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Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. 320 pp. $29.95.
CORMAC MCCARTHY'S MASTERPIECE is Blood Meridian, a bloody and disturbing and unforgettable novel, with prose, as one critic writes, remarkable for its "scriptural stateliness."
Of the fourteen essays in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, only five focus primarily on Blood Meridian, yet the novel and those five essays dominate the collection, in part because nearly all the writers, whatever their primary subject, find their way back to or through Blood Meridian. But mostly the novel rules this collection because of the first essay, Dana Phillips's "History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian." Editor James D. Lilley placed Phillips's essay first, one assumes, because it is touchstone and foil for so much of what comes after. Whether the other critics take up Blood Meridian, the Border trilogy (the subject of five essays), or the "Southern" novels (four essays), almost all refer to Phillips's essay-with approbation or reservations, or both.
Phillips's essay first appeared in American Literature in june 1996 and, according to Lilley, immediately "caused a stir among McCarthy scholars."3 Phillips examines Blood Meridian's "philosophy of composition" (in part through Lukacs' writings on the novel), claiming that the book is a historical novel, but in a different register than that term usually implies: it is a "natural history," not...