Blood Meridian

I want to start with this concept, taken from a (what I thought was) brilliant online commentary written by Stanley Fish on the New York Times's website discussing the differences he saw between the original, John Wayne adaptation of Charles Portis's novel, True Grit, and the most recent Coen brother's version:

... there are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.

Hazarding a summary and oversimplification, the faith one has in God matters little in determining our course through our present existence; if such a supernatural force exists, it likely doesn't score the rights and wrongs amassed by humans as they toil an existence.  Instead, what matters is the faith one has in his or her own existence, and the extent to which he / she adheres to that faith.  Only through that sort of resolution of conscience, drawn out over a long and varied life, can any sort of reconciled redemption be found.

I read Fish's commentary shortly before I read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a bleak and powerful novel.  From one perspective, the book is a study in the creation of (what I agree is) an American classic.  McCarthy's 3rd person, narrative writing style; his lack of the use of quotations; and his expressive punctuation (as though he were sitting in the room with you, telling you this story in person) was extremely compelling.  Granted, it took me a few pages to get used to, but I quickly learned to love and devour it.  Then you have the contents of the novel.  His ideas and interpretations of man and nature were stark and unremitting.  The speed and depth of his character development was devastating.  And the resolution (if you can call it that) of his story left me in a state of profound thought, leaving me to mull meaning from his passages still even a week after I finished the book.

I opened with the Fish quote because it resonates with the tone of McCarthy's book.  The West in which we find the Kid is a cold, sensible place; yet it is also abhorrent, particularly if you seek to compare its existence with norms of culture and society developing in settled, more urban areas of the East and West.

You don't get much dialogue from the Kid, nor does the author provide much in the way of a window through which to see the Kid's reactions to the scenes that pass as his days in the West.  However, indirectly, you learn much in the way of the things the Kid is willing to accept and not accept through his acquaintance with the Judge.

The Judge (Judge Holden) is a character who's mark has likely been left in the annals of literature much as that left by Iago, Jay Gatsby, John Galt, Mersault, and others whose force of philosophy stands both alone and inclusive of the greatness that has become the text to develop them.  You are simply forced to accept the Judge's existence, since you are unable to reconcile his existence with any conventional justification provided by religion, science, or rationality.  He may be God or he may be the Devil.  He could be both.

Appreciating Blood Meridian for more than its bloody story, you are left asking "how could this have transpired?, wondering whether the sum of human social development really could be condensed into the metaphor of "War is God."

In developing his brutal homily, McCarthy invokes "total war" as exhibited by Stonewall Jackson's "march to the sea" or through the eyes of Charles Marlow as he searches for Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  Barbarity and compassion are found almost equally, and the reaction shown to either is almost the same, exhibited by the kindness shown the Kid and the Priest by some Mexican settlers as they are fed and housed as by John Joel Glanton's head being cleaved (to the Thrapple) by a Yuma Indian.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible.  Have you not seen it all from birth and there by bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate distinction after many a pitch in many a muddy field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. (256)

The point: neither compassion or barbarity really matters in the context of "life."  What does matter is the philosophy by which the Judge, Glanton, and the Kid lead/led their lives.  I'd hazard such a summary: (echoing Fish) it matters little how society or a compassionate God might judge acts of man.  What matters more is the resolution of man to exist and to dominate within the world he finds himself, and in no other situation can this resolution be tested than in that of violence and war.  In this context, the simplicity is clear: live or die.  It is the ultimate test, and it seems the Judge views that to be about as good as man will get it in life.

Despite the shadow cast by the Judge in the book, the Kid really is the main figure; therefore, I believe some final meaning must be resolved from the arc the Kid's journey portrays through the story, and perhaps it is this.  Survival matters; the Kid did and more-or-less accepted what he had to to survive.  Yet, in the end, he chose a different path, one that was not typified by a morally blind brutality, which is why his end was such that it was.  I'd like to believe that, in the end, despite the likelihood that neither good nor bad really matters in the reckoning of one's existence, the morality we place in life and death does matter, and that we can accept compassion as almost equally as significant a precept of life as survival.

I'm sorry to mix in the pop culture with these thoughts on a very important, poignant novel, but I thought a parting thought from the movie Shutter Island relevant--and it goes right to the importance of how we perceive the life we lead (regardless of survival): "would you rather live as a monster or die as a good man?"