The central character in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” says at one point, “Whatever exists in creation without my knowledge exists without my consent”. The book that details his journey surely seems like it could not have existed without his knowledge and consent.
There are a few universals that fill a McCarthy novel: the crudity and Neo-Biblical, fire-and-brimstone bleakness of human sagas with no respite in sight, the almost complete absence of women, the haunting, bone-chilling, lyrical physical descriptions of nature and devastated landscapes, the metaphors literally dripping from every sentence, and – ubiquitously so – the brutal violence and desperation. But “Blood Meridian” stretches each one of these plot devices to the breaking point. Critics have universally praised it as one of the best American novels of the past 25 years and heavyweights like Harold Bloom have said it’s the most significant encapsulation of all of human frailty and triumph since ‘Moby Dick’. Yet it remains one of the most complex, challenging and exhausting works of fiction I have ever read, and this feeling seems to be widespread.
It’s certainly the most extraordinarily violent. The violence here is mind-numbing, routine-as-rain and runs on every page like fresh blood pulsing through a healthy artery. For several days when I was reading and re-reading the book, the story was lodged like a splinter in my brain, not letting go even when I was away from it; as one reviewer of the volume put it, there is no safe space (not in the contemporary sense of the term) from which you can watch what unfolds. But it was the kind of splinter whose pain and beauty you want to feel before you finally dislodge it in a final act of defiance. And even though I read it as carefully as I could, there are parts I will have to read again so that I can fully digest their mystical properties. When I finished I was glad to be done with it and just felt like sleeping, and yet I will re-read it at some point in time; it's a bone-rattling wine that makes you sick but ages with time and contains mysteries that are still waiting to be plumbed.
The book is challenging and exhausting for several reasons. The plot is set in 1840s Texas, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the language is often a bastardized mix of English and Spanish from that era; if you understand Spanish you will have a leg up. But that’s the least of the obstacles. Anyone who has read McCarthy knows how a single one of his sentences routinely fills an entire paragraph or even entire pages. Not just this, but these sentences can consist of garbled verbs and nouns and sometimes words that are pure inventions: there was more than one occasion when I looked up a word in a dictionary, only to find that just like McCarthy’s fevered creations, it’s a phantasmagorical thing that only exists in the heaven and hell of his characters. There is plenty of free association in the book, but somehow, this free association often congeals into a kind of mesmerizing, rhythmic meter.
The basic story centers on a boy of 14 years who joins a gang of bounty hunters who are hungry for Indian scalps. They ride on through the American southwest, regularly encountering various tribes of Indians and massacring them, scalping them, and parading these bloodied trophies around. In the process they also kill, maim and mow down hundreds of innocent men, women and children who have done them no harm. After each of these “missions” they ride back into town, collect their bounty and revel in a night of drunken excess and destruction before setting off on their next bloodthirsty trip through bleak and cruel lands. Like many other McCarthy stories, this begins in mid-stride, seemingly without a beginning and a background, wrenched from the orderly march of destiny. Who is the kid? Where does he come from? What is the historical context in which he lives in his life? None of this really matters. His actions simply are.
Although the story centers on the kid, the main character is a man called the Judge who has to be one of the most fascinating characters in all of fiction. He is a terrifying, large, sweaty, bald, crude hulk of a violent creature, capable of crushing heads simply by squeezing them. Blood and guts permeate his entire being, his naked body often providing the backdrop to some of the most gratuitous scenes in the narrative. And yet like Whitman he contains multitudinous contradictions. He engages in extended, complex disquisitions on every topic from evolution to astronomy, from philosophy to religion, from morality to agency and the Bible. He dances little jigs when in the mood. This murderous psychopath is, almost violently disgustingly, a kind of gentle Darwin, constantly sketching scenes, fossils, flowers and other natural objects in a little notebook around the fire and holding forth on the timeless beauties of the rocks and stars to young recruits. His extended monologues comprise some of the most interesting, deep-seated and shocking parts of the book, and ones that will almost certainly take more than one reading to fully digest.
Here’s one excerpt, one of the more comprehensible ones:
“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 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. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
For the Judge and the other men, violence is not something to be done, something to be inflicted on friends or foes; it’s simply their natural state of being. Just when you think the killing in these pages is conveniently making you numb, there is a fresh instance of it that delivers a blow in a wholly novel manner. There is no swashbuckling cowboy and Indian story here, although there’s certainly plenty of the lawlessness and the casual, break-bottle-on-head kind of violence which was prevalent on the frontier in those times. But that’s just the beginning. When someone is not being scalped, they are being pierced by arrows; when they are not being pierced by arrows their brains are being smattered on the walls. If it’s not bodies of babies strung out on a clothesline, it’s pet dogs being bound to their owners and cast alive into a fire. And all this happens relentlessly, often without rhyme and reason, at the drop of a hat. Violence and war here simply exist, infused into every emotion and cell and fiber of the world.
But the violence in the narrative is not just physical; it extends to the violent descriptions of pretty much everything. Man in this book is reduced to his primal state, wallowing in his own blood and filth. Random characters who seem to serve no further purpose are depicted as naked, bound in chains, with a leash around their neck if alive; split open, their entrails spilling out and being eaten by wild animals if dead. The animals in the story are desperate and wretched; wolves constantly trail the party and subsist on human and animal bones, lizards crawl out of the rocks and drink the men’s spittle and horses routinely buckle under in a heap of broken bones and spurting blood when they are shot. And not just the living organisms but the rocks and trees and weather and stones and lightning and arroyos and rivers and sand and houses and stirrups and food and whiskey and guns and nooses and feathers; all of these seem to cry out with crudity and conflict. And sometimes they evoke great beauty.
At least half of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of the gang just riding through landscapes of wind and rain and fire and sunsets and sand and storms and snow and heat whose descriptions drip with high metaphor, often mesmerizing; sometimes these streams of consciousness go on for pages. Here’s a typical - although atypically short - example:
“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 a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”
And a stunning, poetic one-sentence description of a war party of Indians on the horizon, defying any I have seen before:
“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.”
One scene that deals with the horrible massacre of Indians like these is another single sentence one that goes on for several pages. You can of course tear away your eyes, but the only recourse for doing that would be to stop reading and step away. Once you are committed to the narrative however, it has contaminated your soul, so it would seem pointless to not trudge on.
Taking a ride with the Judge and his fellow scalpers feels like taking a ride through Sodom and Gomorrah with Lot, except that these men are the malevolent God of the Old Testament who are committed to raining fire and misery on the world. McCarthy’s predilection for Neo-Biblical, apocalyptic tellings is well-known; “The Road” featured some of these doleful ingredients at their most effective. And yet the central core of “The Road” was the tender relationship between father and son. There is no such redeeming relationship in “Blood Meridian” except the occasional fleeting bonds between men engaged in casual murder. In fact there is no redemption in the book at all, and that’s what makes it so wholly unique.
What is the rationale behind this kind of murderous, nihilistic writing, a vision for the end of time that never ends and keeps sucking the marrow from our bones, albeit in its own lyrical manner? Cormac McCarthy is a very private person who has granted maybe three or four interviews over the past twenty-five years. But a clue comes from his interview with – of all people, Oprah – which takes place at the Institute for Complexity Studies in Santa Fe, a scientific organization at the forefront of interdisciplinary research. In it McCarthy confesses that he has always liked hanging around scientists much better than around artists and writers. In fact he seems to have almost shunned contemporary writers. His scientific eye is evident in the often excruciatingly graphic details of physical landscapes and human anatomy that he provides.
And it is this love for describing things as they are in all their gory detail that I believe provides a window into McCarthy’s writing. McCarthy’s men seem to engage in a kind of inexorable, stark Darwinian extravaganza; just like the cruel laws of nature which are made bright through tooth and claw, the wanton killing and maiming here seems to be part of a Darwinian cycle of rebirth through murder. Just like mutations and nucleosynthesis and entropy and life and death, the violence in these pages just is.
There is still a key difference, however: unlike Darwinian evolution which somehow also manages to produce butterflies and tulips and kindness and altruism, there seems no redemption at the end of “Blood Meridian”. And that’s perhaps the best way to read it, as a story that can only be described, not explained.
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
Mind blowing novel.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2023
Vincent
Pessimistic view of human nature.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 25, 2023saki
Astonishing Use of language
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A difficult read but worth it
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2023