SOURCE: Pitts, Jonathan. “Writing On: Blood Meridian as Devisionary Western.” Western American Literature 33, no. 1 (spring 1998): 7-25.

[In the following essay, Pitts argues that Blood Meridian's encompassing of historical, cultural, and literary styles enhances its ability to serve as a parable for the American vision of life.]

We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer.

—Emerson, “The Poet”

The nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.

—Emerson, “The Young American”

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.

—McCarthy, Blood Meridian

So far there seem to be four sorts of readers of Blood Meridian. Roughly, there are the historical readers like John Sepich, for whom the novel is primarily historical fiction; the cultural readers like Dana Phillips, who read the novel in broadly narrative/textual terms—literary, historical, and philosophical; and the literature readers like Bernard Schopen, who argue that the novel's significance is experientially literary rather than historical or cultural. A fourth group would consist of those who, like Peter Josyph, don't finally know what to think about the novel since it seems to be about almost everything.¹

Cormac McCarthy's work is of course both literary and historical, the combination Emerson wishes for in “The Poet” when he criticizes Milton for being too literary and Homer for being too historical. But if Blood Meridian is about everything, then it risks being about nothing in particular. It moves like a narrative whirlwind, sucking us in and whirling us out, hollow at its eye.

But there is the language, vehicular and transitive, as Emerson wanted it in “The Poet”—riding on. If there's anything the various reading groups agree upon, it is that the narrator of Blood Meridian is the most interesting aspect of the novel even though he/she is nameless, disembodied, and seemingly very cold-blooded. The narrator sees everything in exquisite detail but has nothing much to say about it.

With less of a presence, a silent, omniscient narrator would be transparent and unremarkable. But in Blood Meridian the narrator is neither transparent nor, in postmodern fashion, opaquely reflexive. Why? In this essay I will argue that McCarthy's novel is a parable of American seeing, a critical account of the “American religion of vision.” If Blood Meridian seems to be so strangely about everything, that is because the novel is about the tyrannical ambition of the American eye to see all.

Here I will be arguing with readers such as Schopen, who see the novel as a cautionary tale of religious significance. Christian morality is certainly an aspect of the narrative point of view. But in Blood Meridian this morality must be understood as part of the American narrative lens, joined as it is so seamlessly with the optical drive to see what's over the next hill. In this American religion of vision, Christian morality is tied to the perspicacity of a uniquely American power to see both panoramically and particularly.² The more precise and expansive our vision, our tyrannous eye, the more godlike and thus moral our judgments. But the more godlike our judgments, Emerson warns, the more we are unable to see unity in its variety. We see all, but we must also see all things in their particularity.

If the narrator of Blood Meridian is an Emersonian transparent eyeball, universalizing itself in order to see all, what happens when the eyeball sees red—not the pleasant Concord Common but the bloody deserts of the Southwest?

A variation on Emerson's tyrannous eye is Turner's frontier thesis, which sought to account for the violence of westward expansion by subsuming it in the development of the American character. What the Emersonian poetic eye could not see—violence and brute fact of epic proportions—Turner's historical eye transcended. The narrator in Blood Meridian sees all, disturbing in its steadiness, steady in its experiential, imaginative account of disturbing facts. I want to propose, then, that McCarthy's narrator, because it is both literary and historical, does the work Emerson's eastern poetic eye and Turner's western historical eye could not do: see the bloody facts of America for what they are. This would seem to bring us back to the ocular ideal of American sight, the yearning for a language that obliterates itself in the presence of the facts, at the service of some purely visual apprehension of reality.

But finally I will argue that the genius eye/I that emerges in McCarthy's novel will be a self-consciousness irresolvably transcendent and immanent—a sort of bifocal. What the bloody facts of Blood Meridian show us is the capacity of language to articulate and question the ideology of American vision. In arguing that McCarthy's novel is devisionary, I am proposing that Blood Meridian doesn't simply critique frontier myth and symbol in the manner of the revisionary Western. Revisionism often replaces one set of symbols for another, leaving unexamined the underlying claims to greater accuracy of vision and perspective. I am saying that in the voice of the narrator, Blood Meridian challenges the assumptions underlying the American religion of vision that there is a truth out there, over the next hill, if only we can take in the panorama of possibility to get closer to it.

“MORNING-REDNESS,” “EVENING REDNESS”

The first sentence of the novel contains the tyrannous ambition of the American eye/I: “See the child.” The sentence is both a perceptual challenge to trust in the facts and an exhortation to moralizing judgment. The symbolic weight of “the child,” its load of clichéd associations, lays out the path of the narrative as one from innocence to experience. The Lincolnesque qualities of the child give him a boy/man character that marks the narrative as peculiarly American: he doesn't know his mother; he is illiterate; he has big wrists, big hands; his shoulders are close set—like Huck, Billy the Kid, Boone Caudill. The kid leaves behind Emerson's morning redness of the American pastoral (“The freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots” [3-4].) for the violent and anonymous ship of fools and confidence-men drifting into McCarthy's evening redness in the West. One might assume that these details, as so many obstacles, can eventually be overcome through the child's determination and will. But we quickly sense that this happy ending is somehow not to be. That the child ends up dead in an outhouse, then, comes as no surprise given the brutal America to which he has been subject on his journey.

As readers our instinct is to bring our symbol-making skills to bear on the child's beginnings. To really see the child we have to contain him within the confines of our moral conscience—the adjectives “pale” and “thin,” “ragged” and “linen” used to describe the child are not only precise descriptors but religiously symbolic ones. Our symbols, however, are also our redemptive morality tales so that to see the child as the narrator exhorts us to do in the opening of the novel is to conventionalize him, to not see him at all. Like the child's father, we are blinded by our metaphors.

For Emerson, the danger of seeing is containment through convention, resulting in a perceptual stasis. Sight then is both imaginative and intellectual. Thus in “The Poet,” imagination “is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others” (316). For Emerson, seeing is a “fluxional” movement of thought between multiple points of view. The other, bad kind of seeing is mysticism, consisting in “the mistake of [misinterpreting] an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one” (320). The reader who takes the morning redness as a symbol for truth and faith ignores the existence of other readers of the world and their own unique symbols for their realities. The universal symbol that Emerson wants will be the product of the quality of the imagination to flow between individual symbols and thereby transcend their particularity. Thus all language is, for Emerson, conveyance, like the flatboat the child takes to Texas, like the mule he rides into Nacogdoches. To see the child in the Emersonian sense is to see as the narrator does—to move between signs and symbols.

But the narration in Blood Meridian is not all random movement between signs and symbols. As Schopen suggests, the narrative voice constructs an order out of what it sees as it follows the kid into the series of violent events that constitute the novel (182-83). But this order is the narrator's response to the conventional Christian/American narrative with which the novel so powerfully opens. To see the child from the narrator's point of view is to see the manifestations of the ideology of conquest that works only because the ideology remains so invisible. This is what the narrator says when, halfway through the novel, an account of the Delawares is interrupted in favor of a discourse on westward expansion:

They did not speak. They were men of another time for all that they bore christian names and they had lived all their lives in a wilderness as had their fathers before them. They'd learnt war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from the ashes at Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the outlet to the bloodlands of the west. If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

(138)

Here is contained the problem of seeing and killing, which is the novel's thematic heart. For the narrator is not only discoursing critically about frontier ideology but suggesting its alternative in the Indian culture it has destroyed. I take up this alternative in more detail in the final section. Here I am simply establishing the thematic focus of the novel. In this alternative, “man” bears a symbiotic relationship to the world; there is no drive to see what else is out there, since man knows he is dissimilar and alien. So, significantly, the Delawares are able to turn back in their hunt for the bear that has taken their kinsman, whereas Captain Glanton, the leader of the scalp-hunting crew, must ride on.

Also of thematic significance is that the judge is seen conferring with the Delawares the following evening around the fire. The judge scratches into the ground a map of their failed hunt and scrutinizes it. This scene, backlit like a stage or, as the narrator says of another scene, a diorama, is a reflection of the novel's narrative dilemma: the judge reading the signs of the world, putting things into order, tracing out the patterns and rhythms of movement wherever they may lead. The problem of course is that no amount of visual perspicacity will reveal the truth. The problem, like the wanderings of Glanton's band, is recursive and inexorable, since it is the very frontier-bound constitution of sight which fragments the world. “And so these parties,” says the narrator, “[are] divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys” (121).

“INVERSIONS WITHOUT END”

In arguing that the theme of Blood Meridian is American sight, I am also arguing for the centrality of Judge Holden to the narration. Not that the judge, or anyone else in the novel, is a character in the traditional sense. We care for no one except perhaps for those who come to a violent death. The narrator raises our capacity for sympathetic identification in the first sentence of the novel, but not for purposes of character realism. Instead, the narrator wants to thematize those stories of sympathetic identification under the assumption that whatever we can see, we can somehow remake in the image of ourselves. Blood Meridian is a novel of nonidentity, of the simultaneous existence of opposites, an alienness, the Emersonian Not-me, that resists not only sight but the destruction (or, put less weightedly, the transformation) that is the inevitable result, for most of the people in the novel, of being seen. The judge, then, is the narrator's pilgrim, not the kid. Holden's progress is not one from innocence to experience but one from identity to nonidentity. So says the inscription on his rifle: et in Arcadia ego.

The judge, like Emerson, works from the foundation of idealism—the proposition that man was once whole, a unity. Whereas Emerson insisted that Americans could find wholeness still in the multitudinous world, the judge seems rather to believe that unity is merely rhetorical. “Books lie,” says the judge to the illiterate band gathered around him, but God doesn't, since “he speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things,” the wreckage of nature (116). “The squatters in their rags,” says the narrator, “nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools” (116).

It is tempting at this point to make two identifications: to identify the judge with the voice of the narrator and to identify the credulous squatters with the rapt readers. These identifications don't quite work, however, since in the gently mocking tone of the quotation above, the narrator is making an implicit moral judgment of the judge. In other words, it's difficult to give the judge's seemingly learned discourse much intellectual weight. Therefore, the identification of the readers with the foolish squatters doesn't work either. Certainly we aren't the fools led astray by books! But the judge is nevertheless a crucial character for the narrator because the judge, in his ersatz (and often comical) intellectualism and quasi-philosophical nihilism, represents the historical consciousness of the Emersonian man in the violent bloodlands of the West. In this landscape the universe is particularity to the point of chaos. The judge sifts and studies as much intellectual ruin as animal, geological, and archaeological ruin. He looks for the universal by examining the particular, but unlike Emerson he finds not a unity but a sameness. This is, as I discuss below, the judge's mistake.

There are times when the judge seems a reasonable person, a character of some depth. At these moments the narrator describes him with relative tenderness, and the judge seems more like us, more earnest and sincere in his efforts to study the textual evidence and thematic traces, to understand experience:

The judge walked the ruins at dusk, the old rooms still black with woodsmoke, old flints and broken pottery among the ashes and small dry corncobs. A few rotting wooden ladders yet leaned against the dwelling walls. He roamed through the ruinous kivas picking up small artifacts and he sat upon a high wall and sketched in his book until the light failed.

(139)

John Berger's description of drawing is useful here in understanding the judge's importance for the narrator and the narrative. According to Berger, where the photographed image has been selected for preservation, “The drawn image contains the experience of looking. … A drawing slowly questions an event's appearance and in doing so reminds us that appearances are always a construction with a history. (Our aspiration towards objectivity can only proceed from the admission of subjectivity)” (149). So says the judge too in his discussion of appearances and history. History is everywhere in the western desert, both fossil and spirit of the “dead fathers”:

Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

(146)

In the optical democracy of the West, where history disappears into the primal mud of the landscape, subjectivity is universalized as a common destiny. The maker of the reed-and-hide shelter is a nomad adrift on the tide of human evolution, in contrast to the builder in stone, who seeks an identity, an expression of subjectivity against the generalized flow of time.

Here the judge acknowledges the difference between seeing and looking. In order to grasp the significance of history one must see beyond progress and evolution to the life of the imagination in history. The difference between a drawing and a photograph, according to Berger, is that a photograph stops time, while a drawing (or a painting) encompasses time. To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. The drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at (150). The judge is always sketching in his book because that is the form representation must take in the prephotographic West. The judge tells the story to his interlocutors of drawing an old Hueco and thereby chaining the man to his own likeness not as a lesson in vanity but as a lesson in self-consciousness (141). To see is to see mediately. “It is very unhappy,” writes Emerson in “Experience,” “but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist” (343).

The judge seems ambivalent about this self-consciousness and, in our relationship to the judge, so in a larger sense do we as readers. The judge is important for the narrator because the judge keeps the reader self-conscious, looking for meaning with increasing despair and skepticism as the judge wanders through a world of strange equanimity of meaning where the luminous, the momentarily distinguished, is suspicious. In an implicit criticism of the luminist school of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American painting and its visionary naturalization of man's progress across the landscape, the narrator warns the reader of the deceptive effects of the ambition of the American eye to see all. The “will to deceive that is in things luminous may … post men to fraudulent destinies” (120).

In “Experience,” Emerson writes that the fall of man into self- consciousness produces a subject-lens which, while it lacks the means to correct itself, possesses a creative power to absorb all things so that “God is but one of its ideas” (343). The subject-lens (the narrator) of Blood Meridian works on two levels. On one level, the lens sees all things in the landscape as it tracks the scalp hunters and the central figure of the judge. On another, larger level, the lens takes its own structure as its theme, engaging the reader in a similarly trackless search for something luminous in the narrative.

“A SHIMMERING SURMISE”

If Emerson could remark that the nervous, rocky West would produce an American genius, he would also suggest that his idea of creative self-reliance had been misunderstood. “Things are in the saddle,” he said, “and ride mankind,” referring to the growing spirit of unchecked individualism and materialism that could characterize westward expansion (qtd. in McQuade xxv). If the ideology of the American vision includes an ability to both expand and contract—to see the universal and the particular, to be objective and subjective—and if nature comes from us, then at least one of the dangers of the American vision is, in Myra Jehlen's words, that the American can claim “to embody nature's own, self-evident model” (18). Turner's frontier thesis is an argument for the naturalness of the American subject-lens. The narrative point of view of Blood Meridian is historical not only because the events it describes are based on fact, but, more important, the novel is an imaginative account of the historical imagination in the nineteenth-century American West.

To read the narrator's story is to read the story of historical narration as it constructs its subject-lens. Because the story takes place before Turner formulates his frontier thesis, Blood Meridian bears two important relations to Turner's thesis: the novel is an account of the conditions (subjective and objective) from which Turner derives his thesis; and the novel is therefore critical of Turner's thesis. These threads of the novel's theme work, once again, on two structural levels: the judge is both a historical embodiment of the frontier imagination and a pedagogical exemplar in the narrator's drama of the constructedness of American self-evidence. The drama is played out, as we have seen, between history and appearances.

In the baking, parched desert landscape of barren llanos and mesas, the scalp-hunting crew almost disappears. They are followed by the unnamed narrator whose omniscient, God's-eye view suggests the objective, epic ocular sweep of human history. One moment the scalp hunters are seen to move across the landscape as prehistoric savages draped in animal skins and “ornamented with human parts like cannibals” (189); then they are encountering a conquistadorish band of crazies wearing ancient helmets and shouldering muskets. The judge examines prehistoric pictographs, then discourses on jurisprudence, quoting Anaximander and Thales. Everywhere they stumble on mummified remains, adobe ruins, various detached limbs, and bleached bones. Human history is jumbled, everywhere yet nowhere: it remains unordered and unrecorded, a confusion of language and time. The scalp hunters seem to circle endlessly in the same dry riverpan in a continuous encounter with the past, never getting anywhere except to die or to kill. If, as the judge says, order must be imposed, then such order must run no deeper than appearances. In this “optical democracy,” the sun-dried level plain, everything is equal and so nothing substantially meaningful (247). Humanity becomes geology, an endless shifting and grating. The world “tend[s] away at the edges to a shimmering surmise” (215).

Turner would probably have agreed with the narrator of Blood Meridian that the frontier as a peculiarly American projection of the future was, by 1890, a shimmering surmise. For Turner the western landscape had not only been settled but internalized as the American took on its character: “That coarseness and strength. … That masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy” (37). Turner is in effect arguing for both the origin of an American character in the development of the frontier and, since such development was a necessary reaction to force, for the developed landscape as a necessary outgrowth of an essential American energy. The displacement opens up the frontier again even as Turner attempts to close it down, for the frontier is now a figure for an essential American expansiveness which will, according to Turner, “continually demand a wider field for its exercise” (37).

The frontier has been displaced and reconstituted so convincingly in our likeness that we cannot help but read it as our history, as a reflection of our presence. It is literally impossible to see our absence, for where we are not we will inevitably be, and where we once were we can never leave. To open the American eye is to see that which is inevitably and originally American. With the closing of the American frontier comes the opening, as in a God's-eye view, of the American landscape, of the American eye. In this optical democracy, in this intellectual and spiritual equilibrium, everything is necessarily luminous.

The concept of an optical democracy is, as I have argued, central to Blood Meridian. McCarthy sets individual, historically specific acts of violence against this intellectual and spiritual equilibrium as a kind of historical corrective. This violence, in the optical democracy of Turner's frontier vision, is necessary and inevitable, a given not needing cultural interpretation and congenial only to detached contemplation. So McCarthy's narrator is nameless, a disembodied eye or ocular presence somewhere above a landscape in which “all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships” (247).

Jane Tompkins has commented on the tendency of the landscape in the popular Western to “push the consciousness of the hero and of the reader/viewer beyond itself and into another realm.” The desert landscape in particular

is the fullest realization of the genre's drive toward materiality, the place where language fails and rocks assert themselves. But by the same token it is the place where something else becomes visible, an ineffable thing that cannot be named. … The landscape, which on the one hand drives Christianity away, ends by forcing men to see something godlike there.

(85)

I am arguing that this “something else” that becomes “visible” is the disembodied power of transcendent sight, which may be “ineffable” only because it cannot distance itself from itself—it must remain, like Emerson's transparent eyeball, invisible in order to work. Any amount of self-consciousness, of self-criticism, would obstruct this fixed, clear view.

The intellectual historian Martin Jay has traced the history of the development of Cartesian perspectivalist epistemology. Based on Descartes's model of subjectivity and Renaissance notions of perspective, Cartesian perspectivalism privileges an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject entirely outside of the world it claims to know only from afar.

As Jay notes, a reaction to the tyranny of Cartesian perspectivalism was the baroque “madness of vision,” in whose dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images lay a rejection of Cartesian monocular perspectivalism (122). McCarthy's narrator's vision can be seen as “baroque” in this sense. The difference in vision between Turner and McCarthy, as between history as written by historians like Turner and history as written by artists like McCarthy, closely follows the history of modern conceptions of epistemology as vision. In his richly textured, intensely detailed descriptions, McCarthy's narrator wants to unsettle Turner's Cartesianism.

This unsettling occurs most powerfully in the scenes of violence, when the narrator is most disturbingly serene and detached. To take an example at random (which is how they should be taken):

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging 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 midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew.

(156)

The violence is simply too much to take in, to get the imagination around. We are both drawn to the individual act in the scene and taken up in its swirling chaos. Yet it is also difficult because we begin to wonder why, after all, we would want such precision. Why would we want a precise image of brains bursting forth, and what possible meaning finally could such an image hold for us? The power of the mind's eye fails us because, as René Girard says about violence in Greek tragedy, violence operates without reason (46). The braining of babies seems so meaningless and so aesthetically or perceptually unrewarding, and therefore gratuitous, that our attention may wander. This is the effect McCarthy wants—such violence and chaos defy the narrative order of history, defy the conception of the West as Turnerian process. In McCarthy's rendering, the West, the frontier as West, becomes a meeting place marked by possibility rather than a Cartesian point in a temporal process: whites, Indians, and Mexican slaves swirl in a kind of tragic ballet.

We may return to the language, the strong verbs, the colloquialisms and archaic speech: midden, fontanel, berserker. This language lends a patina of history to the violence, slows it down. The effect is the precision of surface and texture that characterizes the baroque response to the concern with depth characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism. The meaning of such a violent scene seems primarily associative—horizontal in meaning—rather than deeply symbolic. It is as if, in the perceptual torsion between the pure gore of the scene and the density and materiality of the language, we must come to terms on some fundamental level with the nature of violence and the history of its representation.

The violence in the novel appears to speak for itself; it simply happens, seemingly without a reasoning consciousness to mediate. But the description is so peculiarly historical and idiosyncratic that it is as if something like history were speaking or observing. Then again, the description isn't really historical, since the prose is self-conscious, not reflexively so but artful enough (the streaming syntax, for example) to give the narration an imaginative voice.

The violence the narrator describes isn't mythic either, in that it doesn't carry any transhistorical resonance, doesn't speak to anything like a collective cultural memory. The violence happens, and seems to happen in an isolated place and moment in the prehistory of the American frontier before the writing of the frontier myth and its incorporation into our cultural memory. In this way, the violence seems to view itself, to usurp our own powers of sight, defying any attempt to order it. It defies also any sense of purpose—the acts of violence in the novel seem random and vaguely connected, defying the logic of evolution and progressive, sequential development. Such violence is not only difficult to imagine but difficult to integrate into a social and cultural order. It happens as we may imagine history should happen: without us.

There is no sense of a future when reading a passage such as this, though we are dimly aware of a narrative momentum. Where the traditional western hero and the Turnerian American are necessarily future-oriented, horizon-bound, and progressing toward some end, McCarthy's narrator's vision seems to wander or remain in place, a victim of a chaotic and random universe. The frontier is less a historical gate of escape than an existential sentence or condemnation. The frontier is less a progressive process than it is, for the narrator, a terrible condition.

Blood Meridian is photographic in its detail, but for purposes of historical understanding McCarthy wants to situate his narration in the prephotographic West, where there are no lines of sight emanating outward from a single, fixed point of view in the present. Instead, McCarthy is interested in a baroque West, where historical events are localized and randomly situated. In their randomness they resist the ordering mechanism of Cartesian perspectivalism, showing all attempts at ordering and explanation to be imaginative constructions.

“WORDS ARE THINGS”

Judge Holden is the most fully developed character in Blood Meridian, or the character with the fullest sense of interiority. The kid, who looks in the beginning to be the questing hero, is never more than a sacrificial presence, a victim. The judge wants to understand the apparent randomness and chaos of the world but knows, finally, that any ordering of it must be artificial: “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze” (245). The truth about the world, says the judge, “is that anything is possible” (245); in this world the mind takes its place as a fact among other facts. The universe, like the randomness and violence at its center, is meaningless.

But the judge does find meaning there, even if it is depravity, bloodlust, and war. War, says the judge, “is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. … 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” (249-50). The judge has abandoned all pretensions to selfhood and subjectivity and in his attempt to understand his depravity has given himself over to it. What is left is the unity of violence and death—and language.

In describing the judge, the narrator might be responding to Turner:

Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg.

(310)

Without terminus or origin, the characters wander in a horizontal continuum of endless signification. “Words are things,” the judge says, because there is no distinction between fiction and reality, nature and culture, myth and materiality (85). There is no fixed vision, no authorial datum, from which to make radical sense of the world, so there is no past, no present, and no future. Progress, sequence, and causality are illusions, perceptual totalities imposed on a world of chaotic particularity.

“TRACK OF HOLES”

McCarthy leaves us with the spectacle of our violence, an apparently unmotivated and purposeless emptiness that some critics have seen as nihilism.³ It is difficult not to see Blood Meridian as nihilistic, given the apparent randomness of the narrative, its indifference to or denial of any reflection, morality, interiority. Yet the epilogue and its insistence that progress is “less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle” says something else—and that is that the traditional vision of meaning as progressive and evolving is equally a sort of violence because of the totality of its orientation toward the future (337). In this vision nothing, actually, means anything except for its place in sequence and causality, as in the track of holes that runs to the horizon. The pushing of the frontier becomes its own end, since the frontier must always recede. “People forget,” Emerson reminds us in “Experience,” “that it is the eye which makes the horizon” (343).

McCarthy recognizes the implications of the paradox that in the development of the myth of the West the violence of its material history must be obscured, since to encounter violence and chaos is to encounter the objectified, given natural laws of social evolution. Violence is reified, mythicized, made natural, and so somehow beyond our historical ken. We have seen this process in Turner's use of the geography metaphor to explain the development of characteristically American traits—traits which become identified with the landscape, with nature and origins, and finally constitute the very eye by which the American sees. When we read the page of the landscape we are seeing our own expansiveness, and we need a vision large enough and detached enough to contain such desire. The result is the specious freedom of a disembodied though historical vision, an uneasy fusion of the mythic and the material which characterizes Turner's frontier hypothesis and, in its complex resistance to this fusion in the voice of the narrator, Blood Meridian.

The narrator enacts an alternative to Emersonian transcendence and Turnerian progress. Buried in the novel, too easily ridden over, is the alien nonidentity of the Delawares. In this nonidentity there is no drive to see what else is out there, since man knows he is, like everything else, dissimilar and alien. The effect of this acknowledgment isn't alienation and anomie or the despairing depravity of the judge. The effect is rather a reemphasis on the imagination at the expense of progress and the kind of dialectical synthesis effected by Turner's thesis. Myra Jehlen has termed this view “totemic.” On this view, a recognition of our apartness from the landscape emphasizes the function of opposition to define both man and nature as distinct realities rather than as the terms of a contradiction to be resolved into each other (31).

According to Jehlen, “the integration of nature and civilization that is achieved in totemic mythology does not, then, represent a transformation of nature and civilization” but rather a symbolic acknowledgment of the oppositional tension, as suggested in the language of McCarthy's narrator (31). The voice of the narrator is both detached and engaged, tyrannous and forgiving, literary and historical, factual and imaginative.⁴ But this tensive movement is a function of language rather than sight—of language writing on.

Notes

1. Sepich, “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian” 16-31, “‘What kind of Indians was them?’” 93-110, “A ‘bloody dark pastryman’: Cormac McCarthy's Recipe for Gunpowder and Historical Fiction in Blood Meridian” 547-63; Phillips 433-60; Schopen 179-94; Josyph 169-88.

2. Meyer, “The Hypervisual Essence of American Democracy” 35-44; see also Meyer's “Melville and O'Connor: The Hypervisual Crisis” 211-29, in which he makes the point that with the exception of Moby-Dick, “no American novels are so obsessed with the mere fact of seeing and being seen … as are Wise Blood and The Scarlet Letter” (220). I would argue for Blood Meridian as the fourth.

3. See Bell 31-41 and Ditsky 1-11.

4. As self-conscious historical fiction, Blood Meridian should be read against the current debates about the New Western History. Forrest Robinson, for instance, has argued that the New Western historians have been reluctant to acknowledge the inseparableness of history and fiction in their own work. Though he does not mention McCarthy, his call for the continued acknowledgment of the literariness of historical narrative is well served in Blood Meridian. See Robinson's essay “Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History” in the recent special issue of Arizona Quarterly 53.2 (summer 1997) devoted to the New Western History.

I would like to thank Mark Busby and Bruce Jackson for their advice and editorial help.

Works Cited

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” Selected Writings of Emerson. Ed. Donald McQuade. New York: Random House, 1981. 326-48.

———. “The Poet.” Selected Writings of Emerson. Ed. Donald McQuade. New York: Random House, 1981. 303-25.

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Josyph, Peter. “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian.” Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1993. 169-88.

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———. “Melville and O'Connor: The Hypervisual Crisis.” Stanford Literature Review 4.2 (fall 1987): 211-29.

Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” American Literature 68.2 (June 1996): 433-60.

Robinson, Forrest G. “Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History.” Arizona Quarterly 53.2 (summer 1997): 61-98.

Schopen, Bernard A. “‘They Rode On’: Blood Meridian and the Art of Narrative.” Western American Literature 30.2 (summer 1996): 179-94.

Sepich, John Emil. “A ‘bloody dark pastryman’: Cormac McCarthy's Recipe for Gunpowder and Historical Fiction in Blood Meridian.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture 46.4 (fall 1993): 547-63.

———. “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Literary Journal 24.1 (fall 1991): 16-31.

———. “‘What kind of indians was them?’: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (summer 1992): 93-110.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History. 1920. Malabar, Florida: Krieger, 1985. 1-38.