Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: "The Mystery is That There is No Mystery"

The pretense is gone in Blood Meridian, the pretense of the civilized man. Instead the pack mentality rules and that part of our nature that is the most base and self centered is allowed the front seat. That creature which was domesticated thousands of years ago has been set free tearing and gnashing. There is no mercy, no compassion, no putting yourself in another’s place. “Empathy” is a word that has been covered up by the fossilized remains of a primitive man, and has momentarily been forgotten. But this is more than just survival and unadulterated avarice, it’s cerebral, it’s calculated. But I’ll be damned (pardon) if I’ll say it’s evil. Because you see, once you go all Baptist and say something is evil, you make the perpetrators into something supernatural and their behavior is seen as almost beyond their control. You give them an alibi. And it helps you sleep at night because at least you have an intellectual reason for their behavior. But for the sake of argument let’s say these folks are just ordinary mortals like you and me and they can kill babies and old women and rape little boys and girls, you’re then face to face with something too real and too honest and too ugly to bear—that something is that there is a latent cruelty gene somewhere within us that creeps and lurches around within our collective human bloodstreams and subconscious that has the possibility of ignition—whether by nature or nurture.

That possibility is rampant in the “terra damnata” and the evidence (for me) is in the many instances in the novel where prehistoric or “caveman” language is used: words such as cavefolk, stoneage, atavistic, primal, ossified, and Neolithic. The Judge is described at the end, when he’s slumming with the town folks, as being “among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and …among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties…” Other mythological and biblical references that I think also ride along side this notion are words like Pandemonium, pilgrim, Argonaut, acolyte, and even mention of “fairytale beasts”

I get the part about having to have the civilized in order to show the incivility in others—foils they are—the antithesis. Also the “bad” guys have to have someone to terrorize, rape, pillage, and plunder. But the behavior of the perpetrators of these extreme crimes is confusing. The goodhearted womenfolk cleanse and try to bring the idiot back into the fold of humanity, but the judge also takes him “under his wing” to become his sidekick. At the very least, the judge is not charging admission. And in an environment where the infirmed, wounded, elderly, and young are treated as “surplus” and expendable; the reprieve of the idiot is surely a miracle. Or perhaps it is an act of providence (and mercy) on the Judge’s part. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” He decrees who shall live and who shall die. He sees himself as one of the gods or as god. This is his random act of kindness. He does it because he can.

And then there’s this whole Nietzsche thing going on. Survival of the meanest. The Judge even says, “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.” The Judge and Glanton and the boys have their own brand of morality because their law transcends morality. They make up their own rules as they go along (never play UNO with them). They prey upon those least able to defend themselves. In fact, they delight in it—whether it’s in a village or town or the side of the road; if the most vulnerable in society are present (babies, puppies, little boys, old women), the gang will get their trophy. They feed on fear and love having the power over life and death. This is evident in the towns that they ransack after days of excess and of taking advantage. They give the words “raising hell” a new meaning. But they don’t limit their cruelty to the ordinary citizen; they have no qualms about killing detachments of colorful soldiers or even their own men if they’re wounded beyond effectiveness, such as Glanton’s murder of his right hand man, McGill (who happened to be a Mexican). Waste not, want not. They are landlocked pirates. Their pillaging had a Mad Max feel to it, a B rate ‘70s movie feel to it. It was almost a parody. And it worked.

And in a society whose only rule is that there are no rules, women are good for one thing (other than saving idiots), well two, cooking and sex. There are hordes or whores, whores of various southern cities, garishly clad whores, whole flocks of whores, a dark little dwarf of a whore, and whole squadrons of whores. (OK, that was funny). The repetition becomes carnivalistic and hilarious. At least McCarthy has evolved from cuntdom (in Suttree) to mere whoredom. And in a land where body parts and genitalia are road markers, it is amazing that there is not one gaping “cunt” among them. I could take the feminist road most traveled and speculate that McCarthy is a raving misogynist, but I simply don’t see that as the case. Though McCarthy’s books, on the surface, seem to be smack in the middle of boy’s town, they are not. I see them as addressing the human race. He just does it through a masculinized vehicle. And I believe the references to whores in this novel are a satirization of that environment. It’s also a poke (sorry) at the phenomenon of the whore of the myths and westerns most of us grew up believing or watching. Note: Miss Kitty was hot! She was also intelligent and a shrewd business woman. She shouldn’t have been wasting her time on Marshall Dillon. 

Wait! Just had a thought. I think it blew my whole argument. The society, just like the gang, is just as corrupted; but that corruption is in disguise. Let’s take the old man at the beginning of the novel, the one that blew snot into the fire (attractive). He seemingly was giving advice to the boy about the world, but his advice is totally fucked. I mean, come on, the whole four things that will destroy society spiel. They could walk arm in arm down the yellow brick road singing about the evils of—whiskey, money, women, and n-bomb, oh my!—not necessarily in that order. I see at least two nasty “isms” in that sentence. And the man that kept his own brother in a cage to suffer and eat his own shit—what a humanitarian! Then there’s the restaurateur—oh yeah, I hear “Cum by yah” rolling off his tongue and “We are the World” as he refuses to let “coloreds” eat at his four star. Also the “civilized” government made the call for scalps of human beings as a way to control the “Indian problem.” And you can’t say that higher intelligence creates egalitarianism or that it makes people compassionate. Look at the Judge. He is a genius. He could win on Survivor (after a body count) by his wits. He is MacGyver, the bad seed. So what is McCarthy saying?? Is this an indictment, a prophecy even, on the chaos that will surely reign when certain parts of our psyche say it’s OK to be a mother fucker (perhaps, literally).

“Sie mussen schlafen aber ich muss tanzen“or “You can sleep, but buddy, I’m gonna dance.” OMG, what does that mean?? The Judge does talk about creating your own destiny. Does dancing mean acting instead of being acted upon? Is that why he shoots the bear, because the bear’s dance is symbolic of human beings accepting and going through the motions and struggles of day to day but never really living? Is this taking responsibility for YOU without the trappings of society, politics, or religion? Is this Existentialism for Dummies handbook for humanity? But they’ll be no fence sitters here. He judges (sorry) the boy for changing, for being conflicted, for being wishy washy (in the Judges view) about what he had chosen.  I wonder how much the boy participated in the fun and games (atrocities). He disappears throughout a large chunk of the novel. Though the Judge does name his “sins,” such as his behavior at the governor’s ball, so we know there was complicity. But it does seem that when he’s called upon to act as individual, when the microscope zeroes in on him, he chooses the greater good: He helps the man get the arrow out of his shoulder when no one else will, he will not kill the Judge (even when he knows the Judge will most likely kill him), and he will not leave Tobin (even though he slows him down in the desert). And the Abuelita scene where he finally shows compassion and love is poignant (even if it is a bit late). His empathy gene finally makes an appearance and he connects to the earth, recognizing the old woman, the (grandmother), as part of his human family. As with the Native Americans, he shows reverence to the elderly. He has come full circle from the eye gouging, “You talkin’ to me?” youth that we first see. Though his action is irrelevant in that the woman is past help, I think that his action chalks one up for the universe and humanity, and I believe it is a pivotal point in the novel. It is his “saving grace.”