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Seventy years after its publication, librarians at the New York Public Library catalogued Moby Dick with other books that explored the finer points of whaling. In making this bibliographic classification, librarians at this most American exemplar of that most American institution, the public lending library, read Melville's novel not as a great national epic but as an instance of the particular, the regional, the ethnic, the vocational. Given that American readers (not to mention critics of American literature) continue to be more interested in the particular than the epic, it is not surprising that Melville's successor, Cormac Mc-Carthy's epic Blood Meridian (1985), has failed to attract the critical attention it deserves. Writing resolutely against the contemporary grain, McCarthy treats American history and identity as if it were a continuous whole. Although revisionist, McCarthy's version of American history offers little comfort to those who would rewrite American history from the point of view of the peoples who were obliterated so that American history might fulfill its Destiny. Where a typical revisionist history might read Manifest Destiny as a story about Europeans and European values destroying local lands and cultures, McCarthy insists that this kind of history is fragmentary because it depends on a denial of the fact that we only arrive at such critical positions of moral superiority because we are the survivors and successors to this Destiny. His novel examines the burgeoning American empire of the mid-19th century not to indulge in the compensatory pleasures of self-accusation but to remind us of how particularizing versions of history necessarily deny how we have become to be who we are. |
