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Katabasis in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
Author(s) -
Sørensen Bent
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2004.10812.x
Subject(s) - narrative , literature , epic , frontier , meridian (astronomy) , history , reading (process) , close reading , philosophy , art , linguistics , physics , archaeology , astronomy
A postmodern Western novel, such as Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), presents a story world where the conventional distinctions between heroes and villains are meaningless, since the people involved in settling and resettling the frontier all are motivated by greed and selfishness. Such a story world reminds us of mythographic genres such as the classic epic, and intertextualities with Greek and Judaeo‐Christian narratives are endemic. In particular, the reader is invited by McCarthy's use of paratext, such as chapter titles, to see the novel as an instance of katabasis. This paper reads McCarthy's novel as having the dual function of de‐mythologizing and re‐mythologizing the American West, showing that in order to read the West with fresh eyes we must first read it through the old lens of classical literature, and that via a feedback loop the reading of McCarthy's novel changes our understanding of classical mythographic literature as well.