The Western Edge
When Cormac McCarthy moved from Tennessee to El Paso in 1976, he enjoyed a small cult following built on the basis of three post-Faulknerian Southern Gothic novels. Three years later he published Suttree, his best novel to that point but one that exhausted the Tennessee material. Then, in 1985, came his first take on the Southwest, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, a book drenched in violence yet possessed of great beauty. In some of the most precise and demanding prose of the waning century, McCarthy staked out his claim as a major writer. Literary don Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian as "strong and memorable" a work written by any living American novelist, praising it as a "canonical imaginative achievement."
Yet I know friends and historians who find themselves giving up on Blood Meridian because of its gore. Bloom himself says that it was only on his third attempt that he was able to get past the carnage. On the surface the novel might owe something to the genre of historical fiction, but the difference between it and works such as James Michener's Texas is, as Mark Twain once said of using the right word, the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Set along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849, the novel limns the bloody, apocalyptic adventures of a gang of cutthroats and scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton. Glanton, a historical figure, fought in the Texas Revolution, in sundry clashes during the years of the republic, and in the war against Mexico. After the war, the Mexican government paid Glanton and his crew to kill Indians, and they made good profits from selling the scalps of Indians as well as poor Mexicans. The satanic band later took over a river ferry in Arizona where they routinely murdered all comers until Glanton and most of his followers were themselves scalped by Yuma Indians.
One who escaped is a figure of monumental impressiveness: Judge Holden, the sage and sadist whose grim vision is at the heart of the novel's darkness. The narrative ends with Holden dancing naked, vowing he will never die. Like Glanton, Holden is also taken from the pages of history; both appear in Samuel Chamberlain's memoir, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue. The novel's protagonist is the unnamed "kid," who finds himself a member of Glanton's outlaw band and whose attempts to maintain some kind of humanity amid a blood-soaked world are doomed from the start. The kid undergoes the goriest initiation of any innocent in American literature.
When Cormac McCarthy moved from Tennessee to El Paso in 1976, he enjoyed a small cult following built on the basis of three post-Faulknerian Southern Gothic novels. Three years later he published Suttree, his best novel to that point but one that exhausted the Tennessee material. Then, in 1985, came his first take on the Southwest, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, a book drenched in violence yet possessed of great beauty. In some of the most precise and demanding prose of the waning century, McCarthy staked out his claim as a major writer. Literary don Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian as "strong and memorable" a work written by any living American novelist, praising it as a "canonical imaginative achievement."
Yet I know friends and historians who find themselves giving up on Blood Meridian because of its gore. Bloom himself says that it was only on his third attempt that he was able to get past the carnage. On the surface the novel might owe something to the genre of historical fiction, but the difference between it and works such as James Michener's Texas is, as Mark Twain once said of using the right word, the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Set along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849, the novel limns the bloody, apocalyptic adventures of a gang of cutthroats and scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton. Glanton, a historical figure, fought in the Texas Revolution, in sundry clashes during the years of the republic, and in the war against Mexico. After the war, the Mexican government paid Glanton and his crew to kill Indians, and they made good profits from selling the scalps of Indians as well as poor Mexicans. The satanic band later took over a river ferry in Arizona where they routinely murdered all comers until Glanton and most of his followers were themselves scalped by Yuma Indians.
One who escaped is a figure of monumental impressiveness: Judge Holden, the sage and sadist whose grim vision is at the heart of the novel's darkness. The narrative ends with Holden dancing naked, vowing he will never die. Like Glanton, Holden is also taken from the pages of history; both appear in Samuel Chamberlain's memoir, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue. The novel's protagonist is the unnamed "kid," who finds himself a member of Glanton's outlaw band and whose attempts to maintain some kind of humanity amid a blood-soaked world are doomed from the start. The kid undergoes the goriest initiation of any innocent in American literature.
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