I found all these comments extraordinary and inspiring. I've just finished reading The Road and was unable to get past a few pages of Blood Meridian which I tried about a year ago, but I'll give it another go over Christmas in the light (ha) of all this.
I read in a very different way to all you people; I read for the language and for the emotional propulsion. This one, this Road one, was already how I mostly feel anyway, so it was easy for me to read and understand. Actually, a lot of you don't talk about the language very much, by which I mean these scenic descriptions and the catalogues of a land disinterred. I had a few difficulties understanding how anything had survived at all and why in fact there was much point in continuing since future life was eradicated, its potential; but he goes on, the father with his son, he goes on, and that seemed to make meaning for me, if that at all answers the question about what shapes creation, or if the will of man has a hand in it, which has been asked by a couple of people here. God has always seemed to me the force of creation, and that exists for its own ends alone and inside whatever chaos. The love here is not of the normal order and not claiming, even here, selfish or rational ends but other ends and other insistences.
The dialogue of this book is an enquiry between what one must do to survive and what the point of survival is; the kinds of questions I find often in Shakespearian Tragedy and certain rather extreme poetry, not in modern novels, or often novels at all. How far does one go to defend and to breed, or even to exist at all, when to live is to kill in one form or another? It is purgatory here, perhaps slightly worse than purgatory because one is meting it out with no hope, and even living at all eats at the infirmary of another, when to dream is to destroy and to remember to deny (there's a quote for that but I've given the book away). McCarthy's made a kind of picture of available compromise in a world where nothing can ever again grow and memory slays the past it recollects; thought itself hurts the thing it thinks of; there's something somewhere about how literature wrote on assumption and expectation and was a library of lies. Without the world, who are we. Without memory and language, what are we. And this boy is really the emblem of all that: a-historical, untrained, practically pre-vocabulary, yet alive and creative: he's the creative focus. Though he's very annoying when he keeps forgetting things and losing the gun and so on: I'd shout and clip him round the ear, but it is a metaphysical terrain: he is love, isn't he, and love forgets defense, love does not destroy. On the other hand, how many cans of food can you get through before you just take a bite out of a passing stranger? Perhaps you'd just lie down and die instead rather than chew off someone's face, I don't know.
What I mean to say about all this is that the entire book is something to do with the point of creation placed inside the worst interior dynamic: where sustenance seems to cut away at others' sustenance and self-replenishment attacks the world around it. This fish bit at the end struck me too - the novel ends on the word 'mystery' (I think; because I unfortunately have just lent the novel to Simon Downstairs who won't even read it and certainly won't understand it if he does) and I agree that somehow in all this, there is a mystery beyond the ribs of the book, and it reminds me of writing, or moments where one knows not why but continues anyway. It may be this particular striving that has created the beginnings of the universe in the first place.
It is very unusual for a book to picture up the conveyance of rational existence, or the rationality of existence, in such a satisfying way and under circumstances that have no obvious rapture to them. I was reminded constantly of paintings and etchings, of Art in fact, but more drawing type art, or art before anyone's filled anything in yet, for sure a world before colour. Nothing has any flesh, all the grass is dry and the sea is just some salt tomb; this is all pre-colour, it is the beginnings of writing and the beginnings of paper even - why one would ever depict anything, why one would choose to breathe. It's the love that sends him on this road, and it's the love that is, I think, the custodian of the damage: I am reading this poetically; I am reading a parable of why life is such a bloody pain. These orchids that are somehow mummified, the burnt trees; it's as if he said: 'but why wake up in the morning, why go on, if we take away all material reasoning and ease, and give no reason for it and no reason for tomorrow? Create a world where all has been - unmade' - as somewhere here put it, where the atom has been disbanded from the atom. It's all unlinked, in this world, and there's only one force to link things. Poetically, it's the fire that's laid waste the world so these two now 'carry the fire', in the form of salvation, whether they perish or no.
I've had trouble with McCarthy before because I felt a bit alienated from his thoughts and considerations, but this particular book seemed to me to be so much about the point of creation, with no reflection of creation, creation against the odds, which really is why anyone creates at all, that every page mattered, every word in fact. And it didn't seem to me any more about a world that had been destroyed but about the reason for the world and for its inevitable rebirth; the world mapped out on the scales of the fish, the pattern of worms in fact, because I think it was the worm that started all this, some snake thing way back (final paragraph) 'vermiculite'. William Blake thinks it all starts with the worm.
I was... rather... undone by this book, but for its prodigious faith, not its waste land epitaph (or epigraph). There is something about this book that reminds me of Paul Celan, that Holocaust poet, though McCarthy's slightly more optimistic. Both lean towards this idea of burning and erasure, and language just doesn't get pumped out in the same way as it would in a fertile climate; drewdeman (above) talks of a world reduced to a kind of mineral afterlife, a reversal of nature, and I think he's right, though it's more to do with a poetic separation than a cellular one, 'Everything uncoupled from its shoring.' It may be a prolonged meditation on the irrationality of death, the entire book. But 'The mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death,' as Oscar Wilde said, though I suspect he was talking romantically rather than biblically. Lear talks about mystery too, in that scene with Cordelia: 'we two will be God's spies, and take upon the mystery of things,' though they're both to die any second. 'Oh you are men of stone,' says Lear and 'if only my heart was stone,' says McCarthy. T. S. Eliot thinks that love is torture ('who then designed this torment? Love') and I think the cannibals are missing the point.
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