My Take | Late genius of doom shows how frontier violence has always defined America
- Cormac McCarthy, who died this week, conveys more truth and reality about the US’ bloody expansionist history in his novel ‘Blood Meridian’ than most non-fiction books on the country that are mostly fiction
The word “meridian” is already so pregnant with meaning that when you add the word “blood” to it, the semantic explosion literally makes your head spin. Those who have read Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, the 1985 “Western” novel by Cormac McCarthy – who died this week aged 89 – usually recall being overwhelmed, even sickened, by its extreme violence and savagery. And yet, the great literary critic Harold Bloom has compared it with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and cited McCarthy in the same sentences with Homer and Shakespeare.
I am no literary critic, but I trust Bloom’s authoritative judgment. I truly admire the totally unflinching depiction of violence at the fluid Mexican-American borders of the early 1850s. Mexicans, white and black Americans, and native Americans – they all shared one common trait of humanity, and that was their savagery and blood lust towards each other.
If you want to understand American history, the book is as good a place to start as any; nay, probably better than most non-fiction books on the subject. How ironic, I have long thought, that you need to find reality about America in a novel whose violence is on a mythical, even cosmic scale, while most non-fiction books are actually fiction!
Blood Meridian(s)
Meridians are also called longitudes. Their story is also the story of empires. They had been a perennial problem for sailors and explorers since the time of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy. But the “longitude” problem was solved in the 18th century by the Englishman John Harrison, who invented what we today call the chronometer that could tell sailors where they were at sea without reference to land and the stars.
Like sonar and radar more recently, the chronometer provided the cutting technological edge to the British navy and the building and spread of the empire.
But let’s start with a particular longitude or two before we discuss all the other longitudes or meridians and empire.