![]() 1 In the Suttree (1979) chapter of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (2009), I discuss the ways in which Suttree’s attention to photographs, not only his studying portraits of the dead but also his habit of capturing evocative images of the living within the frames of windows, reflects “his obsessions with death and his regretted or repudiated past” (217–226). More recently, in ground-breaking articles Randall Wilhelm identifies and explores the implications of the pattern of still life imagery in The Road (2006) and examines McCarthy’s engagement with the picture book genre in All the Pretty Horses (1992). ![]() ![]() luminism, which extends from Emerson to Frederic Church, then from Church to the landscape painters and seaside photographers of the late nineteenth century and early modernism, and which culminates in Ansel Adams’s black and white photographic landscapes” (36–40). Early on, Robert Jarrett briefly noted that McCarthy’s landscapes “derive from. Top of pageġ The ways in which Cormac McCarthy’s knowledge of visual art informs his writing is a fruitful area of study that has evolved slowly over the past two decades and is now beginning to receive the detailed attention it deserves in studies of various art genres in McCarthy’s fiction. Evoking in the reader the perceptual and interpretive modes of a pensive viewer of a painted landscape, these scenes invite us to apply techniques drawn from art criticism to comprehend them as the narrator’s sober meditations on the Glanton gang’s violent enterprise. Each of these scenes bears a title reminiscent of painted landscapes, such as “Under the Animas peaks” or “Night scene with moon, blossoms, judge.” Each comprises a static composition that slows the violent action and also functions as a prose poem, rich in allusiveness. ![]() It culminates in readings of several scenes in which the narrator interprets the landscape before him in moments of sober contemplation. The article surveys the biographical evidence for McCarthy’s interest in the visual arts, then inventories the language of art in Blood Meridian and explores the novel’s allusions to specific artworks. This study argues that in Blood Meridian (1985) McCarthy creates landscape scenes that function as narrative commentary on the Glanton gang’s Indian-fighting, on America’s pursuit of Manifest Destiny, and on humanity’s innate aptitude for violence. ![]()
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