Blood Meridian & Baudrillard's Desert of the Real

Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is an extremely violent, dark “Western Gothic” novel in which the desert landscapes of the Mexico-US border play a major role. Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher who, unfairly in my view, is often dismissed as a postmodern relativist and who wrote a travelogue entitled "America" in which the deserts of America are described and analysed in depth. In this video, I take Baudrillard’s poetic-philosophical travelogue and use it to show how readers can appreciate a two-way, illuminating, relationship between McCarthy’s literary descriptions of the desert and Baudrillard’s philosophical musings based upon similar American desert landscapes and how he perceives they relate to American culture. I argue that, in their very different ways, both McCarthy and Baudrillard are seeking to convey a sense of the essence of reality that we encounter in deserts. To further explore the notion of this essence in art (whether in deserts or elsewhere) I use some paintings by the Naive/Primitivist French painter Henri Rousseau. #bloodmeridian #baudrillard #desertofthereal #cormacmccarthy #westerngothic