SOURCE: Mitchell, Jason P. “Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and the (De)Mythologizing of the American West.” Critique 41, no. 3 (spring 2000): 290-304.

[In the following essay comparing Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Mitchell argues that, despite the surface dissimilarities between the two books, they are both borne from the myths of the American West which they ultimately refute.]

“Fighting; his way with knife and gun,” the Texas cowboy was evolved, a fearless rider, a workman of sublime self-confidence, unequaled in the technique and tricks of “cowpunching,” the most accurate on the trigger and the last to leave untasted the glass which the bartender silently refilled. When the northern trails became an institution the Texan was trail-boss and straw-boss; and as boss he was a dictator. As an underling he was not so successful in the north; with a Yankee boss, or worse yet an Englishman, he cherished a studied disregard for authority, and an assured satisfaction in the superiority of is own ways. His loyalty to his profession made him willing to do any amount of work in the line of duty; but he would have defended with his gun his right to sing as he rode:

Oh, I am a Texas cowboy.
Far away from home.
If I ever get back to Texas
I never more will roam.

—Douglas Branch, The Cowboy and his Interpreters, 1926 (16)

They believed in a Great Spirit, a power superior to all others, but it was a belief very much corrupted by superstitious additions of special deities […] In place of priests there were “medicine men” and sorcerers, professed dreamers and interpreters of dreams. If an Indian was sick, the doctor would often give his patient […] a severe bite, sufficient to make blood flow, [and then] he would exhibit with triumph any little thing, as a bit of wood or bone, which he had hidden in his mouth, but which he would claim to be the cause of the disease that he had now happily frightened away.

—Joseph W. Leeds, A History of the United States, 1877 (36)

From the establishment of Jamestown until the disappearance of the last American frontier, the white intruders generally dealt ruthlessly with the Indians. [… G]enerally, relations between the two races tended to fall within a vicious circle. First border squatters would venture within the Indian country and establish their cabins here and there. These would be raided by angry Indians; and, in turn, the settlers would retaliate. Then an Indian war would follow in which the whites would be successful and force the red men to relinquish the squatter-occupied area. Settlers would now rush into the ceded district, and once again squatters, seeking “elbow room,” would encroach on Indian lands, and the process would be repeated.

—Leroy Hafen and Carl Rister, Western America: The Exploration, Settlement, and Development of the Region Beyond the Mississippi, 1941 (83)

Died: Louis L'Amour, 80, virtuoso of Old West storytelling whose 101 briskly paced books of the American frontier won a worldwide following (almost 200 million copies in circulation).

—Time, June 27, 1988 (54)

The Heroic West is easily American culture's most cherished myth, created and fortified for generations of Americans by films, popular fiction, and countless history textbooks. In this popular conception, the West was originally a land inhabited only by the unworthy (and “superstitious”), which God in his Manifest Destiny gave to the deserving. Those who happened to be there already were, as one textbook refers to them, “the Indian Barrier” blocking “the Rancher's Frontier.” Now, for some time there has been a tendency to debunk the myth of American settlement in general and the westward expansion in particular. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which demythologizes American expansion into the West through the horrific deeds of the Glanton gang, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, which treats the expansions aftermath as typified in the bleak, fragmented lives of modern reservation Chippewa, represent part of that trend.

CONSTRUCTING (AND DECONSTRUCTING) THE COWBOY

1. A cowboy never takes unfair advantage.
2. A cowboy never betrays a trust.
3. A cowboy always tells the truth.
4. A cowboy is kind to small children, to old folks, and to animals.
5. A cowboy is free from racial and religious prejudice.
6. A cowboy is helpful and when anyone's in trouble he lends a hand.
7. A cowboy is a good worker.
8. A cowboy is clean about his person and in thought, word, and deed.
9. A cowboy respects womanhood, his parents, and the laws of his country.
10. A cowboy is a patriot.

The process that transformed the frontiersman from comic or even contemptible figure portrayed in the work of the humorists of the old Southwest to a heroic exemplification of American virtue had some unexpected motivators. One was the popularity in the early nineteenth century of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, which “created a taste here both for local-color writing and for a body of historical fiction celebrating patriotic subjects and native scenes” (Zanger 14). Another was the popular reputation of Andrew Jackson, first as Indian fighter and then as president. In addition, many popular biographies of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett appeared in those years (Zanger 142). The most direct source, however, of the present-day cowboy is James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking character. Henry Nash Smith, on examining 79 earlier dime novels dealing with the West (some of which he found “unreadable even under the urging of scientific curiosity”) learned that “forty contain one or more hunters or trappers whose age, costume, weapons, and general functions entitle them to be considered lineal descendants” of Leatherstocking (95). However, the appearance in the popular consciousness of Native Americans as stock villains rendered the Leatherstocking type problematic because his sympathies were generally with the Native Americans, whose knowledge of the woods he shared. The decline in Leatherstocking's popularity created a need admirably filled by the cowboy (Smith 95-96). He first appeared in modern form as Deadwood Dick, the protagonist of Edward L. Wheeler's enormously popular series of tales (Smith 99).

Perhaps no single individual had as much influence on the creation of the cowboy myth as Erastus Beadle, marketer of “dime novels.” Beginning in 1860, Beadle's company issued more than three hundred titles (Smith 90). One, Seth Jones, sold more than 400,000 copies, a phenomenon by nineteenth-century standards; Beadle's total sales were nearly 5 million volumes (Smith 91). The market for such works was apparently unlimited. One writer, Ned Buntline, whom Smith describes as “the patriarch of blood-and-thunder romancers” (103), is believed to have written 1,700 dime novels (Lejeune 24). Buntline's biography of Buffalo Bill, first published in serial form in 1869, was still available from Sears, Roebuck as late as 1928 (Smith 104).

The transformation is striking: from buffoon to Leatherstocking to Buffalo Bill. Given the power and popularity of the cowboy myth, it is not surprising that new technologies continued Beadle's work. The first narrative film, made in 1903, was a Western, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (Maynard 55). Fenin and Everson assert that “American western literature would have remained confined to the limited domains of folklore and a narrow literary genre, or, at best, to the specialized field of history if the birth of motion pictures had not exerted the stupendous verdict of its own possibilities” (57). In the years since The Great Train Robbery, the Western has remained a perennial favorite of both film and television audiences. Its popularity waned at some points—during the Depression and the Vietnam War—but the Western thrives today, though in a modified form (Scott A18; Slotkin 254).

Why the enduring American fascination with the Western myth? What need does the idealized cowboy fulfill? Fenin and Everson see the issue in a broader mythological context:

The frontier is, in fact, the only mythological tissue available to this young nation. […] The cowboy on horseback shapes into the fabulous Centaurus, guardian of a newly acquired legend; the woman—whose presence is biologically sought in the frontier town—becomes a sort of Minerva […]; Marshal Wyatt Earp's exploits come strikingly close to the labors of Hercules, while William Frederick Cody's (Buffalo Bill) and Wild Bill Hickok's struggles with Indians and “badmen” are often recognized as modern versions of the classic heroes. The massacre of the Seventh Cavalry at Little Big Horn carries the seed of fatality bearing down upon Oedipus, and “Remember the Alamo!” reminds us of Thermopylae.

Above this epic looms the pathos of the fight between good and evil so dear to Anglo-Saxon hearts, a theme that finds its highest literary expression in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

(56)

The cowboy, then, serves for Americans the same purpose as Hercules did for the Greeks and Beowulf for the Anglo-Saxons. Witness the ways in which we have made the cowboy the exemplar of the American. His home, in the words of a Denver journalist and amateur poet, was “Out where the handclasp's a little stronger, / Out where the smile dwells a little longer” (Lejeune 24). In its popular conception, the West undeniably remains “fused in the popular mind with such notions as freedom, opportunity, self-sufficiency, a better life” (Zanger 146).

Slotkin argues that interest in the Western myth is tied to larger social trends. Commenting on the recent resurgence of interest in the West, he observes that

[a]s a nation, we are reassessing some very basic questions about race, gender, class, family, what the role of government should be in our lives, where we think we are going as a society. […] At such moments of crisis, any culture goes back to its traditions, its myths. It takes them all out of storage and dusts them off and looks them over again. And, hopefully, it rewrites them.

(Scott A1)

In recent years, the position of the Western myth has been quite paradoxical; it has come under assault precisely when all things Western are attracting new interest. Dealers in vintage boots and clothing cannot keep up with demand; films such as Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Tombstone, and Wyatt Earp have been popularly and critically acclaimed, and the highest-rated show ever on the Arts and Entertainment network was called The Real West (Scott A1, 18). Even cowboy poetry has achieved new popularity; one collection published in the early 1980s has sold over ninety thousand copies, an incredible number for any book of verse (Scott A18). However, the re-examination of the Western myth continues, linked to the larger trend of historical revisionism. Recent historians of the West “favor […] a more critical view of Western expansion and an exploration of the roles of American Indians, Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and women.” In the process, they have “have unearthed a wealth of new stories” that have found their way into the popular media (Scott A18).

The results have been surprising; one Western writer, Win Blevins, “has included gay main characters in his past three books” (Charlier B1). However, as further testimony to the Western myth's enduring power, the political Right sees those revisionist books and films as a new front in its Kulturkampf. Decrying the “new” Westerns, Anthony Lejeune, writing in the National Review, argues:

A nation which loses its myths is in danger of losing its soul. Just as the legends of King Arthur were “the Matter of Britain,” so Westerns have been the Matter of America; which is why what's happened to the Western is no trivial affair.

(23)

For Lejeune, “what's happened to the Western” is the work of liberals:

In old Westerns, as in the old West, there were no scruples about racism. […] But in the 1950s the doctrine of progress collided with a newer fashion. To the question, “When are the Indians going to win a battle?” the traditional answer was, “When Indians make the movies.” The actual answer turned out to be, “When liberals make the movies.” Almost overnight, ruthless redskins were transformed into an oppressed Third World people.

(25)

For Lejeune, opposition to racism, then, is a fashion. He goes on to remind his reader that “[n]oble savages have had their role ever since Fenimore Cooper, but because Westerns were an epic of the pioneer and the settler, Indians were primarily a threat and an obstacle” (25). In that golden age, there was none of “what Dr. Johnson called ‘counting in favor of savages’” (25). The result: “[t]he Indian-loving stance of Broken Arrow, which had seemed such a novelty in 1950, became the new cliché” (25).

Another writer, Hertha Lund, goes further than even Lejeune; she sees the hand of the collectivist at work in the reappraisal of the West:

Our country was founded on the sort of “can-do” spirit that our cowboys exemplify. If they are put out of work by the bureaucratic centralizers, we will have lost a lot more than a picturesque image out of our past.

(26)

In short, for her, concern for historical accuracy and sensitivity to issues of race are nothing more than liberal cliches that lead to bad filmmaking and, given enough time, to totalitarianism. Other reactions to the “new” Western have been similar to Lejeune's, though perhaps more delicately phrased; they do not speak of “savages” and “redskins.” Ann Hulbert, writing in The New Republic, dismisses popular interest in Love Medicine as another example of “hick chic” (25), a yuppie fascination with the rural; she identifies Erdrich as a leading “hick writer” (27). In response to recent innovations, Chet Cunningham, author of traditional Westerns, says, “I believe you've got to dance with the girl you brought” (Charlier B1). Tom Doherty of St. Martin's Press observes that “this country wants to see greatness. It doesn't want to know that cowboys were just migrant farm workers” (Charlier B5).

LOVE MEDICINE IN CONTEXT

Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: “There were these two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friends cheered and their parents' eyes shone with pride. ‘You were very brave,’ everybody said to the two Indians boys. ‘Very brave.’”

—Sherman Alexie, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” (109)

Love Medicine and Blood Meridian are such different books that there might seem to be no reasons for comparing them. They are set in separate centuries and regions, are vastly different aesthetically, and certainly have different aims. Blood Meridian is, in structure, style, and subject, a fairly traditional nineteenth-century novel; Love Medicine on the other hand, is highly unconventional, not a novel at all in the usual sense of the work, but much like Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. However, both works are reactions against the powerful myth of the American West.

The process of demythologizing the West gained strength in the 1960s, but the epigraph from Hafen and Rister attests that as early as the 1940s even mainstream scholars, looking back on the era of the frontier, seriously questioned the myths. In this, however, they were speaking from a tension regarding the proper treatment of the Native Americans, dating to the 1880s, once simply moving them further west was no longer possible. On one side, were men such as Nelson A. Miles, who in 1879 advocated placing Native Americans under the control of the military on the grounds that “it is useless to suppose that thousands of wild savages thoroughly armed and mounted can be controlled by moral suasion” (in Ridge and Billington 584). Opposing were the views of Helen Hunt Jackson, set forth in A Century of Dishonor, which recounted the United States government's history of broken treaties and violence in dealing with the American Indians and proposed extending citizenship to Indians and educating them into the mainstream (in Ridge and Billington 585-6). Jackson's view won out. In 1881 President Chester A. Arthur proposed, among other measures, granting American Indians citizenship and individual plots of land so that they might “be persuaded to sever their tribal relations and to engage at once in agricultural pursuits” (in Ridge and Billington 588). The phrase “sever their tribal relations” is crucial, because the humanitarian answer to the Indian question was often referred to as “killing the Indian to save the man,” that is, making the Native American more white to overcome a white “aversion which it is almost impossible to dislodge or soften” (in Ridge and Billington 585).

Erdrich's Love Medicine illustrates the effects of that policy. Her characters over roughly a fifty-year period are seen grappling with the contradictory effects of this effort to, on the one hand, isolate the Native Americans on reservations, and on the other, make “regular” Americans of them. The Morrisseys, Kashpaws, Lamartines, Lazarres, and others must define their relations to alien religions, customs, economic realities, and family and social structures. Over their struggle hangs a pall of alcoholism and despair.

The conflict between the “new” religion and racial identity is seen most clearly through Marie, who explains her decision to go to the convent, thusly:

I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could. Because I don't have that much Indian blood. And they never thought they'd have a girl from this reservation as a saint they'd have to kneel to. But they'd have me. And I'd be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean shells, which they would have to stoop down off their high horse to kiss.

(43)

Marie's sense of conflict is clear. Although she is at least partly motivated by the thought of the nuns having to accept an Indian as a saint, she must also reassure herself that she is only barely an Indian. She freely admits that when she was young her primary attraction to Catholicism was not religious faith:

I had the mail-order Catholic soul you get in a girl raised out in the bush, whose only thought is getting into town. For Sunday Mass was the only time my aunt brought us children in except for school, when we were harnessed. Our soul went cheap. We were so anxious to get there that we would have walked in on our hands and knees.

(44)

Years later, Marie compares her faith in the nuns to that of the “bush Indians who stole the holy black hat of a Jesuit and swallowed little scraps of it to cure their fevers. But the hat itself carried smallpox and was killing them with belief” (45). Nevertheless, Marie cannot escape Catholicism; her remarks about “the mail-order Catholic soul” seem an attempt at reassurance. Years later, the scar on Marie's hand, left by Sister Leopolda's bread poker, still “ache[s] on Good Friday” (146). Marie is enough of a Catholic to recognize Sister Leopolda's attempts at sainthood as motivated by vanity, but when she scalds herself while canning apples, Marie cries, “‘Damn buzzard’ […], as if she'd done it. And she might have. Who knew how far the influence spread?” (148). The reader might well ask the same question.

The conflict between old and new beliefs recurs; Lyman Lamartine, who prides himself on his hard-nosed approach to life and considers himself superior to those who refuse to modernize, still fears for the soul of his brother Henry, for “[t]he old ones say a Chippewa won't rest if he's drowned” (298). Despite his best efforts, the beliefs of the older faith with which he was raised prove powerful for him and others. The “more devout Catholic Indians crossed their breasts when a Pillager happened to look straight at them,” “so dark” was their medicine (312). Marie says of Fleur: “[T]he Pillager was living back there with no lights, she was living with spirits. [… she] scorned the nuns as they scorned her, visited the priest. She made no confession, though some said Father Damien Modeste confessed his sins to her” (101). In the midst of her difficult delivery, Marie summons not the priest or the doctor, but Fleur, for “she knew the medicines” (101). We find the conflict between new and old religious beliefs even in Love Medicine's imagery.¹ June's Easter death is described in explicitly Christian terms: “[T]he pure and naked part of her went on. The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home” (7). To most readers, “home” suggests heaven, but as Rainwater observes, “June's ‘home’ might not be a Christian heaven but instead the reservation, where her spirit, according to Native American beliefs, mingles with the living and carries out unfinished business” (408). Love Medicine's characters contend with Catholicism in differing ways, but even for those who believe strongly, the Roman faith is a structure built on an older one whose foundations remain visible.

The same is true of new economic and social structures. Lyman's acceptance of the capitalist ideal seems complete, quite natural: “My one talent was I could always make money. I had a touch for it, unusual in a Chippewa” (181). He is willing to use his heritage for profit, opening a factory to produce such items as a souvenir tomahawk, which he describes as

[a]n attractive framed symbol of America's past. Perfect for the home or office. A great addition to the sportsman's den. All authentic designs and child-safe materials. Crafted under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Anishinabe Enterprise, Inc. Hand produced by Tribal Members.

(310)

His mother, however, dismisses the products as ka-ka and predicts that the workers will walk out soon, for “they'll look at the junk they're making. They'll look at what's in their hands” (314). And that's what happens.

The factory causes another conflict by subordinating personal relations to economic concerns. The older belief of absolute respect for elders, exemplified in Marie's willingness to care for Rushes Bear, despite their earlier enmity, falls quickly in the new setting. Lyman, tired of his mother's reproaches, fires her in “a sweep of inspiration” (313). Shortly after, Lyman finds Marie sitting in the employee lounge, and his “nerves suddenly twanged like a banjo.”

“Why the hell aren't you on the line”

Shame followed my words. No matter how she and my mother gossiped and planned, she was a grandmother, an elder. […] Still, at that moment she showed pity. She could have taken me down, embarrassed me, but Marie remained composed, eyes clouded.

(315)

Lyman is aware that the new economic order based on profit poses an irreconcilable conflict with family relationships. How is he to treat a wayward employee when that person, according to the older beliefs, is worthy of unquestioning respect?

Catherine Rainwater proposes that the characters of Love Medicine contend with an alien conception of time, which she terms “mechanical time,” as opposed to “ceremonial time,” which is “cyclic rather than linear, accretive rather than incremental, and makes few distinctions between momentous events and daily, ordinary events” (414-16). That would explain Love Medicine's apparent chronological haphazardness (which strikes one reviewer as evidence of Erdrich's “inexperience as a storyteller” [Lyons 71]). By beginning in the 1980s and then passing through the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70, “Erdrich's text suggests that the meanings of events and conditions in the present lie piecemeal in the endless round of time” (Rainwater 416).

The conflict between new and old conceptions of family is also crucial. Although Native American definitions of family include “various ties of friendship—including spiritual kinship and clan membership,” June and Lipsha are treated as inferiors because they are not members of a nuclear family, which is strictly a Western European institution (Rainwater 418).

Whether we examine the words and actions of Erdrich's characters as they speak for themselves or examine the book's imagery and narrative structure (as does Rainwater), it is clear that the Chippewa of Love Medicine are caught between competing systems of belief with which they must contend to create an identity. Old and new faiths flow into one another, though not quite seamlessly; even the most devoutly Catholic still fear the spirits. Traditional family forms are challenged by such alien conceptions as a for-profit enterprise and the nuclear family. Pride fights against the desire to assimilate. Such tensions are not without their cost, and Love Medicine abounds with such examples as King, a violent alcoholic married to a white woman, a man whose son prefers to be called by a name other than his father's. King, in a graphic illustration of his struggle with identity, informs on Gordie, a member of the American Indian Movement. Lipsha feels moved to join the same army that once carried out a policy of exterminating the Chippewa, then goes AWOL and becomes a fugitive like his father. Every character in Love Medicine suffers, in some way, the consequences of being a product of incompatible cultures.

BLOOD MERIDIAN IN CONTEXT

Anyone who doubts that Blood Meridian challenges traditional conceptions of the Western settlement need only consider the reaction that it elicited from conservative reviewers. J. M. Blom and F. R. Leavis, writing in English Studies, are singularly dismissive: “The unnamed ‘hero’ of the novel rides with a band of unspeakably bloodthirsty perverts and their unappetizing adventures are pushed down the reader's throat throughout the full 337 pages of the novel” (438-39). Andrew Hislop, in The New Republic, is more articulate though scarcely more favorable. He explicitly states his distress at Blood Meridian's revisionist nature by remarking that in the book “the challenge of starting society anew, epitomized by the well-scrubbed little community in Shane, is transformed into the rootless quest for blood, money, loot, and women” (37). He complains that the novel is tedious and contrived.

There are hundreds of brutal killings in this book. Dying men are sodomized, babies are strung up through their mouths and tied to trees, a tame dancing bear is shot full of holes and bleeds to death in the arms of its little girl keeper. Everyone the kid meets is either a killer, a victim, or a pervert. Everywhere he goes turns into a scene of horrible massacre or sickening degeneracy. None of this grotesquerie earns its place in the landscape, or in the kid's story.

(37)

Clearly, the Western landscape known to generations through Louis L'Amour and Gunsmoke is no place for such violence. In Hislop's opinion, McCarthy should have stuck to writing about the South: “he […] knows the lunatic, hidden places in the hearts and minds of some of the people who live there. […] McCarthy should go home, and take another, closer look. He'll find the real devil soon enough there” (38). The conflict of myths is clear; to Hislop, depravity is acceptable in the benighted South, perhaps even necessary if one is to deal accurately with the home of “the real devil,” but everyone knows that a “cowboy is kind to small children, to old folks, and to animals.” In the end, says Hislop, McCarthy's challenge to the myth that clearly holds the critic captive is nothing more than “hyperbolic violence, strained surrealism, and pseudo-philosophic palaver” (38). Those reviews, not at all atypical of Blood Meridian's reception, serve as a valuable reminder of how powerful the Western myth remains and how powerfully McCarthy has challenged it.

Blood Meridian in some interesting, although overlooked, ways is in the dime-novel tradition rather than that of later, more genteel Westerns. The violence that strikes Hislop (not unjustifiably) as “hyperbolic” calls to mind the remark of Orville Victor, Beadle's chief editor, “that when rival publishers entered the [dime-novel] field the Beadle writers merely had to kill a few more Indians” (Smith 92). The point is not that McCarthy seeks to attract more readers, as did Victor, but that the level of violence in Blood Meridian is more reminiscent of that in the later dime novel or the spaghetti Western than works in the High Noon-Shane tradition. Lurid as it might seem, the violence of Blood Meridian is vital to the novel. A massacre was a sure seller to Victor, but in the context of Blood Meridian, apparently senseless bloodshed emphasizes the novel's lack of a moral center or grounding. That point is further accentuated by the beautiful language in which sickening acts of violence and their artifacts—scalps, severed heads, a tree of dead babies—are described. Shavior observes that “Blood Meridian's gorgeous language commemorate[es] slaughter in all its sumptuousness and splendor” (111).

Blood Meridian's apparent historicity offers another parallel with the dime-novel Western. Dime novels were frequently fictionalized accounts of actual people and events, and Blood Meridian likewise makes extensive use of the historical record.² Sepich notes that John Glanton, David and C. O. Brown, and Sarah Borginnis, among others, are actual historical figures. He has traced Judge Holden to Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession, which relates Chamberlain's adventures with the Glanton gang (“Dance” 17).³ The historical relationship between Holden and Chamberlain is a probable source for that of Holden and the kid. Of the real-life Holden, Chamberlain says, “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” (“Dance” 17). Chamberlain's suspicions were justified; “this ‘gentle’ Judge is also the man who would steal Chamberlain's horse as they plodded across the desert after the massacre, shoot at him, and threaten to ‘denounce’ Chamberlain and other survivors as robbers and murderers. ‘You shall hang in California!’ he gloats in a ‘yell of triumph’” (“Dance” 17).

It is precisely in its similarities to the dime novel and to the later (Lejeune would say “decadent”) Western that Blood Meridian trangresses the Western myth. The novels extreme violence and its apparent historicity reinforce the observation that the book does not have a moral center (Kartiganer). In that regard, McCarthy has taken his predecessors a step further; in even the most formulaic novel of the 1880s or the B Western of the 1930s, good triumphs—if only after some entertaining killings. The cowboy with the white hat, whether the (considerably) embellished Buffalo Bill of Buntline's account or a Ronald Reagan character, acts violently because he is morally justified in doing so. (In High Noon, a Quaker pacifist is “redeemed” by recognizing the necessity of violence and shooting a man in the back.) Inverted, the traditional morality of the Western applies even to the most heavily revisionist Western in recent popular culture, Dances with Wolves; the moral perspective here is simply that of the Native American.

In that regard, Shaviro seems to miss the point, when he states that Blood Meridian “explode[s] the American dream of manifest destiny, of racial domination, and endless imperial expansion” (112). In what way? There is no sentimentality here; the Western settlers seem no better or worse than those they replace. The Apaches, in one of the earlier massacres, are indeed frightening in appearance alone:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of buffalo […] like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

(52-53)

So much for Rousseau's (or Costner's) noble savage. And, in this case appearances are not deceptive; on reaching the party of whites, the Apaches are seen

riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by their hair and passing their knives about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.

(54)

Those actions, however horrifying, differ little from those of the gangs with which the kid rode. In their massacre at the Gileño camp,

some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in Spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of hidden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives.

(156)

Later, the same scene is eerily reminiscent of the slaughter by the Apaches quoted above: “Men were wading about in the red waters hacking aimlessly at the dead and some lay coupled to the bludgeoned bodies of young women dead or dying on the beach” (157).

Clearly, there is no moral hierarchy in Blood Meridian, at least not of the usual sort. For the most part, we can only argue that some characters are less inclined toward cruelty than others, and even that becomes problematic. For the Judge, the kid's moral flaw is precisely his failure to “empty out his heart into the common” (307). Significantly, the efforts of the most conspicuous humanitarian in the book, Mrs. Borginnis, come to naught. Seeing James Robert Bell, the idiot, caged, naked in his own filth, she bathes and clothes him.⁴ Yet after she kissed James Robert goodnight, he was soon naked again.

shambling past the fires like a balden groundsloth. […] He went wide of the landing and stumbled through the shore willows, whimpering and pushing with his thin arms at things in the night. Then he was standing alone on the shore. […] He entered the water. Before the river reached much past his waist he'd lost his footing and sunk from sight.

(258)

Who rescues James Robert?

Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked himself […] and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon.

(259)

That scene has two baptisms, one by Mrs. Borginnis and one by the Judge. Mrs. Borginnis's, motivated by conventional ideals of charity, nearly kills James Robert. The Judge, whom many see as a sort of Mephistopheles, brings the idiot back into life in a scene more explicitly identified with baptism—a travesty, perhaps, of the religious ideal of regeneration.

Blood Meridian's apparent moral ungroundedness does not mean that it cannot be a critique of anything. Interpretation always rests with the reader and always involves the reader's sense of morality; the notion of the objective, unmediated reading of the objective, unmediated text has long since been demolished. Thus, Shaviro would be correct in arguing that the book might plausibly be seen as an indictment of “manifest destiny, […] racial domination, and endless imperial expansion.” It is reasonable to argue that Blood Meridian is a harsh critique of racial domination, yet there can be no claim for the moral superiority of either party; the Apaches and the Glanton gang are shockingly similar (from the viewpoint of both traditional and new Western myths). It is even difficult to find a critique of Western expansion here; brutal tribal wars went on years before such men as Glanton and Holden entered the scene (thus the third of McCarthy's epigraphs, recounting the discovery of a 300,000-year-old skull that had been scalped).

Those who would find in Blood Meridian a critique of capitalism have some grounds; the Glanton gang sells scalps, and in a pinch does not care whose. They consume vastly without producing, like some “entrepreneurs” of the 1980s.⁵ Yet even that is problematic; the same criticisms that we might level against Glanton and the descendants of Spanish imperialists who employ him hold true of the Apaches.

If Blood Meridian is an indictment of anything, it is of both the traditional myth of the West and of the alternative one of those revisionists who seek to portray the settlement as yet another case of rapacious Europeans descending, wolflike, on peaceful natives. In this sense Lejeune's objection to many contemporary Westerns—that they are “corpse-strewn, amoral, unromantic” (25)—is precisely the point of Blood Meridian. In McCarthy's landscape of “optical democracy,” “all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships” (247).

Although apparently dissimilar, Blood Meridian and Love Medicine spring from, and respond to, the myths surrounding the American West. Traditionally, this myth has consisted of virtuous cowboys, sinister Indians, and land given to the deserving. McCarthy's West, however, is an amoral one—God does not smile upon Manifest Destiny. Instead, one nation, with great capacities for both kindness and cruelty, is replaced by another no better or worse, with no apparent moral approval or censure implied. In Love Medicine we see the consequences of the Western settlement: a conflict of identities often submerged in alcoholism, violence, and despair but just as often redeemed by courage and nobility. Erdrich thus contradicts both the old dime-novel and Western-film myth of cruel savages and the more recent myth of the blameless martyr shown in many revisionist films and the popular interest in Native American spirituality that has characterized the New Age movement. Both novels, though distinctive, share a common historical and social context and react to it in ways that though undeniably different, serve to problematize the most powerful of American myths.

Notes

1. Katherine Rainwater further develops this feature of Love Medicine and Erdrich's other fiction.

2. Much of the currently available scholarship on Blood Meridian deals with historical sources. For a full discussion of this issue, see Sepich's essays. His essay “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian” also includes a fascinating explication of the book's Tarot symbolism. His “A ‘bloody dark pastryman’: Cormac McCarthy's Recipe for Gunpowder and Historical Fiction in Blood Meridian” also examines the authenticity of the gunpowder scene and links it in some intriguing ways to Holden's “Faustian” nature.

3. This is the only historical source for Judge Holden.

4. Borginnis treats James Robert as a mother would, providing an interesting contrast to the kid's lack of maternal ties: “The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it” (McCarthy 3). That calls to mind Shaviro's comment that “McCarthy writes with a yet more terrifying clarity than does Melville. For he has none of Melville's nostalgia for lost—primitive or uterine—origins” (112).

5. This concern seems to motivate at least one of Blood Meridian's critics. Hislop observes that the kid “acts out nightmarish possibilities of the American dream” (25). Richard Slotkin (643-54) has written a penetrating analysis of the ways in which the Western myth is a strongly capitalist one.

The author thanks his colleagues Theron Hopkins, Robert Mullin, and Joe Nettles for their comments and suggestions.

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