Bloody Business

“ANOTHER KIND OF CLAY:"
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian


“His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.” (Blood Meridian 4-5)

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) is the most beautiful bloodbath in all of American literature. That’s a strange accolade, even stranger for its stength amid so much bloodless writing. McCarthy rips away all trace of our modernity to examine what he sees as essential truths about men. (Gender is appropriate here; this is not a book about women, though the primal depths may be utterly feminine, a womb of blood). In McCarthy’s vision, our civilized nature perches on top of a savage wilderness like a flimsy tent erected in a desert storm. Attempts to pacify that wild nature are perilous.

Blood Meridian is bloodier than The Iliad and Macbeth combined. As spaghetti Westerns go, it’s entire length rivals the slo-mo butchery which closes Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. With public outcry against violence media increasing in this decade, what place does a book like this have in the American canon? Its relative obscurity (none of McCarthy’s books sold more than 5,000 copies until All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award in 1988) and fictional remove from the present saved it from the sort of lynching posse that swarmed Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho.

The more important distinction for Blood Meridian is that it is so brutally, wildly and wonderfully articulated. The sheer genius of its prose forces us to reckon with its horrors. This book was not written to entertain; it shocks, challenges, refuses. Such aggressiveness blazes a trail of blood; by following that it, we discover that blood is greater than its tragedy. In an increasingly anaesthetized world, McCarthy’s greatness lies in his ability to rouse us from over-civilized slumber, the lion in Wallace Stevens’ “Notes to a Supreme Fiction” who “roars at the enraging desert” and “reddens the sand with his red-colored noise.”

Bloody Business

Set in the Southwest in the 1849, the book follows a vagrant and violent teen simply called the kid as he rides with the murderous Captain John Glanton. Glanton and his troops are hired by the Mexican government to hunt Apache scalps. En route they are not above savaging anyone else who crosses their way. The purity of their hate for non-whites — the Indian, Mexican and black — is white-hot. All of the party eventually die except for the kid and a Mephistophelean giant named Judge Holden. The two separate and meet years later in a fatal reunion.

The catalogue of Blood Meridian’s atrocities is frightening, even to our glutted sensibilities. Murder, rape, pillage, carnage, torture, cruelties beyond imagining fill the pages. Glanton and his crew attack a sleeping village of Galenos Indians:

“... people were running out under the horses’ hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives...” (156)

Blood documents every crime. The kid looks into a wrecked church where villagers have been massacred by Apaches:
“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. Blood lay in dark tongues on the floor and blood grouted the flagstones and ran in the vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their fathers before them and it had threaded its way down the steps and dripped form the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.” (60)
McCarthy has us look long and hard at that blood. Our aversion to that sight and the relative bloodlessness of contemporary life do not represent an advance to McCarthy. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he said in a rare interview in 1992. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous” (Woodward 36).

On the Frontier of Language:
Re-writing Genre, History, and Narrative

No fiction has ever depicted the West so violently, effectively undoing the Western genre by outdoing it:

“...one of its major effects is to demolish for good and all the grand old romantic myth of the western frontier, to take the materials glorified by Frederic Remington and transform them, in prose, into a vastly inglorious tapestry as it might have been painted by the younger Brueghel, Bosch, or the later Goya ..”. (Aldridge)

Blood Meridian not only challenges the Western fictional genre but collective histories in general. This is not history as we have been taught by the wardens of our peace, no evolution from ignomy to security. Rather it is a history of fearful and fallen acts, history that accounts the terrible facts of unravelled destiny: broken spindles and splattered, scattered wool. Little survives in death.
McCarthy’s history describes a different premodern American than the Daniel Boones and Davy Crocketts confected by television and Disney. The backwoods Tennessee environs of his earlier books are peopled by Faulknerian redneck preterit, poor, illiterate and frequently feebleminded, and Blood Meridian is a diaspora of those fallen, “itinerate degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague” (78). Here McCarthy finds Faulkner’s folk made of different clay. These characters have no honor, and their society no morality. The only character in Meridian with any self-consciousness is Judge Holden, but he is also the least moral; the rest are blank motions, motivated by nameless hungers.

Although his characters regress from Faulkner, the book’s language exceeds him. One critic noted, “Though doubtless operating under some degree of Faulknerian influence, McCarthy writes as though Faulkner never existed, as if there were no limits to what language might be pushed into doing in the last half of the twentieth century” (Winchell 294). McCarthy’s use — and perversion — of Faulkner handily meets Bloom’s criteria for canonical writing.

McCarthy’s language, in fact, challenges Joyce. His prose is pared to the nail; there is minimal punctuation and no quotation marks. He has a penchant for composing words to suit his purposes (“pulsebeat”, ”heartsink” “dustspout” “sootysouled”). All this makes for gut English, lean and mean, stripping away intimacy to create what Saul Bellow characterized as “life-giving and death-dealing sentences” (Woodward 30). It is too tough for the streets of Dublin but apropos for McCarthy’s brutal desert realities. “McCarthy’s prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader” (Woodward 30). Consider this scene:
“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.” (44)

Are we in hell, or Mexico? The immensity of the land so dwarfs men that no description can rise above it.
Such immensity is echoed in the gigantism of conflict. When Apaches attack, they are like Milton’s feral angels:
“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms and the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawnbroached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.” (109)
A harrowing beauty unfolds in this violence, an order that demands its own poetry. And while McCarthy’s tone is often archaic and religious, the vistas are geologically correct, their ecosystems intimately known and named. It’s plain that McCarthy loves the West as much as the poet Robinson Jeffers. Both writers offer a natural world far surpassing the human. Jeffers revered the inhuman spirituality of a cliff face:

Nothing strange: light-gray
diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no
fern nor lichen, pure naked rock ... as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the
flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange ... I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and
childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates .. (“Oh, Lovely Rock”)

Similarly faithful to this non-human order, Blood Meridian leaves behind “human” narrative. The company wanders, metes death, wanders, meets death, wanders. Glanton’s band “appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order” (172). The characters are blind to their fates and their stories end abruptly, casually. The dead are forgotten with the turn of a page, their relics indecipherable and useless:

"Even when literary things happen, it is with the inconclusiveness of real life. Rebellion leads to suffering but not to martyrdom. Words of wisdom are spoken without conviction and with no long-lasting effect. Epiphanies change no lives. " (Winchell 296)

Aldridge writes, “It is as if McCarthy had decided long ago that plot was quite irrelevant to his purposes.” If we look to the characters of Blood Meridian for illumination, we will despair, or be deceived (in the case of Judge Holden, whom I’ll explore later).

The real story of Blood Meridian lies not in its characters but in the authorial voice that weaves them through the preternatural wasteland.

“The journey of the reader through McCarthy’s language, though arduous and often confusing, is marked by adventure and mystery all along the way and ends in discoveries of crucial thematic significance. One is that through some abstruse lexical chemistry the language becomes established as the authoritative character of these novels, and as such it declares its sovereignty over the other characters by creating a context in which they take on a richness of meaning that they do not in themselves possess.” (Aldridge)
With language so powerful, narrative consequences are unimportant. Like war and wilderness, language transcends human attempts to circumscribe it. McCarthy stretches this tension as taut as it will go, creating a novel that works like a poem. “The contrast, in fact, between the richness of the language and the bleakness of the material generates a raw discordant energy that comes to replace the tensions between personalities which are the usual sources of dramatic interest in more conventional fiction” (ibid).

The tension between language and narrative is presented in a different way in the impermanence of human life and the illusion of enduring community. All in Blood Meridian is flux and change; the characters live by campsite or riot through towns. Nothing holds against the darker passions. “Most of the places people live in McCarthy’s novels,” writes Terri Witek, “seem one step away from returning to the flotsam and jetsam from which they are, often enough, literally constructed” (137). Civilization erects walls around its cities, but the veneer of safety is false; the townspeople who seek the protection of Glanton are no less vulnerable to the gang’s violence than the decimated Apache camps.
McCarthy would have us believe that any attempt to construct dwellings of permanence violates the lawless provisionality of nature, yet at the same time he understands these attempts as an inescapable part of our human nature’s war against nature. When the gang camps in the ruins of a prehistoric Indian tribe, Judge Holden says,

“‘... whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons, however primitive their works may seem to us.’” (139)

Another way to read McCarthy’s refusal of community is as a sort of aesthetic masculine protest. The book has no love interest, no domestic warmth to draw men in from the desert cold. The gang enjoys sex only through rare forays of whoring, rape, pederasty or necrophilia. Intimacy is usually is dangerous as when the kid refuses to abandon trailmates who become injured. Men must be cruel in the desperate struggle for survival; when a horse is snakebit in the nose and its head swells horribly, the hemmed-in company refuse to shoot the horse because they want to avoid the rot as long as possible.
The reader’s discomfort with such brutalities is an indication how distant we have grown from the lawless politics of survival, where the more virulent attributes are critical. Today, men in corporations attend diversity workshops, “work on intimacy issues” with their mates and drive out beyond the last mall to bond with the boys. For McCarthy, language -- and the novel -- atrophies from surrender to the feminine. The sulfuric passions of Blood Meridian describe the terrible beauty of an order decimated by suburbia.

No God, but a Whale of a Judge

The lone exception to the blinded citizenry of Blood Meridian is Judge Holden, a character so biblically vocal with meanings and allusions to cause Aldridge to grouse that his appearance in Blood Meridian “comes as a distinctly awkward violation of decorum.” A bald gargantua, the judge is the metaphysician of Glanton’s gang, appearing one day out of nowhere to save the gunpowderless gang from massacre by gathering saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur, and the urine of gang members to bake gunpowder on the lip of a volcano. The Apache who think the gang without powder are massacred on the slopes in a fusillade of bullets, and the judge rides on with the gang.

Holden is a both Mephistopheles and Ahab’s Moby Dick, a monstrous rationality more feral than anything delved from salt abysms. His gift of gunpowder is a seen by an ex-priest in the gang as a Satanic pact, a “terrible covenant” (126). The desert is a Godless waste -- McCarthy’s panoramic descriptions are usually hellish -- in which only the judge is at ease. His knowledge of the world is formidable, as if he alone has dominion over it. He is what Mephistopheles became in the 19th century, the unbound Frankenstein of Western science. His curiosity to know is an appetite that destroys whatever it encounters.

His goal is Faustian, for only that knowledge which brings mastery is important:

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent ... Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” (198)

His means are Mephistophelean -- sealed with blood. Blood knowledge is best. He observes that humanity has grown thirstier for blood:

“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? ... And is the race of man not more precious yet? the way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of his achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.” (147)

In the absence of God or moral purpose, war is the ultimate “game,” with the stakes never higher than in the face of death. War is “the truest form of divination,” “the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence” (249). War is all there is left in a world fallen from the old religious hierarchy. “War is god” (Ibid).Ever-articulate judge and the silent kid are the only ones to survive Glanton’s campaign. Separated for 28 years they finally meet in a bar one night where “a dimly seething rabble had coagulated within” (324). The blood dance intensifies when a dancing bear is shot by a drunk. “You’re here for the dance,” the judge tells the kid (327). Blood, he tells the kid, is a sacred ritual soon to be civilized into extinction, a sad event for those who would dance:

“Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.” (331)
Holden kills the kid in a giant bear hug later that night then returns to the dance. “His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps ... He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335).

Who is the judge? His presence in the novel as the only man of words obviously relates him to the author. His secular pronouncements compress the vision of the whole book. Yet the judge is a monster, terrible as he is wise, and nothing he does or says can be trusted. Aldrich conjectures that Judge Holden represents McCarthy’s own ambivalence about a language too prone to spiritual grandeur in an increasingly secular world: “(Holden) appears to be evidence of McCarthy’s discomfort with yet fatal attraction to the manufacture of transcendental codifications.”

Does Moby Dick -- the monster of the ocean wilderness in McCarthy’s favorite book -- need Ahab’s curses from the deck? Probably not, but we do, even through we’ll never know what exactly we’ve learned. Language is full of such worthless wisdom, and McCarthy knows there’s nothing more useless than trying to articulate a silent world. But that’s why he places Judge Holden in his wilderness, and that’s why Cormac McCarthy has so strong a need to create novels that few writers have demonstrated such absolute refusal of every civilized amenity. Judge Holden may be a blight on Blood Meridian, but the novel requires his bloody poetics as much as The Novel needs Cormac McCarthy. Our destiny, for good or bad, lies in that wilderness of the word, and the blood of refusal that glistens along its blade is necessary and good.

Works Cited

Aldridge, John W. “Cormac McCarthy's Bizarre Genius: A Reclusive Master of Language and the Picaresque, On a Roll.” Atlantic Magazine, volume 274 number 2 (August 1994). (Download from Compuserve)

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. New York: Random House, 1985.

Winchell, Mark Royden. “Inner Dark: or, The Place of Cormac McCarthy.” Southern Review, volume 26, number 2 (Spring 1990).

Witek, Terri. “Reeds and hides: Cormac McCarthy’s Domestic Spaces.” Southern Review, volume 30, number 1 (Winter 1994).

Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times Magazine, volume 141, April 19, 1992.