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America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and
looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single
event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
Mass market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Our
continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless
verisimilitude can set that line straight...It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the
stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define
their time. James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ellroy's opening note to his polemical take on the JFK years highlights an
attitude that is readily identifiable in McCarthy's writing. In Blood
Meridian McCarthy's opening quotes take the assertion a step further. An
excerpt from a modern newspaper article reports the discovery in Ethiopia of a
fossilised skull, showing evidence of having been scalped. America was never
innocent? The world was never innocent; a strangely consolatory message that the
book frequently returns to.
The time has now passed when westerns routinely portray Native Americans as the bloodthirsty villains of history. However, Blood Meridian side-steps revisionist westerns and presents an altogether darker, more complex and more believable view of an era. The book does depict Whites against Native Americans, but neither side is shown as morally righteous or innocent. While so often the past is glossed over and simplified, McCarthy gives history it's due, presenting unhinged characters who are nevertheless as plausible in their actions as those we'd expect in a contemporary setting.
Alongside it's great originality, Blood Meridian upholds some
traditions of the genre. For example the plot summaries at the start of each
chapter are particularly reminiscent of early 'Westerns' of the late 19th
century, many of which were presented as true accounts. Peter Carey has recently
used this plot-summarising convention in his True History of The Kelly Gang,
another text which deals with a legendary past sacred to a modern nation. With
such devices, McCarthy and Carey lend their work an instantly recognisable
structure and mythic tone, even as they (arguably) desecrate well-loved myths.
The combining of polemic and familiar elements create what Ellroy calls 'reckless
verisimilitude.'
While a convention-breaking novel in its own genre, interesting parallels to Blood
Meridian can be found in work from a very different era and background. I
would like to explore some of the ways in which Blood Meridian and Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness serve a similar role in destabilising the
foundation myths of great nations and empires.
Of course there are some fundamental differences between the two texts.
Conrad's novel examines the imperial expansion of his own time, while McCarthy writes in the nineteen-eighties about the distant eighteen-forties. McCarthy's impassive narrative voice lacks the ironic viewpoint and deep personal involvement of Conrad's Marlow. While Marlow as a first person narrator strives to remain morally exempt from what he sees around him, this is less true of Blood Meridian’s teenage protagonist, whose thoughts we can only guess at from his actions. He is no Marlow; the very first page tells how, at fourteen 'He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.' Regardless of their intent one way or the other, neither the Kid nor Marlow are able to stay separate from the culture that surrounds them. The kid seems to be swept along in the brutal acts that occur, neither abstaining from nor questioning them. Despite Marlow's misgivings he has little choice but to follow the course of the river.
Apart from the desire to make money, the grander mission of both characters is ostensibly to enforce civilisation on a wild place. Marlow is an agent of the British empire, a great capitalist enterprise, yet one which claims to bring civilisation and progress to the countries it colonised. He comes to question the higher notions of empire, which Conrad famously described as 'the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience'. McCarthy's central character is not so critical of the idealised role civilised society places on him. Unlike Marlow, he has always lived outside of this society.
The Kid is employed into Glanton's gang of mercenaries, men paid by frontier
towns on receipt of each scalp of a dead Indian. The towns are terrorised by
bands of Indians, and initially welcome the gang as saviours. In fact the men
kill indiscriminately, taking payment for scalps and then ransacking the very
towns they are meant to serve, or leaving them at the mercy of avenging Indians:
'The village of Coyame had for some years been laid under annual contribution
by Gomez and his band. When Glanton and his men rode in they were fallen upon as
saints. When they rode out three days later the streets stood empty, not even a
dog followed them to the gates. In three days they would fall upon a band of
peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul.'
They are in fact the antithesis of the town-saving western hero, although their employers do not initially realise this. Once Glanton's men become notorious in one area, they move on and get a new commission to obtain scalps. Marlow's mission is to gain not scalps but ivory, and he is witness to the brutality with which this is achieved. The fact that the books are set on wild frontiers without means of communication or law enforcement allows for the careless violence of the men. This frontier setting is crucial, raising the question of how people would act if they knew they would not be punished. Both writers expose the irony of men becoming savage while simultaneously engaged in a crusade against savagery.
In McCarthy's book the judge provides an articulate commentary on his
surroundings similar to that of Marlow, although quite different in his views.
The judge is also comparable to Conrad's Mr Kurtz. Both characters are
remarkable men who feel they have come to know the truth about man’s place in
the world, and feel also that it is hypocrisy to deny what they see. While Kurtz
eventually responds with 'The horror, the horror', and fades away, the
Judge revels in a lawless life and is apparently immortal. He believes the men
are engaged in war, which he often likens to a dance or a game. He derides
notions of morality:
'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. Moral law is an
invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the
weak. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar
all question of right.'
Much has been said of the influence of 19th century scientific thought on Heart
of Darkness, and the undiscovered theory of evolution is constantly on show
in Blood Meridian. The men observe and the judge explains: dinosaur bones
in the desert, cave paintings, ancient ruined settlements, fossils and meteors.
Conrad and McCarthy show how men become greedy, chaotic and murderous in a wild
setting, and their conclusion is the same, that through the whole of human
history our ancestors have committed great genocides for us to exist, and that
this brutal past is inscribed indelibly on our nature and demands expression.
Marlow and his society try to hide from their heart of darkness. In the end
Marlow lies to Kurtz's fiance about his dying words ('the last word he
pronounced was - your name'), thinking it is better she should live in
ignorance. The conclusion of Blood Meridian sees the judge rebuking the
Kid for a similar denial of the inevitable. Like Ellroy, he preaches an
acceptance of what he feels is the truth:
'There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not
know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of
clemency for the heathen. But you were a witness against yourself. Only that man
who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor
of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to
his inmost heart, only that man can dance.'
The real subject of these books is not a particular place in history, but the unchanging human nature that is brought to the fore in these unusual situations. Where noir authors often show characters in a city background, alienated from the normal lives of those around them, these two works choose for their setting a transitional place and period. Operating on the edge of an expanding civilisation, the characters in McCarthy's novel are misfits released from the constraints of society. They inflict an apparently unavoidable violence on the frontier, a blood meridian after which civilisation can follow, and one which the myths of that civilisation will neatly erase.
Copyright© 2003 David Gow
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DAVID GOW works as a
shop assistant in Edinburgh.
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