Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

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Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

Discussed in this essay:
• The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Child of God, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 206 pp.
• Suttree, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 480 pp.
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 352 pp.
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 320 pp.
• The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 432 pp.
• Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 292 pp.
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.00. 309 pp.
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 287 pp.

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Blood Meridian

Thus, the person that Suttree will become very much resembles the cowboy-protagonists of McCarthy’s next four novels. Though surrounded by everymen who change as circumstance dictates, the more willful men in these four books are guided instinctively by their very similar underlying beliefs, and they cling to what they know, even in the face of otherness and extreme adversity.

Blood Meridian, the first of the four, is set at the beginning of the myth of the West, and the next three, comprising The Border Trilogy, are set at the end. Though these novels reevaluate the myth of the rise and fall of the great American West, they also have loftier aspirations: they are questing novels with no clear goal, and in the inevitable confusion entailed by a quest with no point they attempt to articulate a philosophy about life. In deconstructing the trappings of the heroic journey, these four books have the most clearly defined plot arcs and sense of morality of any McCarthy had written up to that point. It is here that McCarthy will most clearly—perhaps at times too clearly—elaborate the philosophical beliefs that animate his writing.

Blood Meridian also marks an important shift from McCarthy’s Appalachian novels for how he changes his use of the road as a trope. The road is without a doubt the main organizing trope of all McCarthy’s work, yet, unlike the denizens of McCarthy’s first four novels, who were content to wander in small circles within the environs of Knoxville, Tennessee, in Blood Meridian and the books that follow McCarthy’s characters will become true wanderers. They will strike out on the open road and become lost.

Blood Meridian was the only book McCarthy published in the 1980s, coming six years after Suttree and seven years before All the Pretty Horses. Such great expanses of time are likely significant: in this period McCarthy had outgrown his native Tennessee, given up his status as a drifter, found a new home in New Mexico, and celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Congruent with these personal changes, Blood Meridian both distinctly evolves McCarthy’s style, setting, and concerns post-Suttree yet remains very much unlike the explorations McCarthy will make of the same terrain in The Border Trilogy.

Blood Meridian is a bridge between two distinct writers. It marks the start of McCarthy’s use of the myths and landscape of the Southwest border, yet it also draws from prior works by combining the carvinalesque atmosphere of Suttree with the violent world typical of the three novels that preceded that book. It is the author’s most blatant and most successful attempt at an epic, and it begins his use of extremely villainous characters to represent pure evil.

The book involves a gang of Americans hired by the Mexican government to kill Indians. With every shotgun blast and severed scalp these men create their own reality, and thus, whereas McCarthy’s earlier characters simply accepted their anarchic world, Blood Meridian’s characters attempt to create their own. In this they have a leader: Judge Holden, a Kurtz-like philosopher warrior who believes in war as others believe in God. The judge talks over the heads of the rest of the men and is thus often forced to debate himself, and it is in his gnomic, contradictory pronouncements that McCarthy creates Blood Meridian’s dialectic over the nature of free will. The judge’s most consistent debater is found in the character of the kid; although he lacks the learning to debate the judge with words (indeed, the judge is at one point said to know all languages and all things), the kid’s humanistic actions at vital junctures during the gang’s rampages through the Mexican north implicitly contradict the judge’s philosophy of domination and death.

Blood Meridian has been identified (to my mind correctly) as an embodiment of the Vietnam aesthetic: its almost unending series of horrors, its theme of a paternalistic American war in a colored nation, and its dramatization of men being desensitized into killers are all reminiscent of the experiences of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, and McCarthy’s depiction of such in Meridian draws heavily on art inspired by Vietnam: the war films of auteurs like Kubrick and Coppola and books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches. In this way, it is the logical culmination of the brutish, morally befuddled world that McCarthy develops in his first four novels. ¹

We must pause here a moment to pay our respects to the judge, variously described as Ahab, the white whale, or half and half. Massive, hairless, at times a mad war god and at others a fearfully powerful infant, the judge compels attention as an incredible enigma and perhaps McCarthy’s greatest creation. Is he human or not? What does he believe? Where does he go after Blood Meridian ends, and was his tenure restricted to the dark period of manifest destiny, or might he still be a part of the American way of life?

In a typically convoluted declaration, the judge sums up both sides of his thoughts on free will:

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. . . .

The man who believes that the secrets of this 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.

Essentially, the judge argues that knowledge and willful action are only possible once all the facts of a life are known, but the problem is that the only way to make these facts known is to live a life. Thus, as the judge says, life is an already-woven “tapestry”; merely tracing one thread through it, a person will have “taken charge” of his life. But again, the paradox: this is only possible once the tapestry is woven, once a life has been lived and all choices are already made.

I dwell on this point because this is not only the question at the heart of ,em>Blood Meridian but also the question at the hearts of The Border Trilogy and No Country for Old Men. And, in fact, in nascent form something like this philosophy can be seen in McCarthy’s writing before Blood Meridian. McCarthy is an author obsessed with moments of choice for his characters, and in the above quote the judge lays out the quandary that drives him to obsess over these questions of choice, as well as those of divination and moral culpability. Is there a point in which a person can preview the tapestry whole-formed, and thus be in a position to truly choose his course in the world? Or must we always be in the dark as to what form our life will take when all is said and done, and therefore not truly be in a position to make choices that will define our future?

On these questions Blood Meridian is intentionally vague; indeed, one of the book’s great pleasures is its artful ambiguity, watching how McCarthy balances between any clear statement on the book’s big questions. Because the judge takes pleasure in watching his companions struggle beneath the weight of his pronouncements, and because those very remarks are often obscure to the extreme, it is difficult to say what precisely is the judge’s morality, or if he even has one beyond a worship of the chaos of war. He does indeed make many statements that hint at a morality (e.g., “War is the most honest form of divination”), yet these conflict with the fealty he pays to something approaching a great worship of randomness. At one point, he quite forcefully declares that human agency is meaningless in the face of something like a cosmic destiny:

A man seeks his destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.

The great reckoning in Blood Meridian is something that might be called “the kid’s choice.” Alone among all the book’s characters, the kid has a chance to shoot the judge and see if he can be killed. In a tense, perfectly wrought scene, the judge stands naked and unarmed in the desert before the kid, who is armed with a gun and quite pointedly described as a “free agent.” The judge taunts the kid, goads him to take a shot, and the kid is cheered by one of his companions: “You’ll get no second chance lad. Do it. He is naked. He is unarmed. God’s blood, do you think you’ll best him any other way? . . . Do it or I swear your life is forfeit.”

This man ends up being correct. The kid does not shoot—whether he ever truly had a chance to kill the judge, and whether his agency, real or imagined, made any difference in the outcome, are all questions Blood Meridian remains silent on. The scene brings to mind Sylder’s question from The Orchard Keeper: “who owes who?” How did the judge and the kid end up in this battle? Was there any logical order that brought them together, can we unwind and understand the strands of causation that made them mortal enemies? Again, Blood Meridian is wonderfully ambiguous on these questions; what is known with certainty is that at the novel’s end the judge tracks the kid down years after the men have disbanded and murders him by strangling him against his enormous belly in an outhouse.

In the light of the kid’s choice not to murder, it is worth looking back for a moment to McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, where McCarthy depicts the very first murder of his career: Sylder, the whiskey-runner, kills a hitchhiker who attacks him. Foreshadowing the judge’s ambiguous supernaturalism, the hitchhiker radiates a “profound and unshakable knowledge of the presence of evil.” Just a few sentences later McCarthy further embellishes this: “Thanks, old buddy, the man said, sliding across the seat to the far door without apparent use of any locomotor appendages.” Also recalling Blood Meridian, the murder is an act that Sylder quite consciously chooses to commit:

Sylder held him like that for a long time. Like squeezing a boil, he thought. . . . Then he eased his grip and the man’s eyes widened.

For Christ’s sake, he gasped. Jesus Christ, just turn me loose.

Sylder put his face to the man’s and in a low voice said, You better call on somebody closer than that. . . . He dug his thumb into the man’s windpipe and felt it collapse like a dried tule.

This is clearly a moment in which Sylder chooses death over life, and this murder prefigures the rest of the novel: Sylder will later assume a fatherly role to the son of the man he has (unbeknownst to either) murdered, and there are intimations that the book’s other principal character has his life impacted by the dead man’s corpse. This would seem to mean that Sylder has chosen his fate, except that at the moment of the murder he had no clue as to the repercussions such a murder would entail. Sylder’s choice to murder resembles the kid’s choice not to: they are choices whose willfulness is uncertain.

The kid’s choice not to pull the trigger, and the quite clear moral and philosophical matters that underlie it, inaugurate a new stage in McCarthy’s career: before Blood Meridian his writing has never been so allegorical, with characters obviously representing certain ideas. McCarthy will further his newfound interest in allegory in The Border Trilogy as his two protagonists, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, adventure in a mid 20th century Mexico. Never does McCarthy so much become a novelist of ideas as in the trilogy, especially its large hinge novel, The Crossing, although the results here are mixed. Whereas Blood Meridian’s ambiguity and carnivalesque feel could support the judge’s occasional philosophizing as just one more odd element in an extremely strange and baroque picaresque, the allegorical elements of The Border Trilogy stick out more. In these books that finally brought McCarthy widespread fame, it seems he took up a form of writing that he could make salable, but not artistic.

Just as Blood Meridian’s ambiguity and moral uncertainty owe much to the aesthetics of Vietnam, The Border Trilogy’s moral clarity seem rooted in . . .

¹ See “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy,” Vince Brewton

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