PrettyFakes

Over the years, I’ve kept an informal, seldom-updated list of things, people, places, and so forth that are tremendously overrated. It’s so informal that I’ve never written it down, and so seldom updated that I haven’t added anything to it since the day I came up with it. As the list’s sole entries, Jim Morrison and Eric Clapton have been sick of each other’s company for over a decade now; the stream of pretentious, narcissistic chatter that once flowed between them has diminished into a damp bog of awkward coughs and quiet humming.

Of course, now that I no longer live in a dorm populated almost entirely by 18-22 year-old middle-class white guys, neither Morrison’s nor Clapton’s reputation seems so unimpeachable as it once did. Regardless, my annual stroll through the university poster sale indicates that their stars show little signs of being eclipsed anytime soon. So I’ll keep them on the list. But I think I may have found another item to keep them company: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

For years, I’ve been hearing from trusted sources that Blood Meridian is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American novels of the contemporary era. I’ve seen the crackle of disdain in a person’s eyes when he (invariably it’s a he) realizes that my pretensions to being an intellectual, a scholar, and perhaps even a human being are entirely false when I tell him I haven’t read the novel yet. And now that I have read it, and found it wanting, I fear my degrees might be retroactively stripped from me.

So look, it’s not that the book doesn’t have some considerable strengths, its prose chief among them. Sentence by sentence, it’s a feast, and as a billion others have noted, the King Jamesliness of the language is the perfect vehicle for the brutality of the plot, in which men suffer in ways that even Job might have been hard pressed to endure. But aside from beautifully rendered depravity, I’m not sure there’s much there there. A lot of the novel’s alleged philosophical depth comes from the character of Judge Holden, a distillation of Robert Mitchum’s scariest characters who’s spent the whole night reading the The Portable Nietzsche. Cruel and all-knowing, he holds forth on the nature of scientific inquiry, the destructive potential of representation, and the permanence of war.

This is all well and good. But I can’t help but feel that his philosophizing simply offers a kind of high-falutin gloss to the gloriously rendered shoot-em-up-and-then-when-you’re-out-of-bullets-carve-‘em-up violence. The judge is like a dark hole that you think leads to hidden depths, but in fact is just a black circle painted on the ground. You’ll just bump your head if you try to go through. This is b-movie mustache-twirling villain philosophy; Die Hard would seem real deep, too, if you read it in the KJV. (I would love to see this bumper sticker: “If it ain’t King James… it ain’t Die Hard!”). I find myself drawn to the conclusion that Blood Meridian offers the same kind of pleasure as the movie Seven: the pleasure of being able to justify a vicarious wallow in the muck and mire of human depravity by telling ourselves that its really a morality play. Maybe it is, but that’s not why we’re there.

Well. Or maybe we are. It’s always a bad idea to dismiss as complicated a work as BM is alleged to be as overrated, because of course you make yourself vulnerable to the charge of not having understood it. If you came up to me and said that you’d just finished Absalom, Absalom! and that you thought Faulkner was a hack who didn’t deserve his reputation, I would treat you with the smug condescension that you would richly deserve. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of those ninnies you see quoted in surveys of McCarthy’s career who are always getting the vapors over how bloody and violent his novels are. And in fact, as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve stopped myself several times to consider the claims I’m making: is it not possible that part of McCarthy’s point is to drag us down to the point that we take pleasure in this depravity, and then force us to look at ourselves in the mirror with a new awareness of our own potential for evil? Is this truly any more awful than McTeague, which I profess to love? Would I have liked it better if they had gone prospecting for gold at the end? Isn’t he perhaps satirizing the judge’s ubermenschical pretensions? And that whole last scene in the jakes and then at the dance is pretty awesome.

So, I may change my mind yet. For years I thought Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea should go on that list, but it’s won me over in recent years on repeat listens, and though I still think it’s overrated—I mean, it would just about have to be, given how highly it’s rated, and maybe that’s the problem with BM, too—I don’t think it’s grossly, ridiculously overrated. It certainly doesn’t deserve to have to spend eternity listening to Clapton play very slow, very boring, very reverent versions of old blues songs. So I should probably use a pencil with plenty of eraser if I’m going to go through with adding Blood Meridian. Which I’ve kind of talked myself out of now.

But two things are certain: one, Suttree is ten times the novel that Blood Meridian is; and two, Morrison and Clapton are never getting off this list.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Books, In the Nation, In the South, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.