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68 Chapter Three McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Byron, and the US Frontier While The Handmaid's Tale imagines a possible imperial dystopia in the US, Blood Meridian returns to the 1800s to depict the conflicts that expanded US territory across the North American continent. Both novels invoke Romantic poetry to characterize US empire, but Blood Meridian more specifically portrays how the US developed its imperial power—by appropriating land, by charging discourse with racial distinctions , and by perpetuating myths about the US frontier. Blood Meridian opens with a brief glimpse of the main character, known only as "the kid," during his Tennessee childhood. By the end of the first page the kid is fourteen years old, running away from home and heading out West, but we learn in the meantime that the kid, who "can neither read nor write and [has] already a taste for mindless violence," does not follow in the footsteps of his father, a former schoolmaster who "quotes from poets whose names are now lost" (3). Although we do not see the father once the kid runs away, echoes of poets that we might associate with the father curiously resurface and complicate our reading of the novel. Immediately after contrasting the father and son, in fact, the narrator appropriates Wordsworth in concluding: "All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man" (3). Several scholars have commented on this Wordsworthian intertext with lines from the poem "My heart leaps up when I behold." Adam Parkes, for example, argues that: In running away from home, the kid literalizes what is implied in McCarthy 's use of Wordsworth's famous line, "The Child is father of the Man." In McCarthy's hands, this phrase suggests a self divorced from the Romantic notion of an organic, developing consciousness. The child is father of McCarthy 's man not because he will become a man but because he plays the role of his own father, as if to suggest that such terms as child and man do no more than designate the roles that are available to the same character; either role, in other words, could be said to father the other. In this sense, the kid's biological father becomes irrelevant. Wordsworth, who redeployed McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Byron, and the US Frontier 69 this line from "My Heart Leaps Up" as the epigraph to "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," posited a fundamental relation between selfhood and memory, but from the outset McCarthy's narrator denies this version of the self's relation to time. (104) Yoogin Kim, on the other hand, suggests that "McCarthy fixes the boy's identity to man's communal history . . . In a strange adaptation of the original Wordsworthian verse, McCarthy implies that all of history has produced the kid, whose existence extends, and even engenders anew the history of man" (173). The allusion to Wordsworth 's verse so soon after the association of the father with unnamed poets seems to suggest that the poets' words have significance for the novel, even if the poets themselves remain unacknowledged. Poetry is important to the narration of Blood Meridian because it informs how we conceive of our history, how we read the novel, and how we see ourselves. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator tells the reader to "see the child" (3). The Wordsworthian intertext that follows suggests that in order to fully conceive of the history present in his visage—the image of the US he represents—one must acknowledge the novel's engagement with Romantic poetry. As Rick Wallach points out, the line "the child the father of the man" in Blood Meridian is not the only Wordsworthian intertext in McCarthy's oeuvre. In reference to Cities of the Plain, Wallach observes that "considering the elegiac tone of the epilogue , it is perhaps not surmising too much that we might perhaps trace much of the symbolic content of the stranger's dream to Wordsworth's 'Essay on Epitaphs.' All of this is especially poignant when we recall that McCarthy closed his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, with a very close paraphrase of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber did my Spirit Seal'" (60). Clearly McCarthy's larger body of work demonstrates an engagement with the Romantics' poems. Blood Meridian, I argue, does so to demythologize the US West. Set in the mid-nineteenth-century Southwestern borderlands, Blood Meridian revises the history of the western US as it follows the...

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