/lit/ - Literature

Surpassed 50 years ago.
>>2236830
Retard

Few comments on Blood Meridian and Latin American writers:

>I remembered to him that he had remarked in our earlier conversation that he’d made
the point that the book is a romance, and I said that I had done some work on what the
handbooks say is a “Romance,” and we tended to agree that it seemed “probable” that Holden, out of the novel’s last chapter, could live forever. He said there were, he thought, “certain indications of the supernatural” in the book. He said that there seemed nothing to stand in the way on the grounds of physics as we know it.

>I remarked that he must have the best memory in the last two hundred years, to have
done work so close to the historical sources, or that he’d worked well with xeroxes. He said that the book’s made up of what’s out there, and then you see what you can do with it. I mentioned Bell’s Achievement (which he again recognized) on the Yumas’ dress, and he proposed that every detail in the novel is based on actual fact.

>I asked him a question about a part of the book Jake Mills has questions about, of the
scene of the kid and the judge in the jakes, and what happens. All the reader has are the reactions of other characters and no description. I said to McCarthy that it seemed to me
that the kid couldn’t have lived through his experience with the judge, that I’d gotten the
impression out of the Indian treatment of enemy war dead in the novel that the Judge had
probably given the kid a full treatment of such things, and that some of what was going on in the latter jakes scene had to do with 1878 people reacting to that type of bloody war result. McCarthy said that he really didn’t know what had gone on in the closed outhouse, but that what I suggested didn’t strike him as too far off the mark. His answer, as were most of his answers to direct questions, more a reaction to a leading question than the presentation of a formulated response of his own. Nevertheless, it was my distinct impression that the kid did die at the judge’s hands in that encounter, McCarthy’s reluctance to characterize the manner of the death notwithstanding.

>I did ask one last question, about the Epilogue of the book, saying that I knew his
words “fire in the hole” were both a term used in blasting/mining. He said yes, it’s a term from “demolition work,” akin to “timber” in logging, but that what his Epilogue had been
written to be was a description (without “nomenclature,” I suggested) of someone using a post-hole digger, going down to rock, as far as possible, then moving on, and of someone with posts following. The blades of the throw-down digger strike sparks on that rock layer. I said anytime anybody writes about making fire people read Prometheus into it, and he laughed and said yes, but that his Epilogue was about fences. A “literal description of a mundane activity, of post-hole digging.”

>In the late winter of eighteen seventy-eight he was on the plains of north Texas. He crossed the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River on a morning when skim ice lay along the sandy shore and he rode through a dark dwarf forest of black and twisted mesquite trees. He made his camp that night on a piece of high ground where there was a windbreak formed of a tree felled by lightning. He’d no sooner got his fire to burn than he saw across the prairie in the darkness another fire. Like his it twisted in the wind, like his it warmed one man alone.

>>21802240
Pic related is better and I am sick of pretending it isn't.

>>21654527

>>21595466
Because it presents the possibility of hidden knowledge (gnosis), that one thing can be another thing or more than one thing. Tbf Similes do that job better.

>>21462602
According to the Gnostic worldview, humans are composed of “flesh, soul and spirit.” Of these, “flesh” and “soul” are from the archons, servants of the demiurge, the creator god who stands between man and a transcendent God who can only be reached through gnosis, or spiritual knowledge, and “spirit” is from that transcendent God. The coldforger from the kid’s ether dream before surgery is the demiurge, hammering out counterfeit coins representing the false value of the material world, when the only true value is the gnosis, or spiritual knowledge. That the man in the desert of the epilogue is “progressing by means of holes . . . striking the fire out of the rock that God has put there” suggests that he is “freeing sparks of the divine fire trapped in matter, or rock, by the god of this world, the demiurge,” while “on the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search” (337). Some search fruitlessly for truth in the bones and relics of the past, while “those who do not search” seek fulfillment in other areas such as family, work, or sex.

While the coldforger from the kid’s ether dream in descending section six represents the demiurge, or creator god (310), the hermit from the beginning of the book in ascending section four is the transcendent God (18). The hermit shares water with the kid, albeit salty and sulphorous. The hermit protects the kid, telling him to stay with him to avoid the approaching storm. The hermit shares with the kid the remains of a lank prairie hare interred in cold grease, and in the middle of the night the kid awakes to find the hermit watching over him. Tobin tells the kid that the gifts of the almighty are weighed and parceled in a scale peculiar to him. It is the hermit who holds the dried, blackened heart of a slave “as if he’d weigh it” (18).

In Six Theosophic Points, Jacob Boehme states that, “When I see a right man there I see three worlds standing.” According to Edwin Arnold, “Boehme saw humankind existing in three states simultaneously: the external world composed of the natural elements, the world of darkness . . . and the world of light.” Nikolas Berdyaev explains in the introduction to Six Theosophic Points, “The visible world is a manifestation of the interior spiritual world of eternal Light and Darkness, of that spiritual activity, it is a reflection of eternity which allows eternity to make itself visible.” I argue that Blood Meridian is an expression of “three worlds standing:” the ‘natural’ world of the nineteenth century borderlands as the novel’s setting and framework, the Nietzschean world of darkness and nihilism in the novel proper, and the Gnostic world which only offers glimpses of light in the epilogue.

the fuck is this books obsession with spitting? every single page "dry spit" whatever that's supposed to be, seems to be the main character. seems like the kid is always hyper salivating and can't talk before ridding his mouth of said "dry" spit

Why the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter?

>>19306606

This uninspired, overly verbose drivel left my my brain feeling the equivalent of a parched throat.

>They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.

tfw you browse rekt and gore threads and blood meridian pales in comparison

based or cringe?

toadvine bros... did we lose?
why did it have to end that way bros

What are some other works like pic related of a similar quality which deal about the themes of violence and war. Not looking for a run of the mill war novel but something more reflective and philosophical about the violent nature of man

>>18739125
That cover sucks, ugly as hell. This is the only good one. The green and black one with gold lettering is alright but kinda bland.

>>18674139

>>18659235
You could have picked a more dazzling section tbqhwyfamalam.