It’s impossible to not have a reaction to Blood Meridian. Like it, hate it, understand it, become frustrated, baffled or grossed out, see it as the epitome of writing skill, feel it is overdone, too violent, too honest, dishonest, too clear or not clear enough, and on and on. But it will have some effect on you even if you throw up your hands in disgust.
But while I am enchanted with the way the story is told, here I will face the combination of the truth and the way McCarthy handles it. The story’s been told thousands of time in the past hundred years, and it varies from its beginning purpose to enthrall, inform, and sugarcoat the reality of the West to the wondering folks back home via newspaper reporting, to the entertainment and providing of adventure heroes to future generations through the 1960’s, to the exposition of what the good guys and the “injuns” were really like. Yes, it’s hard for some of us who were brought up on Hopalong, Roy, Cisco Kid and Pancho, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto to face the reality, but we should have known that killing is never a clean business. You wouldn’t last a day in the Old West dressed in white and still look well groomed by sundown. Strange, the worst we wondered about or doubted secretly as kids was how, where and when our heroes and villains ever went to the bathroom out in that godforsaken land.
I suppose it can be considered a case of situational ethics, just as in Borowski’s “This Way to The Gas.” Society of the early 1800’s had certainly evolved beyond brutal remorseless slaughter, even in the new lands of America. But the West brought out something in those who lived through it that was to be repeated even 150 years later in Europe. War brings out man’s inhumanity to man. One of the hardest things to accept in Blood Meridian is making sense of a group of people banding together with the common goal of unquestionably horribly executed mass murder. But this is not a group of men who came out one day from the East Coast and found a shared interest in evil. These are normal people from hard times who are gradually subjected to witnessing increasing levels of horror, and in facing such, turn a little less human themselves, a little less sympathetic with the enemy, until, as the prisoners in Borowski’s story of the concentration camps, it becomes the norm for their newly established wandering society of the damned. McCarthy has been able to show us the nature of man and the nature of the land in incredible detail that still is spread across such vastness of physical space. You are shocked over and over again with each cold hearted killing until somewhere midway, and just before you yourself have become acclimated and distant to reality, are shocked with finding an increasing sense of kindness within this hardened group of men. And shocked to find that you have come to the point of admiring someone whose only claim to our sympathy is that sometimes, when he could have killed someone, he didn’t. What drives the judge to save the imbecile from drowning? Whatever it is, for this single act we accept him back as a human being.
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