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Summary: I really, really wanted to finish this book ...
... but I couldn't.
As a lover of literature, I consider myself a pretty patient -- even stubborn -- reader. I don't give up easily on books, even when I have decided it's not the book I thought it was, or even if I've determined the writing isn't very good or the plot uninteresting. I've slogged through 700- and 900-page novels before out of sheer determination, even if halfway through I knew it probably wouldn't be worth it, and never once skipped to the end to get the "payoff". I have a great deal of respect for the journey the author wants us to take, and choose to trust the author for the one or two or even twelve hours I am spending with their creation.
I say all that to say that Blood Meridian, not even 400 pages, beat me. There's a lot that's good about it: McCarthy has a unique and very compelling style (something that's all too rare in today's literature) and his imagery is stark and memorable: I still remember the incredibly written scene where the Indian tribe roars into view, shouting terrible war cries and decorated with war paint and bones and in all other ways appearing so ferocious they strike fear into the heart of their supposed conquerors.
And yet after about 20 or 30 pages in, it became a chore to get through each page. I had to make myself read a few pages at a time and then let myself have a break. Finally, I gave up at about the 100-page mark, trying several times to make myself pick it back up, and failing.
I don't know if it was the run-on style of writing that forced me to pay close attention to every word: it meant that I could never catch the novel's rhythm and escape into the world the author had created. (Imagine trying to enjoy a song that stops and starts every 10 seconds, and you'll get some of what I mean.)
It might have been the relentless violence: I'm not squeamish, but there was no relief, no redemption, barely a pause. If the characters went to a town, I knew better than to hope there'd be a moment of peace or even a moment of reflection -- on their part on on the part of the reader -- but more likely they'd start a fight and slaughter the townspeople instead. I began to dread each page.
It might have been the fact that there was not one character to root for in the novel. I'm not saying novels have to contain at least one "positive" or "good" character -- it's one of the skills of a great writer to make a character sympathetic even if the reader neither likes nor agrees with that character. But I couldn't feel any of that for a single character -- all I felt was revulsion.
But I think it was actually the combination of all of those things that finally beat me -- I realized that, if I kept reading, I was in for more than 250 pages more of relentless violence and horror; I realized there'd be no character who changed or transformed, and that nobody I could identify with was going to come onto the scene. So I began to ask myself what was the tradeoff for suffering through so much more of it.
From what I could glean of the book's message, it was this: the border at that time was a dehumanizing, monstrous place that produced soulless, amoral humans capable of unthinkable destruction. And I could see that McCarthy was portraying all "sides" -- the Indians, the Mexicans, and the Americans-- as equally guilty. For the first part of the message, I don't know why it would be necessary to take hundreds of pages to simply repeat, over and over and over, the events and horror that McCarthy wants to use to make such a point. A well-written 40-page short story would have done just fine. And as for the second part -- that all the parties were the same -- I just can't agree. Were the Apaches, who were resisting the theft of their land by both the U.S. (and before that, by Mexico), on an equal par with those stealing their land? All sides committed bloody, vicious acts, but to portray things as if they were all equally wrong is to be untruthful. And I don't remember who I'm quoting with this, but: "Fiction tells lies to tell the truth." Everyone knows that fiction is not "true" in one sense: they know the characters and events didn't actually exist, they know there's no Captain Ahab or Iago or Kid in real life. But fiction is, ultimately, saying something about the world, through all the elements of its story, and I feel that nobody should use the power of their pen to tell what in actuality amounts to lies -- not the "lies" of the fiction they create, but an actual lie that comes through in what they are ultimately saying about their subject or the world at large. Would anyone want to read, for example, a novel that argued that the horrific rubber trade in the Congo (where the colonists chopped off the hands of those that didn't bring in enough rubber) was good for the native peoples? Or a novel that ultimately argued that there is no global warming, no environmental problem, and that actually the earth is doing just fine and dandy?
I admire the author's style, and even further admire his setting out to depict the border and the wars of conquest in a way that does not romanticize or even identify with the conquerors, as so much fiction set at that time and place do. And furthermore, I can appreciate that so much of what made the book hard to read -- the run-on style, the spare brutality of its prose, the amoral and vicious characters, the endless violence and sense of dirt and filth that the reader can almost taste -- are part of the world the author is depicting. But I just couldn't see putting myself through so many more pages of one of the more horrifying books I'd ever read, for a message I had already grasped 30 pages into it. Maybe there was more I would have gotten out of it if I'd stuck with it -- and maybe one of these days I'll make myself try again.
Hopefully my own story will help you decide for yourself if this book is worth it -- but know what you're getting into.
Summary: McCarthy as Political Philosopher
McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" is deeply conservative in the same sense that Plato and Nietzsche were conservative, which is not the vulgar conservatism associated with party politics but rather a metaphysical conservatism which denies the ontological ideas progressive humanism must presuppose, wittingly or unwittingly. Many who interpret McCarthy metaphysically link him to Gnosticism. I think this is only partly correct. There is a great deal of his work that wants to harmonize opposites--especially good and evil in the Western, Zoroastrian sense--in the manner of Eastern thought, particularly Advaita Vedanta. In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman (ultimate reality) is both good and evil in its physical manifestation (veiled by maya [metaphysical ignorance], the cave of political existence in Plato's cave allegory), but in the pure sense (Nirguna Brahman [without attributes]) is beyond good and evil. But this is obviously in the realm of death only. One attains moksa (release, nirvana) through jnana (related to the Greek gnosis or pure noetic apprehension). But such a level of intellection is available only to a few, and as is stated in the "Bhagavadgita," those lacking the capacity for such levels of intellection must act in accordance with their dharma or duty, which for the warrior means to make war.
This is all very hostile to Western modernity and postmodern aestheticism--postmodernism being merely the continuation of the emancipatory project of modernity (the anthropological leveling force of the Enlightenment) by other means. As with the Ancients and the great Eastern religions, McCarthy is arguing that the "freedom" or "rights" or "liberation" sought by contemporary Jacobins is the mask of the base desires in man to master and conquer nature and those around them in the vain attempt to achieve earthly autonomy (judge Holden the archon) sans gnosis or jñana. Desire for autonomy or mastery is the root of all suffering in man as taught by the Buddha, the enlightened one (Marlow, sitting cross legged with one palm up and the other hand down, in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"). McCarthy's intention is to link this desire for liberty and mastery to the whole of modern Western civilization (let us say from 1600 on), not simply the overtly imperialist desires of nineteenth century Westerners. This is the desire to master and conquer nature and savagery "for the relief of man's estate" announced by Francis Bacon in his 1607 treatise "The Advancement of Learning." It is this drive to master all in the name of humanity and progress that is satirized by McCarthy. I say "satirized" because I think the novel is satirical. Socrates and Shakespeare taught that to the feeling person the world is a tragedy whereas to the thinking person it is a comedy. In the Platonic dialogues Socrates never weeps, but he does laugh in the "Phaedo" (the dialogue in which he dies) while attempting to calm the worries of the young men around him and help them to drive away the fear of the boogey man known as death. "And Cebes with a laugh, said, 'Try to persuade us as if we were afraid. Or rather, not as if we were afraid--perhaps even in us there is some child present who is terrified of such things. So let us try to persuade him not to fear death as if it were some hobgoblin.' 'What you should do,' said Socrates 'is to sing him incantations each day until you sing away his fears'" (Phaedo 77e).
Those modern thinkers who seek to assert the rights of humanity, or seek to combat the mastery of nature in one or all forms, typically show themselves members of the progressive "party of humanity" by proposing societies that are founded in universal human rights (i.e., "for the relief of man's estate"); or in the progress toward just social forms; or in some redemption of humanity from the nihilisms of the age. Since all attempts to save humanity from the mastery impulse of Western imperialism are themselves humanitarian, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they remain within the master/slave dialectic. McCarthy is arguing that this progressive and humanitarian desire to improve mankind results in more inhumanity than the "uncivilized" condition that pre-existed progress itself. Of course this is very Nietzschean and partly Rousseauian (cf. the First and Second Discourses).
But McCarthy does not leave matters at that, as if all is despair. Knowledge is the indeed the soteric force (as it is Buddhism, Advaita, and Platonism), but, contra the hopes and dreams of Western modernity, it is not available to many because it cannot be exchanged or communicated by means of propositional statements. Notice that the judge does not want the night to end. This is why the judge says: "The mystery is that there is no mystery" (BM 252); he does not want man to look for the light, the fire. This is also dramatically presented by McCarthy with the image of the coldforger who seeks favor with the judge.
"In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed to be an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie [i.e., the judge] current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end." (BM 310)
Now the moneyer is necessarily "false" because he tries to reduce reality to an equivalency mechanism. The judge can always stand in judgment over this economist and pronounce his attempts to forge a likeness of the truth as false because the judge himself is god or the ultimate reality which is not a thing but is death and cannot be exchanged because he is the arche from which all other things derive their meaning. Differently stated, the moneyer remains in darkness because he tries to exchange an unreal symbol (money as the equivalency mechanism to pacify the judge) for the real by thinking he can play games with money and thereby avoid facing the reality of death. This is the essence of Western modernity: comfortable self-preservation of econonomically driven existence has obscured the true nature of the human condition. In the "Epilogue" McCarthy situates the opposing force to the judge's neverending night and darkness: the kindler of the fire (light and spirit) from the rock which God has put in the earth.
This brings us to the existence of human nature--knowledge of which is the soteric force itself; that soteric force being Socratic knowledge of ignorance--denied by the moderns and postmoderns but affirmed by McCarthy. The supranatural savagery and violence of "Blood Meridian" satirizes the modern rejection of natural limits and restraint; for the rejection of natural limits is made by the post-Kantians in the name of freedom. But for McCarthy man does have a nature. Man's nature is to be the thinking or knowing (Gnostic) animal. Thus natural limits are not in nature considered in exclusion of humanity (the man vs. nature split of the modern West), but rather in thought as the highest within the hierarchy of nature. Human reflection on nature yields the natural limitations of humanity--the previously mentioned salvific effects of Socrates' knowledge of ignorance. Nor is it a question of man being alienated but rather of being divided or incomplete in his nature. It is not society that corrupts man (evinced by the fact that these men operate outside the bounds of normal political existience) but man's nature that is incomplete (cf. Nietzsche, BGE), leading to a corrupt society. Animals in their nature are complete; man is not. This is obvious because man is the only animal capable of judging and changing his nature through techne or art, conspicuously mentioned on numerous occasions in "Blood Meridian." Nature provides man with defects and the cognitive capacity to perceive them. What is perceived is the destructive and tyrannical aspect of desire. But desire (eros) can be sated only with death, not freedom or mastery. Thus the highest achievement of man is to purify eros through gnosis (noetic apprehension of the eternal, i.e. death [cf. Plato's Phaedo 64a]) by means of an erotic ascent (ascesis) in combination with sophrosune (temperance, [cf. Nietzsche, OGM, third essay]).
Summary: densely written with disturbing visions
This is a novel which cannot be read fast.The vocabulary is often arcane,requiring frquent trips to the dictionary-I always thought my vocabulary was pretty good until I read this book-it also helps to be fluent in Spanish,as i am.That said,the effort is worth it-I can only compare this novel to some of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or the engravings of Albrecht Durer for the images evoked.It makes "The Wild Bunch" look like Dr.Seuss.I realize that all these comparisons are to visual media and that is no coincidence because the novel is a very descriptive narrative-it's an examination of evil unleashed when humans operate outside any framework of laws.the Judge is a figure very hard to describe-he may be allegorical,but representing what?I'm not sure,but he is an unforgettable literary presence.This is definitely not a book for everyone,but I think it is excellent for anyone willing to get through it.
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