A Broken Lyre: History, Violence and Art in Cormac McCarthy´s Blood Meridian
Year: 2011
Abstract
Blood Meridian is a novel that has become an important referent in the American Literature of the late XX century. The novel depicts a new perspective of the so-called conquest of the West as a devastating landscape full of violence and gore. This study explores the different conceptions of violence which could be inferred from the novel, and how that violence became an object of aesthetic representation. On the other hand, as the novel problematizes history and myth combining historical sources with fiction, it configures a new view of a particular event in American History. Part of the reflection that this paper deals with is precisely how History is conceived and depicted in the book. Cormac McCarthy‘s style is the catalyst which encompasses all those topics and stories in a superb artwork that unveils a ghastly panorama of a particular moment of the USA‘s past, creating a new image of it. An image that McCarthy crafted weaving history and myth to produce a new perspective of the Conquest of the West. Thus, this paper analyzes and interprets the possible connections that could be established from the novel among art, history and violence. What McCarthy achieves in that sense, is to reflect upon those issues by re-using the materials already created and a long literary tradition through the aesthetic configuration with which he conflates what the novel is.
Keywords
violence, history, Westerns, image, representation, aesthetic