Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Why I Picked It Up

Thanks for reading Words Like Silver! Subscribe for free to support my work.

Subscribe Now

placeholder

Many of my guy friends love Blood Meridian. In terms of McCarthy's work, it's perhaps his most iconic: scalping, Western ruthlessness, a certain purity of survivalism. I do informally call it "catnip for men."

Having read The Road and All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian has always been next on the list; that being said, I've always heard it's incredibly violent (which it was), and my stomach tends to turn at excessive gore. Is it my preference? No. Can I handle and appreciate it? Yes.

So it took a few times, picking up and putting it down, to be in the right headspace to appreciate so much of its glory.

What It's About

In Blood Meridian, the kid (the narrator) joins a band of scalpers wandering through Mexico and the American South, hunting Apache Indians for reward. It doesn't have the same arc in the sense that All the Pretty Horses does, but its restless wandering says just as much as the other book: speaking to this nihilism.

What It's (Actually) About

Many praise Cormac McCarthy's novel for being an unflinching look at the realities of a dog-eat-dog world, especially for this time period. There's no moral judgement, because no man can submit to a higher power in order to overlay one upon their actions. They just have to survive. And then the deeper purpose of the book is this weighing of scope, and what makes freedom vs. damnation.

The landscape is stark and unforgiving, channeling into how awe isn't only beauty but also terror. I'm a little freak about word frequency and atmosphere, which I'll talk about below, but I'm very fond of both Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville for this romanticism they each wield. Just because it's directed towards the rugged, masculine, and violent doesn't make it any less romantic.

The book itself is violent and gruesome. I knew it would be, but was actually starving while I finished it because I couldn't make myself breakfast (or eventually lunch) yesterday until I closed the book. I can handle gore, but it still nauseates me.

I have so many thoughts on Blood Meridian that they scatter in every direction without cohesion, but I'm going to do my best to bundle them in semi-coherent ways.

First, I thought Blood Meridian was fundamentally a question of who gets to leave their mark. There was this awful, gorgeous, striking sentiment relayed about, how as soon as a man peaks, he has nowhere to go.

It's the flip side of the hero's journey, in a way. Because to accept the contrast of what comes after this relentless pursuit (requiring violence) would be to submit to the terror of one's own moral judgement.

You can't slow, and you can't look too closely, because you might actually be uneasy about the result. So the only option is to buckle down, embrace the philosophy of every man out for himself, and to never look back. But the cost of that is to always be on the run.

“[A man] can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.”

On the surface, McCarthy idolizes this chase for something—the purity of man, the honesty of violence and base darkness. The judge lauds war and existential erosion as inevitable: something to embrace. But then other aspects of the book make it clear—perhaps subconsciously—that choosing this mode is also a damnation (emphasized by the biblical language.)

Because you want and want and want, and then what do you have? Simplifying reality into its base, most violent elements of survival is almost soothing because living that way doesn't require an after. There is no after, at least not one that forges you. Raw is romantic, and that does lead to a purity of existence.

The book as a whole asks: do you believe in redemption? And if you don't, is the only answer to keep going? That restlessness and hunger is also present in All the Pretty Horses. (I love that book.) But in Blood Meridian, the reasoning is different (or at least tinged in ironic contrast), although McCarthy ultimately leads you to the same outcome.

All the Pretty Horses romanticizes chosen solitude, dredging the past, personal transformation. It still embraces this purity of the self, but feels more plot-driven rather than disintegrated. It has that same beating heart of beauty/terror/starkness/vastness combined with personal responsibility present in all of McCarthy's work, again by weighing necessity vs. ideal.

What capacity for judgment or feeling should people even aim to hold onto in circumstances that only prioritize what you do and who makes it out alive? Capacity is just as much of a decision, one that weighs heavily on each man's ability to go on.

It's not so much about solipsism so much as the necessity of some internal framework each man needs to determine their individual fate. (Neurologically—that aligns with McCarthy's curiosity about how we make patterns and narratives. Confirmation bias, attentional filter, etc,.)

Each person has to come up with their individual guiding system of judgment for themselves, considering the proportions of what they will tolerate or pursue—which will then impact what they see, feel, think going forward. That's the "forging" of man.

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”

“The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

For the judge, this is the foundation of his arguments with others. Yes, one perspective is limited, but it's chosen, which is key. You will choose, or the world will choose for you. It doesn't matter to him that there is more, uncontrollable, beyond him.

But that purity of existence is also the fundamental curse of the characters in Blood Meridian. McCarthy asks if it's better to contain yourself to yourself— surrendering to knowing there are worlds beyond yours that you're deeming untouchable—but seems to highlight the bleak irony in that also being another form of surrender. Because you could also choose to surrender yourself to belief in a greater unity, one beyond the clash of individual wills. It's not the choices themselves that matter, but your choice in what scope of choice you actually have.

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

The judge has made his peace with that tension. Others might view it as another type of cage. What expands or damns you?

Although McCarthy has this overt commentary on this re: the judge and the kid and what all they do that points to self-reliance as the only answer, there are moments of McCarthy pointing out (or shaping) the irony around it too. No right answer, only scope. What is freedom or containment?

Anonymity vs. erasure

“Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated.”

“I think you mean to make your mark in this world. Am I wrong?”

I think where this paradox strikes me most powerfully is that the kid remains nameless the entire time. The cruelty of this story is that—to make it through the forging of the world, the kid has to relinquish anything beyond himself and what he can do, but he becomes anonymous in that very act.

The world tunnel-visions down into his ability to kill, act, run, look out for himself. But because of that, he's never able to stop fighting without combusting under the weight of sudden, inflicted judgment — either of himself or from others. (Necessity and morality are not mutually exclusive.)

So is he universal, specific, or erased? Who gets to be remembered?

In Blood Meridian, McCarthy seems to argue that this particular form of self-reliance and redemption (or "making one's mark") cannot possibly co-exist.

Because in his book, the inability to submit to a greater unity or universe beyond the self means there's no contrast, no mirror, no ending, and no satisfaction. The impossibility of an "after" means it's impossible to eventually still; instead, man is damned to eternally wander, claws out.

Shadow and light

In both my visual art and my literature, I have this fascination with shadows and light. And again, I'm a total freak about tone words and word frequency (which I will get into when talking about book revisions another time.) I made a lot of connections between the vocab McCarthy used (and flashed back to AP Lit in the process, and my brief foray into being an English major.) Still, I'm not sure there's a way to read this book without also unconsciously studying it.

“The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand.”

shadows / stain / figure / pale / dust / shimmering / mirage / accruing light / shapes

The symbolism of shadow and light had me fascinated. Sometimes, McCarthy's prose emphasized clarity and honesty—like this view of man was everything raw, barren, in full light. Exposed. Take it or leave it; this is how you mark the world: through movement, action, violence, unapologetic.

But then I read the undercurrent—the shadow of what he was saying—through the words he used, which evoked residue and anonymity within the landscape and the vastness, leaning into the damnation of this particular hunger. Like this is the curse that followed them anyway: that the only way forward is to keep slashing without surrender to anything beyond immediate control, and the cost of doing so is that you can't stop running. You leave nothing, even of yourself, behind. Because there is no contrast now.

Language-wise, he bundles it all. Sun goes with thought goes with violence and purity—but also anonymity. But the shadows or night go with the heart and stopping and the remembering. When they're running, it all works; it's only when they slow that they realize they've chosen something else they didn't want too.

“The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.”

“...and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.”

This is why I say it might be the antithesis of the hero's journey, or this concept of earned beauty and return. Because if you can't return, if you can't ever stop, then everything you do individually ceases to have meaning entirely. There's a reason exile is a punishment, why mythological figures are cursed to wander the plains.

The addition of purpose—or redemption—changes the entire meaning (which McCarthy likely contrasts between this and All the Pretty Horses because of his fascination with patterns and hindsight), but both worldviews are called freedom.

McCarthy doesn't answer which one you should want for yourself; that's where the choice of scope comes in.

Deism, self-reliance, damnation, games, running—

“God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he? I dont believe he much had me in mind. Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?”

“And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.”

“Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings.”

First, it looks like the freedom out. Full sun, complete awareness, action, the self. But then it means there is a peak followed by a shadow. And to avoid the shadow, they have to stay in McCarthy's symbolism of this raw, barren sun and play for stakes of life and death, to never stop or slow. Because in the shadows, the stakes are higher than life or death. They tie into identity and worldview and confrontation of limitation.

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and to die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of his achievement.”

“I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.”

Then again, there is no moral yes or no within the book. It's kill-or-be-killed. The choice is in what to look at and consider. What do you allow to shape you? Would you rather choose what does, even if it comes at a more significant cost? Is that stronger, or weaker?

So yes, Blood Meridian is violent and stunning and shows the truth of action, in many ways. But it also invokes the judgment catching up with them anyway—in ways they can't control. Death, forgetting, or other wills. In the end, what can they stand for?

“For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”

The judge and the voice—

“It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding.”

“The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life.”

“The kid looked at Tobin. What's he a judge of? he said. What's he a judge of.”

Since this is a book about what to believe in and what forces to surrender to—yourself or something beyond—and McCarthy doesn't tell you which one to want, I think you could make the case that the judge is the God the characters believe has abandoned them, if tying together all the biblical imagery. In discussing it with others, I did learn apparently the judge is maybe the devil instead? Oops!

“The expriest leaned to the kid. Dont listen, he said. I aint listening. Stop your ears. Stop yours. The priest cupped his hands over his ears and looked at the kid. His eyes were bright from the bloodloss and he was possessed of a great earnestness. Do it, he whispered. Do you think he speaks to me?”

I'm curious about the sense of inescapability here—like that the judge says these things because he means it, but others shouldn't be able to do the same. Or, at least, it will come back to bite them. I'm sure someone, somewhere, has written a fabulous essay dissecting this all: that it's not the actions that damn them, but the inability to mesh them within a bigger framework. The judge knows that the other men still carry a fear of knowing themselves too well and not being able to run from that too.

The moment that broke my heart was when the kid realizes he's lost and damned and doesn't want to not care anymore. So he turns to save the abuelita for his moment of redemption and meaning—the moment that could transform it into a hero journey. He's talking to her sincerely, saying that he will save her. And then he realizes that she's dead. And what do you do with that lost opportunity? The judgment caught up with him anyway, and is this the only world? Can there be others?

That last question reminded me of Westworld, so I'd be curious how much overlap there is—or inspiration drawn directly from McCarthy—within the show.

“Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course.”

“I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me.”

“Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?”

Gorgeous, gorgeous imagery (and occasional humor)—

“And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, forty-six men wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their yammering, yet all about so changed and strange.”

“wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing”

“What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.”

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they were augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.”

“Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.”

“This man says you threatened his life. What man? This man. The sergeant nodded toward the door of the shed. Brown continued to saw. You call that a man? he said.”

“Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience.”

I love McCarthy's emphasis on false storytelling (and how meta that is), the narrowness of living in a very vast world, the games we play and the rules we make to tell ourselves on a personal level how to harness meaning or freedom. What is ultimate agency, and what is damnation instead?

“That feeling in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. Where only the rules are at hazard. Dont look away.”

And re: that quote above, it's interesting to me that both McCarthy and DFW end on such a similar callout. For McCarthy, it's dont look away. For DFW, it's try to keep up. Both when discussing a similar sentiment, because it makes us flinch. They're each pursuing this purity of truth—a moment of awe and terror of seeing your full self on display, raw. Maybe less honorable than you'd like.

You can look, or you can look away, but cynicism and idealism each tend to be more operational frameworks than this moment of bare essentialism. What are you at your core, and what do you do when clarity shows you that you're different from what you wanted to be? Everything you are is decided by what you do in that moment, maybe.

Of course, I underlined a thousand lines. I thought Blood Meridian was a stunning—albeit violent—look at what scope you should believe in and what matters in terms of individual responsibility. What is honest, and what is burial? Again: universal, specific, or erased? Who is remembered?