Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

I think I had read some earlier McCarthy, and had mixed feelings about it—it seemed to me to be Faulknerian in a way that was not really integrated in a way that made it McCarthy’s own...Suttree...was a strong book, but you had the feeling at times that it was written by William Faulkner and not by Cormac McCarthy.

Yes, McCarthy is faux Faulkner.

The first time I read Blood Meridian...it intrigued me, because there was no question about the quality of the writing, [No. There is question about the quality of the writing.] which is stunning. [No. The quality of the writing is not stunning, it is not of good quality.]

It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

You are a chattering, jabbering fool!

In fact, I taught it for several years in a class I gave here at Yale...

You stain the academy by your existence! Your corrupt the flower of a nation! You are not just stupid but the cause of stupidity in others!

He has attained genius with that book. 

He has attained nothing with that book! That book is SHIT! Shit, shit, SHIT!

AVC: When you called it “the ultimate Western”, did you mean merely the paramount example of the genre, or its final expression?

"The ultimate Western"? Meaning cowboy literature?

HB: No, I meant the final one. It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. 

I...uh...

I don’t think that anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition.

AVC: You placed Blood Meridian not only firmly in the Western canon, but in your own “canon of the American Sublime.” Have there been any books since that time that you’d consider to be part of that canon?

...we have four living writers in America who have, in one way or another, touched what I would call the sublime. They are McCarthy, of course, with Blood Meridian; Philip Roth...; Don DeLillo’s Underworld...; and, of course, the mysterious figure of Mr. Pynchon. 

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

IT CLOSES OUT THE WESTERN CANON?! 

IS THAT WHAT YOU MEAN? YOU ARE A

BRIMSTONE IDIOT! YOU ARE A FLESHY,

CONFOUNDED FOOL!

Blood Meridian is not a good book nor is it well-written. It deadens the sensibilities of human civilization. The prose is stilted, Faulkner meets Mark Twain, detached, the author does not know his subject from experience, it is set in Texas in the 1840's, nor from sufficient immersion in the subject and era.