Blood Meridian or Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

[ashulman]

And since I didn't mention, I agree this is one of the best novels written by an American, period.

[Cioran]

I really can't imagine how anyone could wish a writer as brilliant as McCarthy to commit suicide. Was it a joke?

Anyhow, too bad if you think otherwise, but the novel that McCarthy wrote was based on a real person (the Judge) and real events. There has never been a bigger mass-killing machine than the U.S. of A. Henry Miller: "I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see that mushroom poisoning the world and withering at the roots."

There's a great scene in Blood Meridian in which the racism problem is dealt with in a forthright way. One of the men riding with the Glanton gang is black (and he killed a racist white man in the gang with a machete, as I recall, thus earning the respect of his peers). The boys stop at an eatery and the owner, seeing the black man among them, says, "I cain't serve ye." The Judge, Glanton and the others "bowed their heads like men at prayer." Then Glanton himself, as I recall, whipped out his gun and shot the proprietor in the forehead. His brains flew out of the back of his head and smeared the wall behind him. The men ate, and then stole the rest of the food as the terrified help high-footed it away.

That is how you enforce civil rights, my friends!

[Sancho]

I admired the research McCarthy put into the language. As I recall, he use a lot of expressions that weren't familiar to me, but were common for the time.

As for the historical accuracy of the type of actions the Glanton Gang (or whoever it was they were based upon) engaged in -- uh, I don't know, man.

[WyattGwyon]

I really can't imagine how anyone could wish a writer as brilliant as McCarthy to commit suicide. Was it a joke?

I didn't take it to mean he wished McCarthy would commit suicide. I thought he meant that, given the dark vision of humanity that suffuses such books as Blood Meridian, Outer Dark, and The Road, it is a wonder he would wish to go on living. For the record, this view makes no sense to me.

[ladderandbucket]

As for the historical accuracy of the type of actions the Glanton Gang (or whoever it was they were based upon) engaged in -- uh, I don't know, man.

Mccarthy has said in an interview that he deliberately exaggerated the violence to make a point about modern culture. Nevertheless the Glanton gang were real and it seems that they really were a bad lot. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton:

After the war in summer 1849, Glanton and his gang were hired in a nominally mercenary operation by Mexican authorities, to track down and kill dangerous bands of Apache Indians in the Southwest. To earn more money, the Glanton gang began murdering and scalping peaceful agricultural Indians and Mexican citizens alike to claim under the bounty for scalps. The state of Chihuahua put a bounty on the heads of the gang, declaring them outlaws by December 1849.[7] Chihuahua authorities drove the gang out to Sonora where they wore out their welcome and moved into what is now Arizona.

I have read Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography 'Recollections of a Rogue' which includes a few chapters on his time with the Glanton gang. It's a good, entertaining read.. if a little bit hard to swallow.

He's long overdue for suicide. ~ C A Cafolini

I recall another interview with Mccarthy where he said something along the lines of: 'I am a pessimist but don't find any reason to feel depressed about it' and 'the good thing about being a pessimist is that things never turn out as bad as you expect'. Interview is here, if you're interested:http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment...e-and-art.html It includes Werner Herzog reading from All the Pretty Horses!

[stlukesguild]

There has never been a bigger mass-killing machine than the U.S. of A.

I wouldn't go that far. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China might have a better claim to that position.

[mortalterror]

There has never been a bigger mass-killing machine than the U.S. of A.

I wouldn't go that far. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China might have a better claim to that position.

Someone needs a history lesson: The Assyrians, the Persians under Cyrus, the Greeks under Alexander, the Romans of the Imperial period, the Chinese of the Three Kingdoms and Tang periods, the Arabs under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphate, the Mongels under the Khans, the Turks under Tamerlane, the Chinese of the late Yuan period, the Chinese of the late Ming period, the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Year War, the French under Napoleon and Robespierre, the Zulus under Shaka, the Chinese of the mid nineteenth century.

[Cioran]

Someone needs a history lesson.

Not really. When I say there has never been a bigger mass-killing machine than the U.S., I do not say that the U.S., in pursuit of its imperial designs, has killed more people than the societies mentioned above. Although note that a couple of examples, like the Nazis (especially the Nazis) and the Soviets had a short run compared to the U.S., and most of the deliberate Soviet mass killing occurred under Stalin.

What I say is that the U.S. has standardized mass killing, in the manor of a Henry Ford assembly line.

Cormac McCarthy, in all his works, lays bare the essential violence as the core idea of the American state: Violence against blacks, violence against Native Americans, violence against gays, violence against the environment, violence against organized labor, violence in our sporting events and TV shows, violence, violence, violence. We are an imperial power that spends vastly more sums of money on the military than the rest of the world's nation's combined. We are the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, twice. We have 5 percent of the world's population but use most of its carbon-causing resources which, if we are unlucky, could contribute to the greatest mass extinction of humans and other animals that the world has ever seen. If the methane hydrates go, all bets are off about our survival as a species.

Obama visits a school where kids were killed and gives a heartfelt address. Has he visited Pakistan, where by independent estimates his unconstitutional drone campaign has killed at least 74 Pakistani children, among a larger number of civilians? Obama inflicts a recurring 9/11 among the people of Pakistan, and apparently Americans are OK with that. Because in the triumph of Orwellian doublespeak, if somebody is killed in these attacks, even a child, such a person is just defined to be an enemy combatant.

[Paulclem]

I was surprised to discover the scalping bounty and the history of the Glanton gang through Blood Meridian. My initial thoughts were that this was a history ignored by Hollywood, which had usurped the stories and places with very selective accounts. The "cowboy" films were very popular here in the UK, particularly with my parents' generation, and us until other things started to overtake their popularity.

(In testament to this I remember going to a Country night at the local pub in Wakefield, West Yorkshire to listen to Don William's songs with my dad. This pub is not a million miles away from the location of the type of pub encountered in An American Werewolf in London - you remember The Slaughtered Lamb? And the blokes in that pub could have been found listening to Country music with us that night. I don't know why cowboy culture was so popular in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but I suspect that it was the rebellious outlaw individual that appealed. My wife once went to a cowboy night where there was a quick draw contest, and people dressed up as cowboys).

Anyway, I think the cowboy image - the noble outlaw image perhaps - is what is attacked here in Blood Meridian. You think of the moraliy of the film cowboys and it contrasts very starkly with the amorality of the figures in Blood Meridian, and their historical counterparts. Could you stretch it to an assault on capitalistic individuality against notions of community? It is certainly the communities that suffer in the book, and no-one is safe from them. This was also the case historically with the exploitation of though scalping Indians, mexicans, and stretching scalps to claim more than one. That icon of individual effort, the gold rush was also attacked in the book and reality when the gang takes over the ferry.

it's a great book.

[stlukesguild]

What I say is that the U.S. has standardized mass killing, in the manor of a Henry Ford assembly line.

Cormac McCarthy, in all his works, lays bare the essential violence as the core idea of the American state: Violence against blacks, violence against Native Americans, violence against gays, violence against the environment, violence against organized labor, violence in our sporting events and TV shows, violence, violence, violence. We are an imperial power that spends vastly more sums of money on the military than the rest of the world's nation's combined. We are the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, twice. We have 5 percent of the world's population but use most of its carbon-causing resources which, if we are unlucky, could contribute to the greatest mass extinction of humans and other animals that the world has ever seen. If the methane hydrates go, all bets are off about our survival as a species.

This is simply an expression of American "exceptionality" that is simply the reverse of cafolini's notions of American infallibility... and just as naive. The US has certainly had its flaws. It is no where near being exceptional in terms of standardizing killing or warfare or in its impact upon upon the environment.

I agree with Paulclem as to the interpretation of Blood Meridian. It is far from being an indictment of America and a claim of the exceptionality of American violence. Rather it presents a contrast between the American ideals of the cowboys, Manifest Destiny, and the absolute splendor of the American West and the violence that accompanied this. Judge Holden, especially, presents the horrible contrast between religion... and violence... especially at the end of a gun.

[ashulman]

And I think he's making a larger point about destruction and creation, probably the same thing Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction. This is the concept that still drives our economic lives, if the means are certainly more civilized, ie, we no longer consider it ok to clear land of a native population of millions by force. We still accept some amount of killing to secure our economic futures (see Iraq), but it's nowhere on the scale of the origination of the country. That's called progress, and realize that it's a very recent civilizing. The Vietnam War, which was justified as a vague threat to economic security (Communism will spread, markets will be nationalized, etc), killed 1-3 million Vietnamese. It's hard to imagine that happening today on that scale but who knows? I think McCarthy is reflecting this, and wrestling with the dilemma. It's fitting that the Judge finally gets the best of the Kid in California, the end of the line so to speak in terms of American expansion.

[Sancho]

^Posts like that are the reason I joined the Litnet.

[neilgee]

^Posts like that are the reason I joined the Litnet.

I do agree, what a brilliant thread, although that's not why I joined litnet, but I do think McCarthy is the best writer alive today (that i know of). At first I found that clipped style of writing (McCarthy doesn't waste words) difficult, but as i went on I thought Mccarthy's economy had an extraordinary precision. I do think he is one of the few writers active today that will still be being read in a hundred years and beyond, I think the guy's streaked with genius.

I haven't read this novel, just the trilogy and a couple of other obvious ones, but I just ordered it on Amazon so maybe I'll have more to say later if this thread is still going.

[Sancho]

Honestly, I was a little put off by the extreme violence in the book. It didn't ring true. I read that the source McCarthy used was the memoir of one of the gang member's and he had exaggerated his experiences greatly. Then according to an earlier post on this thread, McCarthy further embellished the violence, making it a sort of exponential escalation of what really happened.

I certainly don't think the western expansion in North America was all singing cowboys and their faithful sidekick, the noble savage, but I don't think it was all marauding bands of homicidal psychopaths either.

Which is why I found ashulman's post above so valuable. It was an ah-hah moment for me, and I finally realized why so many people consider Blood Meridian a great book, and not just a slasher novel. (Yep, I can be a little dense at times.)

[tim270]

So I read this book like two months ago, at the badgering of a friend of mine. I'll be honest: I don't like McCarthy as a stylist; I think he's derivative and inorganic in his use of language. That said, the book was alright. I'll share the notes I made after it:

"It's a book worthy of being read again."

I don't think it's a "great" novel, but that's no backhanded compliment. I mean that: It's a book worthy of serious consideration.

"The premise seems to be that life is war- but, even more, war is life. There's some profundity to this, even if it isn't terribly original. Holden: "War is God."

"As a stylist McCarthy has some gifts and flaws. One can decide which is dominant on personal taste. He writes excellent dialogue and is often capable of the striking image. However, he can be terribly redundant; his diction is sometimes puzzling and flat-out flawed; and there's nothing organic about the way he uses language- except in his dialogue."

"As a work of narrative it is likewise strong and weak. It's definitely action packed and moves along quite quickly (w interspersed drudgery) and it has many memorable scenes and characters. However, he could learn a lot about economy, and there are gaping holes of logic, particularly towards the end. (Intentional Opaqueness?) Why/How does Holden show up naked w the idiot? Why does he start suddenly trying to kill the Kid? When he had ample opportunity beforehand? What is the basis of his accusations that the Kid wasn't fully invested in the group?


"Which leads me to another narrative issue: The Kid disappears for a huge chunk of the novel. I think a lot of my discontent w the ending could have been alleviated w a clearer picture of the Kid's and Holden's relationship throughout the group's activities. But that's largely denied the reader.


So, anyway, those are just some of my random thoughts after reading the book. Again, I don't think it's a great book. And McCarty for all his powers can be a grating author to read. However, I would certainly recommend it as a book worth reading, and thinking about.