Reading Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian is one of the very few books I have read in my life that I turned right around upon finishing and read it again.  I did that with The Lord of the Rings in high school.  I did it again with The Unbearable Lightness of Being after I went to India.  Now, I've done it again with an author I had previously never heard of and whose novel is staggering to read.  

I have my daughter's boyfriend to thank for this surprise.  We watched Oppenhiemer together and he gifted me the book after dinner.  He compared it to Moby-Dick in passing which I thought was a bit ridiculous.  But it turns out his context is appropriate.  “See the child.” is written at the level of “Call me Ishmael.”  The opening of Blood Meridian beckons to the opening of Melville's masterpiece.  Its scope is no less grand.  It is equally philosophical and adventurous, though in a completely different way, of course.

Cormac McCarthy comes at you like William Faulkner on steroids.  His undulating prose articulates the indifferent beauty and harshness of the northern Mexican desert, filled with raw emotion and resonance.  His masterful creation and expression of the major characters brings the story to life in a gritty, earthy, tangible way.  Yet it is all infused with a quality of mystery that I haven't quite figured out yet.  It's...something.  It gives the novel a puzzling, spiritual vibe.

It is also the most violent novel I have ever read.  I am talking about baby head bashing violence.  Blood Meridian pushes violence way beyond anything Sam Peckinpah and Quintin Tarantino ever attempted on screen.  This violence erupts in your hands, traced by your eyes, pierces your mind.  It is shockingly detailed, absurd and sometimes even grotesquely poetic.  It is surreal and orgiastic and horrifying.  

McCarthy offers us a variety of fascinating and enigmatic characters living in all this violence.  All of them are ruthless murderers on the loose in the northern desert region of Mexico circa 1850, with Indian tribes warring one another, while random gangs and pioneers roam freely, taking their chances.  The Indians are such a threat to the pioneers headed to California that local governments are offering bounties on scalps as proof of killing Apaches, Comanches and other tribes.  

Can you think of a more dystopian atmosphere for a novel?  This environment surpasses Mad Max or even Blade Runner.  Cormac McCarthy created a niche genre all his own, the dystopian Western.  Maybe dystopia is the reason for all the violence.  I don't know.   Maybe mass killing is just another characteristic of the dystopian landscape inhabited by these characters. McCarthy interweaves all sorts of philosophical and psychological energy into this murderous, thick, sturdy narrative fabric in a manner that is strangely grandiose.  

I casually opened the book and thought I'd thumb through it a bit.  I was reading several other books at the time and just couldn't fit it in right then.  I read through the first half dozen pages and realized that everything else could wait.  There was something special about this novel.  I did not know what it was yet, but my intuition felt it.  Then came the initial massacre by Comanches upon a troop of white men.  Such writing was superb.  This was quickly followed by the mysterious Judge Holden (an actual historical person, fictionalized, of course).  Truly, he is the Moby-Dick of Blood Meridian.  He's the most mysterious and fascinating character I have read about in decades.

How did I not know about this book?  This came out in 1985?

Of course, the one thing everybody on Youtube says about this novel is that it is the most violent thing they have ever read, more violent than they could have imagined.  So, I'm merely parroting the obvious, but it needs to be said.  If you are the least bit squeamish then you won't survive this novel or you need to avoid dozens of pages, at least.  McCarthy has the prose prowess of Faulkner, among others, combined with a narrative structure much more diverse and unsettling than anything Faulkner ever envisioned.

The book had me hooked in the first few pages.  It was easy to want to read more through the first 75 pages or so.  It is the story of “the kid” and what all happened in his very young life before, at about age 16, he joined the notorious Glanton Gang scalp hunters (this gang actually existed in history, Glanton was a real person, fictionalized).  These early pages focus on the kid alone and keep the violence at the level of fistfighting and wrestling, for the most part.  Until the hunting troop that the kid is with is attacked by Comanches, as I mentioned above.  The writing here absolutely enraptured me.

“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 weddingveil and some in headgear of 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.” (page 55, note that McCarthy is loose with his punctuation throughout this novel.)

This writing is almost hypnotic to me, trying the parse out the absurdity of it even as the Comanches proceed to basically wipe out the kid's company in great gory detail.  This is purely nihilistic dystopia.  Then McCarthy works in his first true shock when the aptly named Captain White, a man of the fullest American military arrogance and belief in Manifest Destiny, is decapitated by Indians, who place his head in a glass jar.  The kid sees him that way, having just started serving under him (and barely surviving the attack).  “He aint no kin to me, he said.”

The kid is a fairly straightforward, unquestioning, no-nonsense fighter.  He is the ultimate loner.  The truth is, he has no kin in this story.  So, he doesn't care about anyone or anything.  He really doesn't want much to do with anyone, though he often tolerates the company of a couple of important characters.  Indeed, we initially see the entire Glanton Gang through his eyes.  But more importantly, McCarthy has used the results of horrifying, psychopathic violence to totally shift the narrative.  You think Captain White is going to be an important character, the way he is presented.  But no, he's nothing at all.  He's a head in a jar.  Deal with it.  The kid does and ultimately ends up with Glanton.

The gang is an assortment of odd balls.  Various misfits come and go, or are killed, there's an ex-priest who really only had a little divinity schooling, four Delaware Indians, the world's greatest drunken bum, known as Toadvine, and a black man in a time when slavery was legal in nearby Texas whose name is exactly the same as the name of a white gang member who is a total bigot.  In fact, they are all bigots, these assorted drifters all use the N-word, the Delawares know they are better than him, yet he is treated as one of the gang, an equality of sorts.  The equality comes from the fact that the black man will kill as much as anyone else Glanton takes in.  Equality in doling out death makes him a natural born gang member instead of a slave.

Then there is Judge Holden.  McCarthy describes him as nearly seven feet tall, hairless, a massive albino (like a white whale).  He does not actually join the gang, rather, in a time of great peril, Glanton's boys come across the Judge sitting cross-legged on a rock in the middle of the desert like some manifested Buddha.  He is smiling “Like he'd been expecting us.”  The Judge is all-knowing yet he is a complete enigma.  He takes great interest in botany, keeps a detailed journal with frequent sketches of people, artifacts, and flora.  He is a legal expert and can quote entire passages of laws.  He speaks multiple languages including Greek and has general knowledge of Greek literature.  He has near superhuman strength and is supremely arrogant, always smiling.

When they came upon the Judge (this is before the kid joined them and is told retrospectively by the expriest, thereby adding a mythic element to the tale) the gang were fighting especially aggressive Indians and were virtually out of gunpowder.  After a brief “sermon”, the first of several in the novel, the Judge guides them (like Moses) to the top of an old volcanic mountain where he elaborately proceeds to fashion a paste of volcanic minerals mixed in the various proper amounts and moistened with the urine of every gang member (they have scarce water).  He makes a dark paste and spreads it on a rock and lets it dry in the sun.  In this manner, he brings forth gunpowder, which the gang proceeds to use against the ever-approaching Indians, killing most all of them.

From that point on, the Judge was an indispensable member of the Glanton's gang.  Glanton himself, we are told, “had his wits stole.”  Presumably by the Judge though, like much in the novel, this is not explicitly stated.  The Judge continues making journal entries and utters the first of his many wickedly metaphysical statements around various campfires at night, this time while verbally jostling the expriest: “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?”  Something to ponder as the mayhem, murdering and scalping continues.

Half way through the novel the gang brings 128 scalps in for their bounty.  The men bathe for the first time in the novel, proceed to spend all their money with the local merchants, dress themselves in finery and enjoy a large feast in celebration of their haul.  Afterwards they spend what cash is left getting drunk and raising hell.  The townsfolk, so curious about them when they arrived, are glad to see them leave.  It is at this time that things take an even more sinister turn.  The gang realizes you can't tell one Indian scalp from another and so they begin to murder everybody they come across, peaceful or otherwise.

“They rode on” is a frequent refrain.  The novel is as much about traveling and surviving in the desert as it is about anything.  McCarthy proves himself adapt at coloring this world with natural details that are often poetic to read.  Oddly like Tolkien in his writings, these short essays on nature lend realism to the world they inhabit beyond mere campfires and violence.

“They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn. It was raining again and they rode slouched under slickers hacked from greasy halfcured hides and so cowled in these primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land. The country before them lay clouded and dark. They rode through the long twilight and the sun set and no moon rose and to the west the mountains shuddered again and again in clattering frames and burned to final darkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land. They went up through the foothills among pine trees and barren rock and they went up through juniper and spruce and the rare great aloes and the rising stalks of the yuccas with their pale blooms silent and unearthly among the evergreens." (page 197)

The Judge is a fierce, merciless, selfish force in the world.  He not only pontificates to the gang over and over again, he performs impressive acts of strength and mind.  The novel suggests he has a “thing” for young boys and girls.  And that he murders them when he's through.  That's not like screaming in your face obvious while you read but it becomes obviously the case by the end.  It's something that occurred to me later, not immediately upon reading the novel.  It pays to read a novel twice in a row.  You get a fuller understanding in a short amount of time.  The best novels demand and reward repeat readings (though not necessarily back-to-back).  There is so much to unpack in this well-written, strangely engaging and invigorating novel.  I have only begun to fully explore its stark depths.

But I have explored them enough to appreciate what I am reading.  This is a sensational novel.  How refreshing to read something of this quality at my age and yet fully experience it as if I were a younger man, with the same pleasure and wonder as I knew then!  To connect with that still youthful part of me makes me feel so satisfied with the choices I've made along my way and how I ended up where I am in life.  I intend to live a very long time yet.  Blood Meridian is proof of the wonder still possible for me right now as I connect it back to all those other moments of wonder I've had in my life over hundreds of things.  It also points to the likelihood of future inspirations in literature.

There is a lot of Christian imagery throughout the novel.  I can appreciate its use and to how it is interwoven into this bizarre, hopeless ocean of death punctuated by moments of civilized life (which intentionally feel out of place).   The story's main characters are well-crafted, with flesh and action.  They all murder without question, but the gang itself is like a blue collar locker room around campfires.  Each has an interesting story too tell, though most of it is only eluded to. McCarthy stays fixed in the present moment.  His characters are brought together by bizarre events.  They commit bizarre acts.  At one point, the gang takes on a traveling troupe that includes a jester and a card reading sooth-sayer.  McCarthy mixes all this up with precision to create an effect – how the book feels to read.  In that respect he is just like Faulkner and Tolkien.

For me, the most poignant moment in this hellscape occurs two-thirds of the way through the novel.  The kid ends up alone and freezing in the winter desert wilderness.  It is almost dark and in the distance he sees the flicker of something.  Turns out it is a tree that was struck by lightning in the middle of the winter storm that he is hiking through.  The fire gives off light and heat and he approaches and kneels before it, warming his face and hands.  There are all sorts of foul desert creatures nearby, also seeking warmth and light.  McCarthy describes all this with earth-shattering existential weight.

Of all his magnificent sermons, Judge Holden has one that is particularly memorable.  I read it twice each time I read the book and then again at other times.  So, by now I have read it multiple times and it is the part of the book with which I am most familiar.  It resonates though I can't say I agree with it.  “This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

“Brown studied the judge. You’re crazy Holden. Crazy at last.

“The judge smiled.

“Might does not make right, said Irving. The man that wins in some combat is not vindicated morally.

“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 or wrong by any ultimate test.” (page 263) He's definitely right about that last part.

What makes any great novel truly great is that it establishes itself bracingly and then it continues through to its conclusion without letting up.  The ending doesn't have to be the best part of the book but it can not let you down either.  Blood Meridian is certainly great in that regard.  The reader experiences this wild-assed adventure but in the end, a tad predictably,  it all comes down to the kid and the Judge.  And this novel does not let you down at all with its powerful ending.  In fact, it inspired me to turn right around and read it again immediately.   

Blood Meridian is all about the worst side of humanity.  It is not a story about love and compassion or learning from your mistakes.  It is not the story of any character getting to know any other character.  Everyone lives in his own isolation, which is a lot like Light in August.  It is about power and murder and chaos and a lot of other things.  But there isn't an inkling of love in this novel.  The neo-Old Testament tone of it all is strictly governed by the God of Wrath.  And Judge Holden is this god's Gabriel, only he is as evil and vile a thing as was ever conceived of in literature.  

But it is so much more than that.  You can't really get all of it even in two readings.  That's why it is a great book.  It transcends its own nihilist dystopian realm to say all sorts of things to its many readers.  I regret not having read it (or even known about it) much sooner given that it is considered a classic of “contemporary literature.”  One of those oxymorons – a contemporary classic.  Ironically, as I have said, I was inspired by it because of that fact.  It was a youthful discovery.  And if you've ever read this novel, “inspired” might not be the exact word you'd chose as how you relate to it, given the fact that somewhere close to 1,000 people are killed during the course of the narrative.

So thank you, Carter for introducing me to Cormac McCarthy and to this novel especially.  It is slightly odd that the author died just weeks before you introduced me to him.  It was particularly appropriate since I had just finished reading two Faulkner novels (see here and here) and was already in that general frame of mind. Still, it is a pretty strange choice, giving your girlfriend's father the most violent novel ever written.  A bold move...and a good call.  I'll be reading this one again some time.

Note:  There is a lot of interesting content about this novel on YouTube.  Everything from ordinary reactions to Yale class lectures. The most extraordinary video I found was here.  This guy tells you the whole story from start to finish, reading large sections of the text, but mostly just telling the story very well.  The video lasts 5 hours and I watched it while reading the second time.  It is wonderful.