Book Ten: BLOOD MERIDIAN

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy, 1985.

TTR: This took me more or less a week, mostly because, as I have stated elsewhere, reading McCarthy is like watching a tragedy unfold and being unable to either walk away or intervene. I think at most I made it through 4-5 chapters at a time before I had to put it down.

Comments:

Blood Meridian is many things, but scarring may be the most accurate. It is like and yet so disturbingly unlike McCarthy's other work. My friend and fellow grad student has suggested that his work in this book is particularly grotesque--a mixture of the beautiful and the terrible. I think it's an astute assessment.

Blood Meridian is so saturated with meaningless, gory violence that I began to wonder if I would eventually become desensitized. I think, more accurately, I just became so overwhelmed with it all that I stopped being able to process it, stumbling through page after page in an attempt just to make sense of it all.

That said, I think that this book is full of interesting, insightful moments (maybe this is just the English Geek in me).

While reading this sorta/kinda historically rooted novel, one character in particularly both intrigued and repulsed me: Judge Holden. So, I think I'll share a portion of the paper I wrote about this insane, giant, hairless judge:

In the first third of Blood Meridian, the kid poses a question that is one of the text’s central mysteries: “What’s [the Judge] a judge of?” (135). Hinted answers are scattered throughout the text, and nearly all of them are cryptic and ambiguous; the Judge is either the devil or a god, he is either a blessing to the gang or a curse, he is himself unknowable (Peebles 234; McCarthy 131). The Judge’s first meeting with Glanton’s gang, which occurred before the kid joined and while the gang was being pursued group of Apaches who had them outnumbered and outgunned, is related by Tobin and serves to emphasize the Judge’s discomfiting lack or moral, physical, spatial, and temporal context:

Then about the meridian of that day we come upon the Judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. Aye and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he’d brung it with him. I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all. He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. (125)

The Judge appears to Glanton and his men completely without context; his origins are never given and his first meeting with the gang is marked by an ambiguous mysticism. Tobin suggests that the rock upon which the Judge sits, solitary, in the middle of the desert, is a “merestone,” which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be used literally to mean “boundary stone,” an object used to mark spatial distances or the boundaries between distinct places, or, figuratively to indicate something that serves as the marker of an era, a temporal signifier of what has been (“merestone, n.” def. a-b). The Judge sits upon the metaphorical confluence of time and place, rather than existing within either time or place. In fact, in the novel’s final chapters we learn that “whoever would seek out [the Judge’s] history…must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin” and will ultimately “discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing” (309-10). The Judge has no discernable beginning and claims, likewise, to have no end.