Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian is a reflection of the evil we are capable of, but also an affirmation of the life that endures in spite of it.

First, I want to preface this review by admitting that Blood Meridian was a difficult read, not only in terms of subject matter but also in terms of language. I haven’t had to look up this many words since reading Infinite Jest, and that doesn’t even include the Spanish that I had to translate using Google Translate. Interesting fact: McCarthy is fluent in Spanish, and he integrates plenty of it in this western novel. Blood Meridian, in short, traces the shocking depravity, violence, and bloodshed along the U.S.-Mexican border in the 1850s and in doing so, completely annihilates the romantic mythology of the “wild west.”

Based loosely on historical events, Blood Meridian chronicles the life of the Kid, a 14-year-old teenager from Tennessee who runs away from home and becomes an itinerant figure in the American Southwest. With a “taste for mindless violence,” he soon joins Captain White’s army as they venture into Mexico to conquer land and expand America’s borders in what later became known as the Mexican-American War. The novel, first and foremost, can be read as a scathing indictment of Manifest Destiny and the racist ideologies that justified the subjugation of Mexico in the mid-19th century. “We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves,” Captain White remarks, alluding to the principles that sanctioned this territorial expansion and atrocities of war. The symbolism of his name isn’t lost on the reader. McCarthy treats Captain White with sardonic irony as he uses the rhetoric and ethos of democracy to justify violent conquest: “We are the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” he asserts, underscoring a “moral” obligation to reinvent the west and all of its wilderness in name of democracy.

The Kid’s westward journey parallels the savage fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. What McCarthy offers is a narrative of brutal subordination, a nightmarish vision where images of cruelty and unspeakable acts of violence abound, where “death seemed to be the most prevalent feature of the landscape,” and where violence is not a means but an end in itself. Dead babies hang from bushes, eviscerated torsos hang skewered upside down to the limbs of trees, entire villages lay slaughtered and buffalo populations decimated, and mercenaries are out for blood, bearing “dried scalps of slaughtered Indians strung on cords.” Blood Meridian examines the darkest cornerstones of our history – from the legacy of slavery to the genocide of Native Americans in the name of westward expansion – and the darkness that dwells in the heart of humanity. “When God made man, the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

After a brief stint with Captain White’s army, the Kid joins an outfit of scalp hunters led by the infamous John Joel Glanton, hired by the Mexican authorities to scalp the Apache Indians for $100 a piece. Joining them is Judge Holden, a seven-foot-tall, larger-than-life figure with an appetite for murder and an amoral, nihilistic worldview; Toadvine, a man with his initials branded on his forehead who also happens to be missing his ears; and Tobin, an expriest who remains the novel’s moral center (if it has any at all). Glanton and his gang terrorize the Southwest and slaughter practically anyone who crosses their path, “half crazed with the enormity of their presence in that immense and blood slaked waste” (sounds about American, right?) They quickly descend into depravity and madness, destroying everything in their wake. A sense of lawlessness pervades the landscape – every man is out for blood, but it’s bloodshed that is ultimately empty of meaning or purpose.

McCarthy completely obliterates the romanticism of the west in his descriptions of the death and destruction that plagued it. In subverting the conventions of the western novel, he also undermines the “noble savage” trope that victimizes the Native Americans and villainizes the white settlers that conquered them. In McCarthy’s literary world, every man is capable of evil, the Indians being just as brutal as the settlers. He even invests the landscape with symbolic significance: “in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood,” and the sun to the west “lay in a holocaust,” alluding to the mass destruction and slaughter that characterized western expansion. As the Glanton gang navigate the southwest, the landscape takes on apocalyptic dimensions, “the blackened bones of trees assassinated in the mountain storms.” Here, nature is as amoral and unsparing as the settlers that ravished it. An unflinching look at the devastation that accompanied this expansion, these naturalistic descriptions illustrate the existential emptiness at the heart of the desert landscape. And when the kid reaches the coast of California, signaling the end of his westward journey, he stares directly into the emptiness of the journey itself, a place “where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

What is most remarkable about this book, however, is the way in which it grapples with deeply philosophical questions concerning the very nature and problem of evil. McCarthy uses Biblical rhetoric and weaves religious imagery throughout his narrative, but these once sacred images and spaces have lost their spiritual significance or resonance. Churches are the scenes of massacres where “the murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood,” while the hell-like desert features crucified Apaches and “crude wooden crosses.” Here, he subverts the redemptive blood of communion and the crucifixion – there is human sacrifice but no salvation, which in turn, raises the question: Can there be good in a world plagued with evil? Only one lone tree burning in the desert, which offers the kid shelter during a snowstorm, seems to confirm the existence of God in an otherwise barren landscape. The judge, who arguably embodies Satan himself, addresses this issue:

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious 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 its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

The answer, it seems, is that humanity is degenerate and amoral, that perhaps men are inherently evil and violent. But when it comes to matters of life and death, the judge argues that morality is besides the point: “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right of wrong by any test,” the implication being that history has always favored the powerful, that war is its own justification. Simply put, “War endures.” For a book that seems to lack a moral center, Blood Meridian asks some important questions about good and evil, and whether there can be any meaning in such a nihilistic universe. An even less popular opinion would posit that perhaps we live in a world beyond good and evil, where God himself allows such atrocities to take their course.

Coincidentally, this reminded me of last week’s sermon, and how this novel can be read as a reckoning with the questions raised in the book of Habakkuk:

Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence and before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted (1:3-4).

If the novel begins with the kid, it ends with the judge, who emerges triumphant as the last man standing – or rather, dancing. He embodies a destructive way of life, but argues that man alone must create his own meaning, because only by fulfilling our capacity for violence can we reach the peak of human achievement. This is a philosophy we morally condemn, but one that actually drove and justified the making of this country today. “A man seeks his own destiny and no other,” the judge asserts. “Will or nill.” He recognizes the emptiness and despair of the world, and uses this as further justification for war, the ultimate test of will or agency. Though by no means an admirable character, the judge is certainly an unforgettable one. He is evil incarnate, the ultimate personification of war and cruelty, and a harrowing depiction of the depravity that lies at the heart of humanity.

Ultimately, Blood Meridian is a compelling reconciliation of myth and history, a revision of the mythology that shaped the American southwest. This was by far the most violent book I’ve ever read, but it’s also arguably one of the most important. Part western, part apocalyptic, the novel forces us to reckon with one of the darkest parts of our history and the consequences of our territorial expansion, including the near extinction of the buffalo. One cannot ignore the fact that we built this country on the blood and bones of those who preceded us. Brutal and unsparing in its imagery, Blood Meridian is a reflection of the evil we are capable of, but also an affirmation of the life that endures in spite of it.

My rating: ★★★★