Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

The whole idea of "the great american novel" really kind of misses the point because we have taken the original meaning of it and twisted it. The "great american novel" should probably today be caleld "the quintessential american novel," because the word grat, in this context, refers to the novel that will encompass what we have been, why, how we got there, and where we were going. And because of the story, by definition, it cannot be "great." The story of America will be unremittingly (and unapologetically) brutal and bloody; it will lack all traces of logic and civilization on a grand scale (though, certainly, there will be logical or civilized characters); and throughout there will remain the slightest glimmer of hope, although depending on the viewpoint of the author, that hope may be snuffed out at the end of the novel or kept alive.

I have read the great american novel, and it is Cormac McCarthy's stunning Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian centers on a character known only as The Kid, who leaves home at fourteen to make his fortune during the expansion of the American West (the book begins ten years or so before the outbreak of the Civil War). The Kid is a mindlessly brutal sociopath; a serial killer before there was a name for such people, who knows nothing of the moral consequence of his actions, only that he feels, in some way, driven to perform them. Along his road, he falls in step with the lawless Captain Glanton and the darkly insane Judge Holden, and we are soon given to learn that the kid is actually a very small fish in the endless pond that is the American West in the 1850s.

McCarthy raises his tale of the American west so far above most of those told through the paradoxical style of writing he employs, at the same time sparely poetic and ugly in a grandiose fashion; were there elements of conventional horror to be found here, McCarthy's novel might possibly be considered splatterpunk (and comparisons with the hallmark of that genre, Robert Deveraux's brilliant Deadweight, are inevitable, and correct). McCarthy never shies away from the actions of his characters, never allows the reader any leeway, but the prose in which McCarthy describes the atrocities Glanton's band commits is so starkly beautiful the reader cannot help but be capitvated by the carnage. And during the lulls in the action, when members of the band philosophize, the philosophy is not so overbearing as it is instructive for those who may not be able to understand the mechanisms that work in the collective mind of Glanton's troops:

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The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.

The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He turned to Brown, from whom he'd heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah, Davy, he said. It's your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.

My trade?

Certainly.

What is my trade?

War. War is your trade. Is it not?

And it ain't yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselevs sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holdgin this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game andthe 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 least a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

Brown studied the judge. You're crazy Holden. Crazy at last.

* * *

Like James Jones' masterpiece The Thin Red Line, McCarthy gives us men at war, though McCarthy's troops answer to no one but themselves, and act as such, and he does it in such a way that we cannot help but understand what it is about violence and bloodshed that makes it so attractive to some. By far the best book I have come across this year. If all of mcCarthy's novels are this good, then truly, he is one of America's most neglected authors, as The Atlantic monthly would have us believe. *****

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(It's worth nothing, by the way, that while I'vehanded out a number of four-and-a-halfs this year, Blood Meridian is the first book in the year 2000 to receive a five star rating.)