‘Blood Meridian’: War Is God

A review of ‘Blood Meridian’, by Cormac McCarthy; Random House, 1985.

It is telling, I think, that Blood Meridian has been so difficult to make into a film. Ridley Scott, James Franco, Tommy Lee Jones and Todd Field have all had a go. Some have blamed the length of the book; others, the brutality of its violence. I would say that what is so tough to render on screen is the general mood of the book: the thick climate of hopelessness and futility that pervades it. It is not just the scalps dusted with dried blood, the bodies of dead babies dangling from trees, the skulls scorched by the sun beating ceaselessly down on the borderlands. It is the impression one has that this is it, there is no relief, there is no goodness in the world.

So it is perhaps not a book for the faint of heart. It is unrelenting, as I have suggested; Cormac’s world is stripped bare of any pretence at morality. Life here, between the United States in Mexico in the mid-19th century, is brutal and death is ubiquitous. Trust is unwise, if not wholly non-existent. The plot, if one can call it that, is skeletal, which adds to one’s sense that the pain and suffering will never end. The ‘kid’, a young drifter, stumbles into the company of scalp hunters, mercenaries hired to hunt Apaches. They are the Glanton Gang because their leader is, ostensibly, Captain Glanton. But they are in practice led by an enigmatic figure named Judge Holden. What unfolds is less a story than a march into the darkness, a depiction of humanity in a Hobbesian state of nature.

The ‘kid’, a young drifter, stumbles into the company of scalp hunters, mercenaries hired to hunt Apaches.

Though charged with the task of killing Apaches, the group is just as content to kill anyone in its path. Moments of beauty and humour punctuate, fleetingly, the slaughter. McCarthy’s muscular prose is biblical in rhythm and style:

‘It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.’

It is a place of annihilation.

At the heart of the book is Judge Holden, who has an almost mythical air. He is huge and hairless and porcelain white, yet does not seem to burn. He is highly skilled at any activity he undertakes. He gives impromptu sermons on science and philosophy. When the Glanton Gang first meet him he is, like Satan in Book VI of Paradise Lost, making gunpowder. Set with silver wire under the check-piece of his rifle is Et in Arcadia ego. The phrase is attributed to Death, who warns those reading or listening that he cannot be escaped ‘even in Arcadia’—a place the ancient Greeks imagined to be a kind of utopia. It is generally used as a memento mori, as it is by Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. In McCarthy’s book, however, it is a promise.

At the heart of the book is Judge Holden, who has an almost mythical air.

The Judge is a kind of cosmic force in Blood Meridian, a philosopher-killer who pushes the gang to commit atrocities of increasing brutality. He justifies these in lengthy, meandering speeches in which he argues that war is not a human failing but the basis of existence. ‘War is god,’ he says, and warfare ‘the truest form of divination’:

‘This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.’

At the risk of labouring the point, violence is the essence of the story. It is not part of the backdrop but the core of the narrative. Blood Meridian deals with the human appetite for destruction, the thinness of the civilisational mask behind which lies our natural savagery and lust for violence. For McCarthy, history is written in red ink, and the West was not tamed but drowned in blood. This grim vision calls to mind Goya’s nightmarish Saturn Devouring His Son, or the Theban Plays of Sophocles, both of which deal with the relentless cycle of pain and destruction across generations. But unlike The Oresteia, say, in which human justice arises out of a divinely sanctioned violence, or Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla, in which Don Juan Tenorio is carried off to hell, there is no moralising here. As in James M. Cain’s The Postman, consequences follow events without commentary or interiority or authorial reflection.

For McCarthy, history is written in red ink, and the West was not tamed but drowned in blood.

The lack of warmth, the sheer absence of humanity, the extreme amorality of this book—all lend themselves to the impression that what is being shown to us is an abyss, around which the characters circle, moving closer and closer with every circuit. Even the prose plays its part. McCarthy does not use quotation marks but writes in long, unwieldy sentences and leaves the Spanish untranslated, as if erasing as many boundaries as he can so we are plunged, headlong, into the novel’s world.

‘It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.’ On this view, espoused by Jakob Böhme, death and violence are not aberrations but woven into the fabric of our existence. This quotation opens Blood Meridian and sets the tone for a masterwork of brutality that is both profound and pitiless.