No Sympathy for the Devil: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
The American West is regarded with wonder and longing by contemporary fans of historical fiction. Plucky folk heroes and enigmatic villains such as Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Bass Reeves, and countless others names have been etched into the annals of history, immortalized in film, literature, and popular culture. What is often misremembered - or indeed forgotten - about this transitional period of manifest destiny is what immersion into a lawless land populated by as many killers as pioneers does to the moral fabric of man. Droves of settlers set off westward across the Mississippi in search of a new beginning, but spurned from the civilized world of the east, murderers, outlaws, and degenerates followed suit in constant pursuit of fresh prey. This sets the blood-soaked stage for legendary author Cormac McCarthy's darkest and most morally questioning novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.
Set in the brutal and destitute borderlands between Texas and Spanish-controlled Mexico in the midst of the 19th century, Blood Meridian follows an passive protagonist known only as "The Kid" as he falls in with a group of scalphunters led by the ruthless John Joel Glanton - a historical outlaw whose reign of terror across the sun-baked deserts of the American Southwest makes for a story one wishes was a pure work of fiction. Glanton, a veteran of the Mexican-American war, sought his fortune at the head of a company of lowlifes and degenerates, indiscriminately killing Apache Native Americans to collect the bounties that the fledgeling provincial governments of Mexico had placed upon them. Heavily armed and in a land lacking the laws of civilization and the government to enforce them, Glanton's gang became the ultimate authority in the region and before long were facilitating the wholesale slaughter of entire villages of Native Americans, Mexicans, and settlers alike. With military firepower, primal bloodlust, and a complete lack of morality Glanton and his gang gained infamy and inspired terror wherever their gruesome work took them next. Neither Glanton nor the novel's protagonist are the main focus, however. That role is played by one of literatures most legendary and terrifying villains: an outlaw known only as Judge Holden, or more simply, The Judge.
The Judge is as mysterious and fascinating as he is imposing and unquestionably evil. He is described as physically menacing - close to seven feet in height, rippling with muscle, and bald from head to toe. Whilst carving out a bloody legacy of terror as Glanton's right hand man, he is also a student of geology, anthropology, botany, and philosophy, recording each and every feature of that vast and lawless wilderness in a journal that is never out of reach. He speaks a dozen languages, dances with high society nobles, is a master draftsman, and plays each musical instrument he lays his enormous hands on as gracefully and skillfully as his six-gun. He is a character as cultured as he is vicious, as knowledgeable as he is ominous, and he is feared not only by his victims, but by each member of the Glanton gang as well. Throughout the narrative he toys with the outlaws, challenging their world views with his thoughts on the natural world, philosophy, and the inner workings of man. His lust for knowledge is not driven by curiosity but by a desire for domination, not unlike the original sin of Judeo-Christian tradition. Perhaps his motives can be best explained in his campfire monologue, in which he says to the gang:
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. This is my claim, and yet everywhere upon in are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation...the freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."
It is through the juxtaposition, or indeed agreement, between The Judge's intelligence and voracious pursuit of knowledge and his animalistic dispensation towards violence and domination that the metaphor between him and the Devil appears, and in fact questions the ethics of the American ideals we hold so closely. In The Judge, we see a character who is a master practitioner of every trade, a scholar who has catalogued and committed to memory every plant, animal, and feature of the land in an effort to assert his complete dominance over it. As the Devil encouraged Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge so that they could become as powerful as God, The Judge abides. In this, he mirrors the goals and aspirations of American settlers moving west to pacify, subdue, ad eventually control the untamed wilderness of the new frontier. In a parallel that is chilling to realize, his motivations mirror that of man: understand the natural order of things so that we can impose our own order over it.
The Judge, as brutal as he is civil, is not merely a metaphoric embodiment of evil, but a symbol of man's timeless efforts to rule the unrulable. Subjugating the native population, ruling through violence and domination, and overriding the laws of nature are, after all, the same actions and objectives of the settlers or America's past. In understanding this metaphor, we see that the settlers who carved niches of society from the mountains and deserts of the American frontier may not be the plucky heroes we remember them as; rather they are the villains, imposing order where none exists save for the laws of nature.
The gratuitous violence and bloodshed punctuating McCarthy's most compelling novel is truly disturbing, but not as disturbing as the realization that the author's embodiment of all that is evil in the world so perfectly aligns with values of civilized society let loose in an uncivilized theater. It is the realization that somewhere deep in the darkest corners of human nature, the desire to rule, to dominate, and to destroy is intrinsic to all of us, and given the opporunity, can be let loose before we even realize what we are doing.
Original photography by Michael MacDonald