Hungerford's Failure to Read McCarthy

One aspect of McCarthy criticism that has become annoying is the claim, especially in regard to the profound violence in Blood Meridian, to have “failed” in reading it. This claim is made in the famous introduction to the Modern Library Edition by none other than the most self-aggrandizing of American literary critics, Harold Bloom. So it is perhaps against this backdrop that all other claims to “fail” reading Blood Meridian are similarly self-aggrandizing. I believe it is poet/critic Christian Wiman (a personal favorite, actually) who makes a similar claim. And I recently stumbled upon the Open Yale Lecture by Amy Hungerford, whose reading of the novel strikes me as a trenchant and willful misreading of the text. Her conclusions are tenuous at best. She stops just short of saying McCarthy is an egomaniac who aspires to supercede all his influences, when in fact he pays homage to his literary antecedents and readily acknowledges them in interviews, whether Melville, Shakespeare, or Faulkner. First, her claim to have failed in her first attempts at reading the novel reek of melodramatic academicese. Failure suggests persistent inability to accomplish something. Obviously, at some point she finished the book. Therefore, this “failure” is blatant hyperbole. It also seems blatantly unoriginal, as if she’s showing off her sophisticated literary sensibility, situating herself with Bloom and others by making this claim. Whether disingenuous or not, it is irksome. Second, it is as if, in her lectures, Hungerford has a predetermined bias against the text and its author. There is no need to prove your sophisticated sensibility. You are a professor of literature at Yale university, not a Victorian schoolteacher. One element McCarthy touches on in the novel is that, at bottom, reality contains conflict, tension, but this is a creative element that gives rise to process and Being, (see Heidegger, Martin), but that we fail to see that reality, instead distorting that creative tension into destructive conflict, war, oppression, exploitation, reducing the wide mysterious world and each other into so many flat, exchangeable commodities, desacralizing and dehumanizing. This lies at the heart of McCarthy’s work. Now, he may be a writer of immense ambition who also admits he "doesn't know how to write women," but to allow that to undermine a deeply necessary work -- that of restoring mystery and pointing out the ways in which we distort it, is well nigh tragic. In his most recent novel, he says as much as "[creation] hummed of mystery," whereas the villian in Blood Meridian perpetuates the distorted view that "there is no mystery." He portrays the effects of this distortion and draws attention to it so that we might learn from it. McCarthy is trying to bring us face to face with who we are and, historically, who we have been. Savagery has been an element of our existence from The Iliad through the Holocaust. Why is that? McCarthy offers some insight. Far from a mere celebration of violence, this attempt to expose its roots is entirely in line with Hungerford’s own interest in genocide, holocaust studies, religion, and social justice. It’s a shame she “failed” to see it. Whether this will all be captured in the upcoming film version is doubtful. That a Yale literature professor missed it highly disappointing.