See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (Part 2)

2. The kid without signification becomes a parricide.

“See the child” (3). The first line of Blood Meridian presents a body manifested from nothing. There is no birth, merely Gestalt. The Kid, in his fourteenth year, has received nothing from his parents. He is base exteriority. His mother died in childbirth, and his father is a schoolteacher who has not taught him to read or write. The Kid was never told his mother’s name, and is himself nameless. He lacks signification, he has not possession of a proper noun by which to elevate himself. But a specter, “all history present in that visage, the child the father of the man” (3). The lack of a parental structure presents an absence of the name-of-the-father. It is entirely foreclosed from The Kid, giving him no choice but to abandon any notion of it. He ultimately abandons the father, exiling himself from the name-of-the-father, left to his own impotent devices in the forging of any identity.

Language is meaningless to The Kid. He is stuck in the blah-blah-blah of the imaginary. In exile he “hears tongues that he has not heard before” where “speech sounds like the grunting of apes” (4). There is no notion of a unified speaking being. In Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body, Jacques-Alain Miller explains, “We identify the body and the being of life in some spontaneous, imaginary way…as far as the speaking body is concerned, it does not emerge from being but from having” (15). The Kid is suspended between the being and having, the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. Because he is alienated from the symbolic, the chaos of language is made physical in violence. It is the only sense in the senseless world through which The Kid has become pilgrim. Even the first words spoken directly to and for him are maniacal. The earless Toadvine states, “I’m goin to kill you…Kill your ass” in such a way that “he had codified is threats to the one word kill like a crazed chant” (McCarthy 9). Toadvine is unsuccessful in killing The Kid, but becomes something of an early indication that the name-of-the-father is the hole in which he needs to fill. Toadvine is by no means a father figure, but his words are formative.

Without signification, The Kid experiences a stabilization of his identity through violence. In destroying any notion of the name-of-the-father, he becomes a nom-du-père-icide. For him “All progressions from a higher to lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and residue of a nameless rage. Here are the dead fathers” (146). The rampant violence in which The Kid is a willing participant is the means by which he may fill the hole of the name-of-the-father by destroying it. In doing so he may become “that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry…by decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate” (199).