Bloodletting Brilliance

Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is a vicious, violent, relentless literary bloodletting masterpiece of American fiction—an apocalyptic prose poem.

It’s as well written as anything I’ve ever read—the writing itself, better than even McCarthy’s other peerless works, is a dark, devastating delirium of alchemic anarchy.

The novel chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

As a novelist, as a student of literature, even when I’m reading for “entertainment,” I’m not. This is especially true of a writer like McCarthy. I can’t fathom anyone purporting to have literary aspirations or claiming to be a student of American literary fiction, not studying this great American novelist.

In recent years, thanks to film adaptations and Oprah, McCarthy’s audience and influence has increased. With “No Country for Old Men” and, especially, “The Road” he has moved more into the mainstream, and while these are more accessible, more contemporary, “Blood Meridian” is the masterwork, that which will surely endure even if no other work does.

I was first introduced to Cormac McCarthy by literary critic, Harold Bloom, whose books have taught me so much over the years.

Here is a bit of his introduction to “Blood Meridian.”

“‘Blood Meridian’ seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant even in 2010 than it was twenty-five years ago. The fulfilled renown of “Moby-Dick” and of “As I Lay Dying” is augmented by “Blood Meridian,” since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as “Blood Meridian,” much as I appreciate Don DeLillo’s “Underworld;” Philip Roth’s “Zuckerman Bound,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” and “American Pastoral;” and Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Mason & Dixon.” McCarthy himself, in his Border Trilogy, commencing with the superb “All the Pretty Horses,” has not matched “Blood Meridian,” but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.”

But the relentless brutality of “Blood Meridian” can’t be denied. It’s not an easy book to read. Listen to Bloom’s confession.

“My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through “Blood Meridian” failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. The violence begins on the novel’s second page, when the fifteen-year-old Kid is shot in the back and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the end, thirty years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in all of American literature. So appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of “Blood Meridian” that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Kosovo in 1999.

“Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because “Blood Meridian” is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and convert goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.

When I teach the book, many of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends continue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined violence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust. But I cannot turn away from “Blood Meridian,” now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the Mexico–Texas borderlands in 1849–50, which is where and when most of the novel is set. I suppose one could call “Blood Meridian” a “historical novel,” since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous paramilitary force sent out both by Mexican and Texan authorities to murder and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else, well into the third millennium. Judge Holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come.

“Even as you learn to endure the slaughter McCarthy describes, you become accustomed to the book’s high style, again as overtly Shakespearean as it is Faulknerian. There are passages of Melvillean-Faulknerian baroque richness and intensity in “The Crying of Lot 49,” and elsewhere in Pynchon, but we can never be sure that they are not parodistic. The prose of “Blood Meridian” soars, yet with its own economy, and its dialogue is always persuasive.”

I agree with Bloom. As interesting, fascinating, engaging as its characters are, as much as their journey is epic and suspenseful, it is the language of “Blood Meridian” that elevates it to the lofty position of art, of enduring, timeless, literature. Mastery of language like this happens so seldom, a work like this is published so infrequently, all of us who hold story sacred, who claim to care about culture, about art and literature, should buy it, read it, study it, reread it, repeat.

Like Bloom, I esteem Roth, Delillo, Auster and others, but, for me, no writer since Shakespeare has so tapped at and tested the limits of language as Cormac McCarthy. Of all the heady and humbling things said about my last novel, “Double Exposure,” nothing meant as much as when reviewers and readers compared it to McCarthy’s work.

“Blood Meridian” is just what the title says—the highest point or stage of development—and not just for Cormac McCarthy, but for literature. It’s a midday zenith of world literature, a peek, a meridional masterpiece written in blood.


A Few Notes:

Thanks so much to all of you have sent such warm and generous congratulations on “Double Exposure” winning a Florida Book Award. I’m truly grateful for both the award and for your kind support.

I’m very happy that “Hurt Locker” took best picture and Kathryn Bigelow won best director at the Oscars. Well deserved! It gives me hope. In the end, I think “Avatar” is little more than an amazing technical achievement and stunning visuals.

Walking into the theater to see a movie recently, I had to pass the two enormous gray garbage cans filled with the trash from the previous audience and it made me sick. We’ve got to do better—not only with what we put in our bodies, but with all the waste, all the garbage we’re creating. Throwing something away doesn’t make it really go away—whether it’s plastic bags or deadly chemicals (and nearly all chemicals ultimately are). I challenge you as I am challenging myself. Consume less, waste less, discard less, reuse more.