The Wrath of God Lies Sleeping
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
“SEE THE CHILD. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbour yet a few last wolves.”
The opening line of Blood Meridian is a blunt command. “SEE THE CHILD.” We are ordered into the dark world of the book. Once there, the macabre beauty of the prose seizes us madly by the shoulders and doesn’t let us avert our eyes until it’s wrecked its whole Truth upon us.
Cormac McCarthy died this week. Eighty-nine is a good innings and by all accounts he lived a good life. He even achieved the level of recognition he deserved within his own lifetime, which few of the great artists ever enjoy. But given he was still writing right up to the end, and I can think of no other living author who can hold a candle to him, it feels like the world lost something on Wednesday.
Tributes and obituaries soon flooded in, including
‘s excellent piece on his mastery of language. Rather than rehashing what others have done so well, I want to discuss the McCarthy work that’s had such a tremendous influence on me. His masterpiece, Blood Meridian.The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies.
Everyone has, I think, 3-5 foundational books. Not necessarily our favourites, but the books that have left the largest mark on us. The books that we read and reread and think about for years afterwards. The books that made us. Blood Meridian is undoubtedly one of those for me.
The book follows the slow descent into violent ruin of the Glanton Gang, a ragtag band of ruthless scalp hunters, employed by the long-suffering residents of the Texan-Mexican borderlands to hunt and kill rampaging Apaches. In truth, there is little plot. Instead, we’re given vast stretches of stunning prose painting a vivid picture of the landscape’s savage beauty, punctuated by brutal orgies of violence that erupt out of the page with blinding ferocity.
Dust staunched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.
Within this ocean of breathtaking wordwork, we’re delivered bleak sermons on the horrors of man’s evil - a message which, when delivered with the vivid intensity that only McCarthy can, cannot be ignored.
You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
The best fiction should tell us something about the human condition, about our place in this vast, uncertain universe. Though the stories aren’t true, they should contain some Truth. Something essential on what it’s like to be.
Blood Meridian’s great Truth is that there lurks evil within each of us. It’s an unrelenting gaze into the darkness of man’s heart. Over 350 pages, McCarthy hammers this point over and over and over again, until we can deny it no longer.
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.
The novel is the great artistic vehicle for the baring of the soul. A window into a character’s mind. But in Blood Meridian, we’re shut out. We are never party to the internal thoughts or desires of any of the characters; we see only their dread actions. There is no Hero’s Journey. There is no redemption.
The child we are commanded to see in the opening is known to us only as ‘the kid’ - an unnamed Tennessean with a proclivity for violence. Repeated again and again through the book, the kid is described as ‘looking’. Our protagonist often watches the action, or is passively carried along by it, rather than being its driver. He is the witness. He is us.
The true main character is in fact the Judge. Huge, pale, terrifying - it’s through the Judge that McCarthy delivers his most stark philosophy. It’s unclear exactly what he is: the devil; a god of war; the personification of man’s evil? He may well be all three, for as McCarthy tells it, war and evil are a singularly human creation.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
There are other books about the darkness within, of course. Chris Browning’s Ordinary Men tells the story of those perfectly every-day police reservists who carried out thousands of Holocaust executions. Ordinary men in an extraordinary situation, asked - not ordered, asked - to murder Jews in cold blood. Ordinary Men is a true story, and one would think that real history would be the most effective at communicating the fact that any of us would be capable of carrying out a genocide, should the circumstances be right. But the book is cold, full of facts and statistics. The message is clear but it doesn’t cling to the psyche in the way a story can.
Heart of Darkness is the paradigmatic novel on the human propensity for evil. Conrad was a genius. His talents need no criticism or explanation. But his was a book for a different time. The audience for Heart of Darkness were the European elites of Empire, those who thought themselves superior races, thought they were providing a moral good in imposing their power over the ‘savage races’. Conrad’s message is that the darkness lies just as equally within every heart, ‘civilised’ or not. But no right-thinking person of today would ever subscribe to the old colonial philosophy. Thus, we might be tempted to think Conrad’s Truth doesn’t apply to us. We let ourselves off the hook, because we don’t agree with those the book is critiquing.
Blood Meridian doesn’t let anyone off the hook. If we look closely, each of us lies within its pages. Each of us is as capable as the kid, or Tobin, or Toadvine. “The horror! The horror!” The Judge sees Kurtz in all of us.
And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night.
McCarthy was a pessimist, there is no doubt. His novels and his outlook are bleak. He thought humanity doomed. But even if we don’t share his pessimism, his message remains a vital one. To truly appreciate the light in this world, we need to recognise the dark. We must stare into the abyss. We must know of what each of us is capable. We need to understand the darkness, so we can make the conscious choice to turn away from it.
I can’t claim to know much about McCarthy, hardly anyone can, but it seems to me that he wasn’t driven by ordinary social games of prestige or status or fame. His art seemed to flow right out of him, whether his books sold in the hundreds or the millions. While it feels a travesty that such an influential writer never won the Nobel Prize, I suspect he wouldn’t have given a damn anyway. He hated discussing his work, saying that anything he had to say about his writing was there on the page. Seems fitting for a man with such mastery of the written word, that he refused to engage with the world through nothing but his art.
Blood Meridian is a masterpiece. I urge you to read it - but be warned, it will haunt you forever. As all Great Art should.
They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Wow. This was a really fantastic read.
I must admit, I have not read any of Mccarthey's work. But Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a book I know well - though, as you rightly say, times have moved on from when that was written (and some of the other underlying themes are a bit uncomfortable nowadays.)
So it is fascinating to learn more about another book that shares similar themes - and you capture the intensity of the prose here really well.
Blood Meridian was the first novel I read whose prose felt biblical in proportion and importance (followed by Moby-Dick, one of McCarthy’s named influences). The feeling comes from its gravity of tone and subject, and it is really difficult to do honestly and without pretension.