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Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God

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Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God . 1 Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God: The Apotheosis of Violence in Blood Meridian​ “See the child” (3). So begins Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening ​ Redness in the West, and this simple imperative, these three monosyllables command the ​ reader’s vision and refuse to let it go. The novel’s first sentence declares its intention to transform the reader into a witness. Blood Meridian​ stakes its claim in a genealogy of violence ​ reaching to the origins of the Western genre, while subversively challenging readers and scholars with an experience fundamentally different from any of its predecessors. The unremitting violence in Blood Meridian ​ ultimately separates the novel in important ​ ways from its own precursors, problematizing not its own generic history, but American history and God’s place within it. The novel self­consciously enters the genre’s violent tradition only to subvert and ultimately explode the reader’s expectations that it use violence in conventional or justifiable ways. ​Blood Meridian’s​ first word commands its readers to “see,” and we somewhat ​ guiltily peer inside. From the novel’s epigraphs to its compressed exposition and through every episode which follows, the violence accretes with lurid precision, and along the way the novel works a transformation in its readers; the text makes witnesses of us all. McCarthy’s aim and Blood Meridian’s​ achievement is to so thoroughly evacuate the ​ landscape of God that nothing remains but a violence that changes the basic coordinates of how we view both its historical reality and its ongoing effects. A​ postmodern ​ tour de force​ , the novel ​ offers its readers one literary convention after another­­hyper­masculine, laconic cowboys, brutal indian attacks, smoke­filled saloons, gambling, drinking, prostitution, and of course high, lonesome desert landscapes­­only to dismantle these conventions until violence and its echoes are all that remains. Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God . 2 By the time of its publication in 1985 the Western had long assumed its place as an iconic American form, both reflecting and creating our cultural identity. Blood Meridian​ masterfully ​ and systematically nullifies the reader’s deep­seated generic expectations until the reader has no choice but to become more than mere voyeur or spectator, but a witness­­with all the word entails­­to the role violence plays in the novel, in our cultural history, in our language, and in ourselves. Harold Bloom, after gesturing to Blood Meridian’s ​ “overwhelming carnage,” and its ​ “appalling . [and] continuous massacres and mutilations,” then famously calls it “the authentic American apocalyptic novel . the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed” (254­255). Blood ​ Meridian has that effect; it imposes itself on readers and critics alike in a way no previous work ​ in the genre can match. The complicity the novel creates is not, as some critics contend, simply because the book is more violent than its predecessors, but because McCarthy’s use of violence,, ​ the degree to which it de­centers the novel’s constitutive elements, and the position in which it places the reader are considerably more complex. The judge’s “endless complexity of being and witness” (141) encompasses the reader in what Oliver Mort calls a “‘new form of epic’ [which] reflects the breakdown of the grand narratives of the past, of progress, rationality and of God, and instead presents a view of the world as provisional, contingent, deeply suspect” (247). As the novel methodically nullifies traditional (often religious) justifications for violence, violence nevertheless remains, and with it profound questions surrounding its origin and agency in a Godless land. One step toward answering these questions is to consider the long­standing relationship between violence and the reader in earlier texts within the genre, where reading is typically Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God . 3 understood as a type of seeing or spectating, both of which remain relatively passive actions. Traditional Westerns (from Cooper to Wister to Grey) invite the reader, most often in the company of a trusted god­like narrator, to view violence from a safe distance. Witnessing, however, imposes a far more active degree of understanding, even responsibility. Witnessing an event is participatory and readers of Blood Meridian​ are forced to participate in its violence in ​ powerful and disturbing ways.​ The enigmatic judge seems particularly attuned to the various ​ meanings and implications of the word, insisting on its centrality throughout the novel, even recounting a parable to dramatize the concept. The judge ends his tale by telling of a child still in its mother’s womb when his father is murdered while traveling. Denied his right as witness, “this son whose father’s existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way” (145). This story seems meant specifically for the kid, who like the son in the tale has lost a parent (his mother during his own birth). “The [kid’s] father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man” (3). The parable and the allusion function ironically in that, rather than anchoring the events or ideas of the novel in history they do just the opposite: the child in the parable inherits only provisionality and speculation while the nameless kid is denied any genealogical grounding or personal identity whatsoever except a timeless penchant for violence. The judge repeatedly invokes the experience of witnessing as an almost sacred act, even as all vestiges of the sacred are stripped from the Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God . 4 world he inhabits, the world he would create. A more subtle way the text manipulates the reader to become a witness is through shifting tenses. The past tense dominates, but periodically McCarthy renders events in present tense. The novel opens in the present tense, immersing the reader into a litany of events: the kid’s birth, his scant upbringing, his subsequent running away at the age of fourteen, and the scars, knife­fights, and gun shots of his first year on his own. The immediacy of the present tense collapses these events into a singular episode, lends a sense of timelessness to them, and establishes a pattern to which the text will frequently return—using the present tense to inhibit the reader’s tendency to seek distance from the novel’s stark realities. The reverend Green episode in which we first meet the judge is related in past tense, but chapter II toggles again to the present: “Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he” (15). Again and again McCarthy pushes the historical into the present, a temporal telescoping that nullifies any attempt to consign the novel’s atrocities to another time. Just as the old Mennonite uses the present tense to warn the kid and his newfound associates that their way is doomed (40­41), just as “the pale sutler [death] . drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground” (44), and just as the judge, in the novel’s penultimate episode, “says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335)—McCarthy’s use of the present tense thrusts the reader into intimate, unavoidable, and immediate association with the novel’s violence. Another technique McCarthy employs to shape the reader’s response emerges in the way he handles characterization. Blood Meridian’s​ malevolent actors­­Tobin the ex­priest, Glanton, ​ Dismantling the Western, Deconstructing God . 5 Toadvine, and Judge Holden­­are certainly difficult to forget, but they are not literary characters in the conventional sense. The novel refuses to grant the reader even minimal access to any psychological interiority. As Dana Phillips argues, “​[Since] the kid spits as often as he speaks . ​ it would not really be accurate, therefore, to call him the main “character” in Blood Meridian​ , ​ since McCarthy seems to have largely dispensed with the concept of character in fashioning his material” (441). ​The judge may be more nuanced than his fellows, but his revelations are ​ complicated by the suspicion that they may be mere performance pieces intended to manipulate more than provide any true window into his character. A third­person omniscient narrator meticulously describes events, yet this voice consistently refuses to evaluate or prescribe, to offer any assistance in interpreting the horrors that confront the reader on nearly every page; the narrator’s godlike omniscience offers little solace. Readers are cast adrift to wander the blasted terrain in lockstep with the novel’s taciturn characters and forced to grapple with its violence on their own. ​The characters remain essentially opaque, static, nearly allegorical. McCarthy’s ​ method of characterization makes sure we are made witness to countless actions but never granted access to their motives. Our inability to peer inside McCarthy’s characters is paralleled and amplified by their own lack of self­awareness and our own doubts about the very concept of identity which abound in a post­structuralist world. Still another means by which Blood Meridian​ unbalances its readers is in its evocation of ​ the land itself ­­ no picturesque Monument Valley here, but a timeless wasteland, a Dantean fantasy, a seething, smoldering, bone­strewn holocaust.
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