Category: American Literature

Two “Losers” – Bellow’s Seize the Day and Eisenberg’s A Real Pain

Recently, I happened to read a novel about one loser and shortly afterwards watch a movie about another. In Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, we have one day in the life of a man, friendless and in crisis. Meanwhile, in Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain the focus is on two brothers on a memory tour of Poland, both of whom are in their own ways losers. What is interesting, in both works, is the way the stories frame their losers. In both, but in different ways, we are made to challenge and ultimately modify our understanding of how these characters really live, and who among them really deserves to be called a loser.

Saul Bellow’s short novel Seize the Day is the second of the writer’s works which I have read, after Herzog. It follows Tommy Wilhelm at the height of his midlife crisis (wife gone, job gone, money gone, aging tyrant father decidedly not gone) as everything comes together to slap him spectacularly in the face one fine day in 1950s Manhattan. Wilhelm is gullible, innocent, naïve, and totally incompatible with his world.

We can contrast Wilhelm with Benji Kaplan, from Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain. Also innocent, also emotional, also Jewish, the key difference between the portrayals of him and Bellow’s hero is the worlds these luckless figures wander in. In Eisenberg’s film, Benji and his brother David are on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Where Tommy’s environment conspired to crush him, Benji’s encourages us to view him more positively – at least at first – as he charms the viewer and other characters with his positive, can-do attitude.

Seize the Day

Tommy Wilhelm is a loser. “The type that loses the girl”, he is told by a potential movie agent, he has signed over control of his last few hundred dollars to a charlatan to invest in lard, and he has lost his wife and children and his work. The reasons for this are not too complicated. The man is delusional, naïve, childish. When a sprinkle of nepotism means he needs to share his job with a director’s relative, Wilhelm resigns without a backup plan. When his wife demands he pay huge amounts of money for maintenance without letting him get a divorce, he just reaches for his chequebook. When Dr Tamkin, a (quack) psychiatrist, tells him to sign over his money to him to invest for a huge return, of course he does that too. He is “a man who reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times.”

The narration of Seize the Day reflects Wilhelm’s own failure and hardly ever seems willing to give him a break. Listen to the brilliant opening:

“When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor – no, not quite, an extra – and he knew what acting should be. Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. He came from the twenty-third floor down to the lobby on the mezzanine to collect his mail before breakfast and he believed – he hoped – that he looked passably well: doing all right. It was a matter of sheer hope, because there was not much that he could add to his present effort.”

Whenever we have a statement, we backtrack. “No, not quite”, “he hoped”, “so at least he thought.” Here is a narration that is hostile to Wilhelm’s delusions and never lets them stay for long. It laughs at poor Tommy by refusing to do him the littlest courtesy – that of letting him off the hook for being wrong by not mentioning it. At one point later in the book he has a disastrous phone call and gets so upset he flees the booth, but not before the narrator can step in to tell us how he left most of his remaining coinage just sitting there on the side.

The narration seems cruel, but quite quickly we see that it’s also the whole world around Wilhelm that is cruel. During the novel, Wilhelm is staying in the same hotel as his father. This man, in his eighties, seems to have chosen a form of existence similar to dried meat – by removing all moisture, or in his case kindness, from himself he has prolonged his own life. Wilhelm desperately needs his father’s financial support, or even emotional support. Instead, the man is all rugged individualism – “carry nobody on your back.” Not even, as it turns out, your own children. Besides the father, there’s Wilhelm’s wife, and Dr Tamkin, who eventually absconds with all the money Wilhelm has left.

Central to the novel is the idea of the market, where Wilhelm gambles away his savings on lard futures. It is here that Wilhelm is a loser in the purest sense – in a game of luck, he has none of it. But the market also represents that unkind, cold world. Its movements are, to Wilhelm, utterly unpredictable. It seems also to be connected to violence – Mr Rappaport, one of the characters there, has made his fortune slaughtering chickens – and, furthermore, it is totally inescapable. The market creeps into the language of the book, with money as a proxy for status (one of the only times Wilhelm’s father seems a little uncomfortable is when he has to lie about Wilhelm’s employment history to big him up), but it goes further than that. We read that Wilhelm has failed at the “business of life”. Regardless of whether you place the emphasis in that phrase on the first or third word, it’s true. But we might also add that if life itself is a “business”, then there’s no way ever to escape the market – it truly is all-pervasive.

Everyone laughs at the loser Wilhelm, so obviously unsuitable for the world. Those laughing includes the reader too, for Seize the Day is a hugely funny book. But then, some two thirds of the way through the book and just as the humiliations are piling up so high we almost can’t see over the top of them, something shifts and the narration begins to change. A few days earlier, we learn, Wilhelm had a kind of revelation, one of those “subway things”: “a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast.” It doesn’t last, but he remembers it. Just like he remembers God, who lurks in prayers at the ends of chapters when things are really bad. The revelation connects Wilhelm to something authentic and higher, which nobody else in the book has any knowledge of.

Wilhelm is flawed and deluded, but so is everyone else. His father rejects him, his wife rejects him, his trusted investment partner runs with the money. All of these people choose to disconnect and trap themselves within their own sensibilities. But only Wilhelm connects with others through his heart, however briefly. It is he who ends the book sobbing over a stranger’s body, something it is impossible to imagine any other character doing. For that, he appears more noble, even if it comes as his abjection reaches its peak, than all the rest.

A Real Pain

In A Real Pain, through the cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David Kaplan (Eisenberg himself), we have another treatment of the idea of a loser, or failure in life. In the movie, the cousins come together to go on a tour of Poland’s Jewish legacy using some money left by their grandmother Dory after her death. Where Wilhelm is alone and competing against an ideal and successful version of himself, the central dynamic in A Real Pain is the real comparison between the two cousins. David is married, with a child and a high-paying job. (Albeit one – working with advertising banners – which Benji is quick to dismiss.) In comparison, Benji is emotionally variable, pot-smoking, and not quite employed.

Of the two, Benji is the obvious loser, with David the sensible family man. Money is less important than in Seize the Day, but it’s still there – Benji is a failure because he cannot hold down a job, David a success because he has a good one. The conversation where Benji dismisses David’s occupation is one of the film’s first ones, just as the one where Benji talks about his future employment without reference to anything more concrete than helping out a friend is one of the film’s last ones.

With the two men this idea of “loser” is questioned almost immediately in a way that it never is in Bellow’s novel. At one of the first scenes in Poland, at a memorial to the Warsaw Uprising, Benji runs and poses next to the sculptures in a way that David considers disrespectful and hence cannot fathom doing himself. Yet with his positive attitude and ebullient personality, Benji persuades the other guests on the tour to join him in a little reenactment, with David left – alone – holding the camera. If Benji is a loser, this is a strange idea of one. It is serious, dorky, David, who is left out.

This line of argument – that the intellectually or financially less blessed may yet be talented or wonderful in their own way – is not new. But rather than labouring it, A Real Pain takes the topic in another direction. Much like Wilhelm, in a number of incidents Benji appears naïve, inarticulate, emotional. When the tour travels to Lublin he complains about them being in a first-class coach, when fewer than a hundred years ago people like them would be herded like cattle into the train’s rear compartments and sent to their deaths. Then, at a cemetery, he complains to the guide that he doesn’t want to hear any facts and that instead they should be silent. He feels strongly, but his delivery turns the others in the group a little against him. At a dinner where he once again unnerves everyone before leaving to the bathroom, David confesses that Benji had tried to end his own life only a few months before – further evidence that his charm is only one side of a more complex and tragic figure.

A Real Pain is not ultimately Benji’s story. Like Wilhelm, he rages, he shows his positive sides, but by the end of the film he is exactly where he was when the story began – sitting in an airport. In this sense, regardless of whether loser is the right word for him, Benji stays one. David, the mirror – awkward, jealous of his cousin’s charm – is instead the person who grows. He comes to realise two things. The first is that he should not question his own life too much – he has a family, he has his job. One of the final scenes has him coming home to that happy little world, in contrast to Benji’s continued loafing around at the airport. David, in other words, has a destination. The second thing that David realises is that he must do more to help Benji, but he cannot save him on his own. That is the significance both of his inviting Benji to come round for dinner in the closing moments – and of his acceptance of Benji’s decision to stay at the airport instead.

Whether you want to call these works stories about losers or use a more nuanced term, the fact remains that for all their humour and wit, the strugglers stay where they are. Benji doesn’t grow, and while Wilhelm might feel connected to the world and have demonstrated to the reader that he’s a decent chap, he still ends with no money left and little prospect of getting some besides selling his car. The narration in both works doesn’t try to save these people from themselves – perhaps the creators thought that would be cheap. Instead, it shows them to be complex, human, individuals through both their flaws and good qualities.

The growth is elsewhere. In Seize the Day, it is for the reader, seeing the bad cruel world surrounding Wilhelm; while in A Real Pain it’s mainly for David, who sees that he was not the loser after all.

Concluding Comments

Your blogger is neither very experienced at writing about film nor at doing comparisons like this. To be honest, it feels a disservice to works that are both individually worth reading and seeing to give them each half a post! For example, given both are, at least in the background (in the Bellow), about Jewishness, I haven’t given it nearly enough space as I perhaps should have.

Then, with Bellow, there’s the prose. Plenty of people have said Bellow has great prose, but I really noticed it here and would have loved to delve more into that. Here’s just one shockingly lovely sentence:

“Light as a locust, a helicopter bringing mail from Newark Airport to La Guardia sprang over the city in a long leap.”

It does nothing except make you swoon.

I also would have wanted to write more about Dr Tamkin, who is one of the funniest characters I have yet encountered in fiction. Again, the pleasure would be in letting him speak for himself, rather than actually talking about what he had to say. (Bellow comes the Nabokov school of anti-psychoanalysis, which quite frankly is not interesting to me at all, so long after people have stopped taking Freud seriously except in literature departments.)

Still, both works are fun and interesting, and I hope I’ve succeeded in commending them to you.

Alice Munro – Dear Life

I bought my copy of Dear Life, the last collection of short stories by the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, right about when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013 (one of the first times a writer of short stories had received that honour). I must have read a few of the stories then, not enjoyed or understood them, and set the book aside. On a whim I brought it back with me to Germany, hoping that being a bit older and wiser might help me understand things, and sure enough devoured it in a week.

It’s a hard thing to write about, though. Munro’s stories seem technically simple compared to other writers, where I’m always dotting the pages with marginal notes. Despite this simplicity, you read one page at a time with the ease of a bird gliding and then suddenly, probably at the end, she tries to leave you devastated and usually succeeds.

There are even few images to get excited about. The only one I remember, of “evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears”, I did not like.

Instead, one of Munro’s key skills on a sentence-by-sentence level seems her ability to find a sharp way of phrasing those moments that change a life: “”Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry but now is not going to marry me.“ Or “That was one of  the few times that I saw him act like a father.”

With such sentences, you get the impression that she has worked hard at her stories, unlike others who mask relative laziness with sheer talent or genius. It takes a lot of effort, hours of chiselling and sanding, to make such unobtrusive workaday prose. Or rather, prose that we cannot distinguish from other simple prose except when it is too late, and it has already delivered its broadside against the unprepared soul.

My favourite of the stories here is “Amundsen”, from which the bear image comes. Its story goes as follows. A young woman arrives to teach at a clinic for children with diseases like tuberculosis, out in rural Canada. She falls in love with Alister, the director, and they arrange to get married. Something happens, however, and they do not. The narrator is set on a train and leaves. Years later she sees Alister again, but barely has time to say hello.

Taken as a whole, “Amundsen” reminds me a little bit of Chekhov’s “House with the Mezzanine” with its sense of a relationship that does not go anywhere. Chekhov’s realist innovation (one of them) was that he translated his observation of unfulfilled promises within individuals’ lives into his fiction. Munro, often called the Canadian Chekhov, gains much of her own atmosphere of reality from this same thing. She is, like Chekhov, a great writer of the fudged life.

The pivotal moment in “Amundsen” is the scene when, having left the clinic to get married in a far off town, the mood suddenly shifts between the couple and they head back, acknowledging that everything is over. Here is that shift in mood. The couple have just eaten, and now the narrator has plucked up the courage to put on a nice dress she had saved especially:

When I come out Alister stands up to greet me and smiles and squeezes my hand and says I look pretty.

We walk stiffly back to the car, holding hands. He opens the car door for me, goes around and gets in, settles himself and turns the key in the ignition, then turns it off.

The car is parked in front of a hardware store. Shovels for snow removal are on sale at half price. There is still a sign in the window that says skates can be sharpened inside.

Across the street there is a wooden house painted an oily yellow. Its front steps have become unsafe and two boards forming an X have been nailed across them.

The truck parked in front of Alister’s car is a prewar model, with a runningboard and a fringe of rust on its fenders. A man in overalls comes out of the hardware store and gets into it. After some engine complaint, then some rattling and bouncing in place, it is driven away. Now a delivery truck with the store’s name on it tries to park in the space left vacant. There is not quite enough room. The driver gets out and comes and raps on Alister’s window. Alister is surprised—if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along?

“Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. “We were just leaving.”

We. He has said we. For a moment I cling to that word. Then I think it’s the last time. The last time I’ll be included in his we.

It’s not the “we” that matters, that is not what tells me the truth. It’s his male-to-male tone to the driver, his calm and reasonable apology. I could wish now to go back to what he was saying before, when he did not even notice the van trying to park. What he was saying then had been terrible but his tight grip on the wheel, his grip and his abstraction and his voice had pain in them. No matter what he said and meant, he spoke out of the same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van.

And a moment later I would be glad even to go back to that time, when he craned his head to see behind him. Better that than driving—as he is driving now—down the main street of Huntsville, as if there is no more to be said or managed.

I can’t do it, he has said.

He has said that he can’t go through with this.

He can’t explain it.

Only that it’s a mistake.

The first time I read it, I was shocked by the news that everything was over. (Shocked by the suddenness, but also because I wanted the marriage to happen.) Yet when we look back over the extract, there are no clues that things are going wrong of the sort that another clever short-story writer might feel compelled to leave. Even going back further, the occasional unkindnesses of the story, such as when the narrator and Alister skip the play of a school-aged friend, Mary, are not “gotcha” moments that we can use to explain what comes later. Adults preferring to spend time together over a meal to watching a performance that will probably be no good is hardly a cardinal sin we cannot ever imagine ourselves committing.

Instead, though we do have words like “stiffly” and the perhaps insufficiently thoughtful “pretty”, the passage before the revelation strikes us by having nothing to do with the marriage at all. We have a “wooden house” and the “hardware store.” It takes us until the man tapping on the window, and the knowledge that Alister is “talking so earnestly”, for us to realise that the reason we are focusing on everything else but what is taking place within the car is that the narrator herself wants to focus on anything else but that. Rather than the text reflecting the narrator’s internal voice, a la free indirect discourse, instead, we have the text reflecting the narrator’s very thoughts. It’s pretty cool, but also the kind of unflashy trick typical of Munro which it took me a second pass to notice. 

We never learn the reason that things collapse between them. Ultimately, it does not matter. Perhaps this is another thing Munro has the right to allow herself – a lack of an explanation. As in relationships, often the only explanation for a break-up is the one that we come up with, alone at night.

Another trick worth borrowing is the use of dialogue without quotes, as at the end of the extract. By placing it in the text in this way the finality, the unchangeability of the fact is emphasised, as against the dialogue within quotation marks which still has this element of hope. I think this is important to note because it can be easy to get sucked into quite a conservative way of thinking, particularly on “realistic” things, which considers that every innovation has already taken place. I know I’m guilty of it. But dialogue is more than just words in quotes. (Just as, for the Sally Rooneys and James Joyces of this world, it can be more than words without quotes!) Dialogue can be silences, like “…”, or shock “!?”, and so on. This may seem rather dreadful to some of my readers, but I think that such a way of writing “dialogue” could be more effective now than the more traditional “She went silent”. Show, not tell, we are told, after all.

Reading the stories in Dear Life is at once a joy and a sadness and a consolation for this blogger. A joy, because they are damn good. A sadness, because I know how vastly far ahead of anything I could ever notice, let alone write down, Munro’s knowledge of human nature is. And a consolation, because that previous statement is at least a little silly. More and more, whether as a psychological defence (you will still be a good writer, don’t give up!) or as a rational position, I’m coming to see how challenging it is to write good stories when you are young. I felt this many years ago, when I literally could not write any kind of time gap in my stories – not even, really, a week – because it felt like I hadn’t lived long enough to perceive time in that way. But still now, when I have lived long enough to allow for a changing of the seasons, I see that I have not seen enough of life’s stages to really write the kind of modern story that rolls itself out slowly, in fits and starts, like modern lives do.

Of course, there remain plenty of stories for the young, but not ones about whole lives. And it is precisely this kind of story that Munro chooses for her own in most of Dear Life. At around eighty when these stories came out, she was certainly entitled to it. But it’s still a surprise, and a powerful one, when we read in a story that began in the time of the Second World War, the news that characters are reaching out to one another over “email”.

I think I might have to live a lot longer to write something like that.

Blood Meridian

“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.