‘War is god.’ Blood Meridian and how the West was won
‘It makes no difference what men think of war, said the Judge. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade waiting its ultimate practitioner.’ — Judge Holden.
The American sociologist Charles Tilly once observed that ‘war makes the state and the state made war’. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian goes one step backwards and examines the space before war. Based on extensive research of events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, McCarthy weaves togethers episodes from the scalp trade, Indian raids, robbery operations, and wanton massacres by white and Indigenous alike. Although it takes place in a historical context, Blood Meridian is neither a political novel nor a direct commentary on American history. It reaches at something deeper, towards the very root of human nature.
The novel follows the life of ‘the kid’, an illiterate fourteen-year-old runway born with ‘a taste for mindless violence.’ Before the first chapter is out, he has already committed arson, fought one man, and mercilessly assaulted two others. Circumstance later brings him into contact with the real life ‘Glanton Gang’, a group of mercenaries contracted by the state of Chihuahua to track down and kill bands of Apache Indians terrorising Mexican and American populations. They are paid by the scalp. But as the Kid follows the gang further into atrocity and as they travel deeper into the hostile environment of the borderlands, their motivations shift from political to criminal. Soon they kill for scalps alone. Indian, Mexican, or American; a scalp is a scalp. Eventually they kill without any motivation whatsoever. They start to ride on ‘like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote in their communal soul.’ Glanton’s gang and the Kid are savage, but they are no more savage than the other military forces present in the novel. Violence is central to the story and to all the characters who inhabit it, whether they are perpetrators or victims. It is a bleak universe.
The only character who attempts to account for the bloodshed is its most egregious perpetrator: Judge Holden. The Judge is based on a real figure, described in the memoirs of one the gang’s members as a giant ‘6’6 in his moccasins, a large, fleshy frame, a dull tallow coloured faced, destitute of hair and all expression.’ In the novel, he has otherworldly and mythic qualities. He possesses tremendous physical power, capable of lifting howitzers and rocks with a strength no man can match. He can perform magic tricks and speak all the world’s languages. Like the devil himself he is adept on the fiddle, and he is a master of the arts and sciences. He does not age. Every man in the gang claims to have come across him earlier in their lives, and the gang discovers him under mysterious circumstances, as if he were waiting for them. As if to embody man’s animalistic essence, he frequently appears in the nude. And, at once, he is the gang’s articulate philosopher and its most vicious member. He is an Indian hater, a murderer, and a child rapist. Harold Bloom calls him ‘a theoretician of war everlasting’.
Holden’s theory of war is based upon the simple observation that war endures ‘because young men love it and old men love it in them…men are born for games. Nothing else.’ Games only have meaning because something is at stake, Holden observes.
‘This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.’
Questions of morality are absent. ‘Moral law’ according to the Judge, ‘is an invention of mankind of the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test.’ Victory does not morally vindicate the winner. It only grants him the right to enforce his will upon the weak. What is therefore really in tension in war is not the moral question at hand, but the conflicting wills of the soldiers involved.
‘A man fallen dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly to the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledges remains imperfect and however much he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court… Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all questions of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral spiritual, natural.’
It’s an intensely cynical take. The Judge’s relativism is an echo of Thrasymachus’ famous challenge in Plato’s The Republic — ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger’ — an ethical theory upon which virtually all of Western philosophy has been created to rebut.
War endures because it is a supreme test of wills. Since there will never be total consensus on ethical questions — consider the uncountable responses to Thrasymachus — man will always hold within himself the potential for conflict, for his will will always come against another’s.
Is this cynicism reasonable? The novel ends in 1878, when the frontier was ending and as the American state was fully imposing itself upon the West. The unrestrained warfare of Glanton’s gang and of Indians and Mexicans became subsumed into an American war that in turn consolidated the white state’s rule in the West. In the American mythos, it was the beginning of the end of history.
The brilliance of Blood Meridian is its decimation of this myth. ‘Do you believe it’s all over?’, the Judge asks the Kid, who by 1878 has become the Man. It is a rhetorical question, for the Judge knows struggle will continue, only in another form.
Let’s jump to today and observe pictures of MS-13, a savage gang that operates along the border, and consider McCarthy’s description of Glanton’s Gang:
‘They saw one day a pack of vicious looking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short two barreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses raw looking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of half naked savages sewing in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.’
Or think on the recent scandal in American immigration policy, whereupon children were taken from their families and housed in detention centres. So far there is no evidence of systematic sexual abuse, but the Judge’s proclivity for child rape is not unique. Just as Americans tortured and sexually abused prisoners at Abu Gharib, that potential exists on the border today. Anecdotal accounts are already in. And, although it is less discussed, the European states are all but considering similar measures with the establishment of so-called ‘migrant processing centres’ to be located and, essentially, run by warlords on the North African coast. These policies are no more moral than any action of MS-13. The human suffering that results is the same, for the victim of the gang and for the victim of state policy.
Blood Meridian ends with the Judge’s sickening and sexualised destruction of the Man. In its aftermath, Holden begins to dance, declaring that he never sleeps and that he will never die. The terrifying scene comes full circle with a quotation that opens the novel; an excerpt from The Yuma Daily Sun in 1982, which read:
Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia and UC Berkeley colleague of Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.
Blood Meridian’s relentless nihilism is exhausting. It is small comfort to know it is only a reflection of part of human nature.
So why carry on? McCarthy’s gives us an answer in two other, extremely bleak, books. In The Road, the Boy and the Man carry ‘the fire’ as a symbol of their basic decency in a desperate world. No Country for Old Men ends with the Sheriff describing a dream of his father using a torch to lead the way through a storm and prepare camp. In McCarthy’s violent world these are Sisyphean acts, pointless as they are heroic. At times, perhaps that’s all there is. Carry on, carry on.
[Note: This was written in 2018. I am publishing here on the day of McCarthy’s death.]
