid to invade Mexico gets immediately and brutally killed by the Comanches along his entire expedition. Holden is concerned with brutality for brutality’s sake, not as a part of a political project of territorial expansion. He exists solely in the frontier, in the territories were anarchy reigns (the completion of that project means his end). The removal of the Indians was vital for that project I grant you that, but he kills pretty much anyone who comes into his path. He sells scalps and he is not particularly fuzzy about the source.It is also precisely my point that it is the Comanches the ones that truly embody the spirit of War, not the settlers. What you call “the irrational brutality of manifest destiny” is in no way more irrational or brutal than that of the Comanche war drive (though perhaps I would dismiss entirely the notion of irrationality in both examples). Just talk to an Apache ( who used to be brutal fighters and great warriors on their own) or a Pueblo Indian. If you had a basic knowledge of anthropology and history of the nations/tribes that inhabited the region you probably would not have made such a ridiculous simile, and if it had been for comic effect, I would have not objected to it, but this reply tells me it clearly wasn’t. Although on the other hand you seem stuck in 20th-21th century leftist college student hermeneutics, to the point I don’t think you are capable of understanding people who lived in other time periods, so I am not even sure that knowledge would do much for you.
P.S. If you think Ursula K. Le Guin is a valuable source for anthropology just forget my advice. You can’t be helped.
That’s a nice gnostic reading of the novel and of Holden. However, I think you understate the importance of the particular historical period McCarthy uses to explore not only violence, but a particular kind of violence developed by a society engaged in 'civilising’ others. He could have easily just set the novel in a prehistoric setting like that alluded to in the opening epigraph and concentrated on a simple story of timeless human warmaking. Instead, he chose to ground it in the American frontier and wrote it during an era when American imperialism was resurging. More generally, I think you’ve over-interpreted my posts and seem to be shadow-boxing. Critique of colonial violence doesn’t necessarily entail a naive, sentimentalised account of indigenous peoples like the Comanche - it doesn’t in Blood Meridian and it’s not something I argued, so I’m not sure where you’re getting that from?
I’m so excited that we’re all reading Dracula together. As we temporarily leave our friend Jonathan in Transylvania sans shaving mirror, to catch up with Nerd Queen Mina Murray, I thought I’d volunteer a little close reading walk-through of some of the stuff we’ve already seen. I do this as someone who has 1) seen a bunch of posts saying Don’t Panic Because of Problematic™ Elements and 2) taught Dracula in both literature and history classes because I’m that kind of nerd, I mean professor. Also, I thought it might be helpful to have an illustration of how you (yes, you!) can read and find multiple meanings in a text.
If anyone replies on this post with a variation on “the curtains are blue,” that person is getting blocked. Okay? Are we sitting comfortably? Good. Let’s talk about Jonathan Harker and Orientalism. Conveniently, we can do this using just evidence from Chapters 1-2; but you’ll be able to see more of this throughout the book. The brilliant Edward Saïd came up with the term Orientalism to describe taking “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning ‘the Orient.’” As it happens, it is super easy to illustrate how Jonathan’s perceptions of his journey participate in Orientalism.
Ex. 1, as he enters Budapest: The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
So here is Jonathan, in the city of Budapest, which got a massive makeover just five years before, in 1892, to celebrate the 1000-year anniversary of its mythical founding. The fancy imperial architecture is fresh and shiny. Also brand new (as of 1896) is Budapest’s electrified subway, the oldest in continental Europe. But to Jonathan, he’s entering “the traditions of Turkish rule,” which have been rhetorically opposed to European liberalism since at least the late sixteenth century. Before that, it’s muddier, and early modern political realities are much more complicated than that, but I’m not going to digress here on what the history of this region actually is. What’s crucial is that, despite all this complex reality (and the subway system), for Jonathan, he crosses a bridge and BAM, rhetorical departure from the West, entry into the East, which is characterized by sensuality, superstition, and despots (who can be sensual as well as tyrannical. Remind you of anyone?)
Ex. 2, the trains: It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?
Again, we have a simple equation here. The more East you go, the less modernity and technology you have. Orientalism 101. The Count’s elaborate and generous hospitality, too, fits the stereotypes of Oriental rulers. And we’ve already talked a lot about all the peasants and their Primitive Superstitions.™ But wait!
The Eastern peasants, with their multiple local languages and their quaint costumes and their worship at roadside shrines and their reliance on physical totems like the rosary… they are rightabout the way the world of the novel works, and our friend Jonathan, as it happens, is wrong. If Jonathan has a hope of surviving, he had better start relinquishing some of his respectable certainties (who is more respectable than an English solicitor with vague allegiance to the Church of England?) in favor of acknowledging the messy realities of where he finds himself. And all of this is 1) pretty explicit in the text 2) very complex in terms of how it asks us, the readers, to consider how we think about categories like modernity, civilization, and superstition.
Ta-da! See? Lit crit is meant to be fun, actually. [Take a literature or history course if you can; we’re doing this sort of thing all the time.]
Thanks for the excellent analysis, @oldshrewsburyian! Lit crit is fun! I seriously have learned more about history, politics, sexuality, racism, LGBTQ+ issues, and a load of other important topics from literature class than from classes that focus on those topics. (Honestly, I’m convinced that teachers who go with “The curtains were blue”-style interpretations are teaching it badly, because real literary criticism is always more interesting and nuanced than that.) And I’m thrilled that all of Tumblr is reading and reacting to one of my favorite classic novels in real time!
