The Red Achievement of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian"

Old thoughts on violence etc. (2011)

I.M. Vereen M. Bell (1934-2021). You were with me from the start, and you told me what I wrote was good; then you had to leave.

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“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”

— Judge Holden in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

“People told us that the War is over. That made us laugh. We ourselves are the War.”

— German World War I Freikorpsmann quoted in Waite’s Vanguard of Nazism (1952)

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 “War is god” says Judge Holden and, in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, he is exactly right: war is not decoration or adornment on the plot, war is not a surface beyond which is the novel’s core. The heart of Blood Meridian is war and what it makes. The world of Blood Meridian — ours — does not exist, has no cause, without violence, without war, a kind of demiurge.

War as strife itself is an obvious component of the book, but violence as a motive force invigorating the book’s writing and shaping its descriptions figures into the notion of war as an omnipotent deity, supreme maker or artificer of the world. Yet for all its might, war in Blood Meridian creates a plot that results in nothing more than what was at the beginning. If not a sense of nihilism, then a sense of pointlessness emanates from the book’s violence: although the violence of Blood Meridian propels the story of Blood Meridian onward to its end, that ending comes for no other reason than that it chances to occur. Blood Meridian is a book that is, for utilitarian purposes, useless. No characters are married at the end; no lawsuit is settled; no murderer is found and convicted; the world is not saved, no lives are changed.  The cessation of Blood Meridian is not the result of the proper dénouement: the end is just extension of the beginning.

“See the child,” begins the book, guiding the reader’s mind’s eye to the book’s protagonist, who is known throughout most of the book only as “the Kid.” “Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens.” “The Leonids” refers specifically to the great Leonid meteor shower of 1833. In Notes on Blood Meridian, John Sepich notes that a birth during the Leonid meteor shower of 1833 would have happened on or about November 12^th of the year. The astrological sign the kid would have been born under would, therefore, have been Scorpio. “Scorpio,” notes Sepich, is ruled by both the planet Mars, “a violent planet,” and by Pluto, “the planet of secrecy…Leo, the constellation from which the night’s meteors appeared to descend [hence the derivation ‘Leonid’], is ruled by the Sun and has among its characteristics generosity and kindness.” The situation of the kid’s birth under the Leonids of 1833 prefigures everything that will happen in the book, which will extend and fulfill this beginning.

“See the child,” it begins. It goes on: “he can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”  The face is one that, McCarthy later writes, is “curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent.”  The visage of history, at this early stage of existence in the kid, appears innocent in all its violence.  That phrase hanging at the sentence’s end, “The child the father of the man,” comes from Wordsworth’s poem, “My heart Leaps up when I Behold” (it also served as an epigraph to his 1804 masterpiece, ‘Intimations of Immortality’.) The short poem reads:

My heart leaps up when I behold

   A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

   Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

“The child is father of the man” says that from the child delighted by the rainbow comes the man similarly delighted by the rainbow. Later in time, delighted all the same: the rainbow, the covenant. There is a sense of communion with and repetition in nature that goes from youth to adulthood and binds the stray and fleeting strands of yourself through time into one continuous and evolving soul in that selfsame natural communion. ‘Intimations of Immortality,’ Wordsworth’s longer ode, treats, principally, Wordsworth’s sense that the sight of the divine in nature that he knew so well in childhood, but for brief moments of meditation and recollection, fled him as he grew older and aged away from that visionary time. As an epigraph to the ode, “the child is the father of the man” reminds the reader that the adult without divine sight grows from the child with it. In McCarthy’s sentence, the child is not the best philosopher who reads the eternal deep, the perfect poet of Wordsworth’s imaginging. The child is the progenitor of a history entwined with a preternatural and mindless violence that will only grow coterminous with the child’s growth into a man.

To pursue a chain of allusions, the subject of Wordsworth’s brief meditation is the rainbow that also figures as the symbol of the communion between the Lord and Noah after the Deluge:

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which [is] between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that [is] upon the earth. (Genesis, 9:13-16, KJV)

The covenant is made between a warrior god, Yahweh, and His people. The pact promises that, in exchange for worship, He has given up violence. In the image of the rainbow, the divine warrior, God, is hanging his weapon, his bow, up in the sky, where His people will look and see proof of the covenant. In terms of its use in Wordsworth’s poem, the pleased beholder of the rainbow in the sky is delighted by looking at the manifestation of an ancient generational promise given by the Lord: divinity is apparent in nature, a promise of peace.

McCarthy imagines something else. He revises this set of images into a generational promise of perpetuated violence, a covenant of war. Were this child to see a rainbow it would be the same one he as a man and generations hence would see. From reading Blood Meridian one gathers the importance of the Bible to the book, whether in allusion (the specter of the parable of the Good Samaritan lingers over passages like when the Hermit asks the kid “Did ye drift off the road in the night? Did thieves beset ye?”) or in style (McCarthy’s pulsing and gigantic writing style owes much of its origin to the rough and gilded English of the King James Version of the Bible). What is perhaps most important to the Biblical tendencies of Blood Meridian is how McCarthy takes the Bible as a foundation for so much of the book and refigures it for his own purpose: the covenant is one example. The promise is not one of a covenant of peace between divine wrath and men, but of its perpetuation.  Holden said that “war” is God; he also said that “if war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.” In the universe of Blood Meridian war is divine, a promise carried down through time, because it makes men more than mere clay: they become the perpetrators and enactors of this bloody covenant between them and their god, war.

This covenant in Blood Meridian, a promise of perpetual violence, does not, however, promise a plot, a story. It is only a promise of more violence. Should one look for a plot that moves forward, it is only one that serves as a vessel to carry war onwards through the pages of the book. As if man himself were the emblem of violence and the child its inception, the result of the book is known from the beginning to be violence begetting generations of violence. War is the “ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner,” Holden says. Whether he intends “ultimate” to mean “greatest” or “latest” or both is left to the reader: Holden may consider war the greatest trade and man its greatest practitioner as well as the last trade and the last practitioner. Either way, war is Holden’s universe’s apex, the great prerogative of existence.

How will the book be closed? The mystery is how violence will be ended — it must end somehow, whether by action of the novel’s characters or by the back cover of the book. The violence perpetuates more without an apparent reason for ending. As Steven Shaviro writes, “What is most disturbing about the orgies of violence that punctuate Blood Meridian is that they fail to constitute a pattern, to unveil a mystery or to serve any comprehensible purpose.” The reader naturally wants to know why he should be subjected to visualizations of rape, rampant murder, torture, scalping, blood spraying, racism, so many avatars of hatred sometimes formed with the most charming evil. That there should be some unknown quantity able to be made known is the reader’s natural inclination, what Judge Holden is talking about when he talks about “your heart’s desire to be told some mystery.” This mystery, however, is even more enigmatic in its state of being mysterious: “the mystery is that there is no mystery” (252). Nothing will come, because there is nothing to reveal. No deeper reason can explain the orgies of violence in Blood Meridian: they exist because they do, analogue to ars gratia artis: art for the sake of art, violence for the sake of violence.

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The word meridian is a Latinate derivation from midday, presently signifying the celestial sphere through which the sun passes at noon. What, then, could the book Blood Meridian mean? Geography is an obsession in the titles of McCarthy works, whether it be The Road, No Country for Old Men, or The Border Trilogy. Geography certainly is an important facet in Blood Meridian: descriptions of the landscape are invigorated with a sense of personality, so much so that the places the Glanton gang passes have their own paradoxically immense but blanked character in the novel’s universe. The sea and its location:

A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. (304)

This description does not occur in the middle of a chapter: rather, it is a chapter’s ending. It’s unusual. Chapter endings offer some sense of linear progression and movement as much as the break in the text requires the reader to pause: something driving the story onward with a dramatic conclusion: a snatch of dialogue, a final action by or description of a character. Here, what is given importance through finality is the image of black and seamless sea. Where important characters often appear, here is a landscape description. An image of life beyond human action, the source and boundary of life. The prominence of these sorts of imagistic passages characterize the massive world that is equal in importance to any other person in the novel.

At the same time, there is a different sort of violence that permeates the descriptions, violence as organizing force of the world:

They rode that night through forests of saguaro up into the hills to the west. The sky was all overcast and those fluted columns passing in the dark were like the ruins of vast temples ordered and grave and silent save for the soft cries of elf owls among them. The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spikes that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within and a wind came up through the hills and all night it sang with a wild viper sound through that countless reach of spines (242-243).

There are a neat hundred words in the above passage: fifteen of those words compose the first sentence; thirty-five compose the second; and fifty compose the third.  A certain elegance courses through it, almost in the form of a sonata: the theme, the riding of the gang through the enormous geography of the Southeast, is stated in an exposition and expanded in the development. There is both a mix of common English words and rarer, indigenous Amerindian words like saguaro, and a mix of vague and general but meaningful words, like night and west, and words of pointed specificity, like the aforementioned saguaro, that would make the common reader reach for an encyclopedia. The violence of the landscape forces these different levels and families of the English language to cohere syntactical, to make sense. The second sentence introduces into this thematic style the unneighborly jostling of figurative and literal language in proximity. We move from a literal description (“the sky was all overcast”) to a liminal metaphor (“those fluted columns passing in the dark”) to a figurative simile (“like the ruins of vast temples ordered and grave and silent”) before returning to the literal description, aural this time, of the “soft cries of elf owls among them.” The sentence alone recapitulates the formal achievement of the passage.

The third and last sentence of the passage combines the formal effects of the previous two sentences, mixing divergent imagery, tropes and language to visionary effect. It begins with a literal description, returning to the province of the passage’s first sentence, here a vision of the terrain “thick with cholla.” Cholla, a genus of cylindrically shaped cactus, grows low to the ground, and its appearance here at the beginning draws the reader’s eye to the ground, to nature, the earth. It is a violent place, we soon remember, as the cactus is dis- or relocated, is put into seemingly unnatural movement, and made vicious. Now “clumps” of cholla appear clinging to “horses,” another universal but specific sign of life, transportation, scope. They cling violently, “with spikes that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within.” This adjectival clause passively ironizes the plant in the terrain, giving the cholla (and by extension, the terrain) the character of a parasitic, violent menace. Looking back at the beginning of the sentence from this point, we see that the cholla does not only cling to the horses with impaling spikes, it also litters the land. There is thus already the notion, at this point in the passage, of the violent and horrifying nature of the landscape in the book: not only do its features extend throughout its vastness, they also enact violence on the riders themselves, and even on innocent life, like their horses. Aggression does not limit itself to men fighting men. The earth too is a terror.

The second half of that sentence (“a wind came up through the hills”) could function on its own, but McCarthy chooses to join it with the first, making the wrath of the cholla spikes from the terrain in the first half function on the same level as the wind coursing in the second part. Wind and hills are common and undescriptive words that are nevertheless but poetically significant, words that signify as much as the “wild viper sound” that the wind sings with. Musicality is especially prominent in this last part of the passage, both in the wind singing all night like an earthen and eternal chanteuse, and in the way the sentence ends with a vicious, quick cadenza, a one-syllable word that, when read aloud, lingers in the mouth: “spines.” We move from the sky to the dirt, swooping through the air and clinging to the sides of horses, from the figurative realm to the most literal, from a long series of words and ideas butting up against each other finding its end in one single small word alone. The world imagined in these sentences is the same as the way it is imagined:  a violent place made up of discordant, conflicting elements, where the absolutely real is pushed up against what is perhaps figurative, but equally as real and central as what is absolutely real.

The lack of punctuation on the page permits the words and ideas to course with fluidity from and into one another. The lack of punctuation is, of course, intended by McCarthy, who would say that he didn’t want lots of symbols cluttering up the page. This lack of punctuation certain frees up the writing, but it also grants the form a sort of Impressionistic mélange where the borders between one image and the next are blurred and, often, lost. Not knowing where one idea will end and the next begin shocks the reader into McCarthy’s art: such violent rapidity in presentation makes registering information not just a test of the reader’s ability to understand, comprehend and retain the literature, but also an act of control in not permitting the mind’s eye to sweep one into vertigo. All of Blood Meridian, as in this passage, is not just “turn of phrase,” a term too tame for what McCarthy does: these are violent sidesweeps of phrase, torques of words, whiplashes of language.

One instinctively questions the reason for the violence and, perhaps, the reason for the book itself. The plot exists only insofar as it is a means by which McCarthy can perpetrate his violence upon the page: aside from that, incidents within the plot and the plot itself serve no independent purpose for the characters or for the novel. Exemplary is an incident not thirty pages into the book between the kid and a bartender who won’t give him drink in exchange for having swept the floor. This is the conflict’s resolution:

The kid crouched lightly with the bottles and feinted and then broke the right one over the man’s head. Blood and liquor sprayed and the man’s knees buckled and his eyes rolled. The kid had already let go the bottleneck and he pitched the second bottle into his right hand in a roadagent’s pass before it even reached the floor and he backhanded the second bottle across the barman’s skull and crammed the jagged remnant into his eye as he went down. (25)

The kid’s attack on and destruction of the bartender gets him, in the next chapter, an invitation to go in a Captain White’s company on a foray into Mexico. Captain White tells him that they are to be “the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land” (34). Having read up to this episode in the novel, the reader may believe that this will be the novel’s plot: the young protagonist riding in Captain White’s company into Mexico to liberate that dark and troubled land. By the chapter’s end the company has been dissolved and the Kid is riding on again. But for a dark saying by a Mennonite at chapter’s end — “there is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto” — the whole episode seems a pointless diversion from a steadily more pointless narrative.

This pointlessness, though, seems to be the major preoccupation of the novel and its gore. The whole book is nullity leading back to nullity. There is an essential emptiness throughout the book, one that makes the violence less purposive, more rndom, meaningless.  Blood Meridian is a book that is, for utilitarian purposes, useless. No characters are married at the end; no lawsuit is settled; no murderer is found and convicted; the world is not saved, no lives are changed: there is no end. The Kid, the reader’s major preoccupation for some 350 pages, disappears at the will of Judge Holden and seems, strangely, to have been forgotten by the book itself. He’s gone at the end, when the Judge dances and says he will never die. At this point, this universe, for corresponding somehow to a definite time (the mid-to-late nineteenth century) and place (the American southwest), offers the sense of a city’s skyline reduced to anonymous flecks of light one sees from the window of a plane climbing steadily above the clouds into the night, when all mean individuality disappears in the lights from below. The Judge is that light; nothing but the Judge seems able or willing to endure.

The Mennonite’s dark comment may be the key to understanding the raison d'être of Blood Meridian. “There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.” It is not the destination sought and reached but the way one gets there that provides fulfillment. The pilgrimage is the thing, not the destination. Between the front and back flap of Blood Meridian, nothing of existential importance is gained: the ending leaves the reader none the richer for having read, the Judge cavorting and delighting as he had before. Nothing’s changed.  The way this end where nothing changes is reached, though, is where Blood Meridian finds the reason for its being. It is a shifting universe created by language that shimmers in the imagination. The language is evocative and communicates the universe through poetic repetition, a world created through language. Less the narrative, the language tells the story. It is the process of artistry, of imposing one’s will on a universe, that is the ultimate reason for Blood Meridian. Judge Holden says that nothing can exist upon the earth without his knowledge, that anything that does is an affront to him. The Judge is the author of the world that authors the Judge.