Blood Meridian

For the sake of Alex, Bo and George, I really wanted to love this book. While I didn't love it, McCarthy gave me a key at the end to liking it. Here's the key, from p. 328-9, as forty years later, the judge explains things to the kid, who perhaps not so miraculously ends up watching the same dancing bear get shot in a Texas bar:

This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in
fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper
time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is
the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its
own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers
contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history
of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none
here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of
knowing eve in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know that he
might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the
plan if plan there be.

Until this time, I knew what I was reading was good, even though I haven't read Faulkner and don't know how this novel outFaulkners Faulkner. I just knew that McCarthy was writing sentences no one else could write, using a lot of words no one else knows. But being aware of the opera singer's talent doesn't mean you're necessarily enjoying yourself.

For me, the problem is about protagonists. If you were to read other posts on this blog, you'll find that my thing is the redemption narrative; I don't necessarily need a happy ending, but there's something in me that needs the possibility for redemption, be it in a Raskolnikov or a Dmitri or Ivan Karamazov or even a Holden Caulfield. Carton's redemption at the end of A Tale of Two Cities even allows me to enjoy wearing my reading helmet while Dickens bangs me over the head with symbolism. And despite the namelessness that characterizes the characters in The Road, I liked its forward movement, forward toward a future.

Not only did Blood Meridian deny me a name for the kid, but I wasn't even clear that he was my protagonist until Glanton met his hatchet-wielding Yuma friend. Until his time in the desert with Tobin, he was part of an ensemble cast. For me as a reader, the ensemble approach doesn't work, especially when big chunks of the story move my attention to pure evil like David Brown and forget all about the kid.

I remain puzzled by the judge. From the time we meet him in the revival tent we know he's a loose cannon, but he seems to be the one character who has sense - not just learning, but sense. And I guess this is what makes him the real villain, because he knows that other worldviews exist, but he chooses nihilism. Nothing exists beyond his perceptions. In the offense he takes to the freedom of birds, I sensed humor; perhaps I was wrong. His worldview comes from a world without the concept of a savior, of deliverance from the ongoing cycles of war, occasionally interrupted by peace. Thomas Cahill, in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, argues that the world before Jesus was a world in which war was the norm, and peace the exception. So it is with the judge, one who believes in an intelligent designer, but not necessarily in God.

Despite these uneasinesses with the story, the ending, like the end of a poem, gives me a way of thinking about the beginning. Where there is nothing greater than oneself, there is no meaning. Where there is no meaning, life is cheap. When life is cheap, there's no need to think or feel anything beyond the moment, no need to consider the existence of others.

So Blood Meridian, with all its nihilism, leaves me with nothing at the end, not the shock of Inman's end, not the anger at the fate of Tom Joad. Nothing, really, but the recognition of the fact that some men are beyond redemption, and that very few authors can use the sentence or the language like McCarthy.