Blood Meridian
The Eras Tour, Cormac McCarthy (3/5)
“McCarthy’s magnum violent lyric masterpiece.”
“One of the best 20th century American novels.”
“Classified as an anti-Western.”
“Barbarously poetic odyssey.”
“An apocalypse without revelation.”
etc. So much has been written about Blood Meridian, from its litany of violence and the demonic Judge Holden to its historical accuracy and religious layers. Hard to find what more to say.
BM is the first McCarthy book I read, in the 2000s. Around that time I’d been reading James Ellroy’s L.A. trilogy and other novels about grimy homicides, so the shock was less about the bloodiness than the lyricism and scale of McCarthy's text. Yet I thought “are all his books that dark?” and shortly after I read All the Pretty Horses and The Road—the latter arguably not less dark, though.
This is the only copy left of BM on my shelves. I used to own three but I gave one to a friend and the other one must have been lost or forgotten because I can’t find. The cover of the lost volume wasn’t as unfortunate as that edition’s. I guess the publisher thought it was a good idea to add that review quote on the cover, but I think it’s terrible and McCarthy would’ve hated it. Instead of these cringeworthy lines they could have added the full title of the book: Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, like on this superior cover:
I’ve read BM several times and every time I read the first and last page at least three times, so I almost remember them by heart. This opening is an obvious parallel to Child of God and wants you to think that the kid won’t be unlike Lester Ballard:
As you’ve figured from that excerpt, BM’s writing style isn’t Suttree’s; drier, more confident, biblical, and rich with McCarthysms like minimal punctuation, neologisms, and stripped of the picaresque warmth of Suttree. BM also includes some short dialogues in Spanish. These seem to bother many readers—including several Redditors in r/cormacmccarthy—but there isn’t that much Spanish and it’s often straightforward to understand even with no Spanish command. Look at the left page below, for example: “somos amigos” and “De dónde viene?”
Blood Meridian is probably McCarthy's most layered work. In its plotlessness, moral rawness, geography, historical grounding, and the pagan theology that Holden espouses throughout, which the last section of this post will discuss. But before that let’s talk about the two men who lead the BM odyssey.
Glanton
BM’s central character is again nameless, the kid from the incipit above, as he joins a group of bounty hunters, actually scalphunters, whose leader Joel Glanton is an actual historical figure. The events happen right after the Mexican War, in 1848-1849, around the current US–Mexican border from East Texas to El Paso and across Chihuahua to Sonora and Arizona. This page from the Texas State Historical Association has a short biography of Glanton where we learn that “His fiancée was abducted, scalped, and killed by Lipan Apaches that year [1835].”
After getting in trouble in various places and enlisting in the army, Glanton gathered a small group of mercenaries later called Glanton’s gang, whose business is documented in the memoirs of American soldier Samuel Chamberlain, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue. On pages 267-268 Chamberlain recounts his first encounter with Glanton:
In BM, Glanton’s gang encounters indigenous tribes in present USA and Mexico including Apaches, Comanches, Delawares, Gileños, Tiguas, Yumas (Quechans). The encounters are rarely peaceful:
His [Glanton’s] name punctuates any number of histories of the mid-nineteenth-century Southwest, and even when nameless his legend is unmistakable:
“[D]isplaced emigrants [were] turning into horse thieves, gamblers, and even murderers. One set up a business killing Apache Indians and selling scalps to the Mexican government for two hundred dollars each, and collecting two hundred and fifty for each prisoner. If Indians were scarce, he even killed Mexicans to profit from their scalps.”
His tale is unsettling, his misfit excess horrifying.
The above is from the article “What kind of indians was them?”: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian by John Emil Sepich and published in the book Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, which also includes the articles A Reading of Blood Meridian and Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.
In My Confession, Chamberlain doesn’t spare details about the real Glanton’s gang misdeeds:
The particular episode below is very BM-esque, and actually inspired a scene from McCarthy’s book:
Said scene in BM: while sitting around a bonfire, Glanton has a juggler (long story) draw tarot cards. The card vanishes from Glanton’s hand, then the old woman accompanying the juggler interprets it as “La carroza… Invertido”—the inverted Chariot, “card of war, of vengeance”:
Then Glanton loses his temper and tells her to shut up and draws his revolver. Then Holden (“like a great ponderous djinn”) steps through the fire and restrains him.
Glanton and many of his group found their demise by the hands of Yuma Indians at the Colorado River crossing in 1850, an event that McCarthy follows fairly closely in BM. From the TSHA biography of Glanton:
By 1850, however, it became increasingly difficult for the Glanton gang to find hostile Apaches, and they began attacking peaceful agricultural Indians in the vicinity of Fort El Norte. Finally, they turned to taking Mexican scalps for profit. As a result the Chihuahua government drove Glanton and his company into Sonora and put a bounty on his scalp. There he contracted with the authorities to fight the Indians, traded Indian scalps for bounties, and again resorted to taking Mexican scalps to increase his profit. He and his gang seized and operated a river ferry controlled by the Yuma Indians. While operating the ferry, they reportedly killed Mexican and American passengers alike for their money and goods. At dawn on April 23, 1850, the normally friendly Yuma got their revenge on the interloping entrepreneurs. They killed most of the ferry workers and slit Glanton's throat in his tent.
And as told in BM’s chapter XIX:
When they entered Glanton’s chamber he lurched upright and glared wildly about him. The small clay room he occupied was entirely filled with a brass bed he’d appropriated from some migrating family and he sat in it like a debauched feudal baron while his weapons hung in a rich array from the finials. Caballo en Pelo mounted into the actual bed with him and stood there while one of the attending tribunal handed him at his right side a common axe the hickory helve of which was carved with pagan motifs and tasseled with the feathers of predatory birds. Glanton spat.
Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple. When they entered the judge’s quarters they found the idiot and a girl of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor.
That’s a good segue to our next protagonist.
Holden
The group leader Glanton isn’t a leader in McCarthy’s novel, neither is he the real villain—he’s not BM’s Lester Ballard or Anton Chigurh. Glanton is the gang’s nominal leader, but not he’s not its soul.
He’s not the character that BM is really about.
Meet Judge Holden, first name unknown, as Chamberlain describes him in his Confession on page 271. If you’ve read BM, the resemblance with the fictional Holden is disturbing—the real Holden wasn’t less depraved and cruel than McCarthy’s:
The second in command, now left in charge of [Glanton’s] camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontereras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.
Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.
BM’s Holden is at least as erudite and sadistic as the real Holden allegedly was. He enters BM when he enters the tent of a local Christian preacher, Reverent Green, wherein the kid is sitting with the audience: Judge Holden is an “enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker”, “bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.” Holden’s first words is this monologue to the preacher’s audience:
Then a fight ensues and later at a bar when men ask Holden how he knew all that stuff he says he’d never seen nor heard about Reverent Green; “There was a stranger 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.”
Judge Holden is terrifying as he’s consistently associated with destruction and moral annihilation. More than Glanton, he often amplifies the gang’s descent into indiscriminate violence. But his violence isn’t from darkness and hatred; it’s from intensity, almost a celebration of existence, for he also embodies vitality, knowledge, enjoyment of art, dance, music, as allegedly the real Holden did—it looks like Chamberlain sensed that too. And that makes Holden more human and therefore even scarier.
Juan’s critiques
Blood Meridian is probably the most studied, analyzed, and written about book of McCarthy. You’ll find plenty of resources online, of uneven quality. Some of the most interesting and literary erudite comments I’ve read are from the French critic Juan Asensio, in his series of posts about BM, which I encourage you to read. Juan’s posts are in French but auto-translations to English will probably be decent. For the excerpts below I’ve used DeepL, with some manual tweaks to get the nuances right, and adding the original English excerpts from BM.
From Relecture de Méridien de sang de Cormac McCarthy:
While a novel like The Road has an obvious religious dimension, as I have established, Blood Meridian, a text that we can without exaggeration describe as overwritten because it is saturated with a multitude of references (to Manichaeism, esotericism, the Bible, geology, flora and fauna, geography, history, firearms, various Native American peoples, etc.), is characterized far more by the exploration of a sacred, auspicious theme, which cannot, however, be separated from the religious dimension, so numerous are the references—direct or indirect—to the latter.
The sacred is distinguished by its ambiguity, the constant reversal of the pure into the impure, the profane into the initiated, good into evil, darkness into light, and, one might say, the past into the future.
It is perhaps through this complex temporality that Blood Meridian most skillfully conveys its modernity—that is, its ambiguity, its openness to an infinite range of interpretive possibilities— and the strange feeling it cannot fail to provoke in the mind of the reader, as if the writer’s aim, with this strange and monstrous novel, had been to offer more than a novel, a prologue to a knowledge that nevertheless eludes us, whose very essence is to remain unrevealed, like messianism in Judaism: “There are three matters that come only by means of diversion of attention from those matters, and these are they: The Messiah, a lost item, and a scorpion” (Sanhedrin 97a.)
And later in the same post, about the part in chapter XIV with the famous Holden quote “Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”:
Nothing can resist Judge Holden’s hold; his desire to know everything about the world can only mean a life-and-death struggle with creation, as he explains to Toadvine: “This is my claim,” he said. “And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation,” as if, through this explanation, McCarthy were once again emphasizing the possible identification between his character and the Devil, whom the Bible reminds us possesses the earth as an inheritance, whom he roams tirelessly, ensuring that not the slightest parcel of territory or soul escapes his empire. Holden goes on to declare: “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
Once again, Judge Holden becomes the herald of a conception that advocates the subjugation of the entire universe, in order to eliminate all forms of the unknown, equated with a disorder capable of shattering the absolute logic of destiny.
Now I’ll let you read the book.
(The featured image is from Chamberlain’s book, captioned “Despair.”)