"This is pornographic," I thought to myself as I read chapter XIII. The violence I mean. If you replaced all the scenes of violence with scenes of sex you could only buy the book in stores with "Adult" and "XXX" on the marquis*.And it's not just "So-and-so shot and killed so-and-so," the details are described graphically. If the sex act were described as graphically it would be gynecological, "hardcore."
One who "revels in death," who describes killing in fetishistic detail, all of whose books (I believe) center on violence-One who has spent his entire adult life writing novels, fiction, on violence.-vivid imagination, that one.
Yet through 193 pages there is no sex. There's that one scene of implied, contemplated homosexual rape of the kid by the hermit; a few pages ago McCarthy wrote that the riders looked at the women in the town with "rape" on their minds; in the same chapter a mention of "bordellos"-That's it! There is about as little sex in Blood Meridian as in Charles Dickens' books. McCarthy's blood-lusty misfits have been riding for weeks, months, now, sometimes desperate of food, water, slaughtering and scalping for money everyone they come across, foe and one-time friend, man, woman and child, and nobody nuts. That is impossible.
"...there is no sex": No conventional sex. The riders do "have a taste for blood and death." Maybe that's their kink. Sadism.* Cormac McCarthy does seem to "revel" in his characters' taste for blood and death. Maybe that is his kink. Voyeuristic sadism, Sadistic voyeurism, something. It's like McCarthy has made a snuff film.
What's in this for Cormac McCarthy? Well, fame, fortune, immense literary respect, maybe a Nobel Prize (5-2 odds in 2010). Besides all that. This is his chosen life: to revel in blood and death.
Revel: "to take intense pleasure or satisfaction" (Merriam Webster).
To have an orgasm is intensely pleasurable.
One who "revels in death," who describes killing in fetishistic detail, all of whose books (I believe) center on violence-One who has spent his entire adult life writing novels, fiction, on violence.-vivid imagination, that one.
Yet through 193 pages there is no sex. There's that one scene of implied, contemplated homosexual rape of the kid by the hermit; a few pages ago McCarthy wrote that the riders looked at the women in the town with "rape" on their minds; in the same chapter a mention of "bordellos"-That's it! There is about as little sex in Blood Meridian as in Charles Dickens' books. McCarthy's blood-lusty misfits have been riding for weeks, months, now, sometimes desperate of food, water, slaughtering and scalping for money everyone they come across, foe and one-time friend, man, woman and child, and nobody nuts. That is impossible.
"...there is no sex": No conventional sex. The riders do "have a taste for blood and death." Maybe that's their kink. Sadism.* Cormac McCarthy does seem to "revel" in his characters' taste for blood and death. Maybe that is his kink. Voyeuristic sadism, Sadistic voyeurism, something. It's like McCarthy has made a snuff film.
What's in this for Cormac McCarthy? Well, fame, fortune, immense literary respect, maybe a Nobel Prize (5-2 odds in 2010). Besides all that. This is his chosen life: to revel in blood and death.
Revel: "to take intense pleasure or satisfaction" (Merriam Webster).
To have an orgasm is intensely pleasurable.
