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An abstract of a thesis that explores how 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville, 'The Bear' by William Faulkner, and 'Blood Meridian' by Cormac McCarthy challenge and interrogate the myth of the American frontier through the lens of the hunter-hero mythology. The thesis also discusses the critical reception of these novels and their connections to each other.
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James Robertson TC 660H Plan II Honors Program The University of Texas at Austin 17 May 2019
Dr. James Cox Department of English Supervising Professor
Professor Don Graham Department of English Second Reader
Author: James Robertson Title: Whale, Bear, and Man: The Demythologization of the Hunter-Hero in American Literature Supervising Professors: James Cox, Don Graham This thesis aims to recognize Blood Meridian , “The Bear ,” and Moby Dick as narratives that subvert and interrogate the myth of the American frontier. Originating in the hunter-hero quest, these narratives challenge the convention of “regeneration through violence” and deny their heroes creative powers over the wilderness. Instead these three works illuminate the violence and troubling aspect that underlie the myth and which the archetype sought to cover up. In the conventional structure of the myth, the hunter-hero creates a new world as he himself evolves into a higher state of being, articulating an engagement with the frontier as a productive and constructive enterprise. However, Blood Meridian and “The Bear,” and Moby-Dick present a pervasive doom, a doom distinctive in their aesthetic and thematic preoccupations with self-defeating heroism, horrific transgression, and ubiquitous destruction. “Doom! Doom! Doom!” D.H. Lawrence recognizes the terrible fatalism at the heart of Moby-Dick : “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark tress of America. Doom!”^1 Faulkner and McCarthy also recognize a similar, distinctly American doom in their own hunting narratives. For these three works probe and undermine the hunter-hero tradition in creating narratives that revise and rewrite the popular (^1) D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 168.
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 97 Biography.............................................................................................................................. 101
From Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau set out into the unexplored backwoods of Maine and cataloged the wilderness—flora, fauna, animal life, and Indigenous culture. Three times, Thoreau made the excursion and his three experiences are recorded in the collection The Maine Woods. In his final essay, he speaks about no longer fearing the growl of the bear or scream of the panther, for he has learned humans often scare off such terrors, leaving only their tracks as evidence of their existence. “Generally speaking,” Thoreau writes, “a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.”^2 Since the first British pilgrims beached on the New World, the cultural idea of a frontier, between settlement and a howling wilderness existed. Before the birth of America, the frontier held a great significance in society as space that offered opportunity, freedom, and moral renewal. Puritans and Mormons, slaveholders and abolitionists, politicians and entrepreneurs looked West with creative energies to remake and renew society. Beyond the frontier line, land waited that was by turns empty and people-less, replete with resources and easy wealth, ordinated by God for the Anglo-Saxon race, offered a New Eden, and provided (^2) Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1972): 242.
archetype sought to cover up. In the conventional structure of the myth, the hunter-hero creates a new world as he himself evolves into a higher state of being, articulating an engagement with the frontier as a productive and constructive enterprise. However, Blood Meridian and “The Bear” and Moby-Dick present a pervasive doom, a doom distinctive in their aesthetic and thematic preoccupations with self-defeating heroism, horrific transgression, and ubiquitous destruction. “Doom! Doom! Doom!” D.H. Lawrence recognizes the terrible fatalism at the heart of Moby-Dick : “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark tress of America. Doom!”^3 Faulkner and McCarthy also recognize a similar, distinctly American doom in their own hunting narratives. For these three works probe and undermine the hunter-hero tradition in creating narratives that revise and rewrite the popular mythology of the hunter-hero, culminating in depictions that unsettle pervasive American ideals and overwhelm the national character with the slaughter of its history. This thesis intends to establish that Blood Meridian engages with “The Bear” on an extensive and significant basis on the basis of the mythology of the hunter-hero and in particular upon Melville’s interrogation of the myth in Moby-Dick. Scholarship on Blood Meridian has recognized points of connection between McCarthy’s work and Moby-Dick and well as with “The Bear.” This thesis brings the three great hunting narratives in American fiction together for the first time. Through biographical information, archival research, and textual analysis both technical and thematic, this thesis then proposes a literary lineage exists between Moby-Dick , “The Bear,” and Blood Meridian. Richard Slotkin’s landmark study of the hunter-hero in American literature Regeneration through Violence grounds my understanding the hunter-hero tradition and the tradition’s investment upon Moby-Dick. (^3) D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 168.
Extending Slotkin’s work as well as Rick Wallach’s “MobyBear,” which recognized the structural and thematic concordances between Moby-Dick and “The Bear,” this thesis seeks to align Blood Meridian with “The Bear” and thereby propose a revisionist literary tradition that begins with Melville. To do so, this thesis seeks to understand the hunter-hero tradition, its significance and its central features which provides a foundation for the following argument for the correspondence between Moby-Dick and the hunter-hero tradition. After recognizing such similarities, this thesis then identifies Melville’s diversions from the tradition and contends that such derivations reveal important insights into the book. The following chapter on “The Bear” follows a similar approach with the additional intention of analyzing the relationship between the novella and Moby-Dick. Like “MobyBear,” this thesis approaches examinations of literary influence not only by identifying technical and thematic connections but also in seeing a dynamic between the parent text and the latter author. A dynamic that sees Faulkner consciously assimilating aspects of Moby-Dick while also shifting his emphasis upon a different focus than that of Melville. Thereby, the thesis moves to an examination of Blood Meridian in context of Moby-Dick , “The Bear,” and the hunter-hero tradition. In establishing a sustained correspondence between the authors in regard to style, theme, and character through close readings and comparative analyses, this thesis offers an opportunity for new readings of all three works. Engaged with the hunter-hero as well as with the dynamic between Moby-Dick and “The Bear,” this thesis attempts to de-emphasize readings of Blood Meridian that attribute significance to themes and ideas that McCarthy borrowed from the earlier works. Instead, this thesis sheds light on McCarthy’s diversions,
and discord in the critical landscape extends partly from McCarthy’s writing process and the unique character of the book. The wildly disparate readings of Blood Meridian , documented by scholars such as John Sepich, Dianne C. Luce, and Michael Lynn Crews, attests to the richness of McCarthy as an author. Yet the diversity of the criticism provokes a notion of ultimate unknowability for McCarthy’s novel. An example: when asked about reading Blood Meridian as a critique of American Imperialism, Harold Bloom said such theory is “too simplistic an understanding of McCarthy.” To illustrate that such a reading does not do justice to the novel’s artistry, Bloom refers to the doomed Apaches advancing upon Glanton’s Gang, the latter freshly equipped with black powder. Bloom continues: “I don’t think that the aesthetically minded reader is trying to think of that as a sociological commentary on the degradation of the Apache Nation. It’s a grand picaresque in its own right.”^5 Bloom captures here the continuous debate around Blood Meridian and its enigmatic character that’s stems from how the novel provokes diverse readings while resisting overarching theories that attempt to account for it. Bloom explains this novel’s quality as ‘an evasion of themes’ which forms an essential part of McCarthy’s artistry and generates the diversity of critical opinions on it. McCarthy’s writing process helps to explain the evasion of themes and diversity of ideas that Blood Meridian contains. Michael Lynn Crews asserts in Books Made out of Books that “what we discover in the archives, in instance after instance, is that ideas are, for McCarthy, material, just as images, metaphors, and striking turns of phrase are….look more (^5) Harold Bloom, “Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian,” Interview by Leonard Pierce, Avclub.com, June 15,
like colors on a painter’s palette than ideas indexed for later development.”^6 Crews understands McCarthy assembling various artifacts not in building an ideological structure but in forming a work of art wholly different, to quote the Judge, “not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories.”^7 Like one of Picasso’s synthetic collages in which he realizes the form of a guitar in a composition of unassociated materials— scraps of sheet music, drawings, wallpaper, etc.— Blood Meridian as a conceptual whole resists explanation from its components. Crews contends: “even when we find McCarthy appropriating the works of other thinkers, it is difficult to draw a line between intellectual and aesthetic appropriation, so suffused with the latter is the former.”^8 McCarthy appears to consciously trying to write himself into a literary tradition in invoking the themes and aesthetics of great writers. Such facts motivate this thesis to understand McCarthy through the context of literary and cultural history, one he himself seems aware of writing within. Over the course of the novel, this process of assemblage bears out. Dana Phillips recognizes the significance of McCarthy’s writing style which demonstrates a preference for the technical and literary over ideological consistency: The speech of McCarthy's protagonists (perhaps his own as well) is no longer, then, an index of characterological or personal traits, the instrument with which to divine some hidden and occult order in the world, but simply a historical and literary artifact. For that reason, it is available to the writer without regard for psychological or moral or political propriety… Once psychology, morality, and politics come to be (^6) Michael Lynn Crews, Books Are Made Out of Books (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017): 12. (^7) Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (New York: Vintage International, 1985), pg. 342. (^8) Michael Lynn Crews, Books Are Made Out of Books (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017): 12.
My approach attempts to recognize the larger narrative structures and conventions that McCarthy engages with and rewrites in Blood Meridian. A tradition uniquely American, I see McCarthy engaging with a national literary canon more so than the wider Western tradition. Rather than Melville and Faulkner who show through engagements with Plato and the Bible, respectively, their interest in the more ancient influences on Western literature, McCarthy demonstrates an emphasis on the national symbolical and the American canon which stood less established in Faulkner’s and especially so in Melville’s time. Since emphasizing surface rather than close readings runs the risk conflating aesthetics and philosophy, I will look at Blood Meridian’s larger formal elements and engage only McCarthy’s most prominent and established influences. In doing so, my thesis aims to aggregate some prominent grounds of agreement in the critical landscape. Faulkner, Melville, Regeneration through Violence , and the myth and ritual of the hunt in American literature all figure throughout scholarship on the novel, yet the existing criticism has yet to consider them altogether.
The hunter-hero pervades the imagination of American society throughout the nation’s history and appears in both fictional and historical forms, often a mixture of both. At the intersection of reality and myth towered the most recognizable hunter-heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, who stand among the defining figures of American identity (at least for white American men.) The hunter-hero continued to persist even after Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier dead in America, thereafter occupying the country’s highest office in the figure of Theodore Roosevelt and treated with old world royalty when
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show crossed the Atlantic. Explaining its mythic appeal and popularity, the American hunter captures the traits such as rugged individualism, kinship with nature, masculine strength, self-empowerment and self-determination which distinguish a popular American character. In the mythic narrative, the hunter-hero enters the wilderness to engage an animal avatar in a violent contest for domination and spiritual empowerment. The struggle develops into an intimate kinship as the hunter-hero forgoes his familial, societal home and enters a new world into which he must assimilate and with which he must identify in order to attain the skills needed to defeat the beast. After an initiation culminating his education in navigating the space and comprehending the animal from its tracks, the hunter locates and engages the foremost beast in a violent embrace that merges their identities and consummates the union of man and nature. In the climax, the hunter slays the beast and achieves spiritual regeneration as well as dominion over the environment. Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence acts as a central authority on the mythology of the American frontier, and his understanding of the hunter-hero provides the cultural and literary historical foundation for this thesis. But unlike other criticism using similar cultural/historical approaches, my analysis develops Blood Meridian’s significance as a work of literature, toward conclusions bearing on an artistic tradition. My focus on the hunter-hero myth, its history and context, locates a basis for the structures and thematic preoccupations of Moby-Dick , “The Bear,” and Blood Meridian. The hunter myth, identified by Slotkin, articulates a regenerative power of violent transgression that justifies and validates recurrent cruelties as ends in themselves, the act of killing containing a spiritual value independent from material rewards like pelts and money
his Studies in Classic American Literature describes the American as a writhing snake, shedding its European skin while trying to grow a new skin underneath.^11 This process, as Lawrence tracks it through James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, makes the American “a torn divided monster,” struggling out of the old-world traditions and creating new values in the self.^12 American mythology developed to reassure and prophesize that the suffering would not be in vain. Rather, engagement with the frontier connected one with the ideal, allowing pioneers to reach heights unattainable in the east and certainly not in an overcrowded, increasingly industrial Europe. Whether that reward meant spiritual conversion, the exorcism of demons, the slaying of the wilderness avatar, or the city upon a hill, the frontier myths rededicated succeeding generations to the project of America expansion. To go west and light out for the territories, Americans followed the myths to pursue the limits of the land, knowledge, and control. While the hunter-hero figure extends far back into human history, the myth emerges to prominence in America after its revolution. Americans now stood on more secure ground than their Puritan ancestors who survived in settlements besieged by wilderness. Whereas the Indigenous people saw their surroundings as their home, hunting and fishing grounds, Anglo settlers now could perceive of the land as nature, an unexplored wilderness to be conquered. Expansion had pushed the frontier westward, and the whole of society did not contend with the frontier realities that gave captivity narratives such relevance before. With independence, the need for a social identity became even more prominent as a search for a national character to justify a people upon the strange continent. The hunter-hero likewise stands (^11) D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 58. (^12) Ibid, 58.
innocent and unnamed, the wilderness working as a site of his practical and spiritual education, the hunt separating the child from the man. As Slotkin shows in John Filson’s fiction, the novels that popularized Daniel Boone, the hunter discovers a growing sense of his true nature through his time on the frontier.^13 Relocating in an unfamiliar world, the hunter learns to locate himself and the wilderness itself, learns to read tracks and translate prints into an animal’s larger behavior patterns. Through ordering the world, the mythic hunter achieves self-possession and a clear identity. “Because of his understanding of the laws of life in the woods, he can impose an order of his own on events,” Slotkin writes, “employing the best of both Puritan and Indian cultures for his own benefit.”^14 The hunter emerges out of two worlds as now a master over both, possessing a culture distinct from either society from whence he came. As America grew westward, the recurring frontier experience produced and distilled an image of the hunter. Since the existential threat of survival had passed and engagement with the frontier had proved productive, a new mythology distinct from “the devilish and pagan wilderness” started to emerge in popular literature. With men like Benjamin Church, who followed the frontier each time the boundary moved further, a frontiersman image started to distill into a character with a new relationship to the wilderness. Church felt drawn spiritually as well as economically towards the natural world and invested his characters with a love for what had previously been feared. Slotkin recognizes the restless western pursuit as a nomadic pattern that typified frontier life and represented a cleavage from the Puritan mindset exalting “a permanent, settled dwelling place, close to ‘the institutions of God” as (^13) Richard Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600- 1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 289. (^14) Ibid, 161.
toward explaining the differences between the American and European, the former progressive, the latter stagnant and time-bound.”^18 Westward from mere foot holds like Jamestown, America experienced frontier life at some point nearly everywhere. And to extend Hall, Daniel Boone in one form or another emerged, lived and died countless times between the two coasts. For at each meridian of confrontation, the violent contest offered Americans to redefine and renew its national character. The American moved as a generative and destructive force, active in labor against primordial forces, and as a result clarified himself and developed settlements in an experiment to reform and energize decadent European society, generating something ideal. Many occupations involved this process, but the hunter-hero encountered the wilderness first in the avant-garde of civilization, learned to perceive the primordial world, and translated it back conceptually and materially. But unfamiliar and unoriented to the wild, the hunter-hero had to experience an initiation that required an indigenous education. To survive, navigate, track and hunt, the hunter-hero depended on the Native American. And in symbolic terms, the ‘Indian’ offered the hunter a means to reconcile himself with the New World. By assimilating the ‘Indian’ culture, the hunter could not only learn to survive in the strange land but also take ownership over it. His mastery of the wilderness justifies his existence in it and, often, his superiority over the people inhabiting it. The hunter’s conversion to ‘Indian’ ways grants him the power to destroy them, (^18) Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 16.
Being self-possessed enough to resist temptation, the hunter-hero could assimilate into Indian society and learn the way of the hunt which, once perfected, would allow him to overcome nature and ‘Indian’ both to become master over the land. Mastery over the land would offer the settlers a justification for their presence upon a strange continent, justifying their motivations and efforts to establish settlement upon the Western hemisphere. The mythology seeks not only to differentiate the America from the Old World, but also reconcile him with the New World. The latter necessitates that the captivity narrative inverts, the hunter offering himself willingly as a captive to the Indian world with the white woman remaining with civilization, a reconciliation of society and wilderness following the culmination of the hunter-hero’s narrative. Such stands as an unsurprising reversal of power relations considering America’s growth as Anglo-Americans began to considered themselves no longer the victim of the wilderness but the aggressor against them. From such position, popular imagination recognized the Indian with greater familiarity and even envy. Lacking any true reality, the “Indian” as a literary figure exists only for white society and bears little upon the peoples indigenous to America. Instead, the Indian represents a projected inversion of European society and reflects the anxieties involved in the American project. In enforcing western propriety and Christian devotion in the New World, the Puritans saw savagery and evil in Indian society as evidence to uphold their institutions and to justify taking Indigenous land and killing and, in some cases, enslaving Indigenous people. While the representation of the ‘Indian’ as a barbarian persisted, Anglo-Americans began to recognize aspects of ‘Indian’ society as a noble alternative to Europe. In both the Boston Tea Party and Whiskey Rebellion, Americans engaged in rebellion in the costume of the Indian to
