| Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West | |
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First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Cormac McCarthy |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Western, Historical novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication date | April 1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 327 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-394-54482-X (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC Number | 234287599 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 19 |
| LC Classification | PS3563.C337 B4 1985 |
Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.
The narrative follows a teenage runaway referred to only as "the kid", with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Indians and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a large, intelligent man depicted as entirely devoid of body hair and emblematic of violence and conflict.
Although the novel initially generated only lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece.[1]
Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[2]
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McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian while living on the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellows grant. It is his first novel set in the American Southwest, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work.
Describing events of extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse, yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references. McCarthy's unusual writing style involves many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to signal most contractions. McCarthy has not granted interviews regarding the novel, leaving the work open to interpretation.
McCarthy conducted considerable research to write the book. Critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even brief and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood Meridian rely on historical evidence. The Glanton gang segments are based on Samuel Chamberlain's account of the group in his memoir My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, which he wrote during the later part of his life. Chamberlain rode with John Joel Glanton and his company between 1849 and 1850. His book has been criticized as embellished and historically unreliable. The novel's antagonist Judge Holden appeared in Chamberlain's account, but his true identity remains a mystery. Chamberlain does not appear in the novel. Some critics have suggested that "the kid" is a fictional stand-in for Chamberlain.
Elements of the novel are also widely believed to be at least partially inspired by the writing of T. R. Fehrenbach, specifically his authoritative and highly original histories of Texas, Mexico, and the Comanche.
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 members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a 300,000-year-old human skull had been scalped.
The novel tells the story of a teenage runaway named only "the kid", who was born in Tennessee during the famously active Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He first meets the enormous and hairless Judge Holden at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas. There Holden accuses a preacher of having sex with an 11-year-old girl and with a goat, inciting a mob to kill him. In fact, the judge had concocted the accusation.
Traveling alone on his mule through the plains of East Texas, the kid spends a night in the shelter of a recluse before arriving in "Bexar" (modern day San Antonio). After a violent encounter with a bartender which 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. Shortly after entering Mexico, they are attacked by a band of Comanche warriors. Few survive. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his cell neighbor, Toadvine, tells the authorities that they will make useful Indian hunters for the state's newly hired scalphunting operation.
Toadvine and the kid consequently join Glanton and his gang of scalphunters. 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 contracts 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 murderers of innocent Indians, unprotected Mexican villagers, and eventually Mexican national guardsmen and anyone else who crosses their path.
Judge Holden, who re-enters the story as a fellow scalphunter, 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 such acts. According to the kid's new companion Ben Tobin, an ex-priest, the Glanton gang first met the judge while they were fleeing for their lives from a much larger Apache group. In the middle of a desert, the gang found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for them. He took them to an extinct volcano, and told them how to manufacture gunpowder, enough to give them the advantage against their Apache pursuers. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin explains that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before joining Glanton's gang. However Tobin ends his tale by saying that this episode was his first time seeing the judge.
After months of marauding, the gang crosses into U.S. territory, where they set up a systematic and brutal robbery operation at a ferry on the Colorado River near Yuma, Arizona. Local Yuma (Quechan) Indians are approached to help the gang wrest control of the ferry from its original owner, but Glanton's gang betrays them, using their presence and previously coordinated attack on the ferry as an excuse to seize the ferry's munitions and slaughter the Yuma. Because of the new operators' brutal ways, a group of U.S. Army soldiers sets up a second ferry at a ford upriver to cross--which the Yuma briefly appropriate until their ferryman Callahan is decapitated and thrown in the river. Eventually, after the gang had amassed a fortune by robbing the settlers using the ferry, the Yumas attack and kill most of them, including Glanton. The kid, Toadvine and Tobin are among the survivors who flee into the desert, though the kid takes an arrow in the leg. Heading west, the kid and Tobin encounter Holden, who first negotiates, then threatens them for their gun and possessions. Leaving Holden behind, the wounded pair hide among bones by a desert creek. Tracking them down, Holden shoots Tobin in the neck and delivers a speech advising the kid to reveal himself. The survivors continue their travels independently, passing each other on the way. Although the kid has several opportunities to shoot the judge, he declines to do so.
Both parties end up in San Diego. The kid gets separated from Tobin and is imprisoned. Holden visits him in jail, stating that he 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. Holden leaves the kid in jail, stating that he "has errands". After the kid tells the authorities the truth about the Glanton gang and where their fortune can be found, he is released and seeks a doctor to treat his wound. While recovering from the "spirits of ether", he hallucinates that the judge is visiting him, along with a curious man who forges coins. The kid recovers and seeks out Tobin, with no luck. He makes his way to Los Angeles, where he witnesses Toadvine and David Brown, another member of the Glanton gang, being 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, and is now referred to by the author as "the man." The lawless city is a center for processing the remains of the American bison, which have been hunted nearly to extinction. At a saloon the man meets the judge. Holden calls the man "the last of the true," and the pair talk. Holden describes the man as a disappointment, stating that he held in his heart "clemency for the heathen." Holden declares that the man has arrived at the saloon for "the dance" – the dance of violence, war, and bloodshed that the judge had so often praised. The man seems to deny all of these ideas, telling the judge "You aint nothin," and noting a trained bear at the saloon, performing a dance, states, "even a dumb animal can dance."
The man hires a prostitute, then afterwards goes to an outhouse under another meteor shower. In the outhouse, he is surprised to see the judge, naked, who "gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh." This is the last mention of the man, though in the next scene, two men come from the saloon and encounter a third man urinating near the outhouse. The unnamed third man advises the pair not to go into the outhouse. They ignore his suggestion, open the door, and can only gaze in awed horror at what they see, stating only "Good God almighty." The last paragraph finds the judge back in the saloon, dancing and playing fiddle wildly among the drunkards and the whores, claiming that he will never die.
The ambiguous fate of the kid/man is followed by an ambiguous epilogue, featuring a possibly allegorical person augering lines of holes across the prairie, perhaps for fence posts. This unidentified man sparks a fire in each of the holes, and an assortment of wanderers trails behind him.
Books and articles have examined McCarthy's sources for the novel.
A major theme is the warlike nature of man. Critic Harold Bloom[3] praised Blood Meridian as one of the best 20th century American novels, describing it as "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,"[4] but admitted that he found the book's pervasive violence so distasteful that he had several false starts before reading the book entirely. Caryn James argued that the novel's violence was a "slap in the face" 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.[5] 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."[6]
As noted above, the most common interpretation of the novel is that Holden kills the kid in a Fort 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 dramatic 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.
Patrick W. 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."[7] According to Shaw's argument, Holden's actions in the Fort 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 Fort 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 Fort 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.—Patrick W. Shaw, "The Kid's Fate, the Judge's Guilt"[8]
Yet Shaw’s effort to penetrate the mystery in the jakes has not managed to satisfy other critics, who have rejected his thesis as more sensational than textual:
Patrick W. Shaw's article . . . reviews the controversy over the end of McCarthy's masterpiece: does the judge kill the kid in the 'jakes' or does he merely sexually assault him? Shaw then goes on to review Eric Fromm's distinction between benign and malignant aggression – benign aggression being only used for survival and is rooted in human instinct, whereas malignant aggression is destructive and is based in human character. It is Shaw's thesis that McCarthy fully accepts and exemplifies Fromm's malignant aggression, which he sees as part of the human condition, and which we do well to heed, for without this acceptation we risk losing ourselves in intellectual and physical servitude. Shaw goes in for a certain amount of special pleading: the Comanches sodomizing their dying victims; the kid's exceptional aggression and ability, so that the judge could not have killed him that easily; the judge deriving more satisfaction from tormenting than from eliminating. Since the judge considers the kid has reserved some clemency in his soul, Shaw argues, that the only logical step is that the judge humiliates him by sodomy. This is possible, but unlikely. The judge gives one the impression, not so much of male potency, but of impotence. His mountainous, hairless flesh is more that of a eunuch than a man. Having suggested paedophilia, Shaw then goes back to read other episodes in terms of the judge's paedophilia: the hypothesis thus becomes the premise. And in so arguing, Shaw falls into the same trap of narrative closure for which he has been berating other critics. The point about Blood Meridian is that we do not know and we cannot know.—Peter J. Kitson (Ed.), "The Year's Work in English Studies Volume 78 (1997)"[9]
Many critics agree that there are Gnostic elements present in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise meaning and implication of those elements. One of the most detailed of these arguments is 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 Hellenic 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."[10]
Daugherty 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". Furthermore, the kid rarely initiates violence, usually doing so only when urged by others or in self-defense. 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 through 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."[11] Barcley Owens argues that, while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel, Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful,"[12] because Daugherty fails to adequately address the novel's pervasive violence and because he overstates the kid's goodness.
In 2006, The New York Times conducted a poll of writers and critics regarding the most important works in American fiction from the previous 25 years; Blood Meridian was a runner-up, along with John Updike's four novels about Rabbit Angstrom and Don DeLillo's Underworld while Toni Morrison's Beloved topped the list.[13]
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."[14] Comparisons have been made to the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Sam Peckinpah, and 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."[6] After reading Blood Meridian, Richard Selzer declared that McCarthy "is a genius--also probably somewhat insane."[15] 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.—Steven Shaviro, "A Reading of Blood Meridian"[16]
American literary critic Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the 20th century's finest novels.[17] Time magazine included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".[18]
Director Ridley Scott had been working on a film adaptation but left the project. Soon after Scott's departure it was announced that director Todd Field had taken over. The film's production has stalled for as yet unknown reasons. Since Field's departure, actor James Franco has expressed an interest in taking over the project.[19] So far, there are no official plans for a film adaptation.
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