Cormac McCarthy's American Waste Land: The Golden Bough, T. S. Eliot, and Mythic Violence in Blood Meridian

Abstract

abstract:Using Michael Crews's analysis of McCarthy's literary influences in Books Are Made of Out of Books, this article will present a reading of Blood Meridian that suggests the novel is heavily influenced by a dense allusive relationship with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Through an analysis of The Waste Land and its own major influences, specifically Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer's The Golden Bough, I argue that McCarthy draws on elements of both ancient myth and grail legend to construct important aspects of the enigmatic character of the kid. An understanding of these elements also yields a new interpretation of the tale of the harnessmaker and its relevance to the ultimate death of the kid in the novel's final pages.