The sunset in the west

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The Evening Redness in the West is a novel by Cormac McCarthy , first published in German in 1996 , which is set in the final phase of the Indian Wars. The English-language first and original edition was published in 1985 under the title Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West at Random House New York . The book is about a group of criminals who indiscriminately massacre Indians in the American-Mexican border area and is synonymous with the fact that the actual expansion of the United States was accompanied by strong violence.

The work is considered to be one of the most important novels of the 20th century and helped McCarthy to become one of the greatest English-speaking authors of his time. Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian also the best single book release since Faulkner's As I lay dying .

content

The novel begins in 1849 and tells the story of an unnamed boy at the beginning of fourteen, whose mother has died and who is fleeing from his neglected parents' house in Tennessee , travels west as a tramp and along the way meets the Glanton Gang, a group of former soldiers and desperados . These move randomly and aimlessly through the country from Texas towards Mexico , partly persecuted and threatened by hunger, thirst and Indians, partly even a threat to people who meet them, as they conquer the scalps of defenseless Indians who kill them, for example , for which they receive a premium from various governorates.

action

The novel has no actual plot , rather it describes in twenty-three chapters and different episodes, sometimes also in retrospect, the incidents that happen to the group, which is changing in its cast. Emotional coldness and senseless violence play a dominant role.

Within the group, a number of figures emerge next to the boy: Toadvine, a shabby, mutilated vagabond who he befriends after a fight; Tobin, a former priest ; Glanton, the leader of the troop and also a so-called judge named Holden, who has ingenious traits and is well educated. All characters are characterized in part by pragmatism , emotional indifference, cruelty or cynicism , whereby the narrator avoids an evaluation of the respective behavior, so that the reader has to form his own judgment, if not even the impression that the respective behavior is, no matter how terrible , depending on the situation and understandable.

When the boy was sixteen, the group was almost completely killed in an Indian attack, and Glanton was also slain. They had previously insidiously deceived the Indians when they pretended to attack a ferry station together , but then attacked the Indians during the attack. Only a few can escape the act of revenge of the Indians and they wander alone or in pairs. Suspicious of each other, they gradually kill each other in the struggle for survival.

Only the boy and the judge survive. They meet again twelve years later in a small town saloon . The judge prophesies the boy, now called "the man", that he will die this night and gives him a lecture on the fate of man, using the saloon and dancing there as a metaphor. He speaks of the indifference of the gods and that only the weak and the failed refer to a higher power. When the man goes to a latrine shortly afterwards , he comes across the judge who presses him to his chest and locks the door behind the man. The fact that the judge kills him afterwards is only hinted at, since other guests find something terrible in the toilet. In the end, the judge himself conducts the dance in the saloon like a superhuman being . He says of himself that he never sleeps and never dies.

reception

The novel breaks with notions of the adventurous “Wild West” and the cultural achievement of its development. The aimless train through the west of the USA and the pure destructiveness of the people involved can be seen as a metaphor for the futility and the questionability of all cultural efforts and achievements of the people.

The reception shortly after the novel was published was only lukewarm in the States. McCarthy was known to few at the time. The German-language criticism came out with a transfer when the work by Hans Wolf was translated by Rowohlt Verlag .

“McCarthy describes the history and progress of man as the result of the lowest instincts that doom him to inevitable doom. He does it laconically and poetically, without pity, without false hope, but with the dreamy images of a great visionary. "

"The novel is great in its power of language and its richness of images, it is terrific in its descriptions of landscapes, disturbing in its depiction of naked violence."

- FAZ

The response to McCarthy's work also changed in the English-speaking world of literature when he received the National Book Award in 1992 for All the Beautiful Horses and was now known not only to literary connoisseurs but also to the general public. The American cultural critic Steven Shapiro wrote that The Dusk in the West could only be compared to Moby-Dick in American literature .

Aleksandar Hemon called the novel the best American novel of the last 30 years . In 2006, The New York Times published a list of the best and most significant works in English-language literature over the past 25 years. The sunset in the west took third place behind Don DeLillo's underworld and Toni Morrison's human child . Time magazine also recognized McCarthy's novel as one of the greatest in the English language of its time and included it in their list of the best fiction books published between 1923 and 2005.

Due to the strong portrayal of violence in the book, a film adaptation has so far failed. Even under Ridley Scott , this project did not materialize.

Secondary literature

  • J. Douglas Canfield: Mavericks on the Border: Early Southwest in Historical fiction and Film. University Press of Kentucky, 2001, ISBN 0-8131-2180-9 .
  • Leo. Daugherty: Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy. Southern Quarterly, 30, No. 4, 1992, pp. 122-133.
  • James D. Lilley: History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian. in: Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
  • Barcley Owens: Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels. University of Arizona Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8165-1928-5 .
  • Christoph Schneider: Pastoral hopelessness. Cormac McCarthy and Evil. in: Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank, Andreas Kraft (eds.): Between apocalypse and everyday life. War narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries, Bielefeld 2009: transcript, pp. 171–200.
  • Steven Shaviro: A Reading of Blood Meridian. Southern Quarterly 30, No. 4, 1992.
  • Patrick W. Shaw: The Kid's Fate, the Judge's Guilt: Ramifications of Closure in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Southern Literary Journal, Fall 1997, pp. 102-119.
  • Billy J. Stratton: "el brujo es un coyote". Taxonomies of Trauma in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 67.3 (2011): 151-172.

expenditure

  • Original edition: Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness in the West. Random House, 1985.
  • German first edition: The Evening Redness in the West. (Translation by Hans Wolf), Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-498-04374-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harold Bloom: Dumbing down American readers . In: Boston Globe - Literary critic , September 24, 2003. Retrieved December 4, 2009. 
  2. ↑ Harold Bloom: Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian. In: AV Club - Literary critic , June 15, 2009. Retrieved March 3, 2010. 
  3. ^ From the blurb for the paperback edition , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Hamburg 1998, p. 2, ISBN 978-3-499-22287-0 .
  4. ↑ Shaviro, pp. 111-112.
  5. ^ New York Times, Sunday Magazine , May 21, 2006, p. 16.
  6. ^ All Time 100 Novels . In: Time . Retrieved April 26, 2010. 
  7. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung, No. 231, page 3 (online with paid access: weapons in the USA )