Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

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Title Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Author	Cormac McCarthy
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Western, Historical novel
Publisher	Random House
Released	February 1985
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0679728759 (softcover)

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a novel written by American author Cormac McCarthy.

A Western novel published in 1985, Blood Meridian initially earned a lukewarm critical and commercial reception. It has since become widely recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels of the past half-century. In 2006, the New York Times conducted a poll of writers and critics regarding the most important works in American fiction in the last 25 years; Blood Meridian ranked #3 (behind Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld).

Set primarily in 1849 and 1850, Blood Meridian is a fictionalized account of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp hunters who massacred Indians and others on the Texas-Mexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850. A large portion is based on Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession, which has been criticized as unreliable, but the book is historically accurate in general, and includes numerous references to contemporary occurrences. The novel's principal antagonist, the demonic Judge Holden, first appeared in Chamberlain's account, though his real identity remains a mystery.

Awash with extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references. The book also features McCarthy's somewhat unusual writing style – there are, for example, many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to note dropped letters (nothin' is rendered as nothin; don't as dont). The notoriously publicity-shy McCarthy has not granted interviews regarding the novel, and the work is open to several interpretations.

Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Characters in Blood Meridian 3 Themes 3.1 Historical research 3.2 Violence 3.2.1 Ending 3.3 Gnosticism 4 Literary significance and criticism 5 Film, TV or theatrical adaptations 6 Notes 7 References

[edit] Plot summary

Three epigraphs open the book: quotes from French writer Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic Jacob Boehme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of the members of an Ethiopian archeological or anthropological expedition that a 300,000-year-old human skull had been scalped.

The novel tells the story of a young runaway named only as "the kid", who was born during the famously active Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He leaves his home in Tennessee during his teen years. The kid first meets Judge Holden at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas: the enormous, hairless Holden accuses the preacher, Reverend Green, of pedophilia and bestiality. The reverend denies the accusations, and accuses Holden of being the devil. A riot then begins, and the reverend is chased out of town. When later asked how he learned the damning facts about the preacher, Holden reveals he had never met the man before, an admission that inspires approving laughter from the mob.

After a violent encounter with a bartender establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-armed U.S. Army irregulars on a filibustering mission led by a Captain White. Failing to stay clear of a huge herd of rustled and stolen animals, White's group is overwhelmed by an accompanying group of hundreds of Comanche warriors. Few of them survive. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his acquaintance Toadvine tells the authorities they will make useful Indian hunters for the state's newly-hired scalphunting operation. They join Glanton and his gang, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to detailing their activities and conversations. The gang encounters a traveling carnival, and, in untranslated Spanish, each of their fortunes is told with Tarot cards. The gang originally contract with various regional leaders to protect locals from marauding Apaches, and are given a bounty for each scalp they recover. Before long, however, they devolve into the outright murder of unthreatening Indians, unprotected Mexican villages, and eventually even the Mexican army and anyone else who crosses their path.

Throughout the novel Holden is presented as a profoundly mysterious and awe-inspiring figure; the others seem to regard him as not quite human. Like the historical Holden of Chamberlain's autobiography, he is a child-killer, though almost no one in the gang expresses much distress at his committing these acts. According to the kid's new companion Ben Tobin, an "ex-priest", the Glanton gang first met the judge while fleeing for their lives from a much larger Apache group. In the middle of a blasted desert, they found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for the gang. In a scene with distinctly Faustian overtones, they agree to follow his leadership, and he takes them to an extinct volcano, where, astoundingly, he instructs the ragged, desperate gang how to manufacture gunpowder, enough to give them the advantage against the Apaches. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin tells the kid that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge before he joined forces with Glanton.

After months of marauding, the gang crosses into U.S. territory, where they eventually set up a systematic and brutal robbing operation at a ferry on the Gila River at Yuma, Arizona. Local Yuma (Quechan) Indians at first help them wrest control of the ferry from its original owners, but because of the new operators' brutal ways, the U.S. Army and the Yumas set up a second ferry at a ford upriver. After a while the Yumas attack and kill most of the gang. Most of the gang is killed at the ferry crossing; the kid, Toadvine and Tobin are among the survivors who flee into the desert, though the kid takes an arrow in the leg. The kid and Tobin head west, and come across Holden, who first negotiates, then threatens them for their gun and possessions. Holden shoots Tobin in the neck, and the wounded pair hide among bones by a desert creek. Tobin repeatedly urges the kid to fire upon Holden. The kid does so – only once – but misses his mark.

The survivors continue their travels, ending up in Los Angeles. The kid gets separated from Tobin and is subsequently imprisoned. Holden visits the kid in jail, and tells him that he has told the jailers "the truth": that the kid alone was responsible for the end of the Glanton gang. The kid declares that the judge was responsible for the gang's evil, but the judge denies it. The kid stoically rebuts all of Holden's statements, but when the judge reaches through the cell bars to touch him, the kid recoils in disgust. Holden leaves the kid in jail, stating that he "has errands." The kid is released on recognizance and seeks a doctor to treat his wound. While recovering from the "spirits of ether", he hallucinates the judge visiting him along with a curious man who forges coins. The kid recovers and seeks out Tobin, with no luck. Toadvine and another member of the Glanton gang, David Brown, are hanged for their crimes.

The kid again wanders across the American West, and decades are compressed into a few pages. In 1878 he makes his way to Fort Griffin, Texas. The lawless city is a center for processing the remains of the American Bison, which have been hunted nearly to extinction. At a saloon he meets the judge. Holden calls the kid "the last of the true," and the pair talk. Holden describes the kid as a disappointment, stating that he held in his heart "clemency for the heathen." Holden declares that the kid has arrived at the saloon for "the dance" – the dance of violence, war, and bloodshed that the judge had so often praised. The kid seems to deny all of these ideas, telling the judge "You aint nothin [sic]", and noting the performing bear at the saloon, states, "even a dumb animal can dance."

The kid hires a prostitute, then afterwards goes to an outhouse under another meteor shower. In the outhouse, he is surprised by the naked judge, who "gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh". This is the last mention of the kid, though in the next scene two men come from the saloon and encounter a third man (possibly Holden, though it is not stated) urinating near the outhouse. The unnamed third man advises the two not to go in the outhouse. They ignore the suggestion, open the door, and can only gaze in awed horror at what they see, one of them stating only "Good God almighty." The commonest interpretation of this ambiguous climax is that Holden has killed the kid, but, as noted below, others have offered other ideas. The last paragraph finds the judge back in the saloon, dancing and playing fiddle among the drunkards and the whores, saying that he will never die. The ambiguous fate of the kid is followed by an ambiguous epilogue, featuring an allegorical man augering what seem like post holes across the prairie. An assortment of wanderers trails behind him.

[edit] Characters in Blood Meridian

• Judge Holden, the principal antagonist
• the Kid, the protagonist
• John Joel Glanton, leader of the scalping gang
• Tobin, an ex-priest in the Glanton gang, friend of the Kid
• Toadvine, an earless criminal in the Glanton gang, friend of the Kid
• Black Jackson, the only black member of the Glanton gang, hates white Jackson
• White Jackson, a white Glanton gang member, has a deep hatred of the black Jackson, who eventually beheads him
• David Brown, one of Glanton's lieutenants who goes to San Diego to get supplies for the gang
• Long Webster; he and Toadvine accompany Brown to San Diego

[edit] Themes

Blood Meridian is a dense, sometimes difficult novel that demands close attention. There are references on nearly every page to historical, religious or mystical concepts, events or persons. Scholars have written pages about single paragraphs in the novel.

[edit] Historical research

McCarthy conducted a considerable amount of research in writing the book, and critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even brief, and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood Meridian rely on enormous historical evidence. One curiosity, however, is that though Samuel Chamberlin's My Confession was a prime source for the novel, Chamberlin himself does not appear in fictionalized form.

John Emil Sepich's Notes on Blood Meridian was the first and remains, arguably, the most thorough examination of the novel's sources, their context and significance. Sepich's 1993 version of this book is out of print, and has become a collector's item, often commanding high prices. However, as of December 2006, contracts have been signed for a revised and expanded edition of Notes by John Emil Sepich to be published by University of Texas Press as part of the Southwestern Writers Collection. The book is expected to be available in Fall 2007. Additional books and articles have also examined McCarthy's sources for the novel.

[edit] Violence

A major theme is the warlike nature of man. Violence is present from the early pages of the novel to the end: "the kid" is shot in the chest not long after he leaves home, and in the subsequent years, he witnesses and/or participates in nearly every type of violence and depravity. Throughout the book, Holden expounds his views on the warlike nature of human beings, arguing that there is little more to human existence. This pervasive violence is sometimes criticized, but McCarthy's defenders have made the point that he is merely representing the indiscriminate slaughter of the time, and have noted that the brief, curious epilogue seems to offer a glimmer of hope for humanity.

"The kid," adhering to a certain personal code of morality to some extent, contrasts sharply with the scheming brutality of the Judge, though he is party to the group's various killings. This is perhaps attributable, at least in the case of "the kid," for a general human tendency not to go against the prevaling trend or crowd behavior. The protagonist is never vindicated in killing the villain, which is perhaps uncommon in Western novels; indeed, the book closes with the Judge dancing after his meeting with the kid, having earlier drawn an analogy to an "endless" dance of violence, or perhaps the balance existing in life between the righteous and the wicked, each of which is never able to overcome the other, no matter what the time and place.

Caryn James argued that the novel's violence was a "slap in the face"^[1] to modern readers cut off from the brutality of life, while Terrence Morgan thought that though initially shocking, the effect of the violence gradually waned until the reader was bored.^[2] Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions… In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else."^[3]

[edit] Ending

As noted above, the commonest interpretation of the novel is that that Holden kills the kid in the Griffin, Texas outhouse. The fact that the kid's death is not depicted might be significant. Blood Meridian is a catalog of brutality, depicting, in sometimes explicit detail, all manner of violence, bloodshed, brutality and cruelty. For the dramitic climax to be left undepicted leaves something of a vacuum for the reader: knowing full well the horrors established in the past hundreds of pages, the kid's unstated fate might still be too awful to describe, and too much for the mind to fathom: the sight of the kid's fate leaves several witnesses stunned almost to silence; never in the book does any other character have this response to violence, again underlining the singularity of the kid's fate.

Though most readers (and many critics) seem to fill this vacuum with the kid's death, Patrick J. Shaw argues that Holden has sexually violated the protagonist. As Shaw writes, the novel had several times earlier established "a sequence of events that gives us ample information to visualize how Holden molests a child, then silences him with aggression."^[4] When the kid is imprisoned in Los Angeles, Holden visits him in jail and reaches towards him through the bars; the kid recoils in disgust. According to Shaw's argument, Holden's actions in the Griffin outhouse are the culmination of what he desired decades earlier: to rape the kid, then perhaps kill him to silence the only survivor of the Glanton gang. If the judge wanted only to kill the kid, there would be no need for him to undress as he waited in the outhouse. Shaw writes,

When the judge assaults the kid in the Griffin jakes… he betrays a complex of psychological, historical and sexual values of which the kid has no conscious awareness, but which are distinctly conveyed to the reader. Ultimately, it is the kid's personal humiliation which impacts the reader most tellingly. In the virile warrior culture which dominates that text and to which the reader has become acclimated, seduction into public homoeroticism is a dreadful fate. We do not see behind the outhouse door to know the details of the kid's corruption. It may be as simple as the embrace that we do witness or as violent as the sodomy implied by the judge's killing of the Indian children. The kid's powerful survival instinct perhaps suggests that he is a more willing participant than a victim. However, the degree of debasement and the extent of the kid's willingness are incidental. The public revelation of the act is what matters. Other men have observed the kid's humiliation… In such a male culture, public homoeroticism is untenable and it is this sudden revelation that horrifies the observers at Griffin. No other act could offend their masculine sensibilities as the shock they display… This triumph over the kid is what the exhibitionist and homoerotic judge celebrates by dancing naked atop the wall, just as he did after assaulting the half-breed boy."^[5]

[edit] Gnosticism

It is generally agreed that there are Gnostic qualities present in Blood Meridian, but their precise meaning and implication have been debated. Among the most detailed of these arguments was made by Leo Daugherty in his 1992 article, "Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy." Daugherty argues "gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian" (Daugherty, 122); specifically, the Persian/Zoroastrian/Manichean branch of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic 'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenistic tragedy by means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence gets introduced to fate."^[6]

Dougherty sees Holden as an archon, and the kid as a "failed pneuma". The novel's narrator explicitly states that the kid feels a "spark of the alien divine" and despite his violent streak, he has a measure of awareness and free will that sets him apart from his peers: he is one of the few in Glanton's gang who seems to express any degree of remorse, however slight, or who ever questions, however haltingly, the propriety of their actions. Furthermore, the kid rarely initiates violence, usually doing so only when urged by others or in self-defence. Holden, however, speaks of his desire to dominate the earth and all who dwell on it, by any means: from outright violence to deception and trickery. He expresses his wish to become a "suzerain", one who "rules even when there are other rulers" and whose power overrides all others'.

Daugherty contends that the staggering violence of the novel can best be understood though a Gnostic lens. "Evil" as defined by the Gnostics was a far larger, more pervasive presence in human life than the rather tame and "domesticated" Satan most Christians believe in. As Daugherty writes, "For [Gnostics], evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of bits of spirit imprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian."^[7] However, Barcley Owens argues that, while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel, Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful",^[8] because Daugherty fails to adequately address the novel's pervasive violence, and because he overstates the kid's goodness.

[edit] Literary significance and criticism

Blood Meridian is the first novel McCarthy set in the American Southwest, making a move from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work. Academics and critics have variously suggested that Blood Meridian is nihilistic or strongly moral; a satire of the western genre, a savage indictment of Manifest Destiny. Harold Bloom called it "the ultimate western" J. Douglas Canfield described it as "a grotesque Bildungsroman in which we are denied access to the protagonist's consciousness almost entirely."^[9] Comparisons were made to the weddings of Hieronymus Bosch and Sam Peckinpah, or of Dante Alighieri and Louis L'Amour. However, there is no consensus interpretation; James D. Lilley writes that the work "seems designed to elude interpretation."^[10] After reading Blood Meridian, Richard Selzer declared that McCarthy "is a genius – also probably somewhat insane."^[11]

The novel is notable for its bleakness (innocents and combatants are massacred alike), its Faulkneresque and Old Testament-influenced language and its apparent exploration of Gnostic themes. It earned rather little notice upon its publication, but its reputation has grown tremendously. Critic Steven Shaviro wrote:

In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny, of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville."^[12]

The famous American literary critic Harold Bloom has praised Blood Meridian as one of the 20th century's finest novels.^[13] The book was also ranked among the top five American novels of the period from 1980 to 2005 in a survey of writers conducted by The New York Times in May 2006.^[14]

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

It is rumored^[15] that producer Scott Rudin, writer William Monahan and director Ridley Scott are working on a film adaptation; however, Tommy Lee Jones owns the rights to film-making of the book.^[16] Regardless of who owns the rights, it has not been formally announced as a film project yet.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Canfield, J. Douglas. Mavericks on the Border: Early Southwest in Historical fiction and Film; University Press of Kentucky, 2001; ISBN 0-8131-2180-9.
• Daugherty, Leo. "Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy" Southern Quarterly 30, No. 4, Summer 1992, pages 122-133.
• Lilley, James D. "History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian"; in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions; University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
• Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels; University of Arizona Press, 2000; ISBN 0-8165-1928-5.
• Shaviro, Steven. "A Reading of Blood Meridian", Southern Quarterly 30, No. 4, Summer 1992.
• Shaw, Patrick W. "The Kid's Fate, the Judge's Guilt: Ramifications of Closure in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian"; Southern Literary Journal, Fall 1997, pages 102-119.