fiction files redux discussion

Blood Meridian--scalp hunting may not be an acceptable modern pursuit, and really who thinks to write a book about it? A judge, ex-priest, and the boy, join together to form the Glanton Gang. This book was deeply researched and historically accurate. And it is supposedly funny.

From the wikipedia:

The narrative follows an adolescent run-away referred to only as "the kid", with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred North American people and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a large, intelligent man depicted as entirely devoid of all hair and emblematic of violence and conflict.
Although the novel initially generated only lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece.

Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Here is an essay about it if you would like to stick your toe in the water:

http://goo.gl/yW0ql

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Brock wrote: "Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West"

...Say when.

This book was pretty great, I'd seriously consider giving it a rereading if you guys go forth with it. That is, if I can find it in my boxes of recently moved books.

Oh gosh. My to-read pile is enormous, but I might not be able to resist reading again if you guys are really going to do a group read of it.

I second that Patty...plus guess what??? I've NEVER read any Cormac McCarthy!

I beleive we had some good discussion of Blood Meridian in the old FF, if not an actual group read. I may pop my head in, as this is a contender for one of my all time favorite novels.

Haven't read this yet, although it's definitely on my to-read pile. Anybody want to lead us through it? Ben?

of course, what humor there is to be had in it is of the bleak, nihilistic kind.

I thought it was the humor of dead babies jokes kind with dead babies nailed to doorways of attacked villages and towns. It was really hardcore Western with maggots and worms squirming in tattoed and bare arms of infected soldiers.

If you would like to start, I began, and I have say it reminds me of a Vonnegut quote: "The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were." This is what I gather about the authentic cowboys real character by McCarthy. The cowboys of McCarthy's old west are cruel, brutish, and violent. Do you think this is a departure? We often romanticize the cowboy as a lonely hero, but maybe that is why we are astonished when we are brought up close.

I was looking for criticism on Blood Meridian and found this by Harold Bloom. He says, "The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate. The Judge stands for incessant warfare for its own sake."

The first place the judge appears is in a Religious Revival. The reverend is in the pulpit and ministering, when the judge walks up the aisle and tells everyone that reverend is an imposter, holds no papers of divinity, he has committed to memory a few passages from the bible for the purpose of leading fraudulent sermons. he is illiterate and wanted four states.

A man from the crowd said he would shoot the reverend where he stands.

All the while the reverend is telling the crowd, "This is him, this is him. The devil where he stands".

Meanwhile, the Judge tells the crowd, "he was run out of Fort Smith for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. A goat."

Later, the kid and Toadvine see him in the saloon. They ask, "when was you in Fort Smith?"
"Fort Smith?"
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?"
You mean the Reverend Green?
Yessir.
I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt he was.
Where was it you run up on him?
I never laid eyes on that man before today. Never even heard of him.
He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

This section was really quite amazing to me, and set the stage for my thoughts about the judge.

It would be fun to talk about this scene--page 9

I just found my copy and reread through the first 2 chapters, I am more enamored with it this time around. The scene above shows the Judge to be exactly what Bloom suggests he is violence incarnate, almost devil like in his attack on the holy man.

In chapter two, the scene on page 23 where the kid enters the bar and is trying to work for a few drinks is quite good too. The interactions and communications between characters is handled really well with the language barrier and all.

Then it get's violent.

What I kept losing track of in the beginning of the book was that the kid was only 14. As the story progresses, it becomes less and less apparent that he is literally a child of war.

What is curious to me is how the Judge acts as a holy man who evangelizes the centrality of war.


This comes from an essay on comedy in the novel (http://goo.gl/yW0ql) :

“The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.” Here again, the Judge spends his time spinning elaborate lies, not for gain or revenge or any other productive reason, but only to amuse himself when the others believe him.

The aphorisms and philosophy of those men are the result of being a blowhard and a drunk, respectively. How do we read the Judge? Is he some alien deity, pale and all-knowing? Some inconceivably learned man? Death itself? Do we take his constant, eloquent ramble at face value? Or do we understand that throughout the novel, the Judge is having one over on everyone, even the reader.

Brock wrote: "This comes from an essay on comedy in the novel (http://goo.gl/yW0ql)"

Great essay. I still don't get the one about the preacher he'd never met before, though. It really seems to me that the laughter there is just an expression of discomfort at his audacity, not actual humor. Maybe that one is just so dry it goes over my head.

oh and which novel is that pirate qoute from? thanks!

I think, Breakfast of Champions. Though correct me if I'm wrong.

the pirates quote comes from Breakfast of Champions. I am not sure why, but some passages stay with me. I always liked that one a lot.

there is a strange humor in Blood Meridian. I really did laugh when I read that section about the preacher. The Judge has a great disdain for anything but his own true god, which is an organic connection to the earth and fate. In his views, man is destined to "dance". What is strange and very awkward is how the Judge is presented. Why would the archetype of war, Ares, look like a giant baby? He is seven feet tall, and is completely hairless with dainty feet!

What I think is fantastic about this novel is the complexity of the context he presents. He builds this story on top of our Western Mythos of the Rugged Individual and Valorous Cowboy and Lawmen.

And what we get:

We get a look at these people as killers. Cold blooded, mean, and nasty . . . and many of them are war orphans. The Kid, is a kid at 14, and later he kills another kid who calls him out when he has grown to the old age of 28.

On top of it ais the judge, who has a deep philosophical system that justifies war as part of nature, and that humans are destined in their fate, and that we all carry each others fates. A line that I really liked had the judge saying, "we are all a tabernacle of each others' actions."

Maybe the idea of comedy in Blood Meridian is not so much happy laughter, but the absurdity and tragedy of war.

In an essay I read here (http://goo.gl/KXPQ0) there is more about the idea of comedy:

the grim but often funny business of desacralization, especially of sacred cows. McCarthy dismantles the politically correct myth of aboriginal victimization, so that victims and their antagonists become indistinguishable. In one celebrated scene, a column of mercenaries the kid has joined encounters a Comanche war party herding stolen horses and cattle across the desert. The kid barely escapes as the Indians, still vividly dressed like eldritch clowns in the garments they have stripped from their last white victims, annihilate his companions.

There are so many of these beautifully written descriptions that are terrible in their content and meaning. We are truly shown the terrifying faces of war. But the fierceness of the warriors is clearly counterbalanced with the ridiculousness of their appearance.

Perhaps clowns are truly terrifying.

In this, the natives and the bounty hunters are clownish bumpkins with no moral limitation for who they will kill, how they will do it. They just know they are paid by the scalp -- no matter where it came from.

I believe that McCarthy is in full control of his imagery and shows great restraint and subtlety. It is masterful actually. He comes so close to being authorial, but always lets the story tell itself out.

He is bringing the true horror or war to my mind from the page, but the savagery he depicts is comical and vicious, just like Vonnegut's description of pirates.

In Blood Meridian, Toadvine plays one of the main comical characters. But he is funny, but perhaps the way he is funny is not funny. He wears an absurd outfit decorated with at least 100 human ears on it. Later in the novel, after Toadvine is hung on the Judge's testimony, the Kid buys the necklace of ears and wears it himself. In many ways, from the aborigines to the savages, warriors are dressed as clowns.

Are you guys serious? How did I have NO IDEA that you were reading Blood Meridian over here? I may have been obfuscated by the subject line of the thread. Is it too late to join in?

It's never too late! I have slowed down considerably in my reread as my brain has decided to shut down this week.

Jump in!

i totally missed this too, martha! in fact i commented on dan's reading it in the updates, asking him if it was a re-read. :P i loved this book, i think i know where my copy is. i'll try to pipe in.

by the way, martha, dan and i were talking about a possible suttree reading together sometime. neither of us has read it.

yes, yes, yes, again I said yes. I've always wanted to talk about Suttree and Faulkner's Sanctuary.

Dan, I finally responded on the Roth thread. Sorry to be so late...

Brock wrote: "In Blood Meridian, Toadvine plays one of the main comical characters. But he is funny, but perhaps the way he is funny is not funny. He wears an absurd outfit decorated with at least 100 human ears on it. Later in the novel, after Toadvine is hung on the Judge's testimony, the Kid buys the necklace of ears and wears it himself. In many ways, from the aborigines to the savages, warriors are dressed as clowns. "

I like what you say about the type of comedy or perhaps the complexity of the comedy found in this novel. It's perverse and absurd. I also think that the Kid taking over the necklace furthers that absurdity but also showing that the world at it's basest doesn't really change: The horrors of war continue on.

Getting back to the Judge: The description of the party's first encounter with the Judge, sitting alone on a rock as if waiting for a ride is quite funny, it is in this chapter (ten) that the Judge makes the gun powder, and is also supposed to be drunk, without the presence of alcohol, while sitting in the stream completely naked (and hairless) with one of the Delaware indians.

That was an amazing scene Dan. It makes me think that the judge is not really human. He just appears in the middle of no where. It is also kind of funny that the basis of their war and the killing is made out of shit. And at the end of the book, the kid is killed in the shit house.

So I have been thinking about the Judge's morality. It seems like he believes in a preordained fate. That we are written in a book.

In a passage on pg. 116, he

---
read news of the earth's origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound the ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled.

Books lie, he said
God don't lie
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.
-----
The judge may as well be supernatural. He appeared from no where. He has his own mythos, and though he converts many to his cause, he mocks them for being so easily led.

For the judge, one man stands at the altar, and it is his own altar.
Just as we all must dance when we are called to the stage.
The judge seems to exemplify unenlightened self-interest:

Unenlightened self-interest
In contrast to enlightened self-interest is simple greed or the concept of "unenlightened self-interest," in which it is argued that when most or all persons act according to their own myopic selfishness, that the group suffers loss as a result of conflict, decreased efficiency because of lack of cooperation, and the increased expense each individual pays for the protection of their own interests. If a typical individual in such a group is selected at random, it is not likely that this person will profit from such a group ethic.
Some individuals might profit, in a material sense, from a philosophy of greed, but it is believed by proponents of enlightened self-interest that these individuals constitute a small minority and that the large majority of persons can expect to experience a net personal loss from a philosophy of simple unenlightened selfishness.
Unenlightened self-interest can result in the tragedy of the commons.

In many ways, this view reminds me of Ayn Rand's

ethics: rational self-interest

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

We can rationalize anything, so this is a slippery slope. And this is what the devil loves.

So is the judge the devil?

And is Ayn Rand?

Genesis 3:1-6

Now the serpent was more subtile than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman,

Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?


And the woman said unto the serpent,

We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman,

Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

In this case, evil is relative, but according to the judge, all of our actions are preordained. We are called to dance, and we dance.
We are called to fight for our lives, and we fight, run or die.

The big question in this book seems to be whether we can run.

Does the boy run?

The kid seems to want to live with humanity. He follows a group of religious zealots through the desert. He finds them massacred. He thinks he has found a old woman who has seemingly escaped the execution in a shelter and tries to help her. Offering safety and comfort under his care. But she has been dead for years and turned to dust when he touched her.

Is this why he seeks the judge?

And, I should say, is the Judge the snake?
He is hairless, and he is has little feet.

The judge is a snake in the metaphorical sense, he's a charlatan. Toadvine, on the other hand, has no ears. Hairless anyone can do. Earless? That's totally reptillian. Or maybe earless is a joke, and means almost fearless? I dunno.

This'll be my 3rd time through the novel, I just started yesterday morning. I'm already regretting the large number of notes that I haven't made.

One thing that I did remember to look up was the 1st epigram, the one by ValeryPaul Valéry. I found an interesting article http://nonsite.org/issue-1/paul-valer...

As a child of 14, before he becomes "the kid," the story's protagonist already "has a taste for mindless violence" and goes out in search of it. What's that all about? Is that an indication that the kid is not a realistic character, but just an allegorical representation of violence? Or are we supposed to accept his adolescent craving for violence as a realistic possibility? Is he some sort of sociopath?

I love that line in the essay,

"the European is not worthy of imitation. Why? Because the Europeans “are afraid of death” (373). While the Chinese excel in patience, orderliness and a “feeling for the irregular,” Europeans only know unbounded intelligence (372). Intelligence is a tool of fear; it is strictly a means to evade an awareness of mortality."


Then the passage in Blood Meridian:

You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time. (373)5

The essay and the book both point out that when cruelty, violence and murder are a way of life, that these acts are built upon blood, it is less reprehensible.

In thinking about the Kid as an early character, he is definitely a being who seems born for violence. He had a literate father who read to him, but he was drawn to violence and did not attempt to avoid it when confronted with it when he first met Toadvine. Additionally, he fought for money, and fought for the enjoyment of it before he met up with Glanton. Perhaps there is no accounting for who our children become.

What we may be seeing is an implication by McCarthy that some people are born to cruelty, violence and murder. There is the sense that these men are base and animalistic. Barely interactive, but then we see dialog from Toadvine that shows him to be capable of sarcasm and mean-spirited humor.

I think ahead to the scene in the desert with the death cart, where the religious penitents were bleeding from their bare feet, leaving a trail of blood pulling a cart with a cross. Perhaps this is a symbol of his own group. That there is something that pulls these people to this life, or to this death.

Here's an odd/interesting tidbit: The night of the kid's birth in 1833, there was a meteor shower. It was the same meteor shower that Joseph Smith took as a sign that he should lead the Mormon's west. 1847, the year that the novel begins with the kid leaving home, is the same year that the Mormon's actually started their westward pilgrimage.

Brock wrote: "I love that line in the essay,

"the European is not worthy of imitation. Why? Because the Europeans “are afraid of death” (373). While the Chinese excel in patience, orderliness and a “feeling fo..."

I found it really mind boggling!

Our westward pilgrimage was basically a pestilence to to the indigenous population. When the natives created their war parties, communities offered bounties on scalps. That is the strangeness of it all: the violence and aggression of "civilizing" a landscape.

Maybe this is where i disagree with Valery, I think the europeans are violent, some of the most violent perhaps. They have their systems and beliefs, and destroy all that disagree or countermand them.

brock, the scene that you mentioned with the clown, was it the comanche scene you were talking about? i just read it and i'm mulling it over.

That scene is very very excellent in the portrayal of the warriors. I think he calls the eldritch clowns:

a Comanche war party herding stolen horses and cattle across the desert. The kid barely escapes as the Indians, still vividly dressed like eldritch clowns in the garments they have stripped from their last white victims, annihilate his companions.


eldritch = Strange or unearthly; eerie.

The scene I am referring to comes when the Juggler's troop read the tarot cards on page 93 http://goo.gl/Y7l2M

just a personal note here. it's amazing how different my 2011 reading of this novel differs from my 1992 reading of it. for one thing, there was no scholarship of any kind about this novel, or even about mccarthy in 1992. all that we knew about him was that he was reclusive. for another thing, if i wanted to find answers to any historical/geographical questions i had, i had to write them all down and go to the library.

this morning i was able to look at a map of the texas mexico border maps, refresh my memories about the mexican-american war, learn about the comanche-mexico wars, discover that judge holden was a real, live person, and see sketches of the landscape and battles of the time.

when i first read this novel, i was overwhelmed by the language, the setting, the violence, the landscape, everything. now, whatever i don't know, the answers are at my fingertips. it's kind of an incredible experience. i even learned that in 1956, the memoirs of a man named samuel chamberlain were published, sections of them were published in life magazine, and Blood Meridian seems to have been based, at least partially, on that memoir.

back in 1992, i considered the fact that there was no scholarship on mcccarthy, and thought about the possibility of tackling it, becoming the expert even. now, there is so much information available on everything that the idea of becoming an expert on anything is almost obsolete.

at any rate, since the time of my first reading of this novel, i've also lived in new mexico, arizona and mexico. i've travelled a bit in chihuahua and sonora, and that has also changed the novel for me.

Brock wrote: "That scene is very very excellent in the portrayal of the warriors. I think he calls the eldritch clowns:

a Comanche war party herding stolen horses and cattle across the desert. The kid barely e..."

i read this section yesterday and again this morning. i'm not sure what to make of it. i guess it's probably historically accurate, and it's an opportunity for forshadowing and ominous music, but i'm not sure that it has any sort of allegorical meaning. what do you think?

I am still thinking about how we have mythologized these warriors--cowboys and indians--and how McCarthy presents them as savage clowns. We are amazed at the violence they are capable of . . . and perhaps part of our amazement is that we would have never expected them capable of violence this horrific from our stories and cultural portrayal.

This is such a great thread Brock and Patty! Sorry I haven't brought more to it, though it would likely pale in comparison.

Your differencing experiences Patty are quite great to read about, it is amazing how the world has changed in such a short time. I had no idea that Judge Holden may have actually been a real guy. I am going to be reading some of this historical stuff for a while now that you've got me started.

This book truly is remarkable, sadly my ability to focus on reading is not. This being my second time reading it I am finding it a much richer, and more beautiful experience.

In Chapter XII there is the Slaughter of the Gilenos (page 156ish) and unless I am missing something (which is entirely possible) the Judge appears to be entirely absent from the killing. If I am not wrong about this, what's going on here? Does this say something about the Judge's realness?

Going back a few pages to 147 I was really struck by this passage:

His (Judge) eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.

Again we find the judge nearly naked and less than human-like. We also find McCarthy's great prose and an ominous tone.

And how great is this description? (page 169):

Blood bubbled from the man's chest and he turned his lost eyes upward, already glazed, the capillaries already breaking up. In those dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.

Good observation Dan. I noticed that the judge merely enables and encourages the killing. The closest we come is the implication with the judge.

in the story told by the expriest of his first encounter with the judge, the judge actually ends up taking the first shot. i hadn't remembered the passage about making gunpowder from bat shit and volcanic saltpeter and their own urine. i think it's got to be my favorite passage so far.

another tidbit, during this period, the state governments in northern mexico were paying $50-200 for indian scalps, depending on the age and gender of the indian, and also on which state was paying. That's somewhere around what would be $1,000-4,000 in today's u.s. currency, per scalp. The northern mexican states were willing to pay because the comanches, apaches, and some others were killing their citizenry for their livestock, which they were selling, in turn, to the hoards of people who were headed out west to prospect for gold.

There's an ongoing project in which six artists will provide an illustration for each page of the novel. For reasons unclear to me, one of the artists has chosen to depict the violent male characters as females.

Six Versions of Blood Meridian

Adrian wrote: "There's an ongoing project in which six artists will provide an illustration for each page of the novel. For reasons unclear to me, one of the artists has chosen to depict the violent male characte..."

this is amazing

"They descended by rocky switchbacks and across the beds of streams where small trout stood on their pale fins and studied the noses of the drinking horses."

- unintentionally surreal? my mind immediatly conjured up

Thank you(?), Patty.

I'm going to have a nightmare where The Judge is played by Don Knotts. And he has the shakiest gun in the West.

I imagine the judge to have allopecia. He is 7 feet tall, pink and hairless like an evil baby, with little feet. Who else could it be?

[image error]

We should invade & terrorize the continuing thread at the Internet Movie Database about the Top 10 Judge Holden Candidates.

done

Brock wrote: "done"

LOL

I was joking!

Anyway, I can't get my Don Knotts pic to embed in a message over there. A few years ago a woman in those forums never forgave me for suggesting that John Travolta should play the lead in a Barney the Dinosaur musical.

Okay, so I am done.

Are we just dancing bears in little pink tutus, innocent until proven dead?