Making the U.S. through violence: o processo de domesticação da fronteira em Meridiano de sangue, de Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, by the U.S. author Cormac McCarthy. The main objective of this research is to analyze the theme of violence in the so-called “civilizing process” of the western frontier expansion of the United States in McCarthy’s novel. The specific objectives are to analyze fundamental terms that are recurrent in western studies. The highlighted terms are: frontier, West, civilization and wilderness; and to investigate how the author presented the violence of a group of mercenaries hired to ethnic cleansing in problematic regions as a political tool of spatial domestication for the proposal of the advance of the anglo-saxon settlers. The theorical references are located in the critical fortune about the author, in the narratological theory, which involves the typology of the narrator, of narrative focus and description, in conservative and contemporary U.S. historiography, in environment studies on the wilderness and in the spatial construction under the political and social point of view. The research method used was the delimitation of the method of approach to the dialectical method, in order to contrast two theoretical currents, that is, a thesis and an antithesis, and generate a synthesis of analysis of the them and objectives of this research. The results achieved in our analysis through Blood Meridian, show the use of extreme violence by the anglo-saxon settlers in the middle of 19th century against ethnic minorities in the desert and frontier regions between United States and Mexico and against the western nature in defense of basic political projects for the construction of the U.S. nation. Thus, the creation process of the United States, in the western portion of the country, according to the novel Blood Meridian, was a constant process of violence and extermination.