“What Happens to Country” in Blood Meridian

Abstract

an enduring delineation in his work of now nine novels. The fifth book's title, and its dense Epilogue contributing to the rich ambiguities of meridian, now resonate against a new novel, No Country for OldMen. McCarthy's latest book begins as a West Texas noir, boiling with enough violence to remind the reader of milder passages from Blood Meridian. But ultimately, the new book simmers down into the bitterness of an old man's jeremiad: the good days of riding and justice are gone, and violence seems a thing of youth. This is ironic, though, as most of Blood Meridian describes a space devoid of law and morality, and it tests the reader, and its protagonist, with the severity of its violence. Early on, the narrator divulges the book's central problem: again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay (4-5). Toward the novel's end, one answer to this problem is given by judge Holden: If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay (307). Holden's position-indeed, the preponderance of the novel's structure and force-demands a space for unbridled war, for violence unconstrained by pity. One definition of the book's meridian, then, might be this: the line in history before which the problem of the human heart's will was tried in the fire of pure war. Beyond that line, history takes over: the possibilities of the heart are indeed become molded like clay, fired in killing, and now cracked in guilt. In the Epilogue of Blood Meridian, McCarthy ultimately renders space into place through enigmatic yet historical details, describ