Ambivalent National Epic: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Abstract

Recognition of the influence of conventions deriving from classical epic is central to any reckoning of Blood Meridian's form and concerns. In its preoccupation with violence and its relationship to the history and heritage of the nation, Blood Meridian owes direct debts to the Iliad and the Aeneid. Several formal features, notably the prevalence of similes, further identify the novel with the genre of epic.

Keywords::

• Cormac McCarthy
• Blood Meridian
• epic
• simile

Notes

Notes

¹ See Christopher N. Phillips's remarks on how, since the seventeenth century, “‘epic’ as a concept seems to have behaved more as a mode than as a genre” (3).

² Moby-Dick was published in 1851; most of the action in Blood Meridian occurs in 1849.

³ The sense of the borrowing from Wordsworth is unaffected by the bitter irony of the context: the kid comes not “trailing clouds of glory” but with “a taste for mindless violence” (3).

⁴ Cf. this passage from All the Pretty Horses: “When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group—bacteria, mice, people—and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist to gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was” (quoted in Phillips, “History” 41).

⁵ On the one hand, most of the characters in the novel are so reduced in the scale of being by physical hardship and the savage trade of scalp hunting as to become something less than human: to adopt the narrator's idiom, so molded and fired by the desert are their hearts as to render them indistinguishable from their elemental surroundings (see BM 247). On the other hand, there is the kid, who alone “sat in judgement on [his] own deeds” (307) and appears to undergo a process of moral maturation.

⁶ He borrows the term from Matthew Guinn (see Works Cited).

⁷ Chris Dacus has usefully demonstrated how the status of the gang changes as the national identification intensifies from Chapter 13, when their Indian-hunting contract is rescinded by an outraged Mexican government (Dacus 101–02).

⁸ In Mikhail Bakhtin's definition, a feature that distinguishes epic from other forms of narrative is that it presents a picture of a valorized “absolute past” that accounts for the present specifically through “beginnings” and “peak times” in the national history, “a world of fathers and of founders of families, a world of ‘firsts’ and ‘bests”’ (Kennedy 150). In its depiction of a gang of fatherless sons (in terms of the judge's parable of the evil harness-maker), “broken before a frozen god” (BM 145) by the symbolic parricide of the War of Independence, Blood Meridian could not be further removed from this convention.

⁹ As an index of the text's epic technique, June W. Allison has counted over eight hundred similes in Moby-Dick, compared with 740 in the Iliad and the Odyssey combined (14–15, 12).

¹⁰ Having said this, it is perhaps worth pointing out that some scholars of Virgil insist on a structural ambivalence (comparable to that which I am arguing informs Blood Meridian) within the Aeneid itself: e.g., “Virgil does not take the easy option of denouncing imperialism or the easier option of endorsing it” (Griffin xxiv).

¹¹ To the objection raised by a colleague that the violence in Blood Meridian is in a category of its own because of the barbaric practice of scalping, I would say that through its repetition and seeming inevitability, scalping comes to function in the text as essentially no different (as tangible evidence of the complete eclipse of the other) from the ritualistic stripping of a fallen foe's armour in Homer.

¹² As the judge puts it:

The truth about the world […] is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. (BM 245)

¹³ In Moby-Dick (Chapter 36), an exhilarated Captain Ahab exclaims: “I'd strike the sun if it insulted me” (Melville 159).

¹⁴ Tobin insists to the kid that “God speaks in the least of creatures […]. No man is given leave of that voice” (BM 124). Tobin's analogy is fascinating, and the authority of his pronouncement apparently unchallenged.

¹⁵ Weil continues,

This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic. Under the name of Nemesis, it functions as the mainspring of Aeschylus's tragedies. To the Pythagoreans, to Socrates and to Plato, it was the jumping-off point of speculation upon the nature of man and the universe. Wherever Hellenism has penetrated, we find the idea of it familiar. In Oriental countries which are steeped in Buddhism, it is perhaps this Greek idea that has lived on under the name of Kharma. The Occident, however, has lost it, and no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages: conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the conduct of life are, in the West, restricted to a servile function in the vocabulary of technics. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue. (15)

¹⁶ Compare the way in which white Jackson taunts black Jackson by riding alongside him and “[taking] his shadow for the shade that was in it. The black would check or start his horse to shake him off. As if the white man were in violation of his person, had stumbled onto some ritual dormant in his dark blood or his dark soul whereby the shape he stood the sun from on that rocky ground bore something of the man himself and in so doing lay imperilled” (BM 81).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gareth Cornwell

Gareth Cornwell is Professor Emeritus of English at Rhodes University in South Africa. He has previously published in Critique on Raymond Carver and J. M. Coetzee.