ABSTRACT
I argue throughout this book that McCarthy’s texts can be read as comments upon the mythology of American exceptionalism in one form or another and that these comments are expressed as a series of anti-myths. It may therefore be considered inevitable that the setting of his novels should move at some point from East Tennessee to “the West.” Of course from a historical point of view Tennessee is itself part of the American West. But the mythic west, the west of the dime novel and the Hollywood movie, constitutes that area lying across the Mississippi River that became part of the United States largely as a result of events of the nineteenth century. Exceptionalist ideology rationalized the process of expansion, conquest and expropriation as “Manifest Destiny,” thus linking imperialist ambition with that “divine purpose” that had inspired the Puritans to found the “redeemer nation” and the revolutionaries to establish the democratic “last best hope of mankind.” Like the British “white man’s burden” it legitimized the cultural and material extirpation of the indigenous population as a divine mission to civilize the savage. It extended the myth of the pastoral onto the great plains as a domestication of the wilderness. Above all it imposed the will of the economically and technologically powerful in the name of racial superiority. at such a history should be characterized by violence was, of course, inevitable and nowhere was this violence more radical than in the Southwest-in what is now Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.¹
As already noted, by the late nineteen-seventies McCarthy had left the Knoxville area and, after a period of traveling the country, was living in the Texas border town of El Paso. is change of personal location matches that of his fiction. His three Appalachian novels² had been relatively short and had drawn their imagery from communities that had been largely excluded from
American discourse. eir scale was such as to permit an intimacy that made clear the extent to which Greil Marcus’s “old weird America” still remained in the mountains and woods of East Tennessee, unobserved by the nation as a whole, and providing an appropriate setting for the kind of anti-myth that McCarthy wished to create. But this intimacy was in itself limiting, relying as it did on the very “strangeness” of the mountaineers’ culture, its smallness, its American otherness; the Appalachian texts lack the epic dimension that has to be incorporated into any examination of American mythology. In writing in and of the Southwest, McCarthy finds the landscape and the mythology of American epic and his texts begin to express the necessary largeness of an American scale. Guillemin comments on this change of fictional location by quoting Tim Poland to the effect that,
Rather than a landscape [the South] that exists as a setting for human action and is imprinted with human qualities, the landscape of much western writing functions more like a character in itself and imprints on the human characters its own qualities.³
Blood Meridian is the text that most tellingly expresses this sense of a harsh landscape as a “character in itself ” whose propensity to “imprint its own qualities on human characters” implies a move away from an anthropocentric cultural standpoint, the grievous consequences of this change being greatly increased by the West’s largeness of scale. e action of the tale ranges from East Tennessee⁴ to the Pacific Ocean, matching the mythic journey across the continent that led to the establishment of the United States as a transcontinental entity, the very heart of the project of Manifest Destiny. It takes us from the north Texas plains to Chihuahua, Mexico. e whole vast area features a landscape comprising “mountain, creosote bush, chaparral and desert”.⁵ us McCarthy chooses to locate his post-Tennessee novels in that region of America that contrasts his former locale in flora and fauna as well as scale. Gone are the woods and creeks, the raccoon and bass of Sevier County. In the arid country on either side of the Rio Grande and at the high tide of imperialistic expansion McCarthy finds his American chronotope.⁶ e tale of slaughter that he recounts has a bleakness that matches this arid landscape; both aspects of the text express the mythoclastic notion of America as a “waste land.” e bulk of the action takes place in “the year eighteen and forty-nine,”⁷ a year of significance in American mythology through its association with the Californian gold rush and all that it signifies of mythic optimism, intrepid pioneering and the promise of immediate riches.
