Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (1985)
You must read Blood Meridian. It is a classic American novel written in 1985 by Cormac McCarthy.
It is violent, intense, and populated with desperate lone men brought together by happenstance, each following a destiny that surely will end in a bloody ignoble death made meaningful by audacity.
It is fantastical prose, almost indulgent, with description and metaphor that bursts from the page, unable to stay in its grammatical rails. It is a headlong, unapologetic spill of words, made free and legitimate by McCarthy’s knowledge of his subject. It is beauty in awfulness.
There is a bit of Faulkner, not quite as dense or difficult, but sometimes the reader must doubleback to understand better the meaning of a precursor signal 15 pages earlier. It is worth it.
It is a story told with such understanding, a mastery of a way of life of the southwest frontier beginning around 1848 that dashes the schoolbook whitewashing and provides visceral detail to the mayhem on that frontier. There is particular attention paid to the political and social tension as Mexicans are displaced in Texas and as Americans seek to push the Texas border further south. It is told with an intelligence that does not compromise with the reader – a full vocabulary, an inappropriate vocabulary that is yet necessary, sometimes in Spanish, of the bloody, dysfunctional relationships of Americans, Mexicans and Indians. It is in part historical fiction with some local warring historical figures seeding the action. McCarthy knows the frontier tools of trade, of animal husbandry, of Indians, and weaponry, to such an extent that a dictionary is necessary on most pages.
It is a book of men, all violent loners, all damaged in some way, mercenaries of brutish violence by default.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the violence of greed from self-defense. Glanton, a historical figure, forms a mercenary group of Americans who are hired by the Mexican city of Chihuahua to rid the territory of marauding Indians, at $100 a scalp. He is a brilliant, sadistic, hardnosed leader who shoots an old Indian woman point blank in a town square for the scalp. He is a man who, when Indian scalps become scarce, kills Mexicans and turns their scalps in as counterfeit Indians.
The descriptions of both the American mercenaries and the Indian fighters (Apache, Comanche, Yuma) are over the top, with breathtaking images of filth, gore and casual death. They wear the clothes of their kill, draped in dried entrails, with necklaces of human ears, reveling in the intimidation of their appearance.
This lawless frontier occurred in the late 1840s, less than two generations removed from the powered wigs of our founding fathers. It is an alien world, totally unrelated to the genteel history of revolutionary action ostensibly based on intellect, philosophy, rationality, and the compact of constitutional compromise. The men in Blood Meridian call themselves Americans, proudly distinguishing themselves from the n-word they use to describe Indians and Mexicans. It is hard to get your arms around a big tent that could somehow accommodate the disparate coordinates of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and the ignorant murderers of the frontier.
Want a memorable character? The judge, as he is called in the book, is amazing – seven feet tall, pink-skinned and hairless from top to bottom. Amoral, awash in intelligence and apparently, surprisingly, grounded in an intellect of literature, history, religion. He holds forth on Indian anthropology, he artfully sketches Indian artifacts in his journal, and he expounds on a godless universe that challenges men to cut a path to make a life significant, and he kills without mercy. To his fellow mercenaries he is a mystery as they take a wide berth around him. He shares some of the mystery, cold grace, and internal integrity of the character Anton Chigurh in McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men, and the judge appears to enjoy comparing the incongruity a life fully-lived with the banal prescriptions of religion. The following description of the judge is representative of McCarthy’s exuberant excess and his totally perfect bursts of prose and energy:
A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
This is an America that we never learned about in school. It feels true, however, and undercuts our notion of a logical expansion of the American ideal across the continent. Where there is no authority, murder fills the void. And the continent was a huge void.
This book must be read. It is flamboyant, extreme, inappropriate, honest, and it pulses with energy. It tells a story of the southwest frontier that is horrifying and raw, but it is a history that must be heard.
Bob Fall 