Literature/Theater: Satan and Mother Teresa discuss "Bears in Space" and "Blood Meridian"
Satan and Mother Teresa are sitting on a park bench in Central Park. Joggers in dayglo synthetic fabrics pass in the background. Theresa warmly greets Satan:
Teresa: I've been to the zoo!
Satan: How lovely, Theresa. Say hi to the marmosets. I've been sitting here catching up on "the great late 20th century novels", and was stoked to finally read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. What a masterpiece!
Teresa (blanching): Isn't that Western novel just a nonstop gore-fest without a single redeemable character? Who could possibly like that?
Satan: Me, for one! The violence is cleansing, purging the towering western landscape of the flawed humans and hapless bison, leaving only the stunning, desolate landscape of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. Its an even darker version than those 1960-70's Clint Eastwood Westerns like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and High Plains Drifter. None of these have traditional western white hat heroes either, and pretty much everyone ends up dead or ruined. The novel is also a grim twist on the familiar journey epic, with a band of (amoral) wanderers traversing a forbidding landscape, like The Odyssey. Their sole goal is greed, paid to take marauding Indian scalps by the Mexican government. But it turns out their are not quite enough of these, so they scalp innocent villagers too. And they (mostly) all die in the end, mostly at the hand of people equally bad (Indians, soldiers, townspeople are pretty much morally equivalent to the gang members). Here, human evil is independent of education, race, upbringing, or wealth. The ultimate epic catharsis, in my view.
Teresa (sighs): Funny you would mention The Odyssey. I just saw a play in midtown NYC, Bears in Space, that was itself a mini-epic. This one-acter by Irishman Eoghan Quinn featured scruffy bear puppets as a newly cryogenically-thawed space crew, who embark on a Star Trek-style quest, all acted out by four non-ventriloquist frat boy types with hysterical improv skills, using the kind of props you would put together from your dorm rooms. For example, their take on the ubiquitous spaceship computer: a Radio Shack motherboard taped to the forehead of actor Jack Gleeson (King Joffrey in Game of Thrones, hyperkinetically hysterical throughout). In a nice touch, the ship computer was more neurotic than malicious. He lacked self esteem, and felt a need to explain his actions at length. The 80 minutes of nonstop silliness was my type of catharsis, thank you very much.
Satan: Humans are strange--they can be transported by both nihilistic violence and by silly juvenile wordplay. Makes my job easier, though...just more ways for me to cause mayhem. Blood Meridian could either be interpreted as a world dominated by me or not needing me at all, since it is already filled with amoral opportunists, taking scalps. No romanticized Native Americans here...listen to this description of a dead Indian:
The painted face came up, sand stuck to the eyeball, sand stuck to the rancid grease with which he'd smeared his torso....The man's hair was long and black and dull with dust and a few lice scuttled...He was old and he bore a healed lance wound just about the hipbone and an old sabre wound across the left cheek that ran to the corner of his eye. These wounds were decorated their length with tattooed images, perhaps obscure with age, but without referents in the known desert about.
In Blood Meridian there is no acknowledgment of my created vision of evildoers battling against extant forces of divine or natural human goodness.
Teresa (animated): It figures you would love a novel of anti-heroes. But how can a cast of anti-heroes be interesting without some force of contrasting goodness to struggle against? Even you would have been a contrasting positive beacon in McCarthy's dark landscape.
Satan: Don't try to sweet talk me like Chris does--he's a pussy. But, back to our topic, in the world of Blood Meridian heroes are just a human fantasy, so I would argue that McCarthy's amoral scalpers are not antiheroes, just humans doing as expected. In the end humans just die, their bones bleaching away in the desert. And thanks for recognizing my radiance! I love getting to hang around forever to make things interesting.
Teresa: That you do. But I still have trouble reconciling McCarthy's world devoid of positivity with my experience at Bears in Space, where fifty diverse audience members could sit together, laugh together, and leave feeling buoyant.
Satan: Humans need their diversions. The Blood Meridian gang stopped every so often to drink, carouse, sleep with whores, rape women and children, and burn down villages just for fun. The Romans needed their gladiatorial contests and lions vs. Christian pageants. Human diversions in 2016 are just more timid...well, perhaps excepting Donald Trump rallies, where people can get their repressed hatred right out in public.
Teresa: So why is this novel any more of a "work of art" than one of the Tarantino gore-fests, or Friday the Thirteenth?
Satan (bristles): Hey! Quentin is my mentee...I taught him all he knows about smug audience manipulation. Cormac McCarthy is different. He doesn't glorify violence, but observes it as part of reality, building a great literary edifice with tight construction and a poetic style. Like all great art this novel moves relentlessly forward without unnecessary diversions or silly subplots. The ambiguous ending is striking. After clinical descriptions of violence throughout the book, the novel ends with an undescribed, unspeakable tragedy (child rape?) perhaps committed by the emotionless "kid" whose amoral course is followed throughout the novel as the narrative framework. Or perhaps by the most vivid character, the Judge, a highly educated, eloquent, brilliant, hairless creature who casually slaughters others while quoting Milton and Shakespeare, traversing the grim landscape with a retarded child locked in a wooden cage. No need for McCarthy to tidy up a linear plot. Men just keep doing what men do, ad infinitum.
Teresa (dismayed): So does the author care about anything? Is there a point to this mayhem?
Satan: Sure. In the brief epilogue, after these innumerable graphic descriptions of human-on-human violence, McCarthy describes the true act of rape: a man violates the earth with a fence pole digger, dividing the landscape into human parcels:
...an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with this steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock with God has put there.
So the real "force of contrasting goodness" of the book, as you put it, is the earth itself. Teresa, if you need an uplifting theme, think of Blood Meridian as the ultimate anti-mankind pro-environmental novel, with the landscape as hero. Listen to this description of the western night...the typical lack of punctuation creates a sort of vastness:
The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they grew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.
Teresa: Wow, that's a power even beyond you, I think.
Satan (sighs): He may be onto something...you can't defeat me with pathetic mortal heroes. Humans are too base for that. McCarthy tries to vanquish my importance by showing that men are ultimately a trivial sidelight in the grand scope of the cosmos, so I should really stop wasting my time. Pretty depressing, when you think about it.
Teresa (sympathetic): So you need a new color for your parachute, Satan. Come down to the counseling center in Berkeley, and I can set you up with a nice upbeat career coach. Maybe Bears in Space could use another comic to uplift the masses.
Satan implodes, vanishing from the stage. Theresa smiles cryptically.
Teresa: I've been to the zoo!
Satan: How lovely, Theresa. Say hi to the marmosets. I've been sitting here catching up on "the great late 20th century novels", and was stoked to finally read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. What a masterpiece!
Teresa (blanching): Isn't that Western novel just a nonstop gore-fest without a single redeemable character? Who could possibly like that?
Satan: Me, for one! The violence is cleansing, purging the towering western landscape of the flawed humans and hapless bison, leaving only the stunning, desolate landscape of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. Its an even darker version than those 1960-70's Clint Eastwood Westerns like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and High Plains Drifter. None of these have traditional western white hat heroes either, and pretty much everyone ends up dead or ruined. The novel is also a grim twist on the familiar journey epic, with a band of (amoral) wanderers traversing a forbidding landscape, like The Odyssey. Their sole goal is greed, paid to take marauding Indian scalps by the Mexican government. But it turns out their are not quite enough of these, so they scalp innocent villagers too. And they (mostly) all die in the end, mostly at the hand of people equally bad (Indians, soldiers, townspeople are pretty much morally equivalent to the gang members). Here, human evil is independent of education, race, upbringing, or wealth. The ultimate epic catharsis, in my view.
Teresa (sighs): Funny you would mention The Odyssey. I just saw a play in midtown NYC, Bears in Space, that was itself a mini-epic. This one-acter by Irishman Eoghan Quinn featured scruffy bear puppets as a newly cryogenically-thawed space crew, who embark on a Star Trek-style quest, all acted out by four non-ventriloquist frat boy types with hysterical improv skills, using the kind of props you would put together from your dorm rooms. For example, their take on the ubiquitous spaceship computer: a Radio Shack motherboard taped to the forehead of actor Jack Gleeson (King Joffrey in Game of Thrones, hyperkinetically hysterical throughout). In a nice touch, the ship computer was more neurotic than malicious. He lacked self esteem, and felt a need to explain his actions at length. The 80 minutes of nonstop silliness was my type of catharsis, thank you very much.
Satan: Humans are strange--they can be transported by both nihilistic violence and by silly juvenile wordplay. Makes my job easier, though...just more ways for me to cause mayhem. Blood Meridian could either be interpreted as a world dominated by me or not needing me at all, since it is already filled with amoral opportunists, taking scalps. No romanticized Native Americans here...listen to this description of a dead Indian:
The painted face came up, sand stuck to the eyeball, sand stuck to the rancid grease with which he'd smeared his torso....The man's hair was long and black and dull with dust and a few lice scuttled...He was old and he bore a healed lance wound just about the hipbone and an old sabre wound across the left cheek that ran to the corner of his eye. These wounds were decorated their length with tattooed images, perhaps obscure with age, but without referents in the known desert about.
In Blood Meridian there is no acknowledgment of my created vision of evildoers battling against extant forces of divine or natural human goodness.
Teresa (animated): It figures you would love a novel of anti-heroes. But how can a cast of anti-heroes be interesting without some force of contrasting goodness to struggle against? Even you would have been a contrasting positive beacon in McCarthy's dark landscape.
Satan: Don't try to sweet talk me like Chris does--he's a pussy. But, back to our topic, in the world of Blood Meridian heroes are just a human fantasy, so I would argue that McCarthy's amoral scalpers are not antiheroes, just humans doing as expected. In the end humans just die, their bones bleaching away in the desert. And thanks for recognizing my radiance! I love getting to hang around forever to make things interesting.
Teresa: That you do. But I still have trouble reconciling McCarthy's world devoid of positivity with my experience at Bears in Space, where fifty diverse audience members could sit together, laugh together, and leave feeling buoyant.
Satan: Humans need their diversions. The Blood Meridian gang stopped every so often to drink, carouse, sleep with whores, rape women and children, and burn down villages just for fun. The Romans needed their gladiatorial contests and lions vs. Christian pageants. Human diversions in 2016 are just more timid...well, perhaps excepting Donald Trump rallies, where people can get their repressed hatred right out in public.
Teresa: So why is this novel any more of a "work of art" than one of the Tarantino gore-fests, or Friday the Thirteenth?
Satan (bristles): Hey! Quentin is my mentee...I taught him all he knows about smug audience manipulation. Cormac McCarthy is different. He doesn't glorify violence, but observes it as part of reality, building a great literary edifice with tight construction and a poetic style. Like all great art this novel moves relentlessly forward without unnecessary diversions or silly subplots. The ambiguous ending is striking. After clinical descriptions of violence throughout the book, the novel ends with an undescribed, unspeakable tragedy (child rape?) perhaps committed by the emotionless "kid" whose amoral course is followed throughout the novel as the narrative framework. Or perhaps by the most vivid character, the Judge, a highly educated, eloquent, brilliant, hairless creature who casually slaughters others while quoting Milton and Shakespeare, traversing the grim landscape with a retarded child locked in a wooden cage. No need for McCarthy to tidy up a linear plot. Men just keep doing what men do, ad infinitum.
Teresa (dismayed): So does the author care about anything? Is there a point to this mayhem?
Satan: Sure. In the brief epilogue, after these innumerable graphic descriptions of human-on-human violence, McCarthy describes the true act of rape: a man violates the earth with a fence pole digger, dividing the landscape into human parcels:
...an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with this steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock with God has put there.
So the real "force of contrasting goodness" of the book, as you put it, is the earth itself. Teresa, if you need an uplifting theme, think of Blood Meridian as the ultimate anti-mankind pro-environmental novel, with the landscape as hero. Listen to this description of the western night...the typical lack of punctuation creates a sort of vastness:
The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they grew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.
Teresa: Wow, that's a power even beyond you, I think.
Satan (sighs): He may be onto something...you can't defeat me with pathetic mortal heroes. Humans are too base for that. McCarthy tries to vanquish my importance by showing that men are ultimately a trivial sidelight in the grand scope of the cosmos, so I should really stop wasting my time. Pretty depressing, when you think about it.
Teresa (sympathetic): So you need a new color for your parachute, Satan. Come down to the counseling center in Berkeley, and I can set you up with a nice upbeat career coach. Maybe Bears in Space could use another comic to uplift the masses.
Satan implodes, vanishing from the stage. Theresa smiles cryptically.
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