Book Review: Blood Meridian

“This is a hungry country.”
“Not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
“Death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.”
These quotations do not describe hell or some fantasy, other-planetary world. They describe the American West as seen through the visionary, brilliant eye of Cormac McCarthy in the novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. I just finished my second trip through this epic, blood-soaked realm and I recommend that every person take a trip through McCarthy’s version of the Mexican borderlands of the 1850s.
Blood Meridian is simultaneously awe-inspiring and absolutely despicable. What little actual plot it has tells the story of The Kid (we never learn his name) and his adventures in the American southwest just after the Mexican-American War. He joins up with the infamous Glanton Gang. The gang moves through the desert killing and scalping anyone they find—Indians, Mexicans, white settlers, they do not discriminate. You may not think that violence in a book can affect you, but the violence in this book will shock you. McCarthy pulls no punches in describing the viscera that soaks the desert of the American West, but the actual description of the depravity is not the most shocking thing. Rather, the utterly senseless nature of the violence truly shocks. The killing and scalping and ritual blood-letting simply do not ever let up. The slaughters and shootings keep coming, and perhaps the greatest shock comes when you reach the middle of the book and you realize that you have become de-sensitized to the violence—that you pass over every mention of the word blood and your eyes slide over the descriptions of wounds and scalped, burned bodies. McCarthy does an absolutely brilliant job of showing, rather than simply telling, his readers of their capacity to accept and encourage the violence that lurks within every human being’s heart.
Speaking of hearts, I find Heart of Darkness to be the most apt comparison to Blood Meridian. McCarthy writes, “They wanted to know from me if you were always crazy, said the judge. They said it was the country. The country turned them out.” Heart of Darkness suggests that a horrific world will turn even the brightest of men into horrors themselves. Blood Meridian likewise suggests that something in the country—the alien, desert landscape—turns ordinary men into terrors and demons. We all have somewhere within us the possibility of evil beyond our imagination. Who knows what we are truly capable of when we must bring a wild, newborn country under our dominion? Conrad expressed this latent capability through the image of darkness. McCarthy expresses it through the color red—the book’s two major images are actual physical blood and the amazing southwest sunsets that make the land itself bleed.
When I first read the novel, I found myself underlining vast swaths of text—whole paragraphs that simply floored me with their powerful, haunting lyricism. McCarthy turns a real landscape into a dreamy, surreal world. The land itself becomes a character with its own whims and fancies. McCarthy really has a poet’s sensibilities and he writes with an ear for imagery, epic, and poetry that makes Blood Meridian resemble Paradise Lost and The Iliad in style. While you may find the substance despicable, the style will truly destroy you with its, shiver-up-the-spine-inducing, awe-inspiring beauty.
Epic in style, Blood Meridian is also epic in substance. Like The Aeneid tells the story of the founding of Rome, McCarthy’s masterpiece tells the story of the founding of America. This is not the founding you learned about in elementary school. This re-telling shatters the myth of the American West—the myth that has good, honest, hard-working folks scraping a living out of the hard earth. McCarthy tells us that the American West of cowboys-and-Indians and homesteads and wagon trails is simply a fairy tale told to comfort the souls of 20th century America. The real West is a war zone. The real settlers were criminals and murderers and thieves—men with no moral compass, no God, and no conscience. Instead they had steel spines and blood of ice. Only men like Glanton could face the wide open plains, deserts, and mountains and survive. America was not founded by men in wigs in a hall in Philadelphia in 1776. The real America, according to Cormac, only emerged through the letting of rivers of blood by men who constantly fled civilization, who knew no other way of living than constant riding through hostile territories.
Blood Meridian does not appear on the Modern Library Association’s list of the best novels of the 20th century. And I certainly understand how the old fogies of the modern literary establishment would be disgusted by Cormac McCarthy. The author himself is a powerful rebel—he never gives interviews and does not kowtow to the literary powers-that-be. He lives in Tesuque, New Mexico and writes the kind of revisionist Westerns that John Ford or Clint Eastwood would scarcely recognize. A Google search doesn’t bring up much. Blood Meridian is certainly not an easy book to read, but I believe that everyone should try to read it. We need to know this story. We need to know the history of our country, whether that history paints our ancestors in a favorable light or not.
Blood Meridian makes me want to write papers. I’ve even thought that if I ever go for a Ph.D. in literature I might just become a Cormac McCarthy specialist. The character of Judge Holden particularly interests me. I have a theory that the Judge is either the Devil or God. I also would love to explore further the relationship between this novel, Heart of Darkness, and The Wasteland. The book offers up so much interesting material to digest and analyze. Tomorrow I will start reading McCarthy’s Pulitzer winning The Road. Tonight I will watch the evening redness in the west.