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RIP, Cormac McCarthy, 6/13/23.

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) is considered by many to be Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece. Since he is in the upper echelon of all time greatest American authors, that suggests this book is one of the great works of American literature, and after having read it, I’ll agree. And no, I had never read it. I have read and taught The Road several times, and count that among the best novels I have ever read. I have read twice his All The Pretty Horses trilogy and love it, but I avoided this book for years because I heard it was even darker than the post-apocalyptic Road.

And it is. Blood Meridian is one of the bloodiest books I have ever read. And one of the best! It’s like a Howard Zinn (People’s History of the United States) revision of the version of “western expansion�� (Westward Ho!) I was/we were fed in American elementary schools, consistent with the view that Christopher Columbus “discovered�� (but really not) America. Anyone not white were savages, that was the idea. I mean “others�� are savages, not "us." Something like Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, where we learn who the real barbarians are. Not quite human creatures living off the land. Cowboys and Indians, and I, a white boy, growing up, was expected to side with the cowboys that had “conquered”or “tamed�� the wild, wild west.

But McCarthy knows that the way we were largely taught this part of American history is not the case, as he reminds us that Spaniards (ala Cortez) for over 300 years attempted to slaughter/colonize Mexico and the American West way before Columbus. I like it too that a Dutch person joins the Judge’s expedition West, as “my�� Dutch people have also been strong-arm colonial powers.

This is a “road�� book to match The Road, and calls to mind other road books like Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Noble journeys, bildungsroman, about spiritual growth attained as one grows and lives. The Odyssey. Many of them positive stories of heroic accomplishment and moral inspiration. And usually about the road west, in American literature. Even On the Road by Kerouac. And yet several are critiques of American culture, such as The Grapes of Wrath, where people move west for a better life from America’s heartland/dustbowl and end up starving and vilified as refugees in California. American Gods by Neal Gaiman and Swamp Thing by Alan Moore take us on road trips across America that reveal the slimy underbelly of American culture, a horror show.

And that’s the category/territory occupied by Blood Meridian, that tells the truth about colonialism in what was to become the USA, based in racism against Mexicans and Blacks and Native Americans. You want some historical precedents for the current/continuing white supremacist movement? Well, it was always there and has never left us, sad to say, and if you doubt this, read this book, wherein you see that a group of rag tag violent white men head west to massacre people of color and anyone else in their way. Manifest destiny. It's ours. Westward ho, indeed, massacre after massacre to the very ocean. This book is about primarily male violence, warring to win, to gain territory, for power, for ownership. And we see it from the first, early on in the book, a kind of primal prehistoric barbarism.

“Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.��

“They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote."

“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.��

There are many terrific characters in this book, including The Kid and The Judge, who is a madman on par with the raging patriarchal King Lear (complete with his “idiot�� [possibly autistic] or Fool), increasingly mad in his linen suit and cigar. The most educated and the most amoral killer, he’s large, bald, reminding me at times of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, and it is probably intentional, as Brando plays another white colonialist madman. He spouts semi-philosophical things throughout:

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.��
“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.��
“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?��

The Judge is an analogue for McCarthy to Milton’s Satan, the most interesting character in the book and a key to our demise.

There are almost no (named) women in this book, no love, no sex--no sexual violence, either, except alluded to, which is an historical inaccuracy, since surely women were victims of violence on this road west, but honestly, it’s a relief not to have to read about it as there is already so much violence.

This is a book written, as was Grapes of Wrath and Cry, The Beloved County, with the Bible wide open as the author wrote. It has roots all the way back to The Odyssey, and Shakespeare, magesterial prose, and it draws on the language of the nineteenth-century history and literature he researched so well. This is historical fiction, with a touch of madness stirred into the mix that probably was historically in there all the time.

I skimmed Paul Bryant’s review, since he hated the book, calling attention to all the similes, and he’s right, as opposed to All the Pretty Horses or The Road, which are (comparatively) stripped down, Hemingway-esque. Blood Meridian highlights this kind of phrase: “Like some fabled. . . �� throughout, and I think it echoes a kind of moral sense-making one finds in Shakespeare and through literary history. This book takes place in the mid-nineteenth century but it makes clear that men have always been violent, in love with war and murder. Violence and cruelty and the seeking of wealth and power is what men do.

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.��

I do think this book is a kind of masterpiece, a five-star book without question, though it is not easy to read, for sure. It is a precursor to the apocalyptic The Road, a vision of Man/man in all his potential horror, man at his worst. And it reminds me of Garth Ennis’s post-apocalyptic comics series Crossed, which before this book was the most brutal thing I had ever read.

There’s really not much plot or variation, but nevertheless, the characters are unforgettable and the writing is truly amazing. Here's just one random snippet:

“He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.��