Creative Destruction, Primitive Accumulation, and the Imagination of Catastrophe in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
p. 109-125
Résumés
This essay argues that Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has been under-valued as a 1980s novel—as a novel that tells us much about the Reagan-era, and that is imbued in a variety of ways with the debates and conflicts of its time. The essay proposes a number of ways in which the “apocalyptic” vision of the novel might be read within the historical context of the 1980s U.S. It considers, briefly, the relationship between McCarthy’s representation of nineteenth century expansionism and the deployment of American (and proxy-American) military power during the Reagan-era. It touches on Blood Meridian’s reconfiguring of 1980s “culture wars” relativism as an overtly nihilistic political and intellectual praxis. Latterly the essay also considers, again briefly, the poetic correspondence between Reagan-era attacks on the public realm and debates about the meaning of “public” and “private” in Blood Meridian, suggesting that the novel might fruitfully be read alongside other Reagan-era American culture such as the work of Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self).
But the essay’s central argument also offers a further reason as to how and why Blood Meridian’s commentary on U.S. “imperialism” across the contiguous continent during the mid-C19th might also be said to evoke, very specifically, the 1980s. Touching on, among other sources, recent Chicano historiography, the essay characterises the mid-C19th SouthWest as a period of what Marx called “primitive accumulation” of capital—for Marx, an “apocalyptic” period, in which the existing structures of older feudal orders are destroyed or substantively eroded as a precondition for the historical emergence of the bourgeoisie. The essay considers the resonance, in the broader historical “text” encompassed within the novel, between this apocalyptic period of primitive accumulation, and what has been described as a new period of primitive accumulation initiated during the Reagan years; the slow but dramatic dismantling of the post-WW2 ‘Fordist’ political economy and the New Deal welfare state, and the systemic reconstruction of American capitalism along “neoliberal” lines.
1980s, Reagan, expansionism, 19th c, Marx, accumulation, Fordism.
Cette étude défend l’idée que Blood Meridian de Cormac McCarthy a été sous-estimé en tant que roman des années 1980 — en tant que roman qui nous dit beaucoup de choses sur l’ère Reagan et qui est imprégné de bien des manières des débats et des conflits de son époque. Cet article propose plusieurs façons de lire la vision « apocalyptique » du roman dans le contexte historique des États-Unis des années 1980. Il envisage brièvement la relation qui existe entre la représentation mccarthienne de l’expansionnisme du xixe siècle et le déploiement du pouvoir militaire américain (et du pouvoir militaire mis en place par les Américains) pendant l’ère Reagan. Il aborde la reconfiguration opérée par Blood Meridian du relativisme des « guerres culturelles » des années 1980 comme une praxis politique et intellectuelle ouvertement nihiliste. Finalement, cet article s’intéresse aussi, encore une fois brièvement, à la correspondance poétique qui existe entre les attaques de l’Administration reaganienne contre le secteur public et les débats sur le sens de « public » et « privé » dans Blood Meridian, suggérant ainsi que le roman pourrait être lu avec profit à la lumière de l’autre culture américaine de l’ère Reagan comme celle qui est décrite dans le livre de Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self).
Cependant, l’argument central de cet article propose une raison supplémentaire d’affirmer que le commentaire de Blood Meridian sur « l’impérialisme » des États-Unis à l’égard du continent limitrophe au milieu du xixe siècle pourrait également évoquer, et ce de manière très spécifique, les années 1980. Abordant, entre autres sources, l’historiographie chicano récente, cette étude définit le Sud-Ouest de la moitié du xixe siècle comme une situation caractérisée par ce que Marx appelait l’« accumulation primitive » du capital — c’est-à-dire une période « apocalyptique » selon Marx, pendant laquelle la destruction et l’érosion des structures existantes des anciens ordres féodaux sont une condition de l’émergence historique de la bourgeoisie. L’article étudie, au sein du « texte » historique plus large inscrit dans le roman, la résonance entre cette période apocalyptique d’accumulation primitive et ce qui a été décrit comme une nouvelle période d’accumulation primitive commencée sous Reagan : à savoir, le lent mais dramatique démantèlement de l’économie politique fordiste de l’après-Seconde Guerre mondiale et celui de l’État-Providence mis en place sous le New Deal, ainsi que la reconstruction systémique du capitalisme américain selon des lignes « néo-libérales ».
1980, Reagan, expansionnisme, xixe siècle, Marx, accumulation, Fordisme.
Texte intégral
1Perhaps it is because I am what Donald Rumsfeld would call an “old” European, but it seems to me that the new age of U.S. imperialism currently under way around the world makes necessary the development of new strategies—or at least the reconfiguring of some old ones—for reading American literature and culture. The very real capacity of U.S. political and economic elites to act as an homogenising presence in the world, by reshaping the global order in accordance with their own interests, means that literary and cultural critics, no less than political activists, may fruitfully begin re-exploring the points of overlap and areas of common ground that exist between and among the great diversity of struggles and resistances rightly privileged by Anglo-American academia in recent years. In the new age of American imperialism there is, perhaps, a need to return if not to “grand,” then at least to somewhat grander narratives—however strategically or provisionally these narratives may be brought to bear—in the interrogation of U.S. literature, and indeed of U.S. culture in the more general sense of daily life as lived experience.1
2 While this essay is concerned primarily with establishing some parameters within which a particular interrogation of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian might respond to this need, it may also be taken as an attempt to revive and renew an existing tradition within American intellectual history—the most recent touchstone for which might be certain positions taken in Kaplan and Pease’s Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), but whose roots go back further to the emergence of the William Appleman Williams school of historiography in the 1950s, and earlier to the work of Charles Beard. In the tradition of U.S. historiography exemplified by these sources, I argue for the construction of a new canon: one that relates American cultural-production to the functioning of crisis-tendencies in American political economy of the modern era, and that views the history of the modern U.S., in more or less structuralist terms, as a continuing cycle of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” in the mechanisms of capitalist democracy.2 The bulk of the essay is a reworking of a paper read at the Cormac McCarthy Society sessions of the 2002 Western Literature Association conference in Tucson. That paper was itself an attempt to develop further the suggestion made by John Beck, in an earlier, unpublished paper read at the McCarthy Society conference in Manchester, 2000, in which Beck suggested that Blood Meridian could be read in interesting ways as a novel of the 1980s, a novel of the Reagan-era. I want to try and take that suggestion in a slightly different direction here, and I want to spend some time, in particular, looking at the peculiar historical resonance the nineteenth century West might have in Blood Meridian, if the novel is considered primarily, as Beck suggests it should be, as an artifact of the Reagan years.
3In re-examining the relationship between the imagination of catastrophe in Blood Meridian and the catastrophic history of U.S. political economy, the essay also aims to raise two broader questions. First: if culture is irreducibly historical, and modern U.S. history can be characterised in part as a narrative of economic and political crisis, how should this effect the ongoing construction of American cultural canons? Second: how do the meanings of discrete cultural artefacts shift and change if they are seen as products of a history that has been constituted, in part, by a catastrophic narrative of imperial power driven by political and economic elites? In order to broach these issues, much of the rest of this essay is taken up by discussion of quite broad historiographical issues, but only because I feel that these issues are germane both to the novel itself, and to the historical moment that helps constitute the novel—in a slightly different sense—as “text.”
4 Blood Meridian’s apocalyptic sensibility has been widely noted in the criticism. Harold Bloom, no less, has described Blood Meridian as “the authentic American apocalyptic novel” (254), and over the years a range of catastrophic scenarios, and disastrous “endings” of various kinds, have been read into Blood Meridian by different critical approaches. It has been frequently said or implied, for example, that Blood Meridian is a postmodern novel, one that announces, like much contemporary thought and culture, the collapse of the Enlightenment project, the end of humanism, the end of ethics, the end of human sovereignty over nature (and indeed culture)—the catastrophic end of modernity itself. A growing body of criticism has commented on the ecocritical components of McCarthy’s prose, an aspect of his writing that directs us in other ways, again, toward something like the dying days of the humanist age—a passing that seems confirmed later in the Border Trilogy’s subsequent, weary acceptance, that small acts of decency, rather than grand revolutionary gestures, are the most we should expect or hope for, given prevailing historical conditions.
5A further critical approach to have highlighted the apocalyptic sensibility informing Blood Meridian has described the book as a revisionist novel of the American West, and as a fellow-traveller of the New Western History, whose emergence in the 1980s gave fresh and dramatic impetus to the iconoclastic tearing down of older narratives about the period of U.S. westward expansion during the mid-nineteenth century. The “new” histories of the West discussed by the revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s were themselves frequently apocalyptic in tone, tending to view the process of westward expansion less as the fulfilment of a democratic national design, and more as an original, catastrophic Fall from grace. The reverberations of this historiographical shift were momentous, at least within academia, where the new enquiry into the formative conditions of U.S. history yielded fresh and urgent assessments of contemporary government policy in, among other places, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Considered as one part of this much broader political and intellectual “text” in which Blood Meridian was shaped and first received, it is the novel’s contemporary resonance with U.S. foreign policy of the ‘80s, and with the “culture wars” unfolding in the universities, that are among its most striking and disturbing qualities.3 As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, in terms that will be quite familiar to readers of Blood Meridian, U.S. containment of anti-capitalism in its “own” back yard during the Reagan-era often meant the visiting of scarcely imaginable violence and terror on “third world” citizens. “What the U.S.-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn’t only ordinary killing. A major element is brutal, sadistic torture—beating infants against rocks, hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their face peeled back so that they’ll bleed to death, chopping people’s heads off and putting them on stakes” (21-22). One U.S. military trainer in El Salvador described his soldiers as “particularly ferocious.... We’ve always had a hard time getting [them] to take prisoners instead of ears” (37). As Chomsky puts it, “If you want a global system that’s subordinated to the needs of U.S. investors, you can’t let pieces of it wander off.”4
6Imperialism itself, at least in certain Marxian understandings of the term, is irreducibly economic in character, an attempt to resolve or export the crisis-tendencies inherent in the functioning of an anarchic, competitive market; the tendency to overproduction and slump when fresh market/ investment openings are blocked, the conflicts embedded in the competitive need to drive down wages and working conditions, and so on. Just as fully as the catastrophic tendency to boom and bust, the subordination of foreign markets and nation-states to the interests of major capitalist powers was, for Marx, “the very basis and living atmosphere of the capitalist mode of production” (Capital Volume III 205).5 If we are to arrive at a satisfactory account of how and why Blood Meridian’s commentary on U.S. imperialism across the contiguous continent during the mid nineteenth century also evokes so ferociously the imperialism of the Reagan years (and since), it may therefore be useful, first of all, to address the economic specificity of each of the two periods competing for our attention in the historical-literary text.
7The Reagan-era was a decade in which the political-economy of the U.S. entered a period of restructuring that was as profound, in its own way, as the capitalist transformation of the Southwest in the nineteenth century. Mike Davis has evoked the full scale and significance of the changes that begin in the ‘80s by referring to the decade as a new period of “primitive accumulation” in the United States”—primitive accumulation” being the term that Marx used to describe the systematic breaking up of feudal agriculture by capitalist modes in Britain, from the end of the fifteenth century onward. Like the New Deal and the postwar construction of the bureaucratic-authoritarian “Fordist” state that precedes it, the Reagan-era initiated another period of “creative destruction” in the history of U.S. capitalist democracy—one that we can now view, retrospectively, as the foundational moment of our current “neoliberal” world order. Brought on by the stagnation and crisis of existing political and economic modes in the previous decade, the 1980s initiated, among other things, the break-up of Keynesian economics and the welfare state, and the end of the postwar model of government as broker of competing class interests. The 1980s are generally thought by economists, historians and political scientists to signal the beginnings of a broad retooling of U.S. political economy, an ongoing transformation that has replaced what are now thought to be the rigidities of the earlier regime with today’s emphases on the de-regulation of business, flexible production and niche-marketing, on the service sector at home and the exporting of industrial production abroad, and on highly mobile finance capital competing in global markets, with an equally “mobile,” casualized and de-unionized workforce whose wages and influence on corporate decision-making have been levelled downward in real terms during each decade since the 1970s.6
8Davis’s use of the term “primitive accumulation” to describe the U.S. 1980s bears further investigation, in the context of what the mid-nineteenth century Southwest might mean, historically and politically, in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. For Marx, the period of primitive accumulation of capital laid the foundations for the full-blown emergence of capitalist social relations, in Britain, in large part by way of the enclosure movements and the displacement of peasant tenants and proprietors from lands held in common with the feudal lords.7 The slow and bloody supplanting of feudal class relations and feudal law during the period of primitive accumulation brought cataclysmic changes to British agriculture. In 1530, legislating against land-clearances in England, an Act of Henry VIII noted “many farms and large flocks of cattle, especially of sheep, are concentrated in the hands of a few men, whereby the rent of land has much risen... and marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families” (Capital Vol. I, 880).8 This process of expropriating the peasantry from the land, and the conversion of peasant tenants and proprietors into proletarian wage-laborers, was given “new and terrible impulse” (881) at the time of the Reformation, with the seizure and dispersal of the great landed estates of the Catholic church, and culminated in the formal abolition of the laws of feudal tenure in 1660. By the end of the eighteenth century, in Marx’s estimation, “the yeomanry [or class of independent peasants] had disappeared, and so [too]... had the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer” (883).
9The closing chapters of Capital, where Marx describes the period of primitive accumulation, are sometimes held to have little relevance to the origins and development of capitalism in north America. As Antonio Gramsci pointed out back in the 1920s, the very absence of feudal modes in north-American history was a crucial factor in the astonishing surge of the market in the U.S. throughout the nineteenth century.9 One of the issues that Gramsci skirted around in this famous essay, however, was the uneven development of the U.S. economy in the nineteenth century, a reality that was as readily apparent in the Southwest as it was in the deep South. As described by the historian William Robbins, the Texas left behind by the kid in Blood Meridian in 1848 remained heavily entrenched in the mores of “a commercial Spanish-Mexican society with aristocratic, even feudal ideas about land and labor—ideas that, as Robbin puts it, would be “rent asunder” in the ensuing decades (29). Robbins draws on the work of David Montejano to characterise southern Texas during the period in which Blood Meridian is set, as a region in which these feudal residues were being confronted and rapidly overcome by capitalist modes exported from the Northeast. For Montejano and Robbins, southern Texas in the middle of the nineteenth century was a world where “the coming of barbed wire represented an enclosure movement that displaced people and left them landless,” and where “displaced Mexicans, who had formerly worked on the great landed estates were reduced to [the status of] wage laborer” (30).10
10Had Marx travelled from Texas to San Diego with the kid in Blood Meridian, he may also have been struck by the critical moment in Californian history in which he had headed West, for “if an argument is to be made for a feudal tradition in the United States, it rests in the great Mexican land-grant system that remained largely intact (albeit under different owners) after the conquest” of 1848 (Robbins 81). In the event, the quasi-feudal barriers to capitalist development in California were overcome more rapidly than in Texas. As Carey McWilliams and Donald Pisani have also noted, California skipped entirely the frontier stage of small family-farm holdings, and moved straight to the ownership of land by capitalist monopoly.
11So it would probably be unwise to accept without qualification Gramsci’s description of north America as a tabula rasa unburdened entirely by the fetters of a feudal past. The period in which Blood Meridian is set may perhaps be better described as a time when the obstacles to free capitalist development in the Southwest were being navigated and overcome with astonishing rapidity, as the culmination of a longer standing privatisation of Western lands that were previously held in the public domain. The need to construct a federal Land Policy for the transferral of public land to private ownership had been a source of concern, in the Northwest, as early as the Land Ordinances of 1785 and 1788. By 1790 Congress had passed an act creating what historian Paul Gates called “a wide-open land system” (152), with no restrictions on the amount of land that individuals could buy. But the story of land policy during the period in which Blood Meridian is set is not, for writers like Gates, Robbins, or Montejano, a story that privileges the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, whose equivalent in England had all but disappeared, according to Marx, by the 1750s. As frontier settlement extended through Utah and Oregon to California, the “wide-open” system stimulated not only the emergence of pockets of small family-farming, but also a more or less monopolistic concentration of land ownership in vast private estates. According to Gates, by 1891 “365,000,000 acres of land [in the West] or an area ten times the size of Illinois were not open to homesteading and an additional 50,000,000 acres had passed into the hands of speculators” (154).11
12In these respects, at any rate, the consequences of westward expansion during the middle of the nineteenth century may then be sketched in summary form as (1) the displacement of indigenous populations, followed by (2) the wholesale privatisation of public lands and the introduction of wage-labor and hence (3) capitalist class relations, to the West. It is a story, in other words, albeit one written in a distinctively American idiom, that is at least analogous to the cycle of creative destruction referred to by Marx as “primitive accumulation”—the catastrophic historical period spanning the destruction of one mode of production and the traumatic birth of another—and invoked by Davis in his description of the Reaganite 1980s.
13I should reiterate, here, that I am not trying to argue for Blood Meridian as an allegory or mechanistic reflection of Reaganomics. My concern is to try to establish a particular paradigm for approaches to the novel that begin or end by emphasising McCarthy’s commentary on the history of U.S. imperialism; approaches that might fruitfully take into account both the successive periods of “creative destruction” that have characterised the history of U.S. capitalist democracy, and the extent to which McCarthy” s return to north America’s encounter with feudalism in the Southwest allows his writing to resonate, quite palpably, with the dramatic destructions and reconstructions of his own time.
14The possible ramifications these historiographical issues may have for a more specific exegesis of Blood Meridian are not explored in this essay. But I would offer the possibility that the renewed privatisation of the public sphere initiated under Reagan and Thatcher may be glimpsed, at least figuratively or poetically, in the relationship between Holden and the kid—a relationship that eventually becomes the structural fulcrum of the novel.
15The terms of this relationship have been described in a number of ways, most of them referring to the exchange between the two protagonists in San Diego, late in the novel, where the judge rails against the kid’s betrayal of the common purpose of the Glanton gang. “You broke with the body of which you were pledged a part,” he indicts the kid, “and [you] poisoned it in all its enterprise.... Each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was?” (307). The kid’s response, “It was you.... You were the one,” indicates the extent to which a debate about the appropriation of common interests by private agendas—and a debate about the very meaning of “public” and “private”— lies at the heart of the novel. The kid may at times be presented to us in Blood Meridian as a dissenting presence, as a protagonist who retains a private ethical code held at one remove from the common body of the Glanton gang. But when the kid accuses the accuser with the words “It was you... You were the one,” he is also reversing the terms of this equation, characterising his private dissent not as a betrayal, but as an agent of the common good, with Holden himself now named as the transgressor.
16The precision with which these protagonists can be lined up allegorically as a synonym for the “private” on one hand or the “public” on the other, is perhaps less interesting than the fact that it is this kind of conflict, and a debate about the fracturing of what Holden calls “the common,” that underpins the central relationship of the novel. The problem here is not so much an ethical or moral one (How “evil” or culpable is the kid, in his personal involvement in, or dissociation from, the atrocities of the Glanton gang?) as it is a political one. How to define the very meaning of the “public” or the “common” in a book that charts such momentous times (as it were) twice over, when the roots of an older order are in the process of being ripped up and supplanted by an emergent political-economic apparatus that brings with it its own ideological designations of what is meant by the “public interest”—a troublesome definition at the best of times, in whatever period, in a society grounded in class monopolies over wealth and power. Throughout their confrontation in San Diego, the definition of what Holden calls “the common,” and the definition of what is public and what is private, remain fluid, as Holden and the kid debate not so much the argument at hand, as the terms within which the argument should be framed. As so often in Blood Meridian, where ghastliness and great beauty are juxtaposed side by side in the same austere style that McCarthy calls “optical democracy” (247), it is the relativising of competing representations, rather than the substance of either protagonist’s case, that governs the scene: we know next to nothing about the kid, certainly not enough to be able to gauge his real motivation for disavowing the judge.
17And it is here that I find Beck’s suggestion that, in Blood Meridian, it is left to us as readers to supply the irony that will allow the book to be read as a condemnation (as opposed to a biblical commemoration) of U.S. imperialism, particularly interesting;12 reopening as it does the issue of the novel’s contemporaneity in the 1980s, in particular its reconfiguring of “culture wars” relativism as an overtly nihilistic political and intellectual praxis. Apart from anything else, Beck’s reading of Blood Meridian gives us a fresh slant on the old debate about the problem the reader may or may not have in arriving at moral judgements on the events depicted in the novel.
The denial of access to any ethical debate is severely enforced in McCarthy to the extent that doubts about the text’s ethical dimension can only take refuge through the appeal to irony. Without the lever of humanism in the text, the reader must ascribe an ethical boundary in some domain outside the text, whether this be the pondering of the text’s “true” ethical or political position, the author’s “real” intention, or the capacity of the culture to contain such discordant evidence of its own ability to absorb and consume unpleasantness.... What makes Blood Meridian so powerful is its very refusal to help answer these questions of intentionality. This may also be what makes it a reactionary book, but it does make it a great book. If it is great it is because it is truly worrying, because it is unflinchingly, unavoidably of its time, reaching toward a fundamentalist universality for the American (read human) experience which reverberates with a nostalgic passion for a world in which, as Barry Goldwater liked to say, “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.”... Blood Meridian, I suggest, is born out of this world, speaks of it, and sometimes, perhaps, even for it (Beck 2000, unpub).
18A “common sense” reading of Blood Meridian may allow us to project a relative moral frame upon the activities and events shown us in the narrative. But, as a number of critics have argued, there is very little in the novel itself that guides us toward moral value-judgements about the relative rights and wrongs of, say, Holden’s conduct, or the kid’s. At times, as Beck notes, “the narrative reads as indistinguishable from the judge’s own disquisitions on power and fate, “vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung,” as Conrad’s Marlow says of Kurtz’s report for the International Suppression of Savage Customs’ (Beck, 2000, unpub). As others have pointed out, certain passages in Blood Meridian appear at times to be ethically “blank,” such is McCarthy’s relativism, and his stretching of clauses and sentences into paragraphs and pages of numbing yet somehow also thrilling grimness and despair. The relative absence of a determinable moral (or, for that matter, political) framework in Blood Meridian remains for me, as it does for Beck, a key part of the novel’s aesthetic power. Partly so because this absence seems so expressive of the more profound transformations governing the historical period in which the novel was produced—a period in which the intensified privatisations of social life under Reaganomics and Thatcherism (and of intellectual life in academia) seemed at times to have abolished even that minimal sense of the public or common sphere that both democracy and a functioning sense of moral order need if they are to work. As Denis Donoghue notes, “Blood Meridian raises an ethical issue mainly by not speaking about it. Most of the events of the novel... seem to be protected from any ethical comment,” in part because “there is no common law or culture to be known, obeyed, [or] respected... with the result that a critical or ethical impulse finds itself thwarted at every point” (Donoghue 264, 266, 267).13
19The very centrality, in Blood Meridian, of a problematic and more or less ethically “blank” relation between “the common” and the private, is just one way, therefore, in which we might measure the novel’s engagement with the catastrophic political-economy of the United States during its new period of primitive accumulation in the Reagan years. Debates about the meaning of the vanishing public sphere, and statements about the changing role of the private self within that sphere, inform much of the more canonical thought and culture of the U.S. 1980s—Oliver Stone’s Wall Street would be the obvious reference, though a more intriguing example would be Christopher Lasch’s withering polemic The Minimal Self, first published in 1984 (the same year as Blood Meridian), in which Lasch developed the discussion offered in his earlier The Culture of Narcissism. A more interesting comparison yet might be with that most revolting, but also most Lasch-inflected novels of the late Reagan era, Ellis’s American Psycho—a novel in which the overweaning narcissism of the narrator constructs for the reader a public world that is defined either as a set of barriers to the free satisfaction of the narrator’s private desire, or as a receptacle into which that desire might be viciously emptied out.14 In Blood Meridian, in a very similar way, the tension between public and private that underwrites the novel is ratcheted up several notches more, if we accept the possibility, floated by Beck, that significant sections of the book are narrated narcissistically by Holden, or at least that they are presented to the reader narcissistically through Holden’s point of view. It may then be that the world we are shown in Blood Meridian can seem ethically blank because that is precisely the kind of public or common world Holden would make for us (think not only Nicaragua and Iraq, but also Flint, Michigan), if social life was to be privatised, in his telling of it, so as to become merely a monstrous projection of the judge’s own personal fantasies and fears.
Bibliographie
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Works cited
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Notes de bas de page
1 It has become clear that the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive military action has been motivated only marginally by the dangers posed by international terrorism. According to Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Gore Vidal and others, the War on Terror has been principally driven by the need to intervene politically and militarily in the defence of U.S. hegemony within the global market, during a period—since the late 1960s—that Robert Brenner has characterised as a “long downturn” in the aggregate performance of the international capitalist economy, a downturn that has gathered new momentum with the collapse of the hi-tech bubble economy of the late 1990s.
2 “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in” (Schumpeter, 1975: 82). Or as Marx puts it, in a slightly different sense, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” (Communist Manifesto 38). As used here, the phrase “creative destruction” refers thus to the periodic crises and reconfigurations of political economy and social life that are inherent, Marx suggested, in the contradictory laws of motion of capital. In very broad terms, U.S. history since the late nineteenth century may then be sketched, schematically and provisionally, in the slump of the 1870s-1890s followed by the transformations of the Progressive Era and the 1920s; the Great Depression of the 1930s followed by the New Deal-era, which extends into the bureaucratic state capitalism of postwar “high Fordism”; the oil crisis and the stagflation years of the 1970s, followed by the era of globalisation and the neoliberal turn initiated under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s.
3 As has been noted by many different critics. On Blood Meridian’s overt engagement with U.S. imperialism, see particularly Parrish and Spiller (1998), McBride (1999), Fielder (2000), Chollier (2000), and Beck (2000, unpub.)
4 Even “the tiniest speck” poses a threat, Chomsky notes, “and may have to be crushed” (24, 25). Or as judge Holden puts it, “the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock” (BM 198).
5 The classic early statement of this being Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
6 For an overview of key issues and critical literature on the neoliberal turn, see Antonio and Bonnano (2000). On the switch to neoliberalism as an attempt to resolve the crisis tendencies of “Fordist” capitalism, see also Brenner (1998). On the impact of Reagan-era restructuring on local geopolitics (and on the imagination of catastrophe) in the “postFordist” urban west, particularly LA, see Davis (1990, 2000, 2002), and Soja (2000). On the retrenchments of the Reagan-era, see Pierson (1994) and Palmer and Sawhill (1984).
7 In Britain this process has its late and most infamous moment during the so-called “Clearances” of the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
8 “[T]he expropriation of the agricultural producer... from the soil is the basis of the whole process” (Marx, Capital 876). The second vital process in the period of primitive accumulation was the creation, from out of the displaced peasantry, of a new class of labour, the itinerant agricultural proletariat. Liberated from the land, and cut off thus from their means of subsistence, the agricultural laborer, as Marx put it, “ceased to be bound to the soil” and became instead “a free seller of labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he can find a market for it” (875).
9 Comparing Europe unfavourably with the United States of the 1920s, Gramsci lampooned the Old World as a social order paralysed by its past, and filled up with what he called “sedimentations of idle and useless masses living on their ancestral patrimony [as] pensioners of economic history.” The U.S., Gramsci noted, had never had “this leaden burden to support” (277-8).
10 On cognate issues in the Border Trilogy, see Chollier (2000).
11 A generation after the Homestead Act of 1862 had signalled, at least notionally, a major shift in land policy. In The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin argued that while small family farming played an important part in the U.S. during this period, carrying forward the transferral of public lands to private hands, it was the subsequent differentiation of small producers into classes of capitalist farmers on one hand and wage workers on the other that was more significant. The Jeffersonian model of land use thus represents, in Lenin’s account at least, something like the preconditions for a modern capitalist settlement of the West. See also Bernstein (1994).
12 Certain passages—for example the Captain White sequence—excepted.
13 On the problem of “nihilism” and ethics in McCarthy see, indicatively, Bell (1983, 1988), Josyph (1995), Donoghue (1998), Ragan (1999), Beck (2000, unpub). For an established defence of McCarthy as moralist, see Arnold (1994, 1999).
14 Strictly speaking American Psycho (1991) is post-Reagan, but it speaks so clearly of and about the previous decade that it bears comparison with Blood Meridian here.
Auteur
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David Holloway
University of Derby, England
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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