Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West in fiction files redux

May 12, 2020 Nandakishore Mridula rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?

I dont believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want t

The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?

I dont believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?

I dont know.

Believe that.

There is a myth that kids of my generation grew up with - the myth of the frontiersman. The hardy and intrepid individuals who spend their lives in the saddle, braving the harsh desert sun, the freezing cold nights, and the bloodthirsty savages who torture men to death and kidnap women and children on a regular basis. Brave men who dispense summary justice. Gunslingers who deal in hot lead.

Total crap, of course. The real frontiersman was a rapacious and unscrupulous bully who rode roughshod over a continent, destroying its environment, flora, fauna and aboriginal people. Most of them were cutthroats, crooks and cheats whose basic interests were only mercenary. The "real" Western is a tale of the white man's perfidy.

The narrative is changing of late. The traditional "Western" has been debunked for the enormous falsehood it is, and more nuanced stories are emerging. However, for sheer, raw, sledgehammer power, no one can beat Cormac McCarthy. This book is proof of that.

Anyone who has had a taste of McCarthy's output knows that he pulls no punches. His characters are doomed and driven, his landscape is bleak, and his fiction moves in violent convulsions. In Blood Meridian, we have a nameless runaway protagonist known only as "The Kid", who falls in with a team of violent mercenaries who are in search of Native American scalps in the blood-soaked years following the Mexican-American War of the 1850's. They roam around Mexico, killing Native Americans and scalping them - and sometimes being killed in turn. This is pretty much the story.

They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote, For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

Their journey is one of devastation, wiping out everything in their path. It has been said that this is an inversion of the Israelites' journey into the promised land. Certainly, the language and the narrative sweep is mythological, and even extremely distressing images have a kind of ugly loveliness.

Long past dark that night when the moon was party of women that had been upriver drying fish returned to village and wandered howling through the ruins. A few fires smoldered on the ground and dogs slank off from among corpses. An old woman knelt at the blackened stones before her door and poked brush into the coals and blew back a flame from the ashes and began to right the overturned pots. All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon. In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.

The retaliation of the aborigines is no less violent. The hellish imagery given below is a sample (warning: extreme violence):

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked shove the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

The fact that McCarthy pulls us through 300+ pages of this almost unbearable violence is a tribute to the man's writing skill. It's like those posters of hell one used to see as a kid - terrifying and distressing, but one can't turn one's eyes away.

The key figure in the narrative is not the kid, however - it is Holden, the guy whom everyone calls the "judge". This enigmatic character, totally hairless and bald, doing scientific research among the people whom he is helping to massacre, often walking about naked except for curious headgear, takes the story beyond the level of the mundane to that of myth. He keeps on spouting words which is either profound wisdom or arrant nonsense - and they have a chimerical quality of not being easily assimilable. As the tale progresses, the judge moves slowly into the realm of utter fantasy.

This is a difficult, distressing and sometimes impossible book - but in my case, absolutely unputdownable. ...more

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Dec 02, 2024 erin w rated it liked it

Dnf, the entire argument in favor of the gratuitous and senseless violence in this book is that it all lends to some grander metaphors or that it’s there for the sake of documenting history. You might be able to form an opinion about that if you can sit through 300+ pages of the worst things you’ve ever read in tandem with characters you are 100% unattached to and extremely droning pacing. I think there is a good story to be had somewhere in here and certainly amazing literary devices but how mu ...more

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