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Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
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Cormac McCarthy's Gothic Horror
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An example of McCarthy's prose: "Night of your birth. Thirty three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The dipper stove. The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off."
The novel is certainly southern, or southwestern, “Gothic,” as that word describes Flannery O’Connor’s, Wm Faulkner’s, Harry Crews’, or David Joy’s work. (Some pulp crime gothics were written by Woolrich, Thompson, and James M Cain).These stories from rural America often feature suicide, rape, murder, sadism, impotence, demonic gangsters, all in a carefully documented regional setting. Horror, the supernatural, and shifting time sequences are other gothic elements. The evaluations of amorality, madness, and crime test readers’ tolerances for what begin as thrillers but defy classification. There are shifting point of view, conflicting views of reality, mythical implications, and indeterminate closure.
Mythic characters include the Judge—a combination of Ahab, Andrew Jackson, and Satan. Does he stand for the quasi-religious concept of redemption thru violence (the nation-state, and peculiarly American way)? “If war is not holy, then man is nothing but antic clay.” “What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.” The Judge thinks boys should be in a pit with wild animals and the worthy ones, fit to survive, will find a door to escape—or else are not worth bringing up. The novel ends with him doing a seductive, energetic dance that can’t be resisted and makes him think he will never die. The protagonist is The Kid, who is 14 when the book begins and in his 40s at the end. He had seen the Judge lead his platoon into battles which have resulted in the death of almost every man. “You know that I love you,” is the Judge’s reply.
Since McCarthy gives a mythic flavor to his prose, and since manifest destiny is “god’s will,” the novel, esp since it is gothic, is a very horrific depiction of what “boots on the ground” really mean to civilians. It also suggests than human beings know they are going to die, and must destroy everything around them in a vain effort to overcome the natural world, which has as little regard for them as the Mexican desert. That might be what The Judge is all about.