Violence is in the soul of the Southern people. And cruelty. Always have been. The legacy of slavery. They are in the soul of Southern writers, like Faulkner and like Cormac McCarthy.
I wrote at the top of page 70, "Like an odyssey, like The Odyssey, like P.P.," Pilgrim's Progress. The trek on horseback. But never in Homer or in Bunyan was there a scene like the Comanche raid on the riders that ends chapter four. And so at the top of page 72: "Or like Apocalypse Now."
We apotheosize the Indians. I am agnostic on the Indians. From reading Lewis and Clark, American history, colonial history, from seeing the Indians on their reservations manning their casinos, seeing their laws, I do not apotheosize the Indians, I am agnostic on them.
The violence and cruelty in Blood Meridian are unfathomable though not indescribable, they are described quite well by McCarthy, and now at the top of page 83 I write "Kurtz, Apocalypse Now" as the judge reappears in the story and I pause and look it up and then write "This was written after Apocalypse Now (1979)". And after Heart of Darkness. So while the writing in chapter four is transcendent now I don't know how original the story is. The appeal of violence and cruelty is in the DNA of Tennessean Cormac McCarthy.
Blood Meridian, like Heart of Darkness, is based upon historical fact.
I wrote at the top of page 70, "Like an odyssey, like The Odyssey, like P.P.," Pilgrim's Progress. The trek on horseback. But never in Homer or in Bunyan was there a scene like the Comanche raid on the riders that ends chapter four. And so at the top of page 72: "Or like Apocalypse Now."
We apotheosize the Indians. I am agnostic on the Indians. From reading Lewis and Clark, American history, colonial history, from seeing the Indians on their reservations manning their casinos, seeing their laws, I do not apotheosize the Indians, I am agnostic on them.
The violence and cruelty in Blood Meridian are unfathomable though not indescribable, they are described quite well by McCarthy, and now at the top of page 83 I write "Kurtz, Apocalypse Now" as the judge reappears in the story and I pause and look it up and then write "This was written after Apocalypse Now (1979)". And after Heart of Darkness. So while the writing in chapter four is transcendent now I don't know how original the story is. The appeal of violence and cruelty is in the DNA of Tennessean Cormac McCarthy.
Blood Meridian, like Heart of Darkness, is based upon historical fact.
