Book Dunce is a series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a book that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never read. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.
Historically, I’ve long had a relationship with difficult novels. In high school, when like so many others I was drawn to beat culture it wasn’t Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that I wore down to a faded dog-eared copy but William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch, a work as important to punks and sadists as beats. Before graduation I’d adopted Hubert Selby Jr. over Charles Bukowski, more interested as I was in deconstruction of literary tropes than assholish hipster antics. Somehow in these paper travels I’d always managed to miss Cormac McCarthy not because I was unaware of him but just because our paths never managed to cross. In doing so, I may have unwittingly missed one of the most challenging authors of all time, made all the more interesting for his somewhat widespread mainstream acceptance despite the unflinchingly anti-populist bent of his work.
I know in some ways Blood Meridian must seem like a peculiar choice for a feature like this, structured as it is around books that are inescapable and a key ingredient in the cultural reservoir. Blood Meridian isn’t necessarily McCarthy’s most famous or important work, those tags more likely synonymous with All the Pretty Horses or The Road or perhaps No Country for Old Men respectively. But Blood Meridian isn’t without its legacy- despite its somewhat modest origins, Blood Meridian has in time come to be seen as one of McCarthy’s greatest works, celebrated by Time magazine and Harold Bloom alike. It has garnered favorable comparisons to Moby Dick and the works of Faulkner, with critics simultaneously proclaiming McCarthy a genius and a lunatic for penning it.
Neither of those terms are thrown about lightly when discussing Blood Meridian, either. As tempting as it is to claim those tags are utilized simply as the result of all too typical critical hyperbole, they’re fitting- like the best works of Selby Jr., there is something wonderfully deranged about the subjects and execution of Blood Meridian, dependent as it is on overthrowing the conventional rules of grammar and disposing of things like punctuation or quotation marks or structure. Blood Meridian is a novel that reads the same way its characters speak, full of harsh, conversational dialogue and abrupt shifts or drops in tone.
Centered around a mostly anonymous character simply named “The Kid,” Blood Meridian is, on its surface, a story about the ugliness of humanity. Set in the peak of the American West, Blood Meridian explores the rampant survivalism that has made that era so exciting for readers all these centuries on while unflinchingly detailing the harsh reality of that time, when death was all too common and decency all too rare. “The Kid” in particular is less a character and more a device, an apathetic and unattached anti-hero who can grant the readers a detached viewfinder by which to reveal the truths of America’s most romanticized time.
Unlike typical protagonists, “The Kid” is uninterested in the normal rules of behavior, instead focused on whatever it takes to prolong his journey and keep himself alive. Each segment of the book finds “The Kid” surviving despite all odds and becoming paired with increasingly more and more deranged partners- first the freakish Toadvine, later the enigmatic Holden.
What makes Blood Meridian such a challenging novel isn’t really its language or structures but the subject itself. Blood Meridian is a relatively short novel but the brutality of its story and the deranged antics of its characters make it a slog, a novel that can at times feel rewarding in the same way a marathon is. Though it’s well-paced, getting through the atrocities on display in the book and the wickedness of its characters requires either titanic will or several breaks. “The Kid” is not a character one is meant to relate to or enjoy, he is instead better viewed as an extension of McCarthy’s favorite theme in general- the unbearable hideousness of humanity as a whole and what evilness means for us all.
With its famously ambiguous ending, seen by some as a statement by McCarthy that some vile acts are too much even for us rubberneckers, Blood Meridian has come to be perceived as a nihilist end to the Western genre altogether. Even now I am unsure what I think of the novel and what it means within McCarthy’s canon but I can testify that it is not a novel one walks into lightly. Unlike the trainwreck excitement of Naked Lunch or the visceral drive of A Clockwork Orange, Blood Meridian makes its mark in unseen ways. Several portions of the book pushed me into severely dark territory, forcing me to dwell on my own bleak moments and what they might mean in terms of my identity but worse was the overwhelming sense that I was taking some satisfaction about the evilness of being human, the relentless sense that to be part of mankind means accepting brutality and foulness. I can divorce myself from the weirdness of Naked Lunch and the uninhibited violence of A Clockwork Orange but I can’t stop thinking about the realistically nihilist philosophy behind Blood Meridian and in the end I can’t think of a more powerful impact a book can have.
by Morgan Davis
