Pretty Good on Paper

Blood Sausage January 31, 2010

Just finished Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and found it very interesting and compelling.  I have to wonder a little about the marketing of the thing, though.  My lovely wife got it for me for a Christmas present, upon recommendation of some of her colleagues (she is an English professor), and the blurb on the front of the book didn’t affect her decision either.  And I’m not sure it would affect anyone’s.  But here it is in all its glory:

A classic American novel of regeneration through violence.  McCarthy can only be compared with our great writers, with Melville and Falukner, and this is his masterpiece.

That by Michael Herr, who I don’t know.

I totally agree about the great writer masterpiece stuff at the end, but I’m having a little trouble with the first sentence.  I think that the phrase “regeneration through violence” is from Slotkin, a sort of restatement of  part of the Turner Thesis.  This novel has lots of violence, but I don’t remember any regeneration at all.  A lot of people have interpreted Turner to be saying that a sort of descent into barbarism and the subsequent rebuilding of civilization, again and again, at the frontier, is what made America the type of society is now, democratic and independent and blah, blah.

Having a hard time seeing the part of the book where civilization is rebuilt.  Maybe the reader is supposed to imagine that part.  Is it at that point where the action becomes so disgustingly violent and abhorrent that the characters can no longer describe it, are finally rendered speechless?  Is that it?  The narrator is so viciously raped (or something) that the writer can’t even imagine the words to describe it? Or perhaps the people in this awful manufacturing town depicted in the final scenes have, despite the fact that they have finally stripped the skin off the last of the buffaloes, become so civilized that the state that the narrator is left in is observed without comment. I like that explanation best of all, but it leaves a little to be desired, since it makes civilization look an awful lot like mere exhaustion.

I am, obviously, still thinking about all of this.

We’ll see if it works for viewers in the same way when the movie comes out next year.

Spoiler Alert–The Lost Symbol October 25, 2009

I guess it should be no surprise to me that I am not part of the demographic for which Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol was written. I find myself very irritated by the protagonist, who I find wimpy and self-righteous and boneheaded.  How could Tom Hanks have wanted to play this guy on the big screen?  An example:

Then watch ESPN, Langdon thought, always amused to see professional athletes point skyward in gratitude to God after a touchdown or home run.  He wondered how many knew they were continuing a pre-Christian mystical tradition of acknowledging the mystical power above, which, for one brief moment, had transformed them into a god capable of miraculous feats. –pp 87

Can you continue a tradition without knowing it?  What if the meaning you are trying to convey is: we’re #1?  And why does this amuse our symbologist?  The first two questions are rhetorical, of course.  The answer to the third is because he thinks he is superior to them.  I would love to take the guy to a sports bar to watch a game, and I actually smiled briefly during the part of the book where you are supposed to think that he has drowned.

But I do find myself wondering who it is that makes up his main demographic, the people who like this Robert Langdon and identify with him in the way you are supposed to care about protagonists of bestsellers.

See, much of the tension in the plot of The Lost Symbol depends upon the reader feeling that the unearthing of a secret by its central villain will be incredibly destructive.  The reader is unsure what constitutes this secret until very nearly the end of the book.  We are led to assume that the consequences will be on par with an atomic bomb.

Langdon turned to her trying to speak, but he could find no words.  It didn’t matter.  Understanding was written all over his face  Sato was right. Tonight was a national security crisis . . . of unimaginable proportions. (ellipsis in original, I’m afraid, pp. 438)

So when I finally get to the denouement of  this terrible secret, that many high-ranking politicians are Masons, and were caught on videotape doing their Masonic rituals, and the villain is going to send the video to major media outlets, I am mystified.  You read that last sentence correctly, not Mansons, he’s writing about Masons. And this is supposed to be a bad thing because people won’t understand.  There will be a sort of witch hunt that will lead to total chaos.

I have nothing against Masons.  But I found myself thinking that it would not be the tragedy he makes it out to be.  Secret rooms for Masonic rituals in the Capitol building sub-basement?  Covert brotherhoods among the most powerful people in the country?  The Director of the CIA scrambling operatives to keep all this stuff secret?  Maybe I am a little angry about the mismanagement of this country over the last (pick a number) years, but I found myself thinking: Bring on the videotape, bring on the chaos.

So, naturally, I found myself wondering, who, when reading this part of the book, breaths a sigh of relief, thinking “gosh, I’m glad they were able to keep that stuff under wraps”?