There’s an old New Yorker cartoon depicting a novelist sitting down for a television interview. In the author’s lap is his latest novel, a massive 1000+ page tome. The caption reads the question by the interviewer who asks the author to sum up his novel in just a few words. The joke being that if the author could do that he wouldn’t have needed t write a 1000+ page novel. However, the joke implies the author is competent enough to actually need all those pages to tell his story.
Blood Meridian is a long fever study of violence in a sun-baked void. Death isn’t just everywhere, it is everything. Violence is inherent in every action of men, in every breath they take (their’s or another’s). The strong devouring the weak is the natural state of the universe of the novel. Yet there is a strange beauty to all this violence that even the most craven cannibal can appreciate: it is unromantic and perverted and deadly, but it has an attraction that is impossible to deny. Some men are more tempted to its beauty than others, some men actually revel in the violence while others flee or take refuge in the mud, but all men sense its power one way or another. This is what the novel, at least in my mind, is about. It is an evening – not as in the time of day but as a leveling or accounting thereof – of the violent animal nature which boils in all men and which they are to be held accountable for.
Blood Meridian is also very boring, over-written, and there is no dramatic tension what-so-ever. Plenty “happens” (at least in the parts where there is more than just page after page of simile description of staring at the sky), but there is no real danger for any of the characters, it’s just a continuing downward spiral of depraved murder headed by a character, the Judge, who I can only assume is the Devil. Whether the Judge is the Devil is hard to say since McCarthy is not one to go in for superstition and the supernatural, but I can’t describe the Judge any more than as the Devil himself. The Judge is everything violent and terrible in man (and in the universe), he is the reckoning, the evening of all men. He comes for blood and he is always just over the horizon. He probably doesn’t even actually exist in the novel but is just a placeholder for the violent tendencies of men personified as an enormous, hairless infant. He’s the imaginary friend of a psychopath.
The Kid we never get to really know because he’s at the mercy of everything going on around him – he barely seems to have any say in the events of the novel at all. The Kid is just led around for a few hundred pages while we watch. I had no sympathy for the Kid because there is nothing to be sympathetic towards. And maybe that was the point, but I can’t subscribe to a philosophy that says it’s okay to not empathize with human beings nor will I believe I have no say in who is in control of my own actions.
I will say that I’m not really sure what I was supposed to take away from the novel. I wasn’t particularly moved to reevaluate my opinions of violence or of savagery or of the cold nature of the universe, I didn’t spend my hours away from the novel contemplating the deeper meanings McCarthy thought he was expressing here, I was, much like the characters in the novel, unmoved by almost everything that wasn’t a beautiful simile of something and found most of what the Judge said to be obfuscated jibber-jabber.
Maybe McCarthy wanted the reader to feel numb and unsympathetic towards violence by the end of the novel? Maybe that’s why we shoot the dancing bear so we can feel grief for at least one dead thing? I don’t know. The book was long, but it doesn’t resonate. McCarty could have just said “The universe is beautiful with or without us”.
Maybe if I cared to I could read up on other people’s interpretations of the novel, but I think I know what I’m going to find there – a lot of hand waving and summary of the language of the novel with a few tentative stabs at what we think the novel is actually about. Maybe McCarthy really did have a point to make, but I feel like he summed his ideas up better in No Country For Old Men with the story of the father carrying the fire in the night. Blood Meridian is a cauldron of ideas McCarthy explores with more deftly (though perhaps not as beautifully) in his other novels.