Scapegoats and Bastards of Manifest Destiny in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian Revisited

국경의 틈새에서 '명백한 운명'을 욕망한 희생양과 사생아 -코맥 매카시의 『핏빛 자오선』 다시 읽기

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (and the Border Trilogy) can be used as a touchstone with which the limit of American literature is tested. For his text is particularly significant in the sense that its language mixes English with Spanish; its characterization confronts Americans with non-Americans; and its narrative structure traverses the geographical and symbolic borderlands between America and Mexico. In this sense, his novels deserve to be reexamined under the rubric of Chicano/a Studies, Hemispheric American Studies, transnationalism, etc. Rereading McCarthy's Blood Meridian, this paper attempts to rethink its historical complexity in relation to Manifest Destiny, focusing on the border-crossing motifs of filibustering and scalp-hunting. For this purpose, I pay due and careful attention to the ways in which the ideology of Manifest Destiny was created, circulated, and manipulated among the 19th century American expansionists and border-crossing agents. Of course, my discussion does not omit the significance of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the contemporary Chicano/a Studies and Hemispheric American Studies. In these historical and interdisciplinary contexts, I investigate how the 19th century filibusters like Captain Smith and his followers fall prey to the imperial practice of Manifest Destiny. I would also interrogate whether and how the Glanton Gang's scalp trade is involved in the capitalist desire of Manifest Destiny.