Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier

1. Foundation of Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

   | 19   Foundation of Empire The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is No more. Empire follows Art and not vice verse.   C ormac McCarthy’s Southwestern works,and Blood Meridian in particular , have been seen as both archetypal Westerns and as antiWesterns ,as myth and counter-myth,as glorifications of American imperialism and as damning indictments of it.I will argue here that McCarthy does indeed evoke archetypal myths and mythic heroes that have traditionally been used to serve the cause of American westward expansion and imperialism . That is, in part, the function of myth—to legitimate current social structures through a stylized vision of the past, to offer blueprints for behaviors and attitudes, and to justify future actions. I will also argue, however ,that by uncovering the most ancient bones underlying these myths and using them to construct a new mythic vision of history, McCarthy is deliberately deconstructing the imperialist aims and justifications of the old myths while disrupting assumptions about the ideas and identities they were intended to uphold. The result is indeed an indictment, bloody and accusatory , of an American national(ist) identity based on the violent conquest of both racialized Others and feminized nature. The new mythic vision presented in Blood Meridian offers a postmodern challenge to notions of essentialized ethnic and national identities and borders. One of the many complex relationships McCarthy explores in Blood Meridian ,or,TheEveningRednessintheWestisbetweenhumans,especiallyAnglo Americans, and the natural world. He does so in part through the manipulation of several archetypal myths closely identified with the European 20 |   experience in the New World, tracing their collapse and rebirth in the border regions of the American Southwest. McCarthy moves Blood Meridian through the dark and disordered spaces of what Lauren Berlant terms the National Symbolic, but unlike the familiar icons of mythic frontier tales, McCarthy’s characters seek no closure, nor do they render order out of the chaos of history. Rather, they reveal the chaos at the heart of history and the myths we make from it. The novel functions on the level of myth-making and National Fantasy as an American origin story, a reimaging upon the palimpsest of the Western frontier the birth of one of our most pervasive National Fantasies—the winning of the West and the building of the American character through frontier experiences.1 Both of these related themes demand a wilderness to be conquered, either literally via ax and plow or metaphorically by defeating the Indians rhetorically tied to the wild landscape. Annette Kolodny has defined the American obsession with land, especially land-as-woman, as an American Pastoral, drawing some images from the European version, yet unique from it. The literary hero within this landscape, she says, is “the lone male in the wilderness”(The Lay of the Land, ) struggling to define a relationship with the female landscape in its troubling metaphorical appearance as both fruitful mother and untouched virgin,one image offering nurturing fertility while the other demands penetration and conquest. Blood Meridian chronicles the origin of this figure, sometimes called the American Adam, though not the benignly patriarchal John Wayne version. McCarthy’s project is not simply to retell the familiar myths or dress up the icons of cowboys and Indians in modern,politically correct costumes.Rather he is using the trope of the historic frontier and the landscape of the Southwest within the genre of the Western to interrogate the consequences of our acceptance of archetypal Western hero myths. Blood Meridian rewrites and reorders those myths in such a way as to bridge the discontinuity Patricia Limerick identifies as being perceived by the public to exist between the mythic past of theAmericanWest and its modern realities.2 This gap,marked by the feeling of discontinuity and limned by continued popular obsession with traditional Western and frontier icons that have thus far failed to cover it, is filled in Blood Meridian with a newly structured version of National Fantasy,though not one that imposes any kind of hoped-for order or control. Instead McCarthy presents a counter-memory, a sort of anti-myth of the West,illuminating especially the roots of the modernAmerican relationships betweenAnglos and non-Anglos and between humans and the natural world. In many ways McCarthy has produced a counter-history, in contradiction [18.220.160.216] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...