SOURCE: Eddins, Dwight. “‘Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted’: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Critique 45, no. 1 (fall 2003): 25-33.

[In the following essay, Eddins uses the philosophical theories of Arthur Schopenhauer to examine the aesthetics of Blood Meridian.]

The great novelists of modern times have tended to be those whose visions estrange us from our familiar world to bring us back to it with unique new perspectives and an expanded sense of the human domain. Joyce, Faulkner, Mann, and Pynchon—to take four prominent examples—all destabilize and unsettle to construct an enhanced reality. Their subversion can be either epistemological or ontological or both; it may problematize the ways in which we construct reality or else problematize the very modes of being by which we define that reality. In practice, as Brian McHale notes, these two problematics tend to blur into each other:

[I]ntractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological questions far enough and they “tip over” into ontological questions. By the same token, push ontological questions far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions—the sequence is not linear and unidirectional, but bidirectional and reversible.

(11)

From the beginning, Cormac McCarthy has been a master practitioner of this calculated estrangement. He dramatizes the seemingly inhuman extremes of the human condition amid the seemingly unnatural presentness of natural landscapes even as he questions the very possibility of reconciling these discrepancies into a coherent picture. The onto-epistemological problematic of this drama becomes most explicit and intense in Blood Meridian, where at times an alien order of being seems to impinge on quotidian reality. Partly in response to that, the scholarly commentary on this novel has tended to be of a wider philosophical and religious scope than that on McCarthy's other novels. Several studies bear directly on this problem. Steven Shaviro notes how the “incessant fluid displacement” of the novel's prose upsets “our usual distinctions between subjective and objective, between literal and figurative, or between empirical description and speculative reflection” (152). Both Leo Daughtery and Rick Wallach invoke the dualistic ontology and the arcane epistemology of ancient Gnosticism to explain the ubiquitous evil of the novel's world and the uncertainty of what Wallach calls the “in vivo ontic status,” the questionable “whatness,” of Judge Holden (125, 126). But Wallach ends up figuring the judge in Derridean terms as “the dance of writing's simultaneous creation and effacement of meaning” (134).

I would like to add Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy to this mix, not only because the categories and dynamics of his system provide some illuminating paradigms but also because his basic world view has such affinity with the novel's prevailing vision. First, however, an apologia for bringing a dualistic metaphysic to bear on a writer more generally regarded as the practitioner of a sternly monistic realism. It is important to note as a starting point that McCarthy's onto-epistemological subversions are woven into his fictions with such ingenious subtlety that the narrative retains its base in a prevailing realism. Eschewing both the overt epistemological constructivism of Faulkner and Joyce and the overt ontological constructivism of Barth and Pynchon, these novels answer more or less to the letter if not the spirit of the criteria set forth by J. P. Stern in On Realism. Realistic fictions, says Stern, “are erected on firm ground which reveals no epistemological cracks, and […] when such cracks appear, they are not explored but transformed into the psychology of characters: realism doesn't ask whether the world is real. […] what it implicitly denies is that in this world there is more than one reality, and that this denial is in need of proof” (31, 54); and, again, “Ontology is not his [the realistic novelist's] business” (112).

The primordial forcefulness of McCarthy's vision in Blood Meridian, however, puts unusual strains upon “realism” as a category. Unchecked by moral or social proprieties, bursting with apocalyptic violence of every imaginable (and unimaginable) variety, the book's driven narrative strains downward into the rawest physicalities of literary naturalism and upward—I argue—toward a metaphysical limbo beyond physical limitations. Tracing the first of these vectors, Barclay Owens devotes a whole chapter of his recent book on McCarthy's Western novels to presenting Blood Meridian as the apotheosis of the American naturalistic tradition. Owens emphasizes the unbridled Darwinian competitiveness, the animal savagery, and the grotesquerie of the novel's protagonists, as well as their apish inarticulateness; and he convincingly places these phenomena in a tradition that stretches from Stephen Crane through James Dickey. This vision of a primordial reality demonstrates, for Vereen Bell, the “antimetaphysical bias” of McCarthy's novels up through Blood Meridian, a bias that “binds” the reader to a purely “phenomenal world” with “no first principles, no foundational truth” (2, 9).

Bell is certainly correct in denying the presence of any doctrinaire ideology behind McCarthy's narrations. I, however, argue that an “antimetaphysical bias” is itself a metaphysical position in the more general sense of that word and that the resistance to signification, the sheer opacity of being with which McCarthy's elemental realm presents us, effects an onto-epistemological destabilizing that hints at the mysterious working of principles and truths yet undiscovered, perhaps undiscoverable. Bell, in a sense, admits as much when he points out that the novels “appear […] to resist abstraction on purpose and to move instead toward some more primal epistemology, toward a knowledge of origins before a bicameral brain enabled us—or compelled us—to begin to sort things out” (2). But to move away from our brain's “sorting-out” process is to move, in Kantian terms, away from the realm of apparitional phenomena in the direction of the noumenal, of unmediated things-in-themselves; and it is this antinomy, suitably modified, that serves as the basis for Schopenhauer's metaphysic.

From a different angle, Bell suggests that those passages in which we might suspect McCarthy of being more metaphysical, his occasional “labored and latinate” flights of prose poetry with their “high ratio of metaphor,” function to “keep us from subsiding into a merely naturalistic perceptual realm. They keep a dreamlike, almost symbolist, pressure of meaning, or meaningfulness, alive in the text.” J. P. Stern glosses this swerve away from the “middle distance” of realism “toward symbolism” as one in which the author “allows the meaning to exceed the concrete details, underscoring their intimatory function at the expense of their referential function” (121, 122). But if intimations of meaning exceed the physical evidence, pushing us beyond the naturalistic realm, we are experiencing a quasitranscendental pressure that at least calls into question that realm's monistic claim to be the only realm and opens the door to some sort of dualistic possibility.

All of this, I hope it will be clear, is in the service of presenting Schopenhauer's philosophy as an explicatory parallel for Blood Meridian, not of presenting McCarthy as a belated Idealist philosopher. Consider, as a prephilosophical starting point, how Schopenhauer's meditation on “the observable life of animals,” for instance, could just as well apply to the observable life of the Glanton gang:

[W]e see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need, and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula seculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks.

(World 2: 354)

The parallel is significant because both the novel and the philosophy represent this state of things as the prevailing nature of existence, not as an abominable extreme. Incessant and often gratuitous warfare without quarter, babies spiked on thornbushes, mules and puppies slaughtered on a whim—the indiscriminate and endlessly repetitive carnage seems to belong to the ground of being itself, as for Schopenhauer in fact it does. This ground he characterizes as der Wille—the Will. It is a mindless, ceaseless striving of energies, a blind vortex of creation and destruction without goals. Because we are forced to view its phenomena, including ourselves, under the categories of space and time, we cannot have direct knowledge of it except through our intuitions of its working within us. Although Schopenhauer does not, despite popular misconceptions of his idealism, deny the reality of our experienced world, he conceives of that world as an apparitional representation of the Will—“apparitional” in the sense of being a mere appearance determined by space and time. We are reminded here of the verdict of Blood Meridian's Judge Holden on the world: it is “a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue or precedent” (245).

In the context I am seeking to establish here, “apparitional” describes the phenomenon—the person, the landscape, the event—insofar as it represents and points back toward the noumenon, the primal will that is its underlying reality. It is as though the phenomenon is wavering between an illusory concreteness and an actual insubstantiality. Cormac McCarthy introduces just such an ontological ambiguity into Blood Meridian to suggest a mysterious order of being of which the personae are emanations and a quasitranscendental agenda of some sort behind the pattern of events. This dynamic permeates the novel. Glanton and his men appear as “ordained agents of the actual […]. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings evoked out of the absolute rock and set at no remove from their own loomings” (172). At night amid “sourceless summer lightning,” they watch “halfwild horses” trotting “in those bluish strobes like horses called forth quivering from the abyss” and in the day they look out on “the secular aloes blooming like phantasmagoria in a fever land” (163). But McCarthy's virtuoso set piece in this vein is a description of the attacking Apaches who become fodder for a wild metamorphic rhapsody that captures the protean energies of the will itself in all their cosmic menace:

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.

(109)

It is instructive to read this as a drama of the will's materialization and dematerialization. The coupling of Hindu and Greek mythology here—“avatars” and “chimeric”—reminds us that the former term can refer to the appearance of a deity in animal form and suggests that the ground of being, more directly intuited, might appear as a chimera, that monstrous hybrid of predation. More directly yet, the cries of the disembodied souls break through “some misweave in the weft of things” in an impossible moment of transcendental horror, the revelation of the unmediated will. This notion that human violence is inextricable from, even ordained by, its macrocosmic context is captured by the link between the path of Glanton's marauding riders and “the movements of the earth itself.” The “cloudbanks stood above the mountains,” writes McCarthy, “like the dark warp of the very firmament and the starsprent reaches of the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders' heads” (153-54).

This violence also has a microcosmic context suggestive of the will's ubiquity and uniformity. Like William Blake, McCarthy can see the world in a grain of sand, but the reflection does not lead the latter to mystic optimism. Passing over a stretch of “alabaster sand,” the hooves of the riders' horses shape it into pulsating whorls “[a]s if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the utmost granulation of reality” (247). Immediately afterward, the riders pass through terrain characterized by a “neuter austerity” in which “all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality” so that “a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.” Both the notion of a quasiconsciousness present even at the mineral level and that of the ontological equality of nature's phenomena fit nicely into Schopenhauer's concept of a monistic, universal force field responsible for the status and the dynamism of all existence.

This inspiriting, which pervades the novel's landscapes, becomes epiphanic in the description of the sea at San Diego, the terminus of the evening redness in the west: the sea is “teething” on a reef as it heaves its “black hide,” and its combers lope “out of the night” (304). A horse, gifted with what we might call a sixth sense, stands staring into the macrocosmic vortex of being “out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” This all-devouring, “seamless” force field has an absoluteness about it, a menacing primacy that aligns it with the noumenal will, as does—in its own way—the desert the judge describes to the kid: “This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone” (330).

Although all the grades of the will's objectification—from forces like gravity and electromagnetism through minerals, plants, animals, and humankind—exist in a unity that Schopenhauer calls “reciprocal adaptation and adjustment,” they exist as well in “an inner antagonism” that is also the very essence of the will. This antagonism shows itself, in Schopenhauer's words, “in the never-ending war of extermination of the individuals of these species, and in the constant struggle of the phenomena of these natural forces with one another […]. The scene of action and the object of this conflict is matter that they strive to wrest from one another, as well as space and time, the union of which through the form of causality is really matter” (World 1: 161).

The wresting of space and time from other phenomena in acts of conscienceless appropriation is precisely the driving force of the novel's violent excesses—the murder of infants, the slicing of scalps from heads, the ripping out of viscera and genitals, the systematic crucifixions. That these excesses in their multiple permutations and their frequency threaten to coalesce into some awful norm within the world of the novel is yet another sign that that microcosm is predicated upon a ruthless, unstinting belligerence deep in the essence of things. It is not simply human-on-human predation. “Every grade of the will's objectification,” says Schopenhauer, “fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another. Persistent matter must change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, each striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another” (World I: 146-47). Thus it is that Judge Holden, the prince of appropriators, wanders the landscape drowning puppies, killing birds and butterflies to collect them, cracking open the shinbone of an antelope with an axe to watch the heated marrow drip on the stones. We also find him destroying artifacts of Indian and Spanish culture after he has made notes on them, with the aim of expunging them—along with the notes—“from the memory of man” (140). In Schopenhauerian terms, this megalomaniacal drive for sole proprietorship comes from the will being present, “whole and undivided,” in each of its phenomena: “Therefore, everyone wants everything for himself, wants to possess, or at least control, everything, and would like to destroy whatever opposes him” (332). This drive extends even to—especially to—mental appropriation, because “the whole of nature outside the knowing subject” exists “only in his representation.”

Glanton, too, is driven by this bizarre ontological imperative deep in the Schopenhauerian scheme of things: the part unwilling to acknowledge that it is anything less than the whole, the pawn of fate intent on usurping the role of its manipulator. Like the will,

he was complete at every hour. [… A]llowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

(243)

Individual willfulness here, as so often in the novel, acquires a force and a cosmic dimension that make the notion of will as the ground of being a natural corollary.

The judge, of course, is the most complex incarnation and symbol of this metaphysical hubris. He feels compelled to search out, analyze, and file in his own consciousness all seemingly autonomous phenomena, in keeping with his principle that “[w]hatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” and that “nothing must be permitted to occur […] save by my dispensation” (198, 199). This cosmic pretension represents a daring artistic risk for Cormac McCarthy because his character must embody human limitations even as he suggests a mysterious transcendence of them. One remembers Thomas Hardy's Father Time in Jude the Obscure—another Schopenhauerian spokesman—floating uneasily between childhood and symbolhood. But McCarthy's risk succeeds more clearly, partly because he knows when to apply negative capability and partly because the metaphysical dynamic underlying the novel's world permits—as we have seen—of an ontological dialectic. The judge, like the other riders, wavers between phenomenon and noumenon, between embodiment and the primal force field that is embodied. But he is, in his cosmic dimension, more clearly identified with the will.

In this light, the feverish dream of the kid in San Diego has particular import: “Whatever his [the judge's] antecedents he was something other than their sum, nor was there system to divide him back into his origins, for he would not go” (309-10). The quest for his history ends up, says McCarthy, “at the shore of a void without terminus or origin,” while science examining “the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will find no trace of any atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.” This transcendental absence of origins is matched by a projected absence of conclusion and of rest from restless motion in between: “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). Compare this with Schopenhauer on the will: “[t]he will never tires, never grows old [… and] is in infancy what it is in old age, eternally one and the same” (“Will” 247). It is “[e]ternal becoming, endless flux” (World I: 164).

In its metaphysical dimension, then, the character of the judge suggests the will's transcendental status; but in its human dimension, ironically, it suggests a transcending of this transcendence. For Schopenhauer, the marvel of the human intellect is that it can detach itself from the will's relentless imperatives occasionally and contemplate disinterestedly what he calls the “Ideas” of phenomena. Even when these phenomena are particularly threatening to the human will of the contemplator—say, a typical day at the office in Blood Meridian—he may, in Schopenhauer's words, “forcibly tear himself from his will and its relations, and […] quietly contemplate, as pure, will-less subject of knowing, those very objects so terrible to the will. [… H]e is then filled with the feeling of the sublime” (World I: 201).

Only the judge among the riders actually occupies this detached aesthetic plateau vis-à-vis the unremitting violence of their existence; the others remain subject to what Schopenhauer calls “the principle of sufficient reason”—an immediate concern with “the where, the when, the why, and the whither” of phenomena as they relate to one's own will (World I: 178). The judge, on the other hand, construes the perpetual warfare of existence alternately as an exhilarating game—“Men are born for games. [… a]ll games aspire to the condition of war” (249)—and as a dance enjoyed only by those who have delivered themselves “entire to the blood of war” (331). To be fair, this is the point at which Schopenhauerian resignation to bellum omnium shades over into Nietzschean celebration in the spirit of Zarathustra: “You should love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long. […] You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause” (47). But it is also worth remembering that Nietzsche acknowledged Schopenhauer as the seminal influence in his own philosophical development and that Schopenhauer's Wille is the clear precursor of the younger philosopher's Wille zur Macht.

Finally, I suggest that Schopenhauer's explanation of the dynamics involved in the experience of the sublime helps us understand the problematical aesthetic of Blood Meridian. Many sophisticated readers surely alternate, at least the first time through, between awe at the sumptuous prose and the haunting vignettes and visceral revulsion at the heinous atrocities unremittingly depicted in them. Peter Josyph describes this bifurcated reaction on his own part, as well as the reaction of a friend who judged that McCarthy was a literary genius and “also probably somewhat insane” (176). The problem is that the sublime detachment created by forcibly tearing away from the will's pressures with the fear and loathing they induce is sporadically reciprocated by the reattachment of those pressures as the threat grows too formidable and immediate to transcend. To adopt the terms used by Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, the static experience of art gives way to the kinetic experience of actualities, even if the latter are imaginary in origin. In its way, this reaction represents an inverted tribute to McCarthy's power to overwhelm our imaginations, just as the will itself does. It is amusing to speculate that McCarthy is the will in some literary modality. It then follows that El Paso is the epicenter of imaginative creation, the matrix for a world of infinitely diverting—and threatening—representations.

Works Cited

Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993.

Bell, Vereen. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988.

Daughtery, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” Arnold and Luce 157-72.

Hall, Wade and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995.

Josyph, Peter. “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian.” Hall and Wallach 169-88.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Ecco, 1986.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1966.

Owens, Barclay. Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. “The Will in Nature.” Two Essays by Arthur Schopenhauer. Trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand. London: George Bell, 1889.

———. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969.

Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness.’” Arnold and Luce 143-56.

Stern, J. P. On Realism. London: Routledge, 1973.

Wallach, Rick. “Judge Holden: Blood Meridian's Evil Archon.” Hall and Wallach 125-36.