Cormac McMonthly: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
A book club not for the faint of heart
Cormac McCarthy is, according to many, one of the greatest living American writers of fiction. Based on his work that I’ve read in the past, I’m inclined to agree. He has published 12 novels. 2023, like most years, is expected to have 12 months. I will read one McCarthy novel each month, in publishing order, over the course of this year. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
In NBA fan circles, it’s not uncommon to talk about basketball players “making the leap.” This is when a player who’s clearly talented – who has all the pieces – suddenly and without warning elevates his game, becoming a dominant force in the league. The kind of player who can, through his consistent performance and unique style of play, alter the landscape of the league and affect the fates of multiple teams over the course of his career.
Going from Suttree to Blood Meridian, we as readers witness Cormac McCarthy making the leap. Through his first four novels, McCarthy demonstrates his gifts: Depicting gorgeous landscapes. Brutality and tenderness commingled. Dialog that is true and oftentimes hilarious.
In the first 20 years of his writing career, McCarthy lets us know that he has deep feelings about the darkness of the human spirit and its corruption being given ungainly form in the project called America.
But it was not clear, until Blood Meridian, that he could write a novel for the ages.
In this book we encounter a thesis statement for America, and the root causes of the symptoms plaguing much of the modern western world.
We also encounter words and sentence structure being deployed so artfully as to elevate text on the page to a viscerally immersive experience.
I have to give a shout out to one paragraph in particular. When I encountered it during this read, I sat up a little more straight in my chair, like being pulled up by the scruff of my neck. All ambient sound around me was drowned out. This paragraph and its placement in the text captured my attention and filled me with awe. This is how it feels to encounter the sublime in art.
It occurs late in the fourth chapter of the book. Up until this point, the narrative is told in staccato sentences, set alone or in compact paragraphs. We are told about dusty militias and good-for-nothing Americans in and around Mexico, employing aggression in the name of some ill-defined righteous causes.
The writing, up until this point, looks like this:
What do you make of that, Captain?
I make it a parcel of heathen stockthieves is what I make it. What do you?
Looks like it to me.
The captain watched through the glass. I suppose they’ve seen us, he said.
They’ve seen us.
How many riders do you make it?
A dozen maybe.
That gives you a pretty good sense of the rhythm, the vocabulary for those first three and a half chapters.
Nothing in the book so far has prepared you for what follows. Here is a lengthy excerpt:
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.
When you reach the end of this paragraph (and this is only half of it), you must pause to catch you breath.
Then you marvel at the line that immediately follows, which is:
Oh my god, said the sergeant.
During my plodding and determined passage through this book, I dreaded the threat of each subsequent chapter.
I then proceeded to devour each chapter, up to and including the book’s conclusion, bearing witness to something too large to encapsulate.
Blood Meridian raises questions, and readers have debated possible answers to those questions for nearly 40 years. Of course I don’t have any goddamn answers.
Why is there so much violence in this book? Why are the scalpings, and deaths, and broken bones, and gruesome injuries, described with such vivid detail, while so much of everything else is merely hinted at, or told obliquely?
What is the judge? Why is he so huge, and hairless? Why are his feet so dainty? Why is he the inverse of the titular character from Suttree? Whereas Suttree the man accepted all that came his way with an infuriating apathy, the judge refuses to tolerate anything – including plants and animals – over which he cannot have dominion.
Who is the kid? Who is the man that he later becomes? Why does it matter that he sympathizes with the victims of colonialism, and yet cannot kill the judge?
What to make of the imbecile? This turd eating blind follower of the judge who survived being sent across the country in a shipping crate over a five week span. Why does the judge favour him?
Why do characters in this story so often ponder whether there are other worlds than this one? What to make of the repeated use of the word meridian, and its (inter)stellar implications? This is not purely a terrestrial tale. McCarthy invokes the unknowably infinite nature of space multiple times in this book, positioning the slaughter of thousands of innocents, at the hands of a few, within the context of galaxies rotating mutely in the void. Why?
Is there any more tragic scene in literature than the dancing bear being murdered while dancing on a stage? Is there any more apt metaphor for life in the late 20th century? Here is a country built upon genocide and slavery. Let us build over it and enforce our worldview with Christianity and guns. Let us keep the populace coddled with mean entertainment, prostitution, and copious alcohol. Fine. Then, what better expression of frustration with it all than pointing a gun at a captured carnivorous beast, dressed foolishly and made to dance in a slapped-together tavern, and firing?
Does Blood Meridian provide the origin story for the state in which we find the world, in McCarthy’s earlier works? Suttree presents a vision of unequally-dispersed decadence and societal decay, but what set those forces in motion? Why, in Child of God and Outer Dark, are individuals pushed to acts of such self-centered and sociopathic enormity? Blood Meridian doesn’t exactly tell us why, but it hints at some of the how.
While deeply profane, Blood Meridian feels like a holy, sacred text. It is closely adjacent enough to truth to be acceptable as gospel. Entire academic careers could, and have, been built on a close analysis of this text, its literary antecedents and its ramifications.
If some far future civilization discovered Blood Meridian and presumed it to be a real document of historical record…
Well.
Could we say that they were wrong?
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
Cormac McMonthly: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
Great write up, as always.
Interestingly, the book is very historically based! Even the Judge is based on an allegedly real person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden
The NBA metaphor is a good one because this is really does feel like the apex of the first half of his career. Excited to read your thoughts on All the Pretty Horses, which I just read last week, since that's the book that turned him from obscurity to award winning bestseller (his first five books sold fewer than 5,000 copies while All the Pretty Horses, by itself, sold nearly 200k copies within six months of winning the National Book Award).
This was a fantastic review of Blood Meridian. The slaughter, the strange alignment to historical facts and biblical text - there’s a lot going on in this book. It’s one of those “big American” works, right up there with Moby Dick, that’s spinning so many plates at once, I often forget there’s just one writer behind it all.
Also, the point you bring up at the end hits hard. The way he wrote this one begs to be taken as fact, and sometimes feels more true than the history we’re told in schools.
I came away from this book convinced that we humans can be terrible creatures when the borders of history aren’t laid out ahead of us. Not sure that’s a great way to see our civilization but McCarthy makes a strong argument for it