[In the following essay, Donoghue presents several possible readings of Blood Meridian as he outlines several key themes, among them McCarthy's muted narrative response to endless violence and the relationship between Judge Holden and “the kid.”]

A year or two ago at New York University I taught a graduate course called Aesthetics and Aesthetic Ideology. The main aim I set myself was to examine the impingement of political, social, and moral considerations on certain works of literature. I did not conceal from myself or from the students the fact that I wished to maintain the aesthetic and formal character of literature and that I was dismayed by current attempts to reduce literature to a set of ideological conclusions. Many of those conclusions were biographical rigmaroles. Yeats and Pound were Fascists. Eliot was anti-Semitic. Wyndham Lewis was a neo-Nazi. So-and-so was prejudiced against women. Or homophobic. In the face of such routines I found it hard to convince students that a work of literature is not an editorial or a political manifesto and that the experience of reading a novel does not consist in finding one's prejudices confirmed. It was difficult to speak of language, form, style, and tone without appearing decadent, ethically irresponsible.

One of the books I prescribed for the course was Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I chose it because it is a work of remarkable creative power and because this power seems to be at one with McCarthy's refusal to bring in a moral verdict on the characters and actions of the book. I started with a few rudimentary notes on his early fiction, mainly to accustom the students to his themes and preoccupations. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985) is McCarthy's fifth novel. The earlier ones are The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1974), and Suttree (1979). The more recent ones are All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994), the first two volumes of the Border Trilogy. I recited such preliminary notes as these.

The Orchard Keeper is set in the mountains of east Tennessee in the years between 1918 and 1948, by my count. It tells of an old man, Arthur Ownby, living a grim life by himself in a mountain cabin; his dog, Scout; and a boy, John Wesley Rattner, whose father has been killed in a fight with a bootlegger, Marion Sylder. A country bar burns down; the boy saves a dog from attack by a coon and is befriended by Sylder. There are strong descriptions of weather, snow, six days of rain, and sundry hardships. The book ends with an elegiac passage: “They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”

In Outer Dark Rinthy Holme has a child by her brother Culla. Culla abandons the child in a local wood where it is found and taken away by a tinker. Rinthy wanders about trying to find her child or the tinker. Culla goes off to look for work, steals a squire's boots, is pursued by four men, takes a ferry boat to cross a river in high flood and is nearly lost along with a terrified horse. Eventually he comes upon three men and the child—one of his eyes gone—at a campfire. One of the men cuts the child's throat. “The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.”

There are further horrors in Child of God, the story of Lester Ballard whose father hanged himself when the boy was nine. Lester grows up a crazed necrophile. “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them,” the narrator says. Lester kills several women, brings them to a cave where he adorns their corpses and makes love to them. This one, for instance: “He would arrange her in different positions and go out and peer in the window at her. After a while he just sat holding her, his hands feeling her body under the new clothes. He undressed her very slowly, talking to her. Then he pulled off his trousers and lay next to her. He spread her loose thighs. You been wantin it, he told her.”

The main characters in these three novels are like recently arrived primates, possessing each a spinal column but little or no capacity of mind or consciousness. A few of the minor characters are ethically precocious: that is, they are kind by nature and instinct, like the doctor who helps Rinthy. But most of them, especially Culla, live on a subsistence level of feeling and cognition. They meet the world without the mediation of law, morality, religion, or politics; and therefore they assume—without putting the assumption in words—that the power of the world is absolute and arbitrary. In Democracy in America Tocqueville says that “the social conditions and institutions of democracy impart certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts: the soul is often left out of the picture which portrays the body only; movement and sensation take the place of feeling and thought; finally realism takes the place of the ideal.” McCarthy's first novels imply that these dispositions are innate and incorrigible, as if they were emanations from life itself.

This may explain why McCarthy appears to have little interest in plot, the development or complication of a story. His novels are episodic, rampant with incident; but each of the incidents is placed at the same distance from the reader, as if each came with impersonal authority. The frisson of surprise and suspense is not part of McCarthy's rhetoric. The effect of his procedure is that a scene of violence and bloodshed, excruciating while it is going on, composes itself almost at once into a nature morte. It is amazing to see this occur. I am reminded of Freud's account of the work of dreaming in The Interpretation of Dreams. Dream-work “does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” The incidents in McCarthy's novels are not discriminated, adjudicated for significance, or pointed toward a climax, a disclosure, or a resolution. The new form they are given is that of being released from observances of ethical or other judgment. In Child of God we read of “old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death … old comings and goings.” But we are not encouraged to ask what these might mean or whether they entail a motive other than survival. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “Everything only connected by and and and.” Not by “and then and then and then.”

McCarthy's novels don't make me wonder what is to happen next and whether or not a significant pattern of events is to be disclosed at last. His episodes are produced not to be interrogated but to be sensed, mostly to be seen in the mind's eye. The appalling quality of each deed is its emptiness, as if it were done before anyone thought of a meaning it might have. Conduct is predicated upon some primitive energy, and when it is vicious beyond apparent cause, it is merely an outbreak of force that knows nothing else to do. Even when the scene is genial, we are invited to look at it without thinking beyond the thing seen. Consider The Orchard Keeper: “Light pale as milk guided the old man's steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pine-shadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind.”

This narrative procedure is Dutch rather than Italian, according to a distinction Svetlana Alpers makes in The Art of Describing. An Italian painting is narrative, dramatic, theatrical, “a framed surface or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or substitute world.” This second, or substitute, world is full of imagined actions and sufferings; the spaces exist so that people and their deeds may engross them. But a Dutch painting gives the look of things and assumes that that is enough; it does not incite the mind's eye to go beyond or through the canvas to divine a story behind it. Meaning coincides with what is offered as visible; there is no remainder. In the passage I've quoted from The Orchard Keeper the details one might pay attention to, such as the descriptive pressure on “past” … “past” … and “passing,” are points of light and color on the canvas; they are not indications of a prior life—the old man's—to be divined by looking through them or beyond them. The old man lives to the extent to which he is a visible presence on the scene. Each of McCarthy's early novels conveys a multitude of events, loosely affiliated or not at all; and soon we start feeling that the world or life has presented itself in these dire ways without human intervention and is not to be asked why or wherefore. If human action in the world of these novels is arbitrary, occasionally kind but mostly red in tooth and claw, there is no point in looking further for causes and explanations.

But in Suttree there is a revision of these assumptions. This book, too, is panoramic, picturesque: one picture gives way to the next. We are not to assume that each object of attention is organically or otherwise related to the next one as a phase in a story being told. But to the spinal column there has been added in at least a few specimens a brain capable of self-consciousness and wit. Suttree is set along the banks of the Tennessee River at Knoxville, where Cornelius Suttree, a dropout, has made himself a shantyboat and gets a poor living by selling fish to local eating-houses. A friend, Gene Harrogate, survives on odd jobs and the fruit of his wits, robbing telephone boxes, poisoning bats for sale to the authorities, removing the upholstery from wrecked cars (under the seat of one of which he finds a human eye). Most of the characters are derelicts, and they get a hard time from sheriffs. People in this book tend to get shot or to turn up dead in the river or to cause mayhem with bottles in the Indian Rock roadhouse. Near the end Suttree takes to the mountains around Gatlinburg, hallucinates, nearly goes mad; but he survives to see the world as if it might at least sustain a question or two:

It seemed to rain all that winter. The few snowfalls turned soon to a gray slush, but the brief white quietude among the Christmas buntings and softlit shopwindows seemed a childhood dream of the season and the snow in its soft falling sifting down evoked in the city a surcease nigh to silence. Silent the few strays that entered the Huddle dusting their shoulders and brushing from their hair this winter night's benediction. Suttree by the window watched through the frosted glass. How the snow fell cherry red in the soft neon flush of the beersign like the slow dropping of blood. The clerks and the curious are absent tonight. Blind Richard sits with his wife. The junkman drunk, his mouth working mutely and his neck awry like a hanged man's. A young homosexual alone in the corner crying. Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there.

The amplitude of this passage does not depend upon Suttree's particular intelligence but upon a comprehensive sense of life that is innate to McCarthy's narrative and dispersed throughout his pages. It is as if people gained this sense of life not by being especially alive but by being “sad children of the fates whose home is the world.” They say yes to life without being particularly specific about its constituents. Later Suttree is allowed a soliloquy in which he claims to repent of one deed only: “One thing: I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.”

Suttree is the most powerful of McCarthy's early novels because its sense of life is a sense of more life than is imagined in the other novels. By comparison with Suttree the other novels are intense but narrow. Suttree is not afraid of its grandeur or of the irony such grandeur attracts: it practices a range of styles such that no narrative perception is too high or too low to be adumbrated. “A surcease nigh to silence” doesn't need the precedent of Faulkner's authority or Conrad's to save it from bombast. Possible bombast is merely the risk nearest to McCarthy's hand, a risk he brushes aside. As here, in one of my favorite passages, when Suttree on a visit to his Aunt Martha looks through her photograph album: “Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.” The cough recurs, as coughs do, hacking its way through “thin” and “cracked” and “macled” to “the dry pilgrims.” Macled, I find, means blurred. I note, too, that the eyeblink doesn't move from “becoming” to its customary affiliate, “being,” but closes upon a word of definite finality, “done,” achieved at last but also over and done with.

Blood Meridian is a historical novel based on episodes in the history of the Southwest—especially the territory between El Paso and Chihuahua City—in the middle of the nineteenth century. McCarthy's main source is evidently General Samuel E. Chamberlain's My Confession. Chamberlain fought in the war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, then deserted and joined John Joel Glanton as a mercenary. His memoir was not published till 1956. Other sources include John Woodhouse Audubon's Audubon's Western Journal 1849-1850 and Mayne Reid's The Scalp-Hunters.

Northrop Frye has remarked that “the so-called historical novel is generally a romance presenting some kind of historicized myth.” When we recall the four forms of prose fiction as Frye delineates them—novel, romance, confession, and anatomy—we are alerted to see that Blood Meridian is a romance, closer to Hawthorne, Scott, and Emily Brontë than to George Eliot and Jane Austen: it is akin to the tale and the ballad, with “stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes.” The last thing it needs is what the novel thrives on—a settled society with a complex system of personal and social relations which the novelist negotiates as the substance and pressure of reality. The “historicized myth” to which Blood Meridian refers is one in which men acquire the aura of gods or devils by sheer force of will and are recalled with fascination for doing so.

The historical context is well known. In June 1849 Angel Trias, governor of Chihuahua, contracted with John Joel Glanton to form a war party and hunt down Apaches who were harassing his people. Glanton was one of many such contractors. Trias agreed to pay ＄200 for every scalp. This was more money than the army offered to men of similar qualifications, and it attracted many displaced immigrants, ex-soldiers, and gunmen. In Blood Meridian a boy called the kid leaves home, comes to Nacogdoches, Texas, and joins a private army, commanded by Captain White, to fight in Mexico. There are terrible scenes of carnage when they confront a band of Comanches. The kid survives, joins Glanton, his second-in-command, Judge Holden, and about forty mercenaries, to hunt the Apache leader Gomez and to scalp Apaches and other Indians.

Blood Meridian raises an ethical issue mainly by not speaking of it. Most of the events of the novel are barbarous, but they seem to be protected from any ethical comment. Many actions disclose something of the “motiveless malignity” that Coleridge ascribed to Iago. To list a few of these. Near the beginning Judge Holden bears false witness, as if for fun, against the Reverend Green, a man he has never met till now. Toadvine beats up old Sydney and sets fire to the hotel he's lodging in. Glanton tries out a new pistol by shooting a cat, some hens, and a goat. One of Glanton's mercenaries kills two infants of the Gilenos. The judge takes up an Apache child, dandles him on his knee, keeps him for a few days, and scalps him. Glanton's men massacre the peaceful Tiguas. The judge buys two dogs, only to drown them. Glanton's men come upon a conducta of 122 mules bearing quicksilver from the mines, and drive them over a ridge to their deaths. One of Glanton's men, David Brown, sets fire to a young soldier and lets him burn to death. Glanton and a few of his men tie up an alcalde, his wife, and the local grocer and leave them to die. There is more. The only ethical objection to these acts is made by Toadvine when the judge scalps the child: “Goddamn you, Holden.” But Toadvine doesn't otherwise speak up for decency. There are a few acts of human kindness. The kid gives the wounded Shelby his supply of water. Yuma women take care of the imbecile James Robert. The judge saves him from drowning. The Diagueons rescue Tobin and the kid, and tend to them. But that is the sum of decency. The dominant impression conveyed by incident after incident is that no ethical, moral, or civic sense is allowed to act upon these characters.

In our class discussions we paid a good deal of attention to a passage in which Glanton's men are looking for the Apaches:

They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like being provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

The first surprising phrase is “devoid of order,” as if in Glanton's world that were a consideration. But the word has been prepared for by “ordained,” which hovers near its referent but doesn't settle upon it. Ordained by whom? Not by Glanton, who merely “deployed” the men. They have been ordained, these antipriests, by some nameless will inseparable from the “absolute rock”: “like beings provoked out of the absolute rock.” Provoked, I assume, by the force of things, pressure in the rock itself, and therefore emerging into human being before there was a society, a culture to receive them. “At no remove from their own loomings”: at once threatening and impalpable, formless. Before nomenclature: anonymous—and therefore exempt from the name and value of humanity, decency, ethical claim. They are forces of nature, not of nurture: there is no common law of culture to be known, obeyed, respected. They are as innocent and as opaque as the rock. Under some other dispensation each of these figures might be considered an individual, not entirely dispelled in the commonalty, but here they are merely disturbances of the landscape, movements of life hardly distinguishable from the rock they may be fancied to have come from after millenia of unanswerable but pointless evolution.

A page or two later, the ethical issue is waived again from the same source, as if murder were in the nature of things:

In the morning they rode out to the south. Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome among themselves. In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul.

On the eve of that day they crouched about the fire where it hissed in a softly falling rain and they ran balls and cut patches as if the fate of the aborigines had been cast into shape by some other agency altogether. As if such destinies were prefigured in the very rock for those with eyes to read.

More explicitly still, in a passage that negates distinction and enforces the figure of equality as if that, too, were a decision of nature:

They rode on. The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

One of the unguessed kinships is prefigured in the second sentence, where horses and earth are brought together by “trudged” and “rolled” to culminate in “milling” as if a motive for such movements could be thought of, ptolemaic in its figured husbandry. The word phenomena holds out the possibility that one article might still be distinguished from another and valued for that consideration; but spider, stone, and blade of grass sink into indiscriminateness, taking their names with them. What remains is the pathos of McCarthy's diction—“luminous” and “enshadowed”—as if the world once had use for such distinctions.

Some students thought that the ethical issue in Blood Meridian could be set aside by construing the book as a satire against the myth of Manifest Destiny—specifically against those white men who killed Comanches, Apaches, Yumas, and other Indian tribes without question and thought themselves justified by the mythology of American destiny and progress. One student proposed that we think of Blood Meridian as McCarthy's Holocaust fiction, his cry of despair over the bones of native Americans. A few students found this reading attractive, especially as it allowed their ethical sense to protest even when the novel didn't: it was pointed out that McCarthy's Comanches and Apaches, unlike the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Poland, were just as vicious as the mercenaries who scalped them. But in the end this reading failed to convince anyone. The pervasive style of the book holds every consideration at a distance from the events, with the result that a critical or ethical impulse finds itself thwarted at every point. Satire is evidently not the issue.

But the main difficulty of the book—a point the students kept coming back to—is McCarthy's apparent refusal to adjudicate—or rather his refusal to allow an immediate judgment to be elicited by any deed. The narrative style—“neuter austerity”—makes ethical judgment seem naïve to itself and therefore willing to be subsumed in ostensibly larger considerations. But what are the larger considerations? A student remarked that McCarthy's procedures are comparable to homeric style as Auerbach describes it in the first chapter of Mimesis. Auerbach quotes Schiller's observation that what Homer gives us is “the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures.” Homer's method, according to Auerbach, is “the externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses.” The procession of phenomena takes place “in the foreground”—that is, “in a local and temporal present which is absolute.” Homer does not distinguish between light and shade: he assimilates every event, large or small, to a “nature of things” which is self-evident and therefore undifferentiated like McCarthy's “optical democracy.”

This comparison seemed worth following up, especially in a passage which describes how the kid and his company are brought to Chihuahua City under arrest.

They entered the city in a gantlet of flung offal, driven like cattle through the cobbled streets with shouts going up behind for the soldiery who smiled as became them and nodded among the flowers and proffered cups, herding the tattered fortune-seekers through the plaza where water splashed in a fountain and idlers reclined on carven seats of white porphyry and past the governor's palace and past the cathedral where vultures squatted along the dusty entablatures and among the niches in the carved facade hard by the figures of Christ and the apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones.

In this remarkable passage no action is ascribed to an individual: groups dominate their members—“they,” “the soldiery,” “the tattered fortune-seekers,” “idlers.” Actions are reduced to motions, as if the operation of things according to their natures required no motive or intent—“with shouts going up.” Verbs reduce the difference between one action, such as it is, and another: idlers “reclined,” vultures “squatted,” the scalps “flapped on the wind.” The effect is to draw the separate species, living and dead, human and animal, into a middle range of vocabulary, a compromise between their several notional modes of existence. The most daring of these displacements is the fanciful award of something like human status to the vultures, presented like priests, “the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence.” At the end of the paragraph the word clapping hovers between the applause of the people and the impersonal noise of hide against stone, while the reader's mind is led away to “the filaments of certain seaforms.” We seem to be in a world such as the one that Nietzsche ascribed, in The Birth of Tragedy, to the olympians, a world of “luxuriant, triumphant existence, which defies the good and the bad indifferently.” Or a demotic version of such a world.

Another student emphasized the three epigraphs to Blood Meridian; the first derives from Paul Valéry:

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

The second is from Jacob Boehme:

It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

The third is from the Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982:

Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

The epigraphs have in common a vision of life beyond good and evil, as if the constitutive principle of life were energy, self-subsistent and unquestionable.

The most remarkable section of Blood Meridian is the last sixty pages. The Yumas attack Glanton's band. Their leader, Caballo en Pelo, kills Glanton with an axe—he “raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.” The judge escapes with the imbecile. Toadvine and the kid also escape—the kid is wounded, with an arrow in his leg—and they meet up with the ex-priest Tobin. One of the most memorable images has the judge and imbecile following the kid and Tobin: “More strangely he carried a parasol made from rotted scraps of hide stretched over a framework of rib bones bound with strips of tug. The handle had been the foreleg of some creature and the judge approaching was clothed in little more than confetti so rent was his costume to accommodate his figure. Bearing before him that morbid umbrella with the idiot in its rawhide collar pulling at the lead he seemed some degenerate entrepreneur fleeing from a medicine show and the outrage of the citizens who'd sacked it.” From here to the end the judge emerges as Cormac McCarthy's most audacious creation, the historical personage transformed from a name and a few memorable details into a comprehensive force.

Historical evidence of the judge appears only in Samuel E. Chamberlain's My Confession, but it sounds convincing:

The second in command, now left in charge of [Glanton's] camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was [sic] blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontereras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapparal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.

Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musician and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

As McCarthy presents him, the judge is a scholar of sorts—a linguist, Darwinian note-taker, amateur biologist, reader of sign, a Nietzschean before he could have read Nietzsche, and so psychologically opaque that he seems a force of nature. Sometimes he sounds like Melville's Ahab or a crazed philosopher of the Enlightenment:

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

What's a suzerain?

A keeper. A keeper or overlord.

Why not say keeper then?

Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgements.

One might expect this speech to be questioned, if only by the mercenary to ask what's a suzerain; but no one in the judge's company is equal to the task. Indeed it is the judge whose speech gathers up bits of the Bible and Shakespeare and the lore of Western culture and utters moral values by virtue of denouncing them: “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.” This sounds like a passage from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human or The Genealogy of Morals. It expresses similar contempt for the little Christian virtues, patience, humility, otherworldliness, the disposition of turning the other cheek. When the judge is quietly and relentlessly pursuing the kid across the desert, he calls out to him:

The priest has led you to this, boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you've not the heart of a common assassin. I've passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?

No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.

Later, when the judge visits the kid in jail, he persists in this Nietzschean rebuke:

You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man, I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man's share compared to another's. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not.

This is the gist of the judge's complaint against the kid: he should have voided in himself every scruple, every impulse of kinship with the defeated. He should have retained no will but the common will, so far as that was embodied in the work of war and killing.

The relation between the judge and the kid is the point of greatest pressure in the last section of the book. It is a relation of antithetical principles, but we have to apprehend the kid's principles by default since he never speaks of them. The judge is all speech, endlessly voluble; the kid is silence. But the judge divines that the kid is his adversary, his blood-brother, his brother in blood. “Was it always your idea,” he asks him, “that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” “You seen me,” the kid answers. The judge ignores this naïveté or deems it false. “I recognized you when I first saw you,” he counters. So far as the novel is explicit, there was never any bad blood between these two. So the antagonism must be reckoned as primordial, one of principles rather than of particles: it is a relation of moral archetypes, and in that regard the conflict must have been developing silently all along. The kid has no philosophy, except to survive; no moral doctrine, except not to kill unless killing is necessary. He would spare a life if he could. We have to deduce as much from his deeds and the silence in which he commits them. The judge's philosophy is one of will, war, power, blood, game, eloquence, and in the end the order of what he ambiguously calls “the dance.”

Years later, in 1878, the kid is in Texas. He goes into a bar. There is a girl on a rudimentary stage, and with her there is a dancing bear. The judge is sitting at a table. One of the drinking men shoots the bear. The judge comes up to the counter and speaks to the kid:

The last of the true. The last of the true. I'd say they're all gone under now saving me and thee. Would you not? He tried to see past him. That great corpus enshadowed him from all beyond. He could hear the woman announcing the commencement of dancing in the hall to the rear.

And some are not yet born who shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's soul, said the judge. He turned slightly. Plenty of time for the dance.

I aint studyin no dance.

The judge smiled. …

You're here for the dance, he said. …

Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee.

And so it is required. After a session with a whore the kid goes out to the jakes and opens the door. “The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.” Presumably the judge kills the kid. McCarthy doesn't say.

I have brought the judge's allusions to Shakespeare's Henry V and Luke's Gospel a little closer together than they are in the novel. In the misquotation from Henry V (I.2.287-88) Henry says: “And some are yet ungotten and unborn / That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.” This passage and Christ's parable of the rich man hoarding his goods are set to a different tune when the judge speaks them. But they remain allusions, and they have something of the force of the fragments of Greek and Chinese that Pound includes in the Cantos and the French and Italian phrases that Eliot recalls in his early poems. They say, if nothing else: there have been other times, other voices. If nothing else, the judge's allusions summon up customary knowledge—as Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition says it is the work of narrative to do. The fact that such lore is now virtually forgotten is part of its force, the pathos of it: most of what has been known and spoken in the world is now forgotten. The judge's phrases from the Bible, Shakespeare, Vaughan, and many other sources speak of gone times and give them momentary acknowledgment, even though other passages in Blood Meridian claim that in McCarthy's Southwest there is no difference between what has been and what will never be, that they are all one in the void. But the judge's tune is his own, or his own choice of an accredited tune. He assimilates his phrases not to Christ's prophecy of eternal life or King Henry's promise to “dazzle all the eyes of France,” but to Nietzsche's claim, in The Birth of Tragedy, that “only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.” No individual life matters except in relation to the provisional orders, forms, and measures which are the best that can be achieved; but even these cannot control the Dionysian violence of blood and heart. What else can the judge mean by “the dance” except the irrefutable force of life itself, before every accredited form of mediation or adjudication?

The novel ends, except for the epilogue:

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

As for the epilogue: some of my students thought it a nuisance and took it as McCarthy's last-minute attempt to make Blood Meridian mean more than he has shown it to mean. Others read it as evidence of the gnostic or manichean axioms upon which the book is apparently based, as Leo Daugherty has argued. The epilogue, merely a few sentences, is set in italic type:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

One man and two groups differing in purpose. The man is a fire-bringer, Promethean in one tradition, gnostic in another: whatever else, he is not Judeo-Christian. The two groups follow him as in clockwork. Escapement and pallet are technical terms for instruments that regulate and adjust ratchets which move at different speeds, as in a watch. One group remembers the past, the other has forgotten or ignored the bones. A parable, then, but of what? I read it as a parable of the artist as Promethean, thief of fire on behalf of humankind, or, if Leo Daugherty is right, as one who releases the pneuma or spark of “the alien divine.” That is as much as I can say on that issue.

Who speaks, then, for reality and justice in Blood Meridian and the early novels? W. B. Yeats said that his occult instructors helped him to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Where is the single thought in McCarthy's novels? I say it is in the narrator; or, rather, in the narrative voice, since no character in the stories is given the role of narrator, except for a while in Child of God, where the narrator is a local resident, gossip, and myth-maker. In the other novels we have impersonal narration that recalls the ancient styles, often biblical or epic, that have served a similar genre. As in Blood Meridian, a description of Apaches riding across the playa to attack the mercenaries:

… The riders were beginning to appear far out on the lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat. They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

Greek rhetoric includes the figure called parataxis: it is a device for placing one thing beside another without subordination. No relation of cause and consequence is proposed: no article requires more attention than another. The effect of this writing is to nullify the force of successiveness and to make the details appear to compose themselves as a picture. Even the words which stand out as fancy writing—“pendant” and “elongate” and “chimeric”—are such as to allow themselves to be assimilated without fuss to the parataxis. They are subdued to the reign of and. The governing motif is given as a phrase, itself picturesque: “some misweave in the weft of things.”

Some students felt that McCarthy's high style, even with the examples of Melville, Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Faulkner to warrant it, is pretentious. They said of a few passages: “That is English or American speech, written as if it were Spanish.” Anticipating that someone would mention gongorism, gongorismo, “a style in imitation of the ornate style of Góngora y Argote 1561-1627,” as the dictionaries say, I suggested that this would have its own felicity in a writer dealing, as McCarthy does, with Spanish-speaking Mexicans as well as gringos. I defended many, most, nearly all of McCarthy's high passages by noting how much they have to do. They have to speak for characters who cannot speak as eloquently for themselves—as in All the Pretty Horses: “He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a seanet. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”

He didn't contemplate any of these things; McCarthy contemplated them for him: it is a common predicament for novelists who know more than their characters know. Or who have heavier duties. McCarthy's styles have to speak up for values the characters could not express—for regions, places, landscapes, vistas, movements of the seasons, trees, rain, snow, dawn, sunset, outer and inner weather; and for time not our time. For such purposes McCarthy commands many styles and dictions. Reading these novels, I was often lost among unfamiliar words, like the mercenary with suzerain. In Suttree alone I was grounded by these and had to go to the dictionaries: mordant (a reagent for fixing dyes), muricate (covered with many short spikes, and therefore used by McCarthy of Christ's crown of thorns), trematode (a kind of worm), soricine (of a shrewmouse), and tribades (lesbians: “the sometime cries of buckled tribades in the hours toward dawn when trade was done”). Most of these are in the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, more useful than the Oxford English Dictionary when one is reading McCarthy's fiction. The hard words are always accurately used, I gather from the dictionaries; and they help McCarthy to control the pace of one's reading and therefore the duration and quality of the attention one pays. A hard word slows you down, keeps you looking.

It may appear that Blood Meridian is a post-Nietzschean fiction expressing what Lionel Trilling calls “the bitter line of hostility to civilization” that runs through modern literature. In Beyond Culture Trilling comments on the books he chose for a course in modern literature for undergraduates at Columbia College. His choice was perhaps an odd one. He prescribed several books that might be thought of as prologomena to modern literature rather than as exemplifications of it: The Golden Bough, The Birth of Tragedy, The Genealogy of Morals, Civilization and Its Discontents leading to “Notes from Underground,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” “Disorder and Early Death,” and “Heart of Darkness.” Not surprisingly Trilling claimed that “nothing is more characteristic of modern literature than its discovery and canonization of the primal, non-ethical energies.” Referring to Mann's assertion that the chief intention of modern literature is to escape from the middle class, Trilling extended it to cover “freedom from society itself.”

Blood Meridian, it might be thought, would be a fit text for such a course as Trilling's: this novel appears to give privilege to the primal, nonethical energies; it virtually ignores the values of civilization and society; and it seems to endorse Nietzsche's claim that art rather than ethics constitutes the essential metaphysical activity of man. “The dance” may be thought to be another name for the dionysian revel. So much is clear. But Nietzsche is Judge Holden's philosopher, not McCarthy's. Blood Meridian subsumes far more of Western thought than the judge's allusions to Nietzsche would suggest: it invokes mystical, hermetic, and antinomian traditions. Indeed the only traditions to which it refuses credence are those of the Enlightenment and of Christianity.

The experience of reading Blood Meridian is likely to be, for most of us, peculiarly intense and yet wayward. The novel demands that we imagine forces in the world and in ourselves that the Enlightenment and Christianity, rarely in agreement on other issues, encourage us to think we have outgrown. We have not outgrown them, the book challenges us to admit. These forces are primordial and unregenerate: they have not been assimilated to the consensus of modern culture or to the forms of dissent which that consensus recognizes and to some extent accepts. They are outside the law. The difficult beauty of McCarthy's run-on sentences arises from the conflict between these dire forces and the traditions of epic, tragedy, elegy, and lyric which have been devised to appease them. Or to sequester them, if they cannot be appeased.