Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

Reviews 59 returning: they are sure of where they have been and where they are going. The men in these stories face more complex situations. They have three and four generations of family on the land behind them, and the accumulated traditions and debts of their families they find difficult to abandon. Their lives lack the direction toward artistic fulfillment or the culture of the East that lured away the youth of earlier novels. Without clear alternatives, it isharder to leave, and yet the complications of family and economic decline make it even more difficult to remain on the land. Together these three novels attest to the continuing developmentof Great Plains literature. Accumulating generations and the crises ofbig business and government programs add to the complications of weather and narrow small towns so that the decision to go or stay does not become obsolete but rather more complex. Sorry and Kurt, young men who come of age in the 1960s, and their older compatriot Martin Troyer, join the long list of characters created by Garland, Cather, Rolvaag, Lewis, Sandoz, Morris and others who must come to terms with themselves and with the barren, bountiful land. These are only the most recent novels in what is a vital Great Plains liter­ ary tradition. DIANE D. QUANTIC Wichita State University Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West. ByCormac McCarthy. (New York: Random House, 1985. 335 pages, $17.95.) Set in the Southwest of the mid-nineteenth century, Blood Meridian does not invite confusion with any romantic notion of the West prevalent in that century or this. Cormac McCarthy reconstructs that West as a Daliesque stage upon which characters and forces often resonant of Shakespeare and the Bible act out their roles. Loosely based upon, or more accurately, around the Yuma Crossing Massacre of 23 April, 1850, and some of its principals, the book rises from its beginning above the mean particulars ofhistory to universal certainties and uncertainties, the stuff of serious fiction. McCarthy’sbook focuses on cruelty, perhaps man’smostapparent quality in the world the author creates. The book’sinhumanity isnot—as isoften the case in Westerns—the cruelty of white to Indian or Indian to white, but the cruelty of human to human perennial to literature and to other affairs of mankind. Underlying that and often reinforcing it is the apparent callousness of fate, indifferently and inexorably putting each person in the place or time to die in whatever predestined cruel or ridiculous manner. As befits such matters, McCarthy’s strong and often apunctuative style blends neologism and archaism in a syntax sometimes drawing on the rhythms of the Bible, sometimes on the resources of Old English, always modern in a Joycean way. Strong images abound (“. . . Callaghan’s body floated anony­ mously down-river, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical 60 Western American Literature black, silent rider to the sea,” and later, “Downshore the dull surf boomed”) and combine with the writer’s cadences to give Blood Meridian both poetry and strength. As the title might indicate, gore, the book’s strongest image, dominates. If the reader has ever witnessed or cleaned up the results ofa totally successful ambush, he (for most American women haven’t) will be prepared for the atrocities man commits upon man in this story; if he has not, the book will slam into him like a Sam Peckinpah film. The protagonist, a nameless and taciturn young Everyman known only as “the kid,” runs away from home at fourteen to the West to keep, as it appears, his appointment with his particular destiny. The book ends in his twentyeighth year, the time intervening filled with his wandering throughout the West from one scrape, adventure and encounter to more of the same. It is not, however, the kid who dominates McCarthy’s terra damnata, but “Judge” Holden, an enigmatic giant, a genius who proves, Rennaissancelike , master of sciences, arts, crafts, war, languages—of the world. At once nihilist, absurdist, rationalist and irrationalist, the powerful judge islimned in heroic proportions, an embodiment of the evil too often inherent in the ways man handles his knowledge. Holden, the most “civilized” and rational char­ acter in the...