Great Books: Blood Meridian

This is one of the most violent books I've ever come across, rivalled perhaps only by American Psycho. It's also very, very good.

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

Read that one again.

"... and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel and ..."

Can you picture that in your head?

And the book from start to finish was immersed in bloody murder with no respite and intent in swallowing the reader whole in its rancorous maw that without a doubt its reputation for violence is richly deserved and but what the author finds it fit to write without interruption of punctuations just strung together ands like swollen infant indian heads strung through the nostrils with barbedwire left to glisten in the sun. They rode on.

I apologize for that lousy attempt to imitate the man. The book's language, if you can get past the savagery, is beautiful and hypnotic. 

McCarthy is a master of rhythm.

What intrigues me most about Blood Meridian, like Amercian Psycho and Lolita, are the glimpses it occasionally offers into things hidden beneath, what on the surface appears to be a story designed to shock and provoke.

In the story we find all sorts of weird structural things. And if you pay close attention, you will begin to notice more and more of these features, like strange geological formations in an otherwise barren landscape. Word repetitions, distant echoes, palindromes, and mirror images figure prominently, contributing to an overall sense that some weird shit is going on behind the scenes, just beyond the grasp of our comprehension.

p. 96

Perdida, perdida. La carta está perdida en la noche.... Un maleficio, cried the old woman. Qué viento tan maleante...

...and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that apposite to which man's transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny.

p. 120

As they rode that night upon the mesa they saw come 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..... And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys.



p. 151 

Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds. They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

What does it all mean?

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. 

Read it.