Charlottesville Words

Blood Meridian is the fourth Cormac McCarthy book I have read since plunging into his work about a year ago. I started with Child of God and loved the style – so often described as “biblical”– and the Appalachian voices. I then launched into what I consider the best of the four, Suttree, whose eponymous protagonist makes his odyssey around and about Knoxville, Tennessee with a traveling freakshow of drunks, whores, idiots and other assorted misfits. Suttree is one part grotesquerie, one part myth, and one part flat-out comedy. This year I read The Road, much sparer but clearly still part of the same imaginative world.

Blood Meridian picks up the story of another Tennessean, the Boy, who joins the bloody Glanton gang hunting down Indians and Mexicans for their scalps as they cross and recross the Mexican border. Though all Westerns are epic, McCarthy takes his epic back to the very wellspring of epic. The events of Blood Meridian don’t take place in our nation’s historical past, or even in its mythic past, so much as they emerge from the prehistoric sources of all myth. The most arresting character, Judge Holden, is a hairless giant who seems to be everywhere and everything to everybody: scholar, solon, soldier, scientist, philosopher, friend, father, fate — a Titan. Or perhaps Death himself. The settings – desert, salt pan, lava plain, fetid village — are worthy of Virgil or Dante (and set the stage for the apocalyptic landscape of The Road).

I stayed away from McCarthy for a long time because of B. R. Myers’ infamous Reader’s Manifesto. I admit a guilty fondness for the Manifesto. Myers mostly refers to All the Pretty Horses in his essay, but much of what he says of that book is somewhat true of Blood Meridian as well: “The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language….Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.” McCarthy will let his style override his characters’ voices, and it’s often obvious that he’s relying on a word for its sound or rhythm, or making a rough gesture toward meaning (“…some rude provisional species….Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being.”)

But right there is the problem with the Manifesto. It’s poor sport to make a case against any author by picking out his misses and holding them up for ridicule. McCarthy hits a heck of a lot more than he misses, and the “accumulation” of “verbiage” that Myers makes mock of builds a world that you don’t often find in literature, one that is profound, and yes, mythic, but also gritty, filthy, visceral, full of rot. And for every egregious appearance of McCarthy’s crutchwords — preterite, anchorite, egregious – there’s a scene of beauty and truth or a metaphor that reaches and exceeds even Myers’ reading standard, well expressed here:

…when Vladimir Nabokov talks of midges “continuously darning the air in one spot,” or the “square echo” of a car door slamming, I feel what Philip Larkin wanted readers of his poetry to feel: “Yes, I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s how it is.” The pleasure that accompanies this sensation is almost addictive; for many, myself included, it’s the most important reason to read both poetry and prose.

For me, it’s not “almost” addictive. I get my fix from McCarthy.

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