Finding Meaning Within the Narrators Optical Democracy

Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Corman McCarthy. Texas A&M University Press: College Station, 2004. 73-101.

Guillemen’s presents his understanding of McCarthy as an author who uses intense settings and to move the philosophy of his works along. In the into Guillemen says this of McCarthy; “The most intriguing aspect of McCarthy’s fiction is that his narrative voice is increasingly at odds with his narrative vision. McCarthy pitches a highly stylized, wholly man-made literary practice against his evolving ecopastoral universe, until a stalemate between humanist discourse and post humanist idea invest his fiction with a narratiove melancholia that is actually very common in pastoral fiction(3)". He then goes on later to discuss the idea of “optical democracy” within Blood Meridian and the “biocentrism” that he finds there. He sees Blood Meridian as the culmination of McCarthy’s melancholy landscapes and wild settings found within his other books because it is “here the absolute lawlessness of the characters matches the absolute wilderness of the setting(73)". Guillemen’s commentary on Blood Meridian is one that really focuses on the narrator, especially how the narrator is prophetic in tone and very dismal in voice. As he says of the style of narration: “The technique underlying the novel’s egalitarian aesthetic is to elevate nature - as in Child of God - to an existential rank equal to that of human beings. The intention is to identify a wild element, and a concomitant wilderness ethos, on all levels of existence. As exposition (of setting and character) assumes the same status as plot action, the aesthetic leveling is necessarily effected at the expense of the protagonists’ status(79)". The argument is that optical democracy provides the setting with the same status as the characters, and the philosophy, and everything else within the story; so then where can meaning be found?, within the narration, the chosen setting, and the nature of the characters.

This book provides insight into the narrator as a character and his role within the story of Blood Meridian, of the narrator Guillemin says; “As in the other two novels, a melancholy narrator projects allegorical characters into a microcosmic landscape, and no approach other than an allegorical one will unite the novel’s protagonists, plot action, and nature aesthetic in one homogeneous interpretation(73)". He addresses in order to explain or understand the relationship found within the unique dialogues of the kid, the judge, and the narrator. But within the confines of the narrator’s optical democracy how can a reader find understanding? Guillemin offers this; “the absolute indifference of the natural environment and the absolute license of the social environment combine in the text as if to subject picaresque survivalism and relational biocentrism jointly to the universal truth of entropy and death. Arguably then, Blood Meridian ought to be read as . . . but as a historicist epos in the sense that it negotiates the meaning of human history. . .(100)". As for understanding the nature of the judge and his philosophy, Guillemin finds explanation in the Bible when he says; “Ultimately, the judge’s totalitarian claim merely represents an apocalyptic consummation of the biblical mission to ‘be fruitful and multiply, . . . (Gen. 1: 28). From a biocentric point of view, the idea that humans - sitting atop the food chain and being the most predatory of creatures - have stewardship over the world is at once deterministically cogent, and totalitarian(100)". In order to understand these characters (the judge, the kid, or the narrator) along with their rhetoric and philosophies, Guillemin says to look to the setting and nature within the novel, and where the emphasis of the narrator lies on each character.