The Writing of Blood Meridian

I don’t know how to process McCarthy’s writing (and I say that as someone who has read many of his books). The writing in Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West comes so quickly at you, and you have to either put the book down and just think HARD about it (which I have been doing periodically), or just keep going, letting it wash over you, through you, or, also – go back and re-read sentences, twice, three times, questioning: “Okay, is that as profound as it first seems?”

Yes. It IS that profound.

The book is almost disorienting to read. I get lost, unsure of which way is up, unsure of the road “back” to myself. The prose reflects the disorienting nature of the landscape, the endlessness of the plain, the lack of verticals altogether, the flatness, the sameness of it all, the shimmering mirages. How does a man know who he is without context, without surroundings? We know who we are by association. That’s one of the reasons why, for me, the images in 2001 Space Odyssey, or an astronaut unmoored from the ship, floating off into the void, are so nightmarish. Nothing to hold onto, nothing, ever, there is no ground, there is no air. You are still alive, of course, but who are you, with no surrounding context? No grips? No hooks? The men in Blood Meridian are in a similar situation. The brutality of the landscape is relentless. One mess-up and you will die. Not to mention the genocidal mission they’re all on. The judge is emerging. I can’t talk about him yet.

The expriest turned and looked at the kid. And that was the judge the first ever I saw him. Aye. He’s a thing to study.

The kid looked at Tobin. What’s he a judge of? he said.

What’s he a judge of?

What’s he a judge of.

Tobin glanced off across the fire. Ah lad, he said. Hush now. The man will hear ye. He’s ears like a fox.

What’s he a judge of?

Who knew that such a simple sentence could send such a chill of ice down my spine. A warning.

Speaking of John Banville, he reviewed the book for The Independent and is quoted on the back cover: “The book reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick … an extraordinary breathtaking achievement.” I think that’s right. I find it hard to talk in any rational way about Moby Dick (although I gave it my best shot here): the book is so ITSELF, so singular, so relentless in its self that it is hard to even “get in there” with the book, and try to pick it apart to look at its mechanisms. Blood Meridian has that almost forbidding quality. Pick it apart at your peril.

Here are some excerpts that show what I mean:

Page 65

They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking their own forms.

Page 75:

All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men’s minds.

Page 86:

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

Page 88:

They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dread pilgrims clanking north.

“the throat of the mountains”??? Can’t you just SEE that? It is perfection. A bafflingly perfect image.

Page 96:

Someone snatched the old woman’s blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny.

Page 105:

The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.

“crumpled butcherpaper mountains”. Wow.

Page 106:

Here beyond men’s judgements all covenants were brittle.

There is this spectacular bit of imagery that I couldn’t believe AS I was reading it:

By the time the animals were secured and they had thrown themselves on the ground under the creosote bushes with their weapons readied the riders were beginning to appear far out on the lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat. They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

Page 119:

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

That writing is UNREAL.