I tried to elucidate my thoughts regarding Blood Meridian. Here it is:
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Ever since I read Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, I've been occasionally reading novels that have been regarded as in contention for The Great American Novel. I've slowly read some Hemingway, some Steinbeck, O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, and some more Faulkner.
This novel was among the newer novels I discovered that could pass muster as a great American novel. Whether I agree as to whether it is The Great American Novel, however, will be discussed in the following paragraphs.
I haven't read McCarthy for the longest time because I wanted to begin with his masterpiece, and most critics consider this novel to be his best. I was only able to obtain a copy about a few months ago, however, and were a buyer not interested in this novel I would have damned my copy to either him or to obscurity.
Let me begin by effacing any doubt: Blood Meridian is undeniably a masterpiece. But it's more a masterpiece of writing than or plot or characterization, as all the reader is privy to are glimpses of the novel's characters. I think that all we really wish for are the glimpses, seeing that this novel features unscrupulous and amoral individuals in an even more brutal environment. McCarthy makes up for his shadows, however, by writing so beautifully. He rivals Faulkner in sharp verbal illustration: his words inhabit the anomie of both the characters and the time they're situated in. One example of his writing that stuck with me was his description of a shotgun's barrel as a lemniscate prior to a rider shooting a horse.
His matter-of-fact narration of the most horrific of perversions performed by the inhuman, inchoate posse creates a masterful contrast. In this manner, he subverts the often-cliched plots of Western novels and turns it around by providing not a plot, but a protracted paroxysm of arrant ultraviolence. This subversion is comparable to Clark's Ox-Bow Incident where, instead of focusing on positive, picaresque adventures, the novel instead focuses on the characters and the repercussions they have to face because of their bigotry. McCarthy essentially removes the romantic in his novel by engorging and deluging the reader with arcane and profuse violence.
To me, the novel is nearly perfect.
But it's not Absalom, Absalom! First, Blood Meridian is more fragmented and diffuse than the former. Absalom, Absalom! remains to me the towering work of American fiction because all the asides, all the circumambulations - everything coalesces and makes sense as the novel closes.