Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian is a tale of great vioence and loss. It follows a nameless 14 year old, the kid, across the Southwestern United States in the late 1800s, where he joins a gang that scalps Native Americans for gold. They ride into these nothing towns, collect gold for the amount of scalps they've collected, drink, celebrate, and destroy the towns. It's not long before the gang, ran by Captain Glanton, is just killing anyone they see, murdering entire towns or settlements, and trying to sell those scalps to the next unsuspecting governor. The central character of the novel is Judge Holden. The judge is 7 feet tall, completely hairless, and extraordinarily large and pale. He is both more sophisticated than the rest of Glanton's gang, while also being the most senselessly violent. He knows how to have humanity, how to show compassion, but he utterly lacks it. He is interested in the world around him, down to minute details, but only to destroy it.
After I read No Country for Old Men a couple of summers ago, I wanted to write a letter to Cormac McCarthy and tell him how impactful his books have been in my life. Not only have they shaped my reading taste, but also changed my perspective on the human condition. While I don't think that the base of human nature is violence, the way that McCarthy does, I do understand the idea that given no rules or laws, typically those who exert the most violence or strength over others will prevail. It does frustrate me that most of McCarthy's books have no women in them, and if they do, they appear relatively briefly to supplement the main male storyline. I would love to see a women that was capable of violence the same way the judge is in Blood Meridian.
I've read a few reviews already of Blood Meridian, discussing how the judge was an incarnation of the devil. I'm not sure that was McCarthy's intention. I think he is meant to represent an overarching view of the "big guys" in the world, those that show interest and have the intent and drive and means to shape the world, but instead of creating the world a better place, they seek to understand it and rule over it, simply to destory it, simply for the desire of power and control. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they seek senseless vioelnce, but it is definitely a product of this mindset. McCarthy uses beautiful southwestern landscapes as the backdrop for this violent, bloody novel, and frequently goes to great lengths to properly depict that barren beauty of the desert, juxtaposed with the violence within it. The landscape is only disturbed by Glanton's gang, the natives, and corpses. I want to leave you with a short passage:
The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be?
How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be out right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust in the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.