Books That Matter: ‘Blood Meridian’
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Edward S. Curtis, “Canyon De Chelly”: 1904.[/caption]
The New York Times called it “[possibly] the bloodiest book since The Iliad.”
The same could be said for any of Cormac McCarthy’s books. Many of them have bloodied the silver screen: No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road.
For McCarthy, books that do not “deal with issues of life and death [are] not literature.” By this standard, his 1985 novel, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, is most assuredly literature.
Blood Meridian follows its protagonist — a nameless kid, born into violence — as he rides with the Glanton gang, a posse that lawlessly terrorized Native Americans in the late 1840s. We keep expecting to like the kid, but never really do.
The antagonist, Judge Holden, is cold, cruel, and archaic — almost biblical. He is a grotesque, hairless incarnation of Evil, and something worse than even the Glanton gang.
For him, “Men are born for games,” “War is the ultimate game,” and “War is god.” God is a game, and we kill each other to play him. The fact that he is a judge in this world is a testament to the book’s ruthless, warped vision of justice.
McCarthy delivers a violent Western, stripped of the John-Wayne-romance of its genre. Cowboys and Indians, looting stagecoaches, tins of beans warming over a fire — sure, those elements are there in the book, but they are not sentimentalized. Blood Meridian is about expanses of stars, piles of skulls, trunks attached to skinned heads, brutality, and nihilism.
John Wayne might kill for protection. The Glanton gang does it for the bounty, and eventually, for sport, for the sheer fun — the great distraction of killing.
McCarthy is interested in violence. But more crucially, he is interested in defining American violence — seeking to answer, “What is so very American about violence?”
We call McCarthy a fiction writer, yet we are all secretly convinced he is a poet, or maybe a painter. The surface beauty, the poetry of his style, in the face of such brutal content is the thing that makes his books so unnerving, so irresistible — the thing that gives McCarthy his genius.
German philosopher Walter Benjamin spoke of the world after the World Wars and the atomic bomb: “[Man’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” In other words, we have become so inured to violence that we have actually come to find an aesthetic beauty in it. There is poetry to the mushroom cloud, awe for its ability to destruct, and for man’s ability to use it. Instead of condemning violence, being ashamed of it, it becomes an aesthetic. We are saturated to the point that we begin to fetishize it.
That is the core of McCarthy’s work. Through his poeticisms — his archaic, biblical language — he holds us in awe of violence. “Riders were towing bodies out of the bloody waters of the lake and the froth that rode lightly on the beach was a pale pink in the rising light.” Violence is entangled in poetry. His poeticism trickles from the surface of his writing into his content, until violence is as poetic and beautiful as it is ubiquitous.
There is a stark hilarity in turning a McCarthy book into a movie. Senseless violence has no poetry to hide behind. Without McCarthy’s poetic prose, it is ultimately little more than violence on television.
McCarthy’s works are exercises, commentaries on how easy it is to make violence poetic — to turn something we should abhor into something we call beautiful. It is all a kind of nihilistic satire: a biblical Dr. Strangelove set in the Wild West.
To turn McCarthy’s works into movies is to not understand them at all.
That he has allowed cinematic adaptations of his books is, I think, his cynical laugh at us. The real horror is that people can enjoy his violent stories without needing his poetry. We do not need the beauty or the poetry. We just want the violence.
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