Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History

I'm quite interested in the history of the era and might give it another go; I think I've got it on a bookshelf somewhere.

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

For me, it's like a literary version of all those renaissance pictures of the events of the book of Revelation or paintings of the apocalypse. The characters and events sometimes just feel like allegories or gods somehow.

I also really enjoy his novel The Crossing, and feel that it has similarly beautiful, poetic descriptions while being a much more introspective and character-focused novel. Still plenty of violence, but nothing close to the brutality of Blood Meridian.

Wow! What a great book!

I had to take breaks because of the violence and it took several weeks to finish because I wasn’t always in the mood. But I’m definitely going to read it again.

I had a writing workshop with Pam Houston back in 2009. She is a very incisive reader, so I was a little surprised when she reacted to Blood Meridian coming up in discussion with something to the effect of how bleak and devoid of beauty it was (I'm synthesizing a little from ~feeling; my memory isn't this good). Part of our ongoing assignment each week was to share a passage we liked, so I brought it the next week and read this one (it is about 2 pages into chapter 11--but there's a lot of this throughout):

> Their way led now through dwarf oak and ilex and over a stony ground where black trees stood footed in the seams on the slopes. They rode through sunlight and high grass and in the late afternoon they came out upon an escarpment that seemed to rim the known world. Below them in the paling light smoldered the plains of San Agustin stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating off in a long curve silent under looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years. The horses picked their way along the rim with care and the riders cast varied glances out upon that ancient and naked land.

> In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

> They rode down from this country through a deep gorge, clattering over the stones, rifts of cool blue shade. In the dry sand of the arroyo floor old bones and broken shapes of painted pottery and graven on the rocks above them pictographs of horse and cougar and turtle and the mounted Spaniards helmeted and bucklered and contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself. Lodged in faults and crevices a hundred feet above them were nests of straw and jetsam from old high waters and the riders could hear the mutter of thunder in some nameless distance and they kept watch on the narrow shape of sky overhead for any darkness of impending rain, threading the canyon's close pressed flanks, the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs.

> That night they camped in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains, a small valley with a clear run of water and good grass. Dwellings of mud and stone were walled up beneath an overhanging cliff and the valley was traced with the work of old acequias. The loose sand in the valley floor was strewn everywhere with pieces of pottery and blackened bits of wood and it was crossed and recrossed with the tracks of deer and other animals.

She listened with something like awe in her eyes. I wasn't smart enough to pry, then, but I interpreted it as a bit of delight at re-discovering the care McCarthy is paying every little detail here even though he must know, on some level, that we'll all be blinded by baby-trees.

"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."

One of my favorite books ever, and I personally love the writing style.

Sorry for offtopic. I dont know how to reach you otherwise.

I was flagged at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374970

Just curious what rule I broke this time?

I recently finished _Blood Meridian_ and then read some analyses of the ending, particularly how the Judge waxes lyrical about "The Dance" of violence as a higher human activity, while the kid dismisses it as base: "even a dumb animal can dance" just as he is sucked back into it.

I do not think that McCarthy intends there to be a single correct reading of what The Judge is; he is inexplicable, uncanny and ambiguous like something from a David Lynch film; however this "manifestation of guilt" reading has to be among the main contenders latent in the book's meanings.

Alternately, the Judge is just a man, the Judge is Satan incarnate, the Judge is chaos and lust for violence, the Judge is a metaphor, the Judge is some other natural force, the Judge is some other supernatural force, the Judge has a deal with Satan, the Judge has tapped into some other supernatural force.

“There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. Just perched on this rock like a man waitin for a coach.”

I’d always gone for a more magical realism approach because of how often his supernatural demeanor is focused on, and because it dovetails neatly with Anton Chigurh being a similar thing in No Country for Old Men.