Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian, Blood Meridian,

What can I say about you? 

Ugh. 

That's my first thought, and probably will be every time I think of Blood Meridian forever.

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, is on it's most basic level a Western by Cormac McCarthy. However, like many things by the author it is actually a deeper tale of darkness and pain. McCarthy's works tend to center on darkness, despair, and death. And as McCarthy's self-described magnum opus, Blood Meridian is full of all three. 

Blood Meridian can be clearly divided into three distinct sections: the first is the introduction to the kid, our point of view in a world filled with violence and death This begins with the death of his mother while bearing him and abuse from his father. He leaves home, traveling West and displaying a penchant for solving problems with violence. He eventually joins up with the Glanton Gang as a way to escape imprisonment. This commences the second main section of the book, wherein the kid travels through the Southwest with the gang as they scalp, rape, pillage, and murder for both fun and profit. Eventually the gang receives Karmic justice for their misdeeds and is massacred leaving few survivors straggling across the wilderness. This leads to the final act of the book, in which the kid is pursued by the Judge to an end that is up to interpretation. Every act of the book is punctuated by violence in the most accurate use of the term, violating another being's existence.

The key theme of the novel is the violence and death inherent in human existence. Someone is murdered on nearly every page (probably every page; I mean, I could pick up the book, open to a random page, and almost certainly find a murder). Violence is shown as the ultimate solution, because death is the only ultimate fate. Even acts of kindness by characters usually end in some form of death and violence. Violence begets violence, which is the only true reality. Now, it is worth noting that the solution of violence is not shown to be the right solution, only that it is the solution; the morality of violence is irrelevant because it is inevitable. Violence is the telos of all things.

The inevitability of violence is embodied in the character of the Judge, whom the kid first encounters as the Judge incites a revival service crowd to lynch the itinerant preacher. To paraphrase Ron Burgundy, That escalated quickly. The Judge seems to thrive on chaos, pain, and death. He seems to be a man without a conscience or soul, inhumanly strong and healthy, and at his root seeks to dominate all things. "That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." He declares that he will never die, and the kid is never able to kill him. 

The fact is that the Judge is the ultimate embodiment of violence (I want to point out that I did not say 'evil'). Now some may argue that is reading into the text, but McCarthy has chosen to make the Judge's nature and history vague and ethereal enough that it is fair. So whether he is the Devil, Ares, or the embodiment of Nature's Bloodlust, the Judge is the mouthpiece for the philosophy displayed by the books narrative. He declares that "War (being the ultimately allowed violence) is the ultimate form of existence" because it forces man's will against man, and shows who is greater. And then the cycle will continue again. In Blood Meridian, man has no hope, only the continual cycle of war: to fight-kill-be killed.

This is no where more evident than the book's ending. The Kid, now the Man, kills someone for bothering him, tries to help an old woman who has actually died long ago, encounters and refutes the Judge one last time in a saloon, fucks a prostitute, and is finally embraced by a nude Judge in the saloon's outhouse. And by embraced we mean... well, we don't know. Because the only thing we know about what happened in the outhouse is that those who looked in the door afterwards muttered "Oh god" and left. The story proper ends with the Judge dancing nude atop the bar, declaring that he cannot die, will never die. The Man is not mentioned again.

What happened to the Man? We can be certain that it was awful. Was he raped to death by the Judge? Possible, although we know from earlier in the book that the Judge's tastes veer... younger.  I think it is most likely that the Man, raped or not, was killed by the Judge. The Man refuted the Judges philosophy that violence is the true end of all creation, and for that he had to die. Because the end of all things is death.

Now, the interpretation that I most enjoy leans toward the spiritual side. If the Judge is the embodiment of violence, the Man wants to avoid and refute his bloodlust. However, the Man knows that no matter what else mankind does, everything ends in death just as his earlier attempt to help the abuelita only showed her to be dead all along. So, after having intercourse with a woman, the very act designed to create life, he goes outside and is embraced by pure violence. What the men saw upon opening the outhouse was the mans body, but he has ended his own life, the only rational act upon the realization that the end of all things is death. And that is why the Judge dances triumphantly upon the bar, and why he will never die. For as long as life exists, and as long as new life is made, violence and death will take it all.

And there's the point of Blood Meridian.

McCarthy here shows what is the logical end of a naturalistic worldview. Just like Rust Cohle in True Detective, he declares that death is the best outcome for man because it is the only outcome for man. 

And I have no problem with this. 

Look around you. 

If all that we are is this matter, and all that we are and have done will die, why bother living?

McCarthy here has, probably unintentionally, highlighted the need for hope. We must have hope to have a reason to live.

Now, my hope is in Christ, what's yours in?

Should you read Blood Meridian? Probably not. Not because it is violent or espouses a worldview I disagree with. If you know me, you know I have no problem with either of those things. No, you shouldn't read it because it's boring and hard to read (and the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite books). McCarthy uses metaphor in the extreme in this book, to the point where I sometimes forgot what he was trying to describe in the first place. Some people might think that's beautiful and creative, I think it's masturbatory (which, oddly enough, is also how I feel about most creative endeavors). Also, somehow his editors allowed him to ignore roughly seventy-five percent of grammar and punctuation rules for this book which has the effect of it reading like a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence (like this sentence, but imagine a book of them). 

If you want a good look at how violent and selfish man can be in the struggle that is existence, watch HEAT, True Detective or No Country for Old Men, or play The Last of Us. If you want to flagellate yourself for enjoying reading too much, read Blood Meridian.