SOURCE: Dow, William. “Topographical Strides of Thoreau: The Poet and Pioneer in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Revue Française D'Études Américaines, no. 84 (March 2000): 89-105.

[In the following essay, Dow examines Blood Meridian as a topographical study in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden.]

A general knowledge of the topography is, then, the main guide, enabling one to determine where the trail ought to go—must go.¹

(John Muir)

We must look to the West for the growth of a new literature, manners, architecture, etc. Already there is more language there, which is the growth of the soil, than here …²

(Henry David Thoreau)

Throughout his career as a writer and naturalist, Thoreau wished to reinvent “a new literature” linked to topographies. He held constant to what I would term a “poet-pioneer” binary in which the figural representations of a “poet” interact with the actual experiences of a “pioneer”³. For example, even in his journal he is constantly alternating between the actions of an explorer and the ponderings of a philosopher-aesthetician: “Well in this pond thus dug in the midst of a meadow a year or two ago and supplied by springs in the meadow, I find to-day several small patches of the large yellow and the kalmiana lily already established. Thus in the midst of death we are in life” (Oct. 10, 1860) (Documents lviii-lix). A fact relevant to the binary: as early as 1850 Thoreau had settled into the routine, which would continue for the rest of his life, of writing in the morning and taking exploratory walks in the afternoon (Sattelmeyer 57).

Thoreau's forays in the wilderness recorded in Cape Cod (1864) and The Maine Woods (1864) alternately focus on the containment desired by the explorer-naturalist and the instable, questioning state of the poet—different versions of experience that constantly compete with one another. Cape Cod is preoccupied with problems of unsettling the conventional expectations of the travel narrative as it rhetorically exploits the Cape's “frontier” and redefines the term “New World discovery”:

What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a light-house or a fisherman's hut the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him.

(502)

Basic to Thoreau's travel narrative is an emphasis on perception and the importance of the observer. And yet for him, the perceiving consciousness (the poet in the poet-pioneer binary), as Robert Sattelmeyer has argued, is not “a ‘personality’ that distorted the accuracy of observation but a necessary component of the equation by which phenomena could be understood and rendered meaningful” (72); it is a stance that renders phenomena figural. In The Maine Woods, for example, Thoreau makes a case for the importance of perceiving “things” and the materiality of “Nature” by claiming that the “poet” and “pioneer” can be seen as analogous:

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him … [Yet] not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing foundation of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.

(533)

The pioneer, then, can be described as the forerunner of the poet but—as Thoreau the writer and naturalist came to see—the two eventually come together. “The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent” (185), he writes in Walden (1854), “our voyaging is only great circle sailing” (285). The (figurative) topography becomes the authority and the poet, distancing himself from time and place, appropriates the pioneer:

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers.

(Walden 79)

In Walden the trope of the pioneer's integration into the poet arises from Thoreau's own perpetual self-mythologizing and his often contradictory self-imaginings: a trope he employs to enact his own spiritual elevation. Yet at the same time, he aims to render a dynamic “natural” law in which the process of knowing is discontinuously progressive, perpetually incomplete. And although his writing would become increasingly concerned with scientific naturalism, a development clearly evident in the transformation of his journal around 1850, he never abandoned the position he took in A Week: “We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives … Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance … A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry” (325). Thoreau was, in a broad Emersonian sense, engaged in the appropriative acts of a “poet” of nature and science.

In Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy adopts a Thoreauvian posture by confronting the “facts” of history and topography. He too relies on figuration as a creative alliance between author and subject. McCarthy's topographical descriptions, like many of Thoreau's, represent reality not “realistically” but through tropes or rhetorical figures that generate, as Thoreau would have put it, “more language,” or to be specifically McCarthian, a “new” language of Western topographies. But in his descriptions McCarthy goes further than Thoreau: “the narrative is itself in fact no category but is rather the category of all categories for there is nothing which falls outside its purview. All is telling” (Crossing 155). Death and violence become the “telling” metaphors that one cannot go beyond, the metaphors for an impenetrable “truth,” because for McCarthy there is no one true description of the human situation, no one definitive naturalistic list, no one universal context for human lives. To put this another way, Thoreau was largely committed to the effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency whereas McCarthy is concerned with the effort to achieve a self-creation by the recognition of contingency. This is essentially why McCarthy presents his landscapes as neither fictional nor factual but rather as a kind of third possibility: a “fact” is a landscape under description⁴. Landscapes—a desert spring, the plains of chihuahua, the Mexican sands—become the sense-making tropes that govern and preformulate the understanding of the past and present worlds of his characters, ordering it to conform to some kind of human concept.

So McCarthy's tropes have more than a merely rhetorical or representational function and, like Thoreau, he suggests that his definitions of topography can only be figurative in aspect—as part of a process of understanding by which the unfamiliar is presented and comprehended through familiar categories. Basically, Thoreau believed in a fundamental correspondence between his figural representations and a higher reality. McCarthy, in the very force and precision of his figural representations, both affirms and undercuts this belief. He is aware of the landscapes and “timescapes” hidden in language: to speak is to uncover the landscapes of the past, but there is no Thoreauvian transcendence. Instead, the wilderness landscapes in Blood Meridian encode (and ultimately justify) a brutal understanding of life, but an understanding dependent on a recognition of the impenetrable and contingent. Critics such as Dana Phillips interpret McCarthy as confirming that “violence and death … are the more or less objective truths of all human experience” (439). My point here is that the narrator-poet sees these “truths” not as objective but rather as mysterious, inscrutable, and therefore most often conveys violence and death in metaphoric redescriptions.

The poet in Blood Meridian, a function highlighted by the “I” introduced in the novel's second paragraph, interprets his pioneers—Glanton, the kid, Toadvine, Judge Holden, and others in the scalp-hunting party—in a language that is crucially figural rather than conceptual in expression. This is signalled, for example, in chapter five when the wounded Sproule and the kid, desperately searching for water, think they see “an immense lake … below them” (62) but, the narrator tells us, “nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds” (63), a realization which leaves the two survivors astonished and uncomprehending. The narrator merely renders a figural explanation of their fear. Or when in chapter nine the scalphunters, led by Glanton, see coming toward them

much like their own image a party of riders pieced out of the darkness by the intermittent flare of the dry lightning to the north. Glanton halted and sat his horse and the company halted behind him. The silent riders hove on. When they were a hundred yards out they too halted and all sat in silent speculation at this encounter.

(120)

The language moves toward an allegorical presentation, an encounter of something ominous but conceptually undefinable. McCarthy's language thus centers on perceived worlds that constantly fringe into abyss and uncertainty. His scalphunters lose all sense of origin and destiny (4); they slip into an hallucinatory void (113).

Thoreau and McCarthy constantly attribute to the topographical the most reliable form of (epistemological) knowledge (though for McCarthy there must be an acknowledgment and appropriation of contingency). From the topographical their narrator-poets engage in descriptions of place, enacting the concomitant “natural” law of landscape and, in McCarthy's case, of dis-placement, violence and death. Furthermore, because the narrator wishes to understand topography and his characters' relation to it, narrative consciousness takes precedence over any focal character. Blood Meridian “appears to have no protagonist, no character from whom the action arises or around whom it coalesces” (Schopen 184). Thus the kid often disappears in the long second sections, and Glanton and the judge become fully realized only quite late in the novel. As in Walden, the locus of energy is generated from narrator to topography into which the narrator pours much intellectual effort, and out of which he creates much new energy. On the level of landscapes and topographies, then, the “shaping” that occurs in Blood Meridian, even passing as it does through a mimetic optic, is non-literal, non-physical, and it puts into question the conception of any anthropocentric notion of land (the material terrain, the historical entity).

The landscape is shaped and framed by a narrator who privileges his pioneers as “objective” referential phenomena while he creates a topographical rhetoric founded on “a vanished, though possibly a once-whole presence” (Bartlett 9). In this rhetoric, facts are not given but constructed; random and contingent descriptions are transformed into sense-making entities only through a figurative narrative. Therefore McCarthy, like Thoreau, denies materiality as he mystifies his natural surroundings. The scalphunters (“the Spectre horsemen” 172) lose themselves in the land. At the same time, in appropriating the impenetrable and contingent, McCarthy's rhetoric suggests that there is no escape from the physical nor is there an escape from the mind. The poet stages his own quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.

The poet describes the origins and ends of the pioneers as impulses of the land itself. When, for example, the Diegunos rescue Tobin and the kid, they see them as “suffering pilgrims,” and as something that “gather[s] itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster[s] along the edge of the eastern world” (300). In chapter eleven the judge uses landscape and temporal metaphors to evoke the demise of the pioneers, who are examples of the “degeneracy of mankind”:

in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

(147)

In this connection the narrator-poet treats the disappearances, failures, and deaths of his pioneers as a “natural” order of events. Once a character's fate has been described, put forth, no further comment or interpretation is required (narrative description is most often restricted to what a character says or does, not to what he thinks or feels). Glanton's death (and indeed the death of every pioneer in Blood Meridian) is a descriptive as opposed to an interpretive event (275). Similarly, when at the carcel the kid witnesses a public hanging, draws near and sees that the hanged men are Toadvine and Brown (311) he makes no comment, gives no interpretation. The next sentence changes the subject: “He'd little money and then he'd none but he was in every dramhouse and gamingroom, every cockpit and doggery” (311).

In describing this “normal” course of events, the narrator-poet derives from topographic elements of sensory stimulation linguistic constructions that signal his refusal to prioritize one phenomenon over another, one landscape over another:

They rode on. The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence.

(247)

The narrator-poet's journey echoes Thoreau's call to follow a “woodman's” path. But it is topography (“the neuter austerity of that terrain”), not human agency and will, that appears to shape the fate of the pioneers. The status of the pioneer, therefore, does not take the form of a special subject set apart from landscapes or objects:

the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another … all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

(247)

Instead, at certain points, the pioneers take on the features of specific landscapes and become inseparable from them:

The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.

(160)

Inversely, the narrator-poet sometimes describes the land through anthropomorphic metaphors:

[The scalphunters] did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian, sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dead pilgrims clanking nort.

(88)

At other points the scalphunters appear as a progeny and extension of the primeval landscapes they encounter. In this way the novel's language constantly gravitates towards an encoding of the physical terrain, a terrain which serves as a meeting point for the discursive truths of violence and death.

Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loopings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in time before nomenclature was and each was all.

(172)

Shortly after this description, the narrator-poet tells us that the scalphunters, in the town of Jesus Maria, “appeared in the streets, tattered, stinking, ornamented with human parts like cannibals” (189). And continuing these images and motifs he says that “[e]ven the horses looked alien … decked as they were in human hair and teeth and skin. There was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel” (232). By giving us a continual replay of these primal scenes and senses of (illusory) discovery, possession and loss, the narrator-poet questions any anthropocentric conception of topography (the pioneers “provoked out of the absolute rock”) while pointing to the provisional and impenetrable.

It is thus not surprising that McCarthy's topographical descriptions, authoritatively metaphorical, “do not satisfy the conditions of analyticity or verifiability” and “cannot be expressed as either logical sentences or as empirical hypotheses”; they “are not cognitive” (Sidorsky 153). The poet's (larger) topographical perceptions (and the linguistic representations they produce) reveal how the novel's topographies interact with its pioneers. This is why the narrator-poet's landscapes—as created by himself through his use of figurative language—do not simply loom in the background but become active and thematic, and set the limits for “doing” and “being”. And this is why, at any moment, topographical representation can appear as the poet's state of mind, in itself not related to the pioneer's actions, motivations, or thoughts. Likewise, the poet's role can be temporarily taken from him. Witness this passage from chapter four:

The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts in the air.

(46)

Here it is not the poet but (extraordinarily) the “white noon” that serves as a witness to the pioneers. Even in its radical inversion, this passage suggests that one's contingency, tracing one's causes back to nature, is identical with the process of inventing a new language—that is of conceiving new metaphors and figural combinations and perspectives. Neither the poet nor his pioneers is given preeminence; instead, language has this distinction. In this view, the poet is not coming to know a truth which was always present out there. Rather, he sees self-knowledge, however limited or imperfect this knowledge might be, as a recognition of contingency and as a form of (self-)creation.

What McCarthy evidently chooses to use as most conducive to his topographical understanding are forms of representation that urge a particular visual witnessing, an “optical democracy” (247). It is through the visual that the novel's narrative information most powerfully conveys its “truth”. The narrator begins by insisting on the visual: “See the child” (3). In the child (i.e., the kid), who can neither read nor write, there is “already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage” (3). Equally important, from the opening pages of the novel, history is presented as metaphor and topography is given preeminence in historical shaping: the barbarous and wild terrain that will “try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is another kind of clay” (5).

While the narrator urges the reader to visually respond to the text, the narrator's consciousness gains panoptic force from one topography to the next. The panoptic eye, emphasizing the importance of topography, can come from almost anywhere (e.g., it comes from a wolf in section one of McCarthy's The Crossing). By giving a panoptic vision, the narrator-poet can describe his pioneers as separate from himself—in this instance, just following the Comanche attack, the fleeing White and his mercenary “pilgrims”:

The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anereta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.

(46)

The poet's metaphorical discourse (“stars go rifling down the dark”; “hearts beating in the sand”) constantly breaks out of one perspective, one metaphoric, into another. And here McCarthy shares again a basic Thoreauvian approach, insisting on a topography of no permanent ground, of making no “beaten track which others may, regrettably, follow” (Walden 293). In distinction from his pioneers, McCarthy's narrator-poet appropriates what he sees by (re)naming it. Thus both Thoreau and McCarthy follow the Emersonian logic: “there is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet” (Emerson 5-6).

Both authors in their descriptions place the emphasis on renderings that eschew paraphrase or the equating of meaning with an external signified or objective pattern of significance. And both rely on the creation of a (new) language—inscribed in the physical world, precise in taxonomic diction—generated by the interactions of poets with pioneers, and poets with their instantiated topographies.

And yet it is for markedly different reasons and ends that McCarthy and Thoreau depend on natural phenomenon and topography to reshape the boundaries of language and subjectivity. While urging his readers to “Direct your eye sight inward” and “be an expert in home-cosmography” (Walden 320), Thoreau uses topography as an essential conduit to his inner explorations. He appears to believe, despite his contradictory and multiplistic thinking, in transcendent truths contained in nature. McCarthy problematizes his topographies in the very mediation of them through a discourse that questions the power over nature provided by force and rational knowledge. While representing such a belief, however, his topographical discourse ultimately presents the position that any literal description of one's individuality, which is to say any borrowing from or use of an inherited language for this purpose, will necessarily fail. At the same time, his topographical claims reflect a belief in non-transcendence (for the narrator, an unquestionable given) and consistently work against the novel's pioneers.

As an inheritor of romanticism and the emerging natural sciences, Thoreau placed himself within his topographical world, where he discovered an account more capable of redemption than that of the civilized world. As Stephen Toulmin and Jane Goodfield have remarked in The Discovery of Time, by the mid-eighteenth century,

men were beginning to recognize that the present face of the world might carry enduring traces dating from much earlier, even prehuman times; and that, if only we could interpret them, these traces would provide evidence about the past as direct and reliable as any human tradition.

(142-143)

Thoreau elevated the description of nature as the means to understand the past. “History was to be found in the landscape through inventive and experimental observation” (Burbick 12).

In his use of a richly metaphorical language, McCarthy reenacts Thoreau's desire to re-create the world in words but he is skeptical of the redemptive qualities of landscape. He insists more than Thoreau on the discursive nature of reality and therefore on the essential paradox through which world and word become interdependent. Identity is more “an iterative matter, as a repetitive sequence of migrations and border crossings during which selves are created, disavowed, and re-created” (Tatum 313). But such characters as John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses (1992), the Parham brothers in The Crossing, and the scalphunters in Blood Meridian can only hope to claim their identity once they become aware of the contingencies of their own existence and are divested of their familiar surroundings, of their future and past. The narrator-poet makes landscape this divesting force. In chapter twenty one of Blood Meridian, for example, he describes how the land “reduces” the kid and Tobin:

By noon the water was gone and they sat studying the barrenness about. A wind blew down from the north. Their mouths were dry. The desert upon which they were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of feature altogether and there was nothing to mark their progress upon it. The earth fell away on every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circumscribed and of them were they the locus.

(295)

This reduction, in another way, highlights the preeminence of language, generated here by the poet-narrator. Nietzsche's definition of truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” amounts to the position of the Blood Meridian poet: the whole idea of representing reality by means of language, and thus the idea of finding a single context for all human lives, must be dropped. The only way to discover the causes of one's being is to tell a story about one's causes in a new language.

Moreover, in Blood Meridian, McCarthy plays on the remnants of a desire for “the core of truth in nature” that motivated Thoreau's quest. Indeed, Thoreau is an unnamed part of the intertext. Witness the judge's obsessive “naturalist” collecting:

He nodded towards the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

(198)

The judge is (or at least seems to be) limitless in his power to catalogue and therefore dominate nature. The other scalphunters, most notably Toadvine and the kid, are dramatized as constantly coming up against their own limitations, their finitude that continually places them at the edge of death and nothingness. What perhaps comes closest to McCarthy's “core of truth” is the understanding, however slight, of this finitude, which usually follows an encounter with “morality” (e.g., Toadvine's reaction to the murder of an Apache child (164)) or some kind of transitional moment that intensely reveals the contingent or the limits of human knowledge (e.g., when the Kid whispers to the judge, “You were the one” (307)). Thoreau, on the other hand, dwelled in the infinitude of nature and individual realization. Even though he modified a strictly transcendental approach to the landscape (doing so as early as 1845), he remained a romantic in the religiously loaded tradition of transcendentalism. He insists on such infinitude, for example, in the worldmaking power of the artist of Kouroo in Walden.

The relationship between poet and pioneer is also markedly different. Thoreau identifies much less with actual American pioneers than with the “pioneer” he sees as constituting an essential part of the questing poet. He therefore insisted upon using the first person in writing his descriptions of landscape. The autobiographical I (poet) was also the I (pioneer) who observed the land and committed himself to observation and description as a means to truth. With A Week, for example, in signalling that the poet and pioneer are one, Thoreau establishes himself as a writer of verifiable observation. By the time A Week was published, describing the landscape became a way of life for him.

But the poet is something more than a scald, “a smoother and polisher of language”, he is a Cincinnatus in literature, and occupies no west end of the world. Like the sun he will indifferently select his rhymes, and with a liberal taste weave into his verse the planet and the stubble.

(431)

In contrast, the narrator of Blood Meridian remains a separate entity from his pioneers and of course there is no autobiographical I. At the same time, like the escaping kid and Sproule, he appears to be “scanning the landscape for some guidance in that emptiness” (67); he seems to be part of their helplessness. Moreover, the narrator, in such locutions as “in truth” (3), in using prolepses (242) and analepses (86), in shifting to present verb tenses (“Already it is twilight down in Laredito” 39) (unobtrusively) makes his presence known. Although no writer of verifiable observations, he is an integral part of his own narrative projectories and the scalphunters' journey. Witnessing the remains of “pilgrims” who died while crossing a Mexican desert, the narrator-poet (in Thoreauvian fashion) visually makes the discovery:

… and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what?

(111)

In contemplating this destruction the poet appears as helpless as his pioneers. The typical visual situation in McCarthy is emphatically perspectival, with the poet at the participative center. The scenes constituting the topography work, in a way reminiscent of the camera obscura, to present life in a spiritually and morally apprehensible form by turning it into a visual surface.

What is also interesting is that both authors make use of actual elements (places, people, historical events) in order to push facts into the figural and history into figments. Through the poet-pioneer binary, both authors call into question the notion of historical progress, both suspect the concept of “manifest destiny” as tied to any Western movement (or tied to anything for that matter), and both distance themselves from a belief in the collective development of a human consciousness.

For example, Thoreau's “progress” in Walden is constantly conceived in terms of a separation of self from history, even though he provides what can be seen as contradictory evidence in his discussions on slavery, Irish immigration, and agricultural capitalism. The construction of Thoreau's rhetorical identity, however, never strays from this position:

I delighted to come to my bearings,—not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may,—not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.

(Walden 293)

History is interiorized. Tied to his attempt “to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization” (10), Thoreau uses the alterity of his historical position to provide a vantage point for examining other possible forms of continuity. Instead of “asserting his freedom from a local past in order to nationalize his identity” (i.e., the prevailing nationalist ideology of manifest destiny), Thoreau “enacts his dissent from a fallen [or illusory] national mission in order to affirm the significance of the local” (Lowney 240).

Again he does so largely through the poet-pioneer binary, which allows him to recognize the “poetic,” living essence of nature:

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth.

(Walden 275)

From reflections of this kind, Thoreau denies the progressive assumption of social evolution underlying the stages of discovery, exploration and any kind of settlement. His concern is not with original historical discovery but rather with “inwardness” and spiritual progress⁵.

Like Thoreau, McCarthy questions history as “a meaningful category” (Phillips 440). Even though Blood Meridian is largely based on the exploits of Captain Glanton and his band of scalphunters in the years just following the Mexican-American War, the novel's history is allusive. McCarthy's “history” suggests more a prelapsarian world than a new world-a world more to be formed and named than one concerned with reality as it is or should be. There is no conflict between “an assumed historical reality and the ideology, myths, and symbols generated in American culture by … the moving frontier of settlement and the territory beyond” (Smith 23) because Blood Meridian's “natural” universe lacks human implication and transcendency. As the judge tells the Kid in the closing pages of the novel, “The past that was differs little from the past that was not” (330). Existence has its own order which the human mind cannot fathom or transcend. But it is a natural universe precisely because it is formed from landscapes that are neither the analogue nor the translation of “natural law”; instead they are its direct expression.

In other words, McCarthy's viewpoint and voice are more concerned with tropic meanings than with fact and assured statements. For McCarthy, correspondence with fact is less productive than the idea of “truth”. The narrator-poet's description of the cave paintings at the Hueco tanks conveys the idea that truth offers itself most fully to us in its hiding:

They were of men and animals and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him.

(173)

Thoreau makes a similar claim in Walden: the concept of truth is a set of choices between what is hidden and what is not (Melley 261).

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

(283)

Thoreau appears to believe, as part of this conception, in “the essential core of truth in language as reflecting a similar core of truth in nature” (Schneider 95). So while on the one hand, Thoreau's “new language” might very well be to refind the old, original meanings; on the other hand, language in Walden can only hope to present a “volatile truth of our words [which] should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement” (289).

One consequence of this mode is that borders or frontiers in both novels speak for something other than the empirically self-evident. In A Week Thoreau puts materiality and history on a second level proposing that

frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor … [T]here is an unsettled wilderness … between him and the setting sun, or, further still, between him and it.

(410)

The pioneer explores the actual frontiers and supplies the poet with the “materials of language” (Fussell 194). But more than this, because “[t]he universe is wider than our view of it” (Walden 285), the “West,” for Thoreau, stands for an “interior white on the chart” (286), an interior only the poet can fill, to go beyond “that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific … but leads on direct, a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too” (287).

For McCarthy's frontiers, the diachronic constantly gives way to the synchronic and the historical moment is eclipsed by the dictates of language, rhetoric, and tropological play. The narrator essentially erases the inhabited landscape by suspending the narrative flow of the text, by locating meaning in figural, topographical friezes. This is McCarthy's semantic investment, carried out by the active roles of topography. In this way, McCarthy echoes Thoreau's binary: it is ultimately the poet “who [has] done the real pioneer work of the world” (Week 419).

But the actual pioneers also play their parts. Blood Meridian asserts a fundamental continuity between text and the world by intruding heretofore “factual” beings into “fictional” landscapes. Almost all of the major characters in Blood Meridian have real-life counterparts. The novel thus relies on inscriptions of personal experiences and relationships and/or historical facts. The discourses of Blood Meridian, then, do not completely undo historicism, for the novel is caught in the historical moment. Instead, the discourses put the “flash points of history” (Lehan 552) in tension with the novel's respective languages, literary methods, and interpretive topographies.

The historical moment of Blood Meridian is based on the Yuma Crossing Massacre of April 23, 1850, and its contingent figures and events. As Joseph Sepich has argued,

The sense of McCarthy's [Blood Meridian] is fully available … only with the recognition that the book is founded to a remarkable degree on the reports of first-hand observers traveling in the mid-nineteenth-century Southwest.

(135)

But the importance Sepich gives to such reports does not penetrate the meaning of McCarthy's language, a language that denies the idea that there is a pregiven meaning built into the flow of history, that there is a pregiven dictate which justifies a belief in progress or destiny. McCarthy negates a sense of the human actor and historical unfolding by suggesting that there is no clearly defined reality prior to the act of representation, and that there is no representation without a topographical witnessing and interpretation.

The language of Blood Meridian undoes the promise of closure and the potential solace of transparent, self-evident, and final meaning. There are no boundaries, only topographical transitions through the distances and times covered. Thus the language of the novel appears to challenge the pursuit of any authority but that established by topographical, tropological, and poetic meaning. The chief function of mimesis in this work, while still proposing a reality, is not to offer a representation but to use a descriptive system as a certain wedge or “dictate” of interpretation (Riffaterre 125).

In their descriptive systems, McCarthy and Thoreau converge art and representation, doing so by the notion of a figure, and by enforcing a relatively metaphorical discourse of reconstruction and supplementarity. Both authors deconstruct an anthropocentric vision of nature and, with a renewed vitality and potency, go back to nature as an originary and prehistoric force. But Thoreau does so more as a process of discovery, in order to come to know a truth which is always out there (or always internal), to break out of the world of time into a world of enduring truth. McCarthy, on the other hand, while aware of the individual as a causal product of natural forces, returns to nature to appropriate the contingent and to leave a self which becomes a tissue of contingencies rather than at least potentially a well-ordered system of faculties. By setting their protagonists in landscapes that “make visible the essential” (Carroll 201) while deadening any kind of permanent individual realization or achievement, McCarthy and Thoreau depict their poet-pioneers' simultaneous sense of liberation and imprisonment. McCarthy, like Thoreau, uses the capacities of language to compose a narrative of the hunting of sources, dependent upon topographies. But unlike Thoreau's emancipating topographies, those of McCarthy, while potentially implying potent and originary qualities, offer only barriers to a permanent identity and only a temporary assuagement at the risk of isolation, displacement, or death.

Notes

1. John Muir, The Mountains of California (Berkeley: Ten Speed P, 1983) 75-76.

2. The First and Last Journey of Thoreau, Ed. Franklin B. Sanborn (Boston, 1905) vol. 1, 85.

3. I am indebted to James C. McKelly's argument on the Western “poet-pioneer” and particularly his discussion on Jack Kerouac, in “The Artist and the West: Two Portraits by Jack Kerouac and Sam Shepard”.

4. James R. Stilgoe has defined landscape (a “slippery” word) as “shaped land, land modified for permanent human occupation … A landscape happens not by chance but by contrivance, by premeditation, by design; a forest or swamp or prairie no more constitutes a landscape than does a chain of mountains. Such land forms are only wilderness, the chaos from which landscapes are created by men intent on ordering and shaping space for their own ends” (3). This essay parts company with Stilgoe. Landscape in Blood Meridian is not a “socially constructed entity” nor is it an “unmediated physical terrain”; rather, landscape becomes landscape when it is represented in words, which is why, for the novel, “human shaping as a criterion for distinguishing landscape from mere land” (Marx xix) is not a particularly helpful distinction. Landscape in Blood Meridian, though necessarily containing the idea of a witness or viewer, is characterized by contention and effect rather than any positive human interaction.

5. Thoreau realized that nature and her secrets could prove to be more elusive than he indicated in his figurative description of them in Walden. Yet Thoreau, as he writes in 1851, relied on “poetry” for his true explanations, for such explanations “puts an interval between the impression and the experience” (Leary 153).

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