“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
There are many passages in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian that I shudder to read. Fallen warriors sodomized and scalped and their genitals hacked to pieces, Christmas trees decorated with the corpses of infants, saloon walls painted with the brains of headshot drunkards. Gruesome acts of this sort are described in hauntingly poetic language about once every third page and the descriptions grow increasingly astonishing and repulsive as the reader traverses deeper into the book. It’s been described as both a Western and an anti-Western, but this is nothing if not a horror story.
The endless procession of senseless violence is so overpowering that by the book’s concluding pages the ruthless atrocities committed in its initial chapters will be only hazy footnotes in the reader’s memory. I had to skim back through to remind myself that early on the nameless protagonist—referred to as the kid—jabbed a bartender in the eye with the jagged end of a broken bottle simply because the man wouldn’t give him a free drink. Similarly Judge Holden, the book’s mercurial antagonist, hurls accusations at a reverend, stirring up the crowd at a tent revival until one of them unloads a pistol at the itinerant preacher. The scene descends into chaos as the revivalists trample one another underfoot in a frenzy. A page later, the judge sits calmly in a bar and admits that he had never laid eyes on nor heard of the preacher before that day, he just wanted a reaction. His revelation leads to “a strange silence” and then someone buys him a drink. These episodes exemplify what McCarthy is doing with his prose, luring the reader in with his impressive vocabulary and then flooding their eyes and minds with gore. It’s not overly theatrical—descriptive and verbose, for sure, but not in a way that obscures the heinous carnage. Rather it emphasizes it. He wants to make you vividly conjure gut-wrenching images in your mind’s eye. And he is very good at that.
The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic.
This style is employed to convey the inherent brutality of man, to establish through repetition that we as a species are prone to mindless slaughter for its own sake. This depiction of man’s fallen nature is evident in both the various Indian tribes that desecrate the corpses of men, women, and children, and the Glanton gang that has been paid by the Mexican government to collect their scalps. Initially taken on solely for the bounty, the task of hunting Native Americans becomes something of a pleasurable pastime for the gang, and eventually, a nihilistic habit.
Born during a meteor shower to an alcoholic father and a mother who died moments after giving birth, the kid runs away from home at the age of fourteen to wander the desolate countryside and satisfy his “taste for mindless violence.” He soon falls in with the branded, earless fugitive Toadvine who almost kills him before they become companions and raze a hotel. Toadvine later slays a prison overseer and makes a necklace out of his gold teeth. The two join up with Glanton, a bloodthirsty savage of a man who has left his wife and children to pursue debauchery of every sort. In his company of mercenaries the kid comes under the dueling influences of the ex-priest Tobin and Judge Holden. Holden—referred to most frequently as the judge—is a force of nature, an enigma akin to Anton Chigurh from the same author’s No Country for Old Men. Physically enormous, hairless, highly educated, conversant in several languages, nonchalantly violent, and contemptuous of all who do not embrace violence as a way of life, the judge is as likely to wax philosophically or pull off a dangerous ruse as to kill a man in cold blood. His philosophies of war and fate and fear and moral law are eloquent but absurd, though not without a hint of truth to them. An image of the massive man submerged up to his smiling eyes in murky water, a smoldering cigarillo protruding from behind his ear, has been stuck in my mind since I read the descriptive passage. It is under his leadership that the gang begins to massacre innocent tribes of Indians and pillage the Mexican villages they’d been hired to protect.
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
Tucked amidst all the nightmarish scenes of perpetual butchery is a scene in which the kid wanders alone in an attempt to reunite with the company of mercenaries. It paints an eerie, biblically allusive picture of a solitary tree lit ablaze during a passing storm, now burning against the darkness, around which all manner of insects, spiders, snakes, lizards, and owls have gathered with the kid himself in what is described as a “precarious truce.” It’s a single moment of peace surrounded by pages of savagery.
Bloodthirsty men rampaging the countryside would not be terribly interesting were it not for the judge’s eloquent opining. Frequently he lets his mouth speak his mind’s wanderings, spewing forth perverted wisdom and semi-coherent ramblings on a diverse set of topics, from extraterrestrials to God to demons to sports to destiny to metalworking. Some of these musings give cause for pondering, but there are also plenty that are basically empty but wrapped in McCarthy’s overpowering prose. The judge serves as the antidote to McCarthy’s run-on tendencies. Plucked from the pages of Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue—a firsthand account of the Glanton gang’s exploits—the man is perverse, humorous, physically peculiar, educated, devilish, covering the entirety of the range between beastly savagery and classy sophistication. When McCarthy gets to describing the same landscape for the umpteenth time, plumbing the depths of his thesaurus for words none of us would ever say aloud, Blood Meridian can get tiresome. Beautifully descriptive and brutally violent, but tiresome. When the judge comes on the scene with his cryptic musings and piercing action, it’s entirely engrossing.
And therein lies my only real hangup with Blood Meridian. McCarthy becomes so wrapped up in using every word in the dictionary and emphasizing violence above all else that things like story and character fall slightly by the wayside. He manages to power through with florid prose and profound gibberish but it’s all so linguistically indecipherable that it frequently feels like an exercise in style. And this is all on top of McCarthy’s signature lack of commas, apostrophes and quotations and copious amounts of untranslated Spanish. It’s very impressive and desensitizing but I don’t always enjoy it to the degree that others seem to. His depictions of weather and landscape and physical altercation and bloodshed are untouchable and his vocabulary is nearly peerless, but I only want to get lost in a page-long run-on sentence if it aids in furthering the author’s aims. At times, it feels like every single sentence strives for such a masculine intensity that the wordiness becomes the central aim and what meager story existed is obscured by it. For every sublime array of archaic terms there is one that devolves into a messy run-on from which little to no meaning can be gleaned. It becomes difficult to parse which is which and re-reading the same sections three or four times is too distracting to be worth the while.
Many suggest Blood Meridian is “biblical” which I guess is true as regards the prose because the biblical languages did not use punctuation at all. But McCarthy’s thematic thrust flies in the face of the biblical narrative. Scripture teaches of repentance, forgiveness, sacrifice, justification, sanctification, glorification, etc. Blood Meridian, if it is biblical, is focused only on the nastiest bits—the suffering of Job, the various nations given over to total destruction, Herod’s order to massacre all the babies. The judge’s philosophy would suggest that the vast majority of us walking the earth today, who have not been baptized in blood and violence and death, are in some way lesser than our forebears who were shaped by war. We haven’t experienced the thrill of uncomfortable proximity to death, some sacred rite in the mythos that McCarthy has cooked up. This exaltation of bloodletting does not jibe with first-hand accounts of those who have actually been to war, which McCarthy has not. Nor does it align with the bible at all, although it alludes to it many times and explores some of its territory.
For many critics Blood Meridian is the seminal work of American literature. It seems to have achieved this lofty status due to its indecipherability, rangy style, and visceral resonance. With its assault of numbing violence, lyrical prose, aspirations to profundity, attempts at theodicy, critique of manifest destiny, the message, if it exists, is too slippery to pin down. It’s a confounding work of depraved genius, an epic prose poem of dark wisdom. Provocative, alluring and elusive, it may never be understood, but it will endure on the merits of McCarthy’s verbosity and extreme violence.