Closeup of the Alamo Defenders, Gillphoto, Wikimedia Commons

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

by Phil Hall

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‘What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.’

Francis Galton, Eugenicist, Darwin’s cousin

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In the end, Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian is asking us to feel pity for ‘The Americans’ completing their thankless task of genocide, essential to the construction of the USA. They paved the way. The Glanton Gang made America great. Donald Trump wants to make it great again, too. Greenland and Canada watch out. Northern Mexico watch out, because Glanton’s gang is ready to ride again.

Donald Trump’s recent discourse reflects the spirit of Blood Meridian. Trump’s use of the term bad hombres is helped by more than 100 years of cowboy films and stories. The discourse of ‘necessary slaughter’ in the service of creating a new nation. Ecocatastrophe and genocide are the foundations of European settlement. He describes Mexican migrants as criminals, rapists, and murderers. Trump taps into a long-standing story that paints Mexicans as dangerous outsiders:

We have some bad hombres here, and we’re gonna get ’em out.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel is set around 1850, just before the United States completed its annexation of 50% of Mexico’s territory. Now, the new empire builders and Trump supporters would like to annex even more, Baja California at the very least. The water can get a bit cold in San Diego; warmer water military ports and the prime real estate of on the Gulf of California coast would be nice.

Cormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian for bleeding-heart liberals to rail against, perhaps in order to gain some literary notoriety and for the first few years, his book was ignored. The relentless violence in Blood Meridian is like a strange long Grimm’s fairy tale. McCarthy’s prose aestheticises brutality. Upon publication, Blood Meridian’s violence against Mexican and Native American people alienated critics and horrified readers. The constant violence in the book is made soporific by repetition and aestheticisation. Blood Meridian becomes an evil bedtime story from Mother Goose.

Piggy on the Railway picking up stones,

Along came an Engine and broke Piggy’s bones.

“Oh,” said Piggy, “That’s not fair!”

“Oh,” said the Engine driver, “I don’t care!”

This is a book written like a poem, panel-beaten and polished into shape over 10 years. McCarthy’s honesty consists of exploring what happens when the brutality of men is revealed in war and conquest, in sensing the joy these men take in killing, tickling the sensibilities of that gun-owning nation. We all have an embittered friend like that, who believes these things.

After all, the society of the settler is a society eternally on the hunt. McCarthy’s men, especially the stronger ones, drop their human disguises, become predators and rapists, and rip open the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The more accustomed they are to doing so, the more they so do.

Blood Meridian does not break with the foundation myths of the US state; it cements ‘Manifest Destiny’ into place with a bloody magical realism inspired by the social Darwinism of Francis Galton, Madison Grant and Samuel P. Huntington.

What Cormac McCarthy really wants to write about is about James Bowie wielding his knife ruthlessly at the Sandbar Fight. Oh no, this is not Wounded Knee, and certainly not Wounded Knee in 1973; Blood Meridien is the Alamo. It is the reply to what so many Americans thought the USA should have done in Vietnam to win. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz was right, after all.

Cormac McCarthy puts these words, unalloyed, into the mouth of one of his characters, Captain White, at the beginning of the novel:

‘No sir. The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than n*****s. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.’

Central to Blood Meridian are Nietzschean values, Jungian concepts of the anima and animus, quantum interpretations of reality, and a brutal misanthropy. We see Social Darwinism red in tooth and claw playing itself out. Obviously. Francis Galton was the arch social Darwinist. He corresponded with Darwin. This is a twisted apologia for the blood spilled by settler colonialism. Glanton’s gang are what the CIA agent Byer played convincingly by Edward Norton in Peter Greengrass’s Jason Bourne calls the ‘Sin Eaters’.

‘We are the sin eaters. It means that we take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us, so that the rest of our case can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible, and absolutely necessary.’

By default, and above all, Blood Meridien provides continuity in the construction of the national myth for the USA. There is no break here with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or John Wayne’s The Searchers. However, it takes an acrostic of a book stuffed with assorted strong cultural oddments and sprinkled heavily with the garum of the Canon to make us take the low-down literature of American conservative nationalism seriously. Blood Meridian is a book William S. Buckley Jr. would have called complex and though provoking and a troubling account of the human condition. Guff of that sort. Though it is true that Buckley gave the appearance of being squeamish.

McCarthy well understood that until the USA finally paved over the history of its colonisation completely and, by hook and crook, justified it, its citizens would never be at home on their conquered and stolen continent. Golda Meir also resigned herself to perpetual war and illegitimacy. Despite Gaza, despite all the plans extreme Zionists have for a greater Israel. It would be impossible for the settlers in Palestine to do to the autochthonous people of Palestine and Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and the north of Saudi Arabia what the European settlers did in Northern America and Australia.

“The Arabs for 20 years have refused to make peace with Israel, with Israel to be used as an experimental ground for all possible arrangements except a contractual peace. The time has now come to put an end to agreeing to Arab refusal to sign a peace contract.’

How could an unknown young man born in a backwater of empire’s become a successful writer in the spirit of Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, and all those other angry white male writers? He could be a kind of 80% proof Bob Dylan and put the USA’s national myth on a stronger foundation. He could read omnivorously until his mind was stuffed like a 30-kilo suitcase with 50 kilos full of literary and cultural and scientific references and deploy them strategically to give ballast to his oeuvre. He could triage them. Inevitably, US citizens, the US intelligentsia, would be attracted to the possibilities of his writing, no matter how horrific and abstract.

Palimpsest is the favoured word—obscuring by over-layering. The judge himself explains: ‘It is not a question of the truth of things, but the overlaying of truth’—and McCarthy’s truth where it is not physical, in some respects, becomes banal. In the end, it is not the good, not the humane that wins out, but the implacable and the strong, and the utterly cruel. The philosophy of war as a winnowing:

‘War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.” Says the Judge. And the Glanton Gang are comic book killers; they might as well dark creations of the Marvel Universe. They slaughter Mexicans and Comanche alike with impunity until they themselves die.’

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Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus moves along the path from Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour to Sam Peckinpah by way of Clint Eastwood’s Hang ’em High —not stopping at Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or “Shane.” This is John Wayne country. John Wayne, who had to be held back by six men from attacking Sacheen Littlefeather, who received Marlon Brando’s Oscar and spoke about the slaughter and oppression of indigenous Americans. Blood Meridien is a book written from the viewpoint of an Einsatzgruppen.

McCarthy, writes wistfully of the absence even of the ghosts of the Anasazi, who barely leave a trace. Soon, Captain White expects, the Apache and Mexicans will also be insignificant ghosts and the USA will annex Chihuahua and Sonora, having swept everyone who lived there away. McCarthy’s descriptions of Mexican mestizos in his half-baked, Mexican landscape make Mexicans seem as strange to ‘The Americans’ as an infestation of giant beetles.

Crucial to this scriptural rewriting of national rebirth is McCarthy’s antiquated protean language. McCarthy mulches gourmandised cultural allusions into a stinking araldite that hardens the rambling narrative into place using the fixing agents of analogy and metaphor – visceral, ammoniac hyperbole, drying slowly to a shine attracting literary critics. This is Alchemy!

McCarthy also creates an enjoyable English vernacular: he leaves out quotation marks and apostrophes and gives the language of ‘The Americans’ a Confederate flavour. How authentic, only an American Southerner would know. There is no evidence of monologophobia here, McCarthy’s repetitiveness makes his book resemble a Philip Glass composition – perhaps he was listening to Koyaanisqatsi when he wrote some of it – and Penderecki and Avro Part.

In Spanish, McCarthy’s prose would be described as rim.bom.ban.te – overegged, overworked, unnecessarily sonorous. He uses a superfluity of adjectives and adverbs, all on the trot. His book is peppered, scented, with the botanical; the smell of it wafting in from open car windows, from the imaginary back of unridden horses.

The whole book relies on the pathetic fallacy. You see, when he finally thought out his approach to Blood Meridian’, Cormac McCarthy was on the run from the FBI travelling down to Mexico with his 14-year-old girlfriend. When the narrator looks across all he sees is angry scrub—the dry landscape is the narrators’ interiority—McCarthy’s.

The power of Mexico’s markets press in on a pretentious and uncomprehending tourist with a smattering of Spanish, collecting words and phrases in a pocket notebook. He won’t be back. When it comes to Cormac McCarthy’s portrayal of Mexico and Mexicans his book is a literary hoax. Evidently, he did not know Mexico well enough to describe it, let alone to pronounce on it. The Spanish he puts in the mouths of Mexicans is curtailed and cartoonish. Andale, andale!

No self-respecting Mexican would see their reflection in this book or could read ‘Blood Meridien’ with equanimity. No Mexican would ever vote this book into the pantheon of world literature. They would veto it. McCarthy follows the trail of all the other exoticisers of Mexico: D.H. Lawrence, and Malcolm Lowry. Barbara Kingsolver? This is not an intricate character study like “The Power and the Glory,”.

Captain White says of Mexicans and Mexico:

‘The captain leaned forward. We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didn’t give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favour will admit have no least notion in God’s earth of honour or justice or the meaning of republican government. A people so cowardly they’ve paid tribute a hundred years to tribes of naked savages. Given up their crops and livestock. Mines shut down. Whole villages abandoned. While a heathen horde rides over the land looting and killing with total impunity. Not a hand raised against them. What kind of people are these? The Apaches wont even shoot them. Did you know that? They kill them with rocks. The captain shook his head. He seemed made sad by what he had to tell. Did you know that when Colonel Doniphan took Chihuahua City he inflicted over a thousand casualties on the enemy and lost only one man and him all but a suicide? With an army of unpaid irregulars that called him Bill, were half naked, and had walked to the battlefield from Missouri?

No sir. The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than n*****s. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.’

In the end, Blood Meridian won high praise after it had time to settle, most notably from the literary critic Harold Bloom, who gave it his imprimatur and described Judge Holden, the protagonist, as the most monstrous apparition in American literature after Moby Dick. And there the book squats! Blood Meridien has become a part of the USA’s literary canon, sitting uncomfortably next to the work of Maya Angelou.

Writers, Doris Lessing observed sharply, are not prophets. Blood Meridian is a book made out of knowledge and ignorance. McCarthy is not omniscient like his main character, Judge Holden, merely well read and thoughtful. Books are created out of misunderstandings and hidden prejudices just as much as they are made out of hard-won nuggets of understanding. They are made out of politics and self-interest and imbued with ideology. They are tunnel vision widened, the wide made narrow.

Why do people come to the underqualified for wisdom? Writers are not good philosophers and they don’t develop scientific theories. Instead, they walk around in public with their zips undone—their unconscious exposed like the insides of an inverted octopus.

Of course, to leave my response to Blood Meridien like that would be to bowdlerise it. This is ten years of hard work we are talking about, and who knows what Cormac McCarthy was really thinking? The reader is at a big disadvantage. The weight of laboured thought weaves its inevitable magnetic charm.

The Judge somehow redeems Blood Meridien. He reminds us of the all-knowing devil sent to plague communist Moscow in The Master and the Margarita. McCarthy’s demonic characters exert an attraction. His books are read for much more than stories of impossibly bloody derring do. The judge looks like a combination of Francis Galton, Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and Leni Riefenstahl’s supermen in Sudan, the Nuba.

In Blood Meridien, Cormac McCarthy manages to combine Jungian ideas with Darwinism and Nihilism together with popular conceptions of quantum physics. He does so in the character of The Judge. While the Glanton Gang represent ‘The Americans’, The judge represents the pact they have made with the devil – with nihilism and evolution. The Judge embodies the principle both of evolution and evolution towards entropy. The howitzer blasts out with its random shot, lit by a casual cigar, and decimates the Yuma Indians. Technology and western civilisation wins.

‘Men are born for games’ and ‘war is the ultimate game’. The hunt is a game.

– ‘Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak.’ and ‘Men are born for games. Nothing else.’ And ‘war is the ultimate game.’.

McCarthy is showing the USA its shadow to help make it healthier:

– ‘Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’

– That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

Cormac McCarthy portrays The Judge in Blood Meridian as the ultimate observer, imposing his will on the world around him collapsing possibilities into a single reality through the force of will – the Nietzschean hero helps forge the future in the teeth of nothingness. But first, with the help of the Glanton Gang he must create that nothingness.

To leave the last word to The Judge, aka the quantum observer:

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‘The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order with it is not constrained by any latitude of 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.

Brown spat into the fire. That’s some more of your craziness, he said.

The judge smiled. He placed the palms of his hands upon his chest and breathed in the night air and he stepped closer and squatted and held up one hand. He turned that hand and there was a gold coin between his fingers.

Where is the coin, Davy?

I’ll notify you where to put the coin.

The judge swung his hand and the coin winked overhead in the firelight. It must have been fastened to some subtle lead, horsehair perhaps, for it circled the fire and returned to the judge and he caught it in his hand and smiled.

The arc of the circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons, coins, men. His hands moved as if he were pulling something from one fist in a series of elongations. Watch the coin, Davy, he said.

He flung it and it cut an arc through the firelight and was gone in the darkness beyond. They watched the night where it had vanished and they watched the judge and in their watching some the one some the other they were a common witness.

The coin, Davy, the coin, whispered the judge.

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