Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy – Violence to the cold extreme

Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian first published in 1985 is probably one of the most violent books I’ve ever read – and that’s saying something. Violence is sort of the theme here, and not in any way that makes you feel easy about the subject. This is not a moral parable that will give you easy outs by defining the areas of right and wrong through the use of dialectic morality. This is more the kind of tale that lays bare the most sordid aspects of human nature without giving you any handles and you’ll just have to make up your own mind about it.

See, now, the warlike nature of man – that is what we’re dealing with here and no matter how much we as a species propound that we want peace, we just never seem to get there, do we? That’s what this is all about.

It’s set along the borderland between the US and Mexico in 1849-1850 and we’re riding with the Glanton gang who are taking scalps and massacring Indians. This is not Manifest Destiny in any pretty Laura Ingalls kind of way. This is dirty and bloody and unnecessarily cruel in every single manner you can imagine. What makes it worse is the cool and detached way the author goes about his business.

The main protagonist is The Kid, a young man who leaves his home in Tennessee and gets signed up by Captain White to ride with the gang. He takes the bloodiness of the business in stride as far as we as readers can tell, and only ever runs contrary to expectations when his own physical safety is in question.

Set against all this is the Judge, a huge towering giant of a man with intellectual capital and a strain of mysticism and otherworldliness about him, not only in appearance, but in reasoning as well.

Here’s the logic of the thing, given the form of dialogue between The Judge and a man called Brown.

“What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it ain’t yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion.
The judge smiled.” (Blood Meridian, p. 249)

This novel has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Actually, it probably has a lot in common with it. The Judge is like Kurtz, The Kid like Marlowe. And there is much, much more to it than that.

The language of it is beautiful and uses so many archaisms and rare words that you find yourself reading slowly to catch it all.

It also has the cool inexorable quality that I recognize from McCarthy’s The Road. It never lets up, not even for a second. Nothing comes to any good and even the end leaves you with a sickening reeling feeling in your stomach, being open enough that you can use your own imagination on the horror of it.

It gives violence in relentless and impartial detail and shows us everything we don’t want to see. It never judges, or offers a moral high ground. It also describes the landscape in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s just fascinating and deeply unsettling, every aspect of it – and like all the best books it makes you work hard for any understanding.

Mule