Calling Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian dark is like calling the sun big or the Sistine Chapel cool. Published in 1985, this is the book that made Cormac McCarthy's reputation as a great writer, (it has been compared to Moby Dick and MacBeth); these days his reputation has never been higher what with the likes of the Coen Brothers and John Hillcoat making movies of No Country For Old Men and The Road, (while each is spare, desolate, violent, and beautiful, which is his style, neither approaches the depths of darkness where Blood Meridian is, nor it's quality). Blood Meridian feels more like an artifact than a scripted story by a modern author. It is one of three or four of my favorite books, but I would never recommend it to a friend -- recommending someone read Blood Meridian is like recommending someone join a templar cult, or recommend they bring someone back from the dead by appropriating a pet cemetery; it's revelatory power you're contracting, and will likely end badly.
+ I've thought for a while to write a series of short essays on the most important books to me, and chronologizing them to the ages at which they impacted my life. So I'll start here with Meridian. 21 years old I read it, and more than a decade later I'm still obsessed with dense, (sometimes abstruse) language, elliptical plotless plotting, and the gnostic geography of rural American history, because of McCarthy's style. (I'll stop here. This last sentence could be bypassed as so much mumbo jumbo, because sometimes I'm writing fast, and often drown my sentences with words. The problem is that explaining this sentence becomes its own essay: By gnostic.. hmm, how to put this: After six/seven seasons of bizarro occurrences, science fiction, and naming characters after philosophers, the television show Lost revealed itself to be a Gnostic story, rather than a science story; Gnosticism (incredibly simplified), is an ancient Christian-style belief system where the dark and light are equal entities, in that the "dark" entity had as much say in the design of the world as the "light"; and speaking of the earth, in Gnostic belief it is considered an inferior clone of heaven; and all this radical dualism, light and dark forces as equal gods, earth as an alternate reality,(an Earth2), of heaven, is founded on the prechristian belief in a higher knowledge (gnosis) as superior and independant of faith. So then, regarding Gnostic as adjective for geography is to say Cormac McCarthy's style,(one he shares with many American writers), is something of finding spiritualism in the barren land of the American west not necessarily Christian but sorta Christian; in the emptiness of wide open spaces he finds mysticism in heaven or hell already being there. It's a popular conceit to link Blood Meridian's mystic aspect with Gnosticism, this is because it fits quite well.
+ So then. Blood Meridian is archaic, biblical, baroque, and simultaneously spare, plain, and shorn of punctuation; even in the writing style there's duality at work. And in the geography of the west, as written above, McCarthy eeks out a beauty that is primal yet calm, and then he destroys it with a setlist of all too human rape and murder. He catalogues the gruesome violence cooly -- because the violence is without the carny flair of a hack writer it can overwhelm. Then a moment comes when the thing is over, and you wonder what this was about, was it simply about what men can and will do in the furthering of their reach? Blood Meridian could be about American expansion, soldiery, and time. Could be about westerns, cowboys; mexicans, indians; could be about American literature, (be it Melville or Mark Twain), and Elizabethan poetry (be it metaphysical like John Donne, or shakespearean like well.. Shakespeare). Blood Meridian could be, could be, could be -- It is a found Gnostic Gospel set in the Americas.
+ Blood Meridian opens like this:
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond the harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him already broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
+ In this opening is introduced the closest thing to a hero Blood Meridian has. He is called 'the kid', and only sentences after this he has left Tennessee and this father. He has struck out west like any pioneering hero of Western genre fiction. A version of Huck Finn at fourteen, perhaps, looking for adventure. That an illiterate tough, a Boy With No Name, has walked out into the world, still feels like any good wagons west yarn; as The Kid leaves, McCarthy bends time. We pass months, maybe a year, with the Kid, in just five pages. In those five pages, in that year, he fights, gets shot, is in St. Louis, is in New Orleans, and finally, lands in Texas. A descent has begun with little let-up, and little to come.
From here the story follows the kid as he takes mercenary work with US Army Irregulars heading into Mexico. After the Mexican campaign ends disastrously, he joins a crew of mercenaries fighting the Apache. And this, with a strange coda decades later, is the book. I write 'book' rather than 'story', because this is only a story the way a biblical text counting phenomena and death is telling a story.
+ If you read about modern Gnostic thought you will come to Eric Voegelin. Voegelin was a German-born scholar who fled the Nazis, became a US citizen, and taught at several universities including LSU, Notre Dame and was a member of the Hoover Institution,(a famous and long standing conservative think tank in the United States who has counted as some recent members Condoleeza Rice and the late Christopher Hitchens). Voegelin believed in radical Gnosticism as the underlying engine of 20th century totalitarianism; his gnosticism was a revision of that old earth is a copy of heaven -- because there is no kingdom waiting for you, gnostic belief tends toward creating heaven here.
wiki: Voegelin perceived similarities between ancient Gnosticism and modernist political theories, particularly communism and nazism. He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection from society and a belief that this lack is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects:
Sound familiar?
'This stands in contrast to a notion of redemption that is achieved through the reconciliation of mankind with the divine. Marxism therefore qualifies as "gnostic" because it purports that we can establish the perfect society on earth once capitalism has been overthrown by the "proletariat." Likewise, Nazism is seen as "gnostic" because it posits that we can achieve utopia by attaining racial purity, once the master race has freed itself of the racially' inferior and the degenerate.
Voegelin died in 1985, the year Blood Meridian was published.
A quote by Paul Valéry opens the book:
An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and he seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.
The reverend had stopped his sermon altogether. There was no sound in the tent. All watched the man. He adjusted the hat and then pushed his way forward as far as the crateboard pulpit where the reverend stood and there he turned to address the
reverend's congregation. His face was serene and strangely childlike. His hands were small. He held them out.
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has
usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years - I said eleven - who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God.
A moan swept through the crowd. A lady sank to her knees.
This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.
Let's hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistol from his boot he leveled it and fired.
The young teamster instantly produced a knife from his clothing and unseamed the tent and stepped outside into the rain. The kid followed. They ducked low and ran across the mud toward the hotel. Already gunfire was general within the tent and a dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud. The kid and his friend reached the hotel gallery and wiped the water from their eyes and turned to
watch. As they did so the tent began to sway and buckle and like a huge and wounded medusa it slowly settled to the ground trailing tattered canvas walls and ratty guyropes over the ground.
The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered.
On the polished wood before him were two hats and a double handful of coins. He raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and the kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and
nodded. These here is on the judge, he said.
They drank. The teamster set his glass down and looked at the kid or he seemed to, you couldnt be sure of his gaze. The kid looked down the bar to where the judge stood.
The bar was that tall not every man could even get his elbows up on it but it came just to the judge's waist and he stood with his hands placed flatwise on the wood, leaning slightly, as if about to give another address. By now men were piling through
the doorway, bleeding, covered in mud, cursing. They gathered about the judge. A posse was being drawn to pursue the preacher.
Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?
Goods? said the judge.
When was you in Fort Smith?
Fort Smith?
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?
You mean the Reverend Green?
Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.
I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.
They looked from one to the other.
Well where was it you run up on him?
I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him. He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone
bought the judge a drink.'
Judge Holden is most assuredly an agent, if not a god of war. Not the type who might grace a Marvel comic, or a heavy metal album, this god of war is a giant, hairless trickster who delights in the murder of women and children, in lighting men to like violence; who is a pederast, and a polymath. He is the most horrific character I have ever read, and one of the more brilliant; at times during Meridian the Judge disappears like Gandalf in The Hobbit, and the reader can surmise he likely is over the next rolling hill, squatting with the Apache, giving them advice on how to kill the coming regulators of Glanton's gang, (of which the kid is one member); in a book full of horrors, Judge Holden's are always the strangest, and most horrific; one can think of him as the literary equivalent of a gnostic Æsir; he has not come down off the tree of life, or from heaven, (or up from Hades), to trick or inform mortals; Texas, Mexico -- here is the plane of magic where he operates, this is his heaven, and he has always been here; and as how he deals with Reverend Green above, there is no place for the idea of morality in his realm.
Consider again Eric Voegelin:
According to Voegelin the Gnostics are really rejecting the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God and replacing it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or practice.
While the cast of regulators in Blood Meridian are demonic in much of their actions, these are mortals; they have mortal excuses for their actions: for the money, because hunting down Indian tribes are a necessary military action, because, because, because -- The Judge makes no such excuses, and the hardened monsters of Glanton's regulators find themselves having to look the other way when it comes to the Judge. Better for them.
For finally, at the end, a man who was once 'the kid', meets Judge Holden a final time, with the era in which they worked together with Glanton's gang far behind them, 'the kid' makes a stand finally against everything they did, everything the Judge is, and in this defiance the book ends with a scene of absolute terror of which no horror writer has come close; it is certainly the most mysterious violence in a book that never before it has played violence mysteriously. And in the end the Judge's veiled nature is revealed. One knows his dance of war will continue on into the coming new century, where men like Eric Voegelin will need escape their homes from a new kind of regulator.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond the harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him already broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
+ In this opening is introduced the closest thing to a hero Blood Meridian has. He is called 'the kid', and only sentences after this he has left Tennessee and this father. He has struck out west like any pioneering hero of Western genre fiction. A version of Huck Finn at fourteen, perhaps, looking for adventure. That an illiterate tough, a Boy With No Name, has walked out into the world, still feels like any good wagons west yarn; as The Kid leaves, McCarthy bends time. We pass months, maybe a year, with the Kid, in just five pages. In those five pages, in that year, he fights, gets shot, is in St. Louis, is in New Orleans, and finally, lands in Texas. A descent has begun with little let-up, and little to come.
From here the story follows the kid as he takes mercenary work with US Army Irregulars heading into Mexico. After the Mexican campaign ends disastrously, he joins a crew of mercenaries fighting the Apache. And this, with a strange coda decades later, is the book. I write 'book' rather than 'story', because this is only a story the way a biblical text counting phenomena and death is telling a story.
+ If you read about modern Gnostic thought you will come to Eric Voegelin. Voegelin was a German-born scholar who fled the Nazis, became a US citizen, and taught at several universities including LSU, Notre Dame and was a member of the Hoover Institution,(a famous and long standing conservative think tank in the United States who has counted as some recent members Condoleeza Rice and the late Christopher Hitchens). Voegelin believed in radical Gnosticism as the underlying engine of 20th century totalitarianism; his gnosticism was a revision of that old earth is a copy of heaven -- because there is no kingdom waiting for you, gnostic belief tends toward creating heaven here.
wiki: Voegelin perceived similarities between ancient Gnosticism and modernist political theories, particularly communism and nazism. He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection from society and a belief that this lack is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects:
- The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis).
- The second is the desire to implement and or create a policy to actualize the speculation, or Immanentize the Eschaton, i.e., to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.
According to Voegelin the Gnostics are really rejecting the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God and replacing it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or practice.
'Since Gnostics did not accept the conventional Christian heaven and hell, Voegelin concluded that they must be engaged in a millenarian revolutionizing of earthly existence.'Sound familiar?
'This stands in contrast to a notion of redemption that is achieved through the reconciliation of mankind with the divine. Marxism therefore qualifies as "gnostic" because it purports that we can establish the perfect society on earth once capitalism has been overthrown by the "proletariat." Likewise, Nazism is seen as "gnostic" because it posits that we can achieve utopia by attaining racial purity, once the master race has freed itself of the racially' inferior and the degenerate.
Voegelin died in 1985, the year Blood Meridian was published.
A quote by Paul Valéry opens the book:
-- Your ideas are terrifying and your
hearts are faint. Your acts of pity
and cruelty are absurd, committed
with no calm, as if they were
irresistible. Finally, you fear
blood more and more. Blood and time.
Fitting. Another Valéry quote, while not on Meridian's frontispice, could be:
God made everything out of nothing.
But the nothingness shows through.
But what makes Blood Meridian, a novel that follows a group of death-dealing shepherds into the skirmishes of our Republic's expansion in 1850, (while dressed up as western genre writing), a Gnostic recalibration of the American west, rather than say, an agnostic meditation on violence and man's inhumanity? (taking a breath) While Voegelin discusses Gnosticism as philosophy, Blood Meridian is literature, and so there is a god of some sort; his name is Judge Holden, and his entrance into Meridian is to interrupt one Reverend Green, and said pastor's christian tent revival show:An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and he seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.
The reverend had stopped his sermon altogether. There was no sound in the tent. All watched the man. He adjusted the hat and then pushed his way forward as far as the crateboard pulpit where the reverend stood and there he turned to address the
reverend's congregation. His face was serene and strangely childlike. His hands were small. He held them out.
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has
usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years - I said eleven - who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God.
A moan swept through the crowd. A lady sank to her knees.
This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.
Let's hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistol from his boot he leveled it and fired.
The young teamster instantly produced a knife from his clothing and unseamed the tent and stepped outside into the rain. The kid followed. They ducked low and ran across the mud toward the hotel. Already gunfire was general within the tent and a dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud. The kid and his friend reached the hotel gallery and wiped the water from their eyes and turned to
watch. As they did so the tent began to sway and buckle and like a huge and wounded medusa it slowly settled to the ground trailing tattered canvas walls and ratty guyropes over the ground.
The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered.
On the polished wood before him were two hats and a double handful of coins. He raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and the kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and
nodded. These here is on the judge, he said.
They drank. The teamster set his glass down and looked at the kid or he seemed to, you couldnt be sure of his gaze. The kid looked down the bar to where the judge stood.
The bar was that tall not every man could even get his elbows up on it but it came just to the judge's waist and he stood with his hands placed flatwise on the wood, leaning slightly, as if about to give another address. By now men were piling through
the doorway, bleeding, covered in mud, cursing. They gathered about the judge. A posse was being drawn to pursue the preacher.
Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?
Goods? said the judge.
When was you in Fort Smith?
Fort Smith?
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?
You mean the Reverend Green?
Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.
I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.
They looked from one to the other.
Well where was it you run up on him?
I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him. He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone
bought the judge a drink.'
Judge Holden is most assuredly an agent, if not a god of war. Not the type who might grace a Marvel comic, or a heavy metal album, this god of war is a giant, hairless trickster who delights in the murder of women and children, in lighting men to like violence; who is a pederast, and a polymath. He is the most horrific character I have ever read, and one of the more brilliant; at times during Meridian the Judge disappears like Gandalf in The Hobbit, and the reader can surmise he likely is over the next rolling hill, squatting with the Apache, giving them advice on how to kill the coming regulators of Glanton's gang, (of which the kid is one member); in a book full of horrors, Judge Holden's are always the strangest, and most horrific; one can think of him as the literary equivalent of a gnostic Æsir; he has not come down off the tree of life, or from heaven, (or up from Hades), to trick or inform mortals; Texas, Mexico -- here is the plane of magic where he operates, this is his heaven, and he has always been here; and as how he deals with Reverend Green above, there is no place for the idea of morality in his realm.
Consider again Eric Voegelin:
According to Voegelin the Gnostics are really rejecting the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God and replacing it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or practice.
While the cast of regulators in Blood Meridian are demonic in much of their actions, these are mortals; they have mortal excuses for their actions: for the money, because hunting down Indian tribes are a necessary military action, because, because, because -- The Judge makes no such excuses, and the hardened monsters of Glanton's regulators find themselves having to look the other way when it comes to the Judge. Better for them.
For finally, at the end, a man who was once 'the kid', meets Judge Holden a final time, with the era in which they worked together with Glanton's gang far behind them, 'the kid' makes a stand finally against everything they did, everything the Judge is, and in this defiance the book ends with a scene of absolute terror of which no horror writer has come close; it is certainly the most mysterious violence in a book that never before it has played violence mysteriously. And in the end the Judge's veiled nature is revealed. One knows his dance of war will continue on into the coming new century, where men like Eric Voegelin will need escape their homes from a new kind of regulator.
4 comments:
This is such a great resource that you are providing and you give it away for free. I love seeing websites that understand the value of providing a quality resource for free. It?s the old what goes around comes around routine. Did you acquired lots of links and I see lots of trackbacks??
I have to say, while looking through hundreds of blogs daily, the theme of this blog is different (for all the proper reasons). If you do not mind me asking, what's the name of this theme or would it be a especially designed affair? It's significantly better compared to the themes I use for some of my blogs.
Fascinating, like most of the things you are writing at the moment. Thanks!
regarding the theme.. it's my own design from Blogger; it required very little code writing, and mostly came from trial and error -- pretty much just cleared the template and started over.
As for the writing, thank you for commenting on this post. I hope I can keep it up.
As for links: 99% of this blog is original content, obviously some essays have been linked to YouTube, and many of those videos are not ours. but other than posting one Shakespeare sonnet in the first month, (march 2011?), everything here is on here first.
Post a Comment