Blood Meridian III

Other than the language, I did not find much to like in Blood Meridian. McCarthy took poorly-documented historical events that were chronicled by Samuel Chamberlain and reimagined them for his literary purposes. There was in fact a criminal group of scalp-hunters led by John Glanton which included a man named Judge Holden. Through some agreement with Mexican authorities, they were paid for the scalps of Indians in northern Mexico, and later they moved on to Arizona and California. In Arizona they took over a ferry for a time and robbed and killed passengers who were traveling to California. Several of the characters, including "the kid," a runaway from Tennessee who serves as the protagonist, are made up. Most of the action throughout the book consists of extreme violence. The Apaches attack, kill and mutilate everyone in their path, and the Glanton gang robs, kills, rapes, scalps and beheads people wherever it goes. Throughout most of the book it is difficult to identify with any of the characters, because they all seem amoral, selfish and violent, holding no loyalties and mistrusting each other. Towards the end, after most of the characters are dead and the gang has disbanded, the narrative opens up, with a protracted, intermittent dialogue between "the kid", ex-priest Tobin and Judge Holden.

Holden is by far the most sinister character in the book and is obviously intended to be interpreted as Satan or a demon of some sort. He has many skills, is conversant on countless subjects, and offers silver-tongued aphorisms and quasi-philosophical thoughts that seem completely out of place, all the while murdering innocent people, including the young girls who satisfy his pedophilic appetites. He also seems to possess superhuman physical characteristics with hints of immortality. McCarthy uses Holden and Tobin for a vague theological debate, and this didn't interest me at all. As in The Road, McCarthy seems concerned about the depravity of human existence in relation to the presumed existence of a deity, and since I don't presume the existence of any deity, the heart of the novel as a theological meditation is of no interest to me.

I find it more fruitful to examine Blood Meridian within its literary context. In that sense it is the brilliant apotheosis of the American Western, which McCarthy has taken to its logical extreme with no apologies, showing, I think, an artistic courage that few could muster. Rather than adopting the conventional narrative, in which cowboys behave rather poorly at times, he portrays his outlaws as brutal killers with no mitigating characteristics. Furthermore, his killers are not presented as aberrations and perhaps open a window to a much darker society than the one in which we imagine ourselves living. McCarthy effectively blows the roof off conventional Hollywood romantic nonsense about the Old West. However, he can still be seen as a genre writer. Blood Meridian was published in 1985, four years after the first appearance of Hannibal Lecter as a character in Thomas Harris's novel, Red Dragon. Though I doubt that Thomas Harris is as talented a writer as McCarthy, both Hannibal Lecter and Judge Holden are early examples of the intelligent, well-educated, psychopathic serial killers that continued at least up to Patrick Batemen in American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, which was published in 1991. That there was money to be made with novels depicting socially polished, cold-blooded serial killers was well-established before McCarthy wrote this book. I think the interest in this type of character may have originated with the real Ted Bundy, who was first arrested in 1975. Of course, there are much older precedents for satanic figures, but those usually have to do with the selling of souls, which doesn't apply in this case. McCarthy reprised the psychopathic serial killer with the less talkative Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men in 2005. 

Since the bar is set so low in American literature, McCarthy ranks near the top. In the U.S., authors can still write novels that are completely lacking in psychological subtlety and no one will notice. Although I don't like much of it, his novels are certainly more interesting than ones about women who are unhappy with their husbands or boyfriends or men who are sexually bored with their wives. After sampling them, I don't see any point to reading novels by Philip Roth or Don DeLillo. Works by Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen are also unappealing. In this environment, McCarthy may be the best living American novelist. My current foray into literature seems to have run its course, and I'll sum up my thoughts in my next post.