SOURCE: Campbell, Neil. “‘Beyond Reckoning’: Cormac McCarthy's Version of the West in Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West.” Critique 39, no. 1 (fall 1997): 55-64.

[In the following essay, Campbell presents Blood Meridian as a re-creation of the traditional Western novel and its archetypal mythos.]

Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth.

—Max Muller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873)¹

Frederick Jackson Turner claimed in 1893 that

[t]he United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.

(11)

On that page Turner inscribed his version of history, marking out his concept of the West as the key to American development.

As Alan Trachtenberg has written,

The nation needed … a coherent, integrated story of its beginnings and its development. Connectedness, wholeness, unity: these narrative virtues, with their implied telos of closure, of a justifying meaning at the end of the tale, Turner would now embody in the language of historical interpretation.

(13)

For Turner then, “‘West’ offered a transparent text” (26) that he could translate and reproduce as a myth of America.

Myths begin to form around specific ideological concerns, as Richard Slotkin has shown:

Its ideological underpinnings are those same “laws” of capitalist competition, of supply and demand, of Social Darwinism's “survival of the fittest” as a rationale for social order, and “Manifest Destiny” that have been the building blocks of our domestic historiographical tradition and political ideology.

(Environment 15)

Thus Turner's blank page filled up with the tenets of Americanism, forged by the notions of Western expansion and frontier values. However, Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, states that such myths have to be examined closely because they “distort” by naturalizing history, hollowing it out into a neat, closed, unambiguous process. Slotkin writes,

Above all, the restorative and regenerative power of the land was emphasised: its ability to redeem the fortunes of those fallen from high estate … the New World's capacity to fulfil even the most extravagant expectations.

(Environment 40)

Barthes takes that idea farther, saying that myth “abolishes the complexity of human acts … it does away with dialectics … organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident” (143). For him the effect of this myth-making process is to stifle man, to narrow the limits of achievement and to “depoliticize” the world, creating “a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility” (Eagleton 135). Slotkin provides a gloss on that:

the myth of the Frontier falsifies this core of reality by extending historically contingent phenomena into a “law” of American development. … [Myths) represent a displacement or deflection of social conflict into the world of myth.

(Environment 45, 47)

Thus the myth of the West is a dangerous reduction of many issues to a few sets of ideas; a dialogue is transformed into a monologue.

I

Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is an attempt to reopen the closed dialogues about the West and to explore its myths in a unique way. The novel writes over Turner's text with a dramatic inversion of the naturalized view of the West and the actions that have become associated with it. In part McCarthy follows Slotkin's advice to “rehistoricize the mythic subject … by specifying more accurately the types of economic exchanges that are subsumed in the phrase ‘expanding Frontier’” (Environment 45).

McCarthy's version of the West goes beyond the Turner thesis to much earlier interests in the significance of the West to the human psyche. In Dante's Inferno, Ulysses recalls his words to his men:

“Brothers”, said I, “that have come valiantly
Through a hundred thousand jeopardies undergone
To reach the West, you will not now deny
To this last little vigil left to run
Of feeling life, the new experience
Of the uninhabited world behind the sun.”

(Canto XXVI)

A West “behind the sun” is a region of the unknowable, of uncharted darkness, a place “beyond reckoning” like that drawn in Blood Meridian. Like Ulysses, Judge Holden, McCarthy's central character, sees the West as a testing-ground for himself, a place “beyond men's judgements (where) all covenants were brittle” (106). Death is the only law, and what counts here, as Dante wrote, is “feeling life” asserted against the risk of being at the very edge of existence itself, at the point of true West. The temptation is to know and experience that which lies beyond or “behind the sun” even at the risk of destruction, for that moment makes you almost Godlike.

That voyage West is fraught with danger,

… left-handed, ill-omened, sinister … A turning away from the direction out of which the sun rises, signifying salvation, to the direction into which it sets, signifying death; a flight compared by implication to the fatal course of Phaeton … it is mad, since to enter the West is to try to live in a dream, i.e., to go insane.

(Fiedler 32-33)

McCarthy sees this paradox of the West as a place that lures with its promise of freedom and all the expectations invested in the American dream, only to deliver a kind of madness, a “fatal course.” The “mythic space” of the West is an emptiness that challenges the self to assert its existence against the death that always lurks there.² McCarthy's “blood meridian” is the point at which one reaches the fullness of life and simultaneously recognizes the proximity, even the inevitability, of its end. The blood is both life-giving and life-destroying, hence the qualification of the novel's title by “or the evening redness in the west,” which reminds us of a larger mythic fear about the West as a place where the sun “dies.” Erich Neumann has written,

the western hole into which the sun descends is the archetypal womb of death destroying what has been born. … For before the earth and human consciousness existed, everything was contained in the realm of the dead in the West … thus the West is the place of the world before the world.

(184)

McCarthy's West is archetypal in those terms, a symbolic landscape that relates directly to the characters in the novel and is both “womb” and “death.” The geographical frontier is the feint line between the two, a line crossed and recrossed by the novel's central figures. It is a “terra damnata” (61) of “purgatorial waste,” (63) full of “itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague” (78). McCarthy strips the urge West of all its mythic glamour and equates it with a baser human need “both imperative and remote” (152) that pushes men to a terrible confrontation with their mortality. He ironically calls them “argonauts,” but the quest for the golden fleece has become a hunt for scalps in a brutal economics of death where the scalp is the “receipt” (98) and “the trail of the argonauts terminated in ashes” (153).

They … turned their tragic mounts to the West and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium, of the sun.

(185)

Death compels these men to the West with the promise of some dreamlike reward, and their journey is the test of survival. But it is only the Judge who has the will to succeed through all the trials of the desert. He resembles Eric Mottram's definition of the true Western man who

lives close to death and maiming in that region of pornographic thrill at the body's vulnerability to breakage and extinction. The villain and hero edge into each other at the point where stoicism and endurance demonstrate how a man can take it, live beyond the worst, and anticipate the inevitable by mocking its approach.

(19)

Judge Holden is the hero-villain who straddles the border between life and death filling the void of the desert with his huge form, at turns mad and magical, murderous and maternal. He hovers “beyond the worst,” mocking and denying the presence of death like a desert Ahab chasing life-in-death. Like Ahab, he is “a man of elements not of sins”³ who would say

I own thy speechless, placeless power, but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. … I am darkness leaping out of life.

(Moby Dick 616)

Both men rail against the shape of life in their desire for power and authority, but the Judge seems related even more to an inverted reading of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier character traits.

That coarseness and strength … that practical turn of mind … that masterful grip of material things … that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and with all that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the Frontier.

(37)

McCarthy creates in Judge Holden an archetypal man of the West, part Faust, Ahab, Lear, and Macbeth, who through his “predacious” (146) nature acts out a dark version of American history. As Slotkin has written, the West can seem to be everything.

On the one hand, it lead to the execution of good designs; on the other, it stimulated a monstrous ambition against authority, an obscene Faustian lust to satisfy nature by violating all bonds of obedience, religion and morality.

(Regeneration 35)

That darker reality interests McCarthy and is personified in the Judge, a composite man resembling D. H. Lawrence's “essential American soul” at its most extreme: “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer … who lives by death, by killing” (68-9) and is obsessed by a desire to control his own fate. Just as Turner inscribed his version of history so too does the Judge, but for him it is a method of controlling time itself. The Judge keeps a ledger in which he re-writes what was into what could be and thereby wrests control of the past by authoring it. As readers we witness his ruthless efforts to alter the past while recognizing that that is akin to the process by which the West itself has been written into our mythology. As the Judge says, “men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not” (330). He is unprepared to accept the limits of life in any way, believing that “a man seeks his own destiny and no other” (330). Although he knows “the truth about the world” (245) is that it is framed by the certainty of death, he seeks a “largeness of heart” (330) despite the “ultimate destination” that is “calamitous and beyond reckoning” (245). The Judge wishes to deny the inevitability of things and to fill up the emptiness of life with a tumult of feelings and experiences so that “each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits” (330).

II

The Judge's motivation is to forestall the inevitable “reckoning”; it is not just death he fears, but something

more terrifying than death—it is the fear of an “unavoidable destiny,” the fear of living in a helpless state where one is passive in the grip of time and change and what they inevitably bring … where the will's sense of mastery and activity is an illusion.⁴

His heroic struggle to achieve “mastery and activity” over his own fate is bound up with his brutal denial of the rights of others. In his urge to conquer time any method is valid. As D. H. Lawrence wrote,

To know a living thing is to kill it. You have to kill a thing to know it satisfactorily. For this reason, the desirous consciousness, the SPIRIT, is a vampire … to know any thing is to try to suck the life out of that being.

(76)

Such is the Judge's way, consuming those around him and drawing out their strength as he plunders the world for knowledge. He devours the earth because in the minerals “he purported to read news of the earth's origins,” as if they were God's words because God “speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things” (116). His lust for knowledge permits his violence, as he literally hacks his way to the “bones of things” to “know” them.

It is the temptation of a vampire fiend, is this knowledge. Man does so horribly want to master the secret of life and of individuality with his mind. It is like the analysis of protoplasm. You can only analyse dead protoplasm, and know its constituents. It is a death process.

(Lawrence 76)

By reducing life to its constituents, its “bones,” the Judge can read it, engulf it and ultimately control it.

These efforts to “master the secret of life” are part of the Judge's complex assault on time and destiny. He must challenge and erase the past, represented by the “dead fathers” whose historical mark is scratched into the land; he must remove their record and replace it with his own narrative in his ledger. Thus he challenges the father by seizing authority and so “achieving temporal priority to his father in the narrative act.”⁵ The images of dead fathers represent the past and the process of time that must be usurped by the Judge. The novel echoes that with its precise references to patricide.⁶

For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods.

(145)

Once again, McCarthy suggests and expands upon an idea about the origins of American identity, taking the parallel of son/America and father/Europe as his focus. As Lawrence wrote, “there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe” (10). The Judge acts out that rebellion, striking against the past in a gesture of mastery. As he says, “whatever exists … whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198).

The Judge also assaults the future with his vampirical destruction of children. He literally enacts the myth of the West that Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence.” McCarthy's “essential American soul,” Judge Holden, needs to regenerate himself with the lives of the young, killing, like William Burroughs' addict-gunfighter Kim Carsons, for whom “killing [became] an addiction. … He's gotta get it one way or another.”⁷ Infanticides abound in the novel, but always around the Judge (See pp. 118, 164, 191, and 333), as if to enact Slotkin's point that

the act of destruction itself somehow makes us believe in our manhood and godhood, our Ahab's power to dominate life and to perpetuate and extend ourselves and our power.

(Regeneration 563)

That gruesome renewal defeats time and keeps the Judge “child-like”⁸ and powerful, as if he has stepped outside time by being both father and son—killing both to steal their power and prolong himself. At the end of the novel we are told that “[h]e says he'll never die” (335) because he believes he has

taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

(199)

The pursuit of such power, however, admirable, is dark and cruel, truly Faustian. The Judge represents a totalitarian wish for “omnipotence … to achieve God”⁹ and to permanently recapture a lost moment of perfection.

When we come kicking into the world, we are God, the universe is the limit of our senses. And when we get older, when we discover that the universe is not us, it's the deepest trauma of our existence.

(Mailer 277)

The Judge seeks a pre-Oedipal harmony, outside time, and is prepared to achieve it regardless of the cost. It is an ironic desire for American innocence and the timelessness of Huck Finn's “Territory” that McCarthy shows being corrupted in the madness of the Judge.

The Judge wants everything: to be childlike and “suzerain of the earth” (199), son and father, God and Satan, and able to declare, “in order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon [earth] save by my dispensation” (199). He is a vision of America in extremis: a Lear with his Fool¹⁰ challenging the gods, nature, time itself on a blasted heath—now a desert—or “some egregious saltland bard” (219) or “some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die” (282). He is Macbeth recognizing that life is “sound and fury, signifying nothing” but willing to remain “bear-like [to] fight the course” (5.5.27-28: 7.2). As the Judge says to the kid, his challenging “son” and shadow, who is nameless throughout the novel,

We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?

(329)

That special bond that the Judge feels for the kid is important but can only be briefly discussed here. As a shadow, the kid reminds the Judge of himself, the rebel son, born to violence and sent out to wander the West. But the kid also represents time, having been born in 1833 when the Leonid meteors fell¹¹ and continually related in the novel to the movement of stars as if “tethered to the polestar” (46). As a son without a father, he presents a challenge to the Judge, his substitute father, who has taught him so much on their journey through the West. The kid has “all history present in [his] visage, the child the father of the man” (3), but he cannot kill the Judge when the opportunity arises (299), and so he allows Holden to usurp time again.

Both the kid and the Judge know about the darkness that awaits them “beyond reckoning,” but only one of them has the courage to seek it out and face it. Their lives are like the stars that lead them through the desert:

He [kid] stood in the yard. Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness.

(333)

But as we have seen, the Judge refuses to pass into “dust and nothingness” and will kill the kid to further deny the powers of time. At the end the kid says to the Judge, “‘You ain't nothin'’”; and he replies, “‘You speak truer than you know’” (331). To be more than nothing is exactly the Judge's aim. To be empowered by dominance and authority in all its forms so that he feels there is “only room for one—one desire, one will, one power, one ‘imperial self.’”¹² The final view of him in the novel confirms that exactly.

And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? … only that man can dance … all others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.

(331)

The Judge wants to remain the “one” and delay his move “down into the darkness.”

To become the “one” means for the Judge to have “been to the floor of the pit and seen horror … and learned … that it speaks to his inmost heart” (331). That is Turner's “dominant individualism” at its most extreme, where the survival of the fittest is uppermost, and any moral law is irrelevant because “moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak” (250). The West permits those traits to flourish because it reduces life to its basics, like war where “decisions are quite clear” in the “testing of one's will” and the “forcing of the unity of existence” (249). The Judge says “war is God” because it sanctions no mystery, no ambiguity and “validates” a man's worth in the simple battle of life against death. The cost of such self-validation is immense and bloody, as McCarthy's novel shows; and the Judge's actions suggest the true brutality behind the myths of American regeneration in the West.

When Frederick Jackson Turner wrote “The Problem of the West” he felt that

the individual has been given an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific administration of government [and] the self-made man was the Western man's ideal.

(213)

That portrait, taken to its logical conclusion, is the Judge in Blood Meridian, literally acting out the ideology of the frontier.

For a moment, at the, frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant … in spite of custom, each frontier did flourish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.

(Turner 38)

The West was the possibility of an escape from time and the past, just as it is the arena for the Judge's similar desire. McCarthy takes the frontier ideology and relates it more darkly to the American character. Turner suggests a useful link (which he characteristically ignores to develop) by writing,

What the Mediterranean sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences … the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States.

(38)

What Turner chooses to ignore is that the Pillars of Hercules marked the known world for the Greeks; anything beyond involved what Dante called the journey “behind the sun.” That is exactly where Blood Meridian goes, taking the myths to their natural conclusion, “to the west … toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun” (185). McCarthy sees that the pursuit of the American dream in the West contains within itself the horrific inevitability of its own failure. Just as life is eternally reaching upward but constantly shadowed by death, and just as the stars, however bright, are condemned to “dust and nothingness,” so man, too, is condemned “to bloom and to flower and die … His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day” (146-47). The West finally is an unattainable dream like the Judge's desire to control time and rule his own fate. By intermingling the stories of the Judge, the kid, and the West, McCarthy has written a version of the American dream. John Irwin provides a useful summary of that dream:

The American dream, the dream of achieving an ultimate earliness, was a European dream, a late dream … the paradoxical experience that the attempt to free oneself from the burden of history … by referring to the origin and starting over is simply to begin history once again … an endless quest for the oldest thing in the past, the point where/before history began.

(113)

To go forward is always to go back; to try to usurp the past is to commit oneself to an endless struggle. McCarthy's West cannot be possessed, only moved toward, and that very movement is ruthless and violent, driven by a kind of madness to succeed that pushes aside all moral law. “The Western Lands,” as William Burroughs wrote, are always ahead of you and,

[a]ll the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands.

(257)

The push West can only ever be a movement toward death. Jane Tompkins has written, “To go west, to go as far west as you can go, west of everything, is to die.”¹³

What the Judge has achieved at the end of Blood Meridian is a postponement of the inevitable, a temporary gap in the relentlessly irresistible process of “blood and time”¹⁴ that will eventually engulf him as he has engulfed his victims. The kid (as challenging son) has been defeated, but the dark plains of the West are populated and “filled with violent children orphaned by war” (322), each one carrying the burden of time closer toward the Judge.

Notes

1. Quoted in Robinson 345.

2. Slotkin, in “Prologue to a Study of Myth and Genre,” defines the West as “a mythic space … defined by the illusions we create about it” (422).

3. Olson 83. He also comments that “[t]he Pacific is, for an American, the Plains repeated, a twentieth century West” (114).

4. Irwin, Doubling 96.

5. Ibid., 114. Irwin uses this phrase to describe Faulkner's Quentin Compson, but, as ever with McCarthy, there is a closeness between his work and Faulkner's.

6. The novel begins with a man hanged for patricide (5), as the kid leaves his real father behind to wander west nameless, and so without the mark of the father on him. See also the Judge's story of sons and fathers, 142-145.

7. Burroughs, The Place of the Dead Roads 77.

8. The Judge is referred to as “child-like” the first time he enters the novel (6) and “like an enormous infant” (335) as he departs.

9. Mailer 277.

10. The Judge's Fool is the imbecile child whom he saves from drowning “like a great mid-wife” (259). The child he does not murder is one who presents no challenge to him because it is retarded, outside time.

11. In 1833 the Leonid meteors fell on America giving rise to the song “Stars Fell on Alabama.” The events tie the novel to a specific starting point in historical time.

12. The phrase is from the essay by Andre Bleikaster, “Fathers in Faulkner,” The Fictional Father, ed. Robert Con Davis (Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 1981) 12.

13. “West of Everything,” in Longhurst 11.

14. The phrase is from the epigraph by Paul Valery to Blood Meridian.

Works Cited

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———. The Western Lands. 1987. London: Picador, 1988.

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———. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of William Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.

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———. “Prologue to a Study of Myth and Genre.” Prospects 9 (1984): 407-432.

———. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1973.

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