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Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), opens the American Southwestern frontier after the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) as a space of racial exclusion and ruthless violence. While the work is understood as McCarthy’s most historic novel, McCarthy also presents the border area as a trope for the border of Western civilization and its tension and chaos. Revisiting the first war of American imperialism, McCarthy presents the violence as activated by disgust towards racial others. Disgust like other emotions is connected to perceptions and ideas and to the social and cultural contexts in which it makes sense to have the ideas and the emotions. Disgust can be a way of understanding the tension and confusion in the racist movement in American history. However, McCarthy goes further to explore the demented and compulsory violence of the band of killers led by John Glanton and Judge Holden, and shows disgust’s double movement of pulling away and toward. Disgust is a feeling of repugnance and expressed through violent acts of rejection. Disgust proclaims the meanness and inferiority of the object. In this sense, disgust includes the perception of hierarchy and does the work of maintaining it. Concurrently, as William Ian Miller observes, disgusting objects have power to allure. Freud and Kristeva also see the power of allurement inherent in the feeling of disgust, and point out that disgust involves the sense of danger of the unconscious desire or contact with the other within oneself. In this sense, disgust involves the movement of maintaining boundaries of the subject, the conscious, or the culture. Though the Glanton band in McCarthy’s novel begin their journey as Indian hunters for bounty, their act of slaughtering every being they encounter on their way and even those within the band shows the confusion in the border area. The Glanton band’s and Judge Holden’s violence becomes pursuit of continuance rather than verification of a political ideology. The movement of confusion in this work comes down to Judge Holden’s grotesque sexual impulse toward the object who he intends to kill. As the pursuit of continuance through violence erases the boundary between the band and the victims or the self and the other, Judge Holden’s will to domination erases the distinction between desire and rejection. Judge Holden’s example can be understood as the hidden impulse of American racism and further of Western civilization’s movement of settling and resettling boundaries through exclusions. Disgust in this sense can be understood as a mechanism of exclusion and an indication of the confusion inherent in the movement of repressing and censoring.

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 Abstract

키워드

disgust allurement of disgust fascination of abomination border repetition agitation emotion affect Mexican War Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian

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• 김미현 [ Miehyeon Kim | 아주대학교 ]

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