“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
Blood and death and violence. The peak of human evil, perhaps. Blood Meridian is, for most people, the most violent and horrific book they have ever read. There is nothing here of love or affection. Tenderness is a thing that little survives an axe to the brain. Babies are murdered and hung on trees like Christmas decorations. Men, women, and children are slaughtered for less than a sideways glance. Yet worse than this is the knowledge that most of this book is a true thing, that John Joel Glanton’s gang was not a fiction but a living pandemonium that truly walked upon the earth in the middle of the 19th century. Cormac McCarthy retraced its marauding steps time after time in writing this book.
Blood Meridian is sustained by its own brutality. Each chapter is a litany of bloodshed through which we stumble, confused and in awe, lost in the power of an almighty language being wielded only to describe that which in our conscious moments we have no wish to see described.
What it is, is a novel about man’s descent (for there are no women, except as bodies to be broken) into barbarism. We may think we know the type. Heart of Darkness and its ilk have prepared us, we think. But Heart of Darkness is less about Kurtz’s descent as it is about Marlow’s coming to terms with it. Marlow has his ideas of right and wrong, just as Kurtz has his own – soon distorted – ideas of the same. It is a moral book, however much it seems to rise from the jungle’s murk.
Blood Meridian is neither a moral book, nor an immoral book. What makes it so frightening is that it is merely an amoral book. “Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.” It is the story of a gang who begins by killing violent Indians in exchange for bounty and loot, then move on to killing peaceful ones, then they kill the Mexicans who hired them to protect themselves from the Indians, and eventually, they kill Americans. That is the simple story which we witness when we read the book.
Some Theory: John Williams on What A Western Should Be
John Williams, author of Augustus and Stoner and most relevantly the Western Butcher’s Crossing, also wrote a programmatic piece, “The “Western”: Definition of the Myth”, which might help us to appreciate Blood Meridian. Williams was writing at a time before McCarthy had switched his stories’ backdrops from the Appalachians to the southwest United States, before the Western genre was made serious with such books as Warlock, and films in our own day like The Power of the Dog. His main complaint of the genre was that its practitioners misunderstood it, and adopted literary modes that were not appropriate.
Williams argues that the traditional Western is purely a thing of “an element conflict between the personified forces of Good and Evil”, which is not inherent in the material but rather a transference of “the New England Calvinist habit of mind” that sees the world, at times without being fully aware of it, as broken up into the damned and the saved. This moral rigidity, whatever complexities might be added to the stock characters of the western, such as the cowboy and sheriff, mean that “beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.” It is about arranging a world where the right judgement can be acted out.
For Williams, the west is not tragic, nor comic, nor epic, but mythic in nature, and this is what he thinks previous writers have failed to recognise. Tragedy is primarily about powerful figures, often historical, suffering, that we might see as “the cost of disorder in an ordered universe.” Epic, meanwhile, is about cultural unification – it is about telling a story that collects together ideas for the building of a nation. It requires this element of nation-building or nationalism, because “the heroism, the bloodletting, the superhuman bravery, the terrible mutilations – these are given point and intensity only by the nationalistic impulse that lies behind them. Without that impulse, the adventure (handled epically) is empty, is bombast, is violence without rage.” This is an idea we will come back to, because under this definition Blood Meridian is easily readable as an anti-epic, as nation-destruction rather than building.
Myth, however, and not anything else is what Williams sees as appropriate for Westerns. He defines it as an approach where “the mythic subject rises from the enveloping action of history, but the events that detail that subject are invented.” The myth is thus a combination of history and fiction, but it is not historical fiction, even though we are aware of as many historical forces – economic, social, cultural, and religious – as the author may wish to include. “The events and characters… are intensely symbolic and they compel belief on a level different from that of historical reality.” The mythic work is symbolic, its characters are often archetypes, stretching beyond themselves in their significance.
The heart of the mythic is the inner quest. This is what distinguishes it from tragedy, where quests and conflicts are generally public and on the level of the state, and from comedy, where conflicts are generally domestic and lie between characters. The mythic, for Williams, is about the acquisition of inner knowledge that can only be bittersweet – “the exaction of the human spirit by the terror of truth.” “The outcome of myth is always mixed; its quest is for an order of the self that is gained at the expense of knowing, at last, the essential chaos of the universe.” If tragedy is about breaking order, myth is about creating a pocket of order whose diminutive size makes us only more aware of the world’s general disorder.
For a mythic tale to work well, history must play a role. In the case of the Western myth, the history is one of exploitation – of people but, primarily for Williams, of land. The period of the frontiersman is one of the lone being attempting to survive in a new land, rather than of the state trying to grow itself through the organised murder of prior inhabitants. People entering that world, coming from the East, brought with them their simplified ideas of good and evil, which crashed and were broken against the reality of a cruel and indifferent sun. This is the central theme of Butcher’s Crossing. Here, a “voyage not the wilderness was most meaningfully a voyage into the self, experimental, private and sometimes obscure.”
To summarise, for Williams, the Western is most appropriately a mythic tale. It is deeply lodged in its own time, like Moby Dick, but it is peopled with symbolic characters who reach beyond themselves in their meanings, and whose essential journeys are internal and with results which are not entirely welcome.
Blood Meridian is both an epic and mythic work, according to the ideas Williams describes, but in both cases, the novel is something quite different to the “straight” interpretation of either approach. Let’s begin with the case of the epic. Western novels, as he acknowledges, have often relied upon epic themes and motifs, but with the exception of the Indian Wars, nationalism and nation-building have been less important than the individual’s struggle for survival and success in a new land. In Blood Meridian we have part of the American wars of conquest, with our character, “the kid”, at first joining a group of soldiers under Captain White to go and murder Mexicans in spite of the recently signed peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.
This figure, White, is an unpleasant one, but his views are somewhat unique in the novel. “A race of degenerates… There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.” White, practically alone among the misfits of Blood Meridian, sees the matter in terms of governance and the growth of the United States. If his views are unpleasant and Hobbesian, then they are also the only views in the novel which are concerned with administration. It is he, whom we might say, belongs in an epic work – though not one we may necessarily be proud of.
Still, they are fallen upon by Indians and White and most of the “army” are slaughtered. The scene is epic, and here McCarthy’s language reaches a pitch that anywhere else would be ridiculous, yet here is Biblical, Homeric:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
Here the language is distinctly non-specific, with the enemies of the Americans containing so many hints of other identities that they become clearly mythic and symbolic in character. White’s group, building a nation, fight against the forces of disorder, and those forces annihilate him.
“The kid” survives. And here the novel begins its anti-epic shift. If White was trying to pacify and crush people for the good of some absurd American nation, Glanton’s gang fight Indians, Mexicans and finally Americans only ever ostensibly for such goals, and time after time we are reminded that their goals are instead more simple, crude, and barbaric. They go to towns to debauch themselves, eating so much food that the townsfolk starve afterwards, they amass great riches and commit crimes so terrible that murder must have seemed a solace to those gifted it, and there is no nation to be built.
It is in this regard that people, including those on my copy’s blurb, have called the novel an anti-Western. It is an unheroic novel, a barbaric novel, where the Indians are not made victims but rather where every specimen of humanity seems determined to drag itself down into the depths of human cruelty. And all of this is related in prose that is entirely unjudging, that never questions or looks into people’s heads except when they have been splattered across a saloon’s wall, so that we feel silly for wanting there to be a point to it all.
If we want to find meaning, we must look at the novel as a mythic work. Such an interpretation is natural when our characters have names like “the kid”, “the judge”, “the expriest”, which eclipse any real names, Holden and Tobin for the latter two, that characters actually have, and when we journey through volcanoes and larger-than-life landscapes and see tarot cards and meet fools in cages. But here, too, there is something unusual that sets the novel outside of the mythic categorisation Williams gives – the sheer lack of interiority.
“The kid” is the character we follow, more or less, throughout the work. But he rarely speaks, and rarely does he act. He is more than anything else a witness to the novel. He is, in other words, like us. And so, it is most fitting to say that the journey to some kind of personal order within a disordered universe is primarily not in him, but in us, the readers, who are forced to confront this most awful tale in the hopes of extracting meaning. The narrator, who merely describes, has no epiphany. So that just leaves us.
But what order, what myth, lies within the bloodshed? The truth is that the novel is about power. It is a mythic representation of power, especially in Western history, and “the judge”, who is one of the most memorable characters I have ever encountered in fiction, anywhere, is power itself.
We meet him, seven foot tall, without a hair on his body, “serene and strangely childlike”, as a reverend is preaching to a gathered room. He steps forward unexpectedly, and declares that the reverend is a fraud. After a short speech he declares, “in truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” A man in the audience immediately shoots the reverend and chaos breaks out. Back at the bar, the judge gets himself a drink. Someone asks him how he knew the reverend was a fraud. “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.”
The incident is the perfect introduction to the world of Blood Meridian and how little human life is worth there. It is also the perfect introduction to Judge Holden. Gigantic, multilingual, an amateur botanist, geologist and artist, the judge seems to embody knowledge itself. With his ability to speak eloquently, he has the ability to kill without moving a muscle, because none of the men in the West and in Mexico have the knowledge he does, and so they listen and defer to him, trusting whatever he says. There are several signs suggesting he is probably the devil.
“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” In those words is his philosophy entire. He learns about the world to gain mastery over it. Unlike White, who at least in name acts for the United States, Holden acts for himself and the growth of his own suzerainty over the world. At one point he says he would have every bird in the world contained within a zoo, that not one of them might have freedom. Blood Meridian was published in 1985. By that point, we had the apotheosis of human power, the atomic bomb. We had also put men and women into camps and slaughtered them on a scale that the murderers of Blood Meridian could only dream of. Human history is many things, but one of them is the increased power of technology over nature, and the use of that power to cause harm to other people.
The judge is that power. He sits and takes notes on plants and flowers, drawing them in his notebook. He saves the gang from certain doom by creating new ammunition for them using gathered guano and sulphur at a volcano. Through force of will and force of knowledge, he gains strength over others, the environment, and himself: “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the 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.”
The ultimate place where power is tested is in war. It is here, as some of the quotes above have indicated, that might determine right, and all other considerations, moral and spiritual and jurisprudential, fall away. In the judge’s reckoning, war is “the ultimate trade” because every other aspect of human existence feeds into one’s success or failure within it: “all other trades are contained in that of war.”
Depending on how cynical we are being, we may agree with the judge. War’s horrible wonder lies partly in the way that it is a complete and total experience, that takes all of our existence and demands everything from our bodies and souls for victory’s attainment. It takes everything from our minds, as we use knowledge to create new weapons and strategies. And from our souls as we destroy ourselves as decent human beings to destroy more capably the enemy standing or sitting opposite us. As the judge remarks, “war is god.” It is also evil.
The judge is evil by other measurements too. But that Calvinistic good-and-evil approach that Williams criticises bears little fruit here. The judge is a mythic creature. His physical attributes are superhuman. He tells us that he shall never die. He spends much of the story naked or wrapped in robes, wandering at night. Glanton’s gang fears him and sits in awe of him, turn by turn. He does no good, but the truth that he carries within himself is not strictly speaking evil. It is an acknowledgement of the state of things: “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.” The disorder that Blood Meridian reveals is that there is no order here, except what we have placed here, and it is inadequate to the task of mastering creation. “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.”
The story as a whole is one of a gang who, themselves disordered and led by an agent of chaos, become forces for the destruction of order within others. They are symbolic of untethered natures and the consequences of a world without any unifying principles. In such a world, only power can unify. And the judge has the most power because instead of simply gaining pistols and rifles he has determined to populate his mind with knowledge that can be used for violence too.
What do we, readers, get from this myth? Because knowledge comes to us. We understand the disorder, and because we understand it without experiencing it first-hand, we may yet be able to build a better order – personally, or on a larger scale. Blood Meridian is a mirror of human cruelty and brutality, an artefact of evils passed. It is a lesson and an unignorable initiation for those who might be tempted to ignore this side of human nature. If we want power, we must have knowledge. And knowledge without moral feeling is just chaos and destruction. With epic scale and epic scope, mythic prose and Judge Holden one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered in any media, Blood Meridian is a book to read and read again.
Cormac McCarthy died last month, June 2023. He has written some of the most brilliant, awe-inspiring fiction I have ever read. Until such time as I can write about him in a way that does him justice, you can read scattered thoughts on The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses here.