Ästhetik der Gewalt

“When he stood up out of the chair he swung the keys off his belt and opened the locked desk drawer to get the keys to the jail. He was slightly bent over when Chigurh squatted and scooted his manacled hands beneath him to the back of his knees. In the same motion he sat and rocked backward and passed the chain under his feet and then stood instantly and effortlessly. If it looked like a thing he’d practiced many times it was. He dropped his cuffed hands over the deputy’s head and leaped into the air and slammed both knees against the back of the deputy’s neck and hauled back on the chain.
They went to the floor. The deputy was trying to get his hands inside the chain but he could not. Chigurh lay there pulling back on the bracelets with his knees between his arms and his face averted. The deputy was flailing wildly and he’d begun to walk sideways over the floor in a circle, kicking over the wastebasket, kicking the chair across the room. Ha kicked shut the door and he wrapped the throwrug in a wad about them. He was gurgling and bleeding from the mouth. He was strangling on his own blood. Chigurh only hauled the harder. The nickelplated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy’s right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it. The deputy’s legs slowed and then stopped. He lay jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether. Chigurh lay breathing quietly, holding him. When he got up he took the keys from the deputy’s belt and released himself and put the deputy’s revolver in the waistband of his trousers and went into the bathroom” (Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf 2005, hier zit. nach der Vintage-TB-Ausgabe, S. 5 f.).

Diese Passage ist — aus meiner Sicht — perfekt, ästhetisch außerordentlich befriedigend, mit einem Wort: schön. Im kalten Blick der Erzählinstanz wird Gewalt zur ästhetischen Erfahrung, die Schrecken erst in der Reflexion produziert. Das wird vollends klar, wenn man die Evokation des Naturschönen in einem der folgenden Absätze derselben Erzählhaltung zurechnen kann:

“The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplains below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself. He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river. To the west the baked terracotta terrain of the running borderlands” (ebd., S. 8).

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