In Rough Country (14 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their lifeâ¦all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.
In
Blood Meridian
the adolescent romance-fantasy of Native American savages on the warpath erupts into an apocalyptic reality experienced by a crew of American mercenaries hired by a Mexican governor to scalp Indians at $100 a head:
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stove pipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveilâ¦death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smokeâ¦
â¦they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knivesâ¦and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and
passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.
McCarthy's scenes of ecstatic violence are interlarded through
Blood Meridian
with a periodicity the reader will find effective or numbing depending upon his predilection for fantasy violence beyond even the biblical Book of Revelation or the most lurid of comic books.
Where
Child of God
is a horror story writ small, depicted with masterly restraint,
Blood Meridian
is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer's
Iliad
; its strategy isn't ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence. The “degeneracy of mankind” is McCarthy's great subject, infinitely demonstrable and as timely in our era of jingoist American aggression as it would have been in the decade following the end of the Vietnam War debacle, when
Blood Meridian
was published. Early on in the novel, a U.S. army captain broods over the “loss” of Mexican territory in the recent (1846 to 1848) war:
We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didn't give it back. Back to a bunch of bar
barians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion on God's earth of honor or justice or the meaning of a republican governmentâ¦
The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexicoâ¦We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for themâ¦
We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land.
Soon, the nameless kid from Tennessee, eerily adumbrating Cormac McCarthy's migration westward, has signed up with a renegade band of Americans to embark upon, in a Mennonite prophet's words, “War of a madman's making onto a foreign land.”
Though “the kid” is the closest to a sympathetic protagonist in
Blood Meridian
, McCarthy makes no effort to characterize him in any but a rudimentary way. We are not meant to identify with him, only just to perceive him, the youngest among a crew of psychopath-killers, as an unreflective participant in a series of violent, often demonic and deranged episodes that soon begin to repeat themselves. Countless men seem to be killed, yet the crew, led by a psychopath named Glanton, seems never to be depleted: “They rode on.”
Blood Meridian
is coolly detached from any of its subjects, distanced and ironic
in the way of a classic Brechtian play; terrible things occur but only as in fairy tales, bluntly summarized and soon forgotten:
When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the [Gileno Indian] village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercyâ¦One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and the humans on fire came shrieking forthâ¦
Among Glanton's crew, a black man named Jackson resolves his feud with a white man named Jackson:
The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head.
Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast.
Apache revenge for the Americans' atrocities:
They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chestsâ¦
Animals, too, are prodigiously slaughtered in
Blood Meridian
, among them horses, dogs, puppies, even a dancing bear. Here, the Americans attack a Mexican mule team, unleashing an ecstatic gush of language beyond even Faulkner:
The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside.
Among the mercenaries is an unlikely seer/prophet known as the judge. Initially a figure of uncanny eloquence as he is utterly without conscience, the judge would seem to be McCarthy's demented spokesman, interpreting what would otherwise be brute, brainless violence passing immediately into oblivion. The judge is a gigantic man nearly seven feet tall, bald, beardless, the “enormous dome of his head when he bared it blinding white and perfectly circumscribed so that it looked to have been painted.” A figure out of some demonic mythology or cartoon Hades, the judge “shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere on that vast corpus, not in any crevice nor in the great bores of his nose and not upon his chest nor in his ears nor any tuft at all above his eyes nor to the lids thereof.” He carries a rifle inscribed
Et In Arcadia Ego
. He rescues an Apache child from a slaughter only to wantonly scalp him on the trail as, later, he rescues two orphaned puppies only to toss them into a river. Even on the war trail he pauses like a gentleman naturalist to “botanize” and take notes for demented sermons to be delivered between bouts of mayhem and murder:
The truth about the worldâ¦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 antecedent nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddy field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The judge's constant theme is the “degeneracy of mankind” of which he would seem to be a prime example, preaching an ethic out of Thomas Hobbes in which “all trades are contained in that of war” and “war is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” Improbably, the obese, often naked judge survives while most of his comrades are killed; the last we see of him, through the kid's eyes, is in 1878, in a tavern somewhere in Texas “among every sort of man” as their seeming exemplar. Prone to inflated rhetoric, as much buffoon as seer, the judge would seem to be a more deranged and far more malevolent Captain Ahab, or an unstoppered Kurtz (of Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
) whose succinct judgment “The horror! The horror!” has been replaced here by slews of verbiage and goofy behavior in the way of Marlon Brando's shamelessly campy performance in Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
, a reimagining of
Heart of Darkness
set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. But where Conrad presents the “impenetrable darkness” of the debased Kurtz sparingly, McCarthy so frequently unleashes the judge upon the reader that over the sprawl of hundreds of pages he becomes increasingly a caricature:
Towering over [the dancers] is the judge and he is naked dancingâ¦huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die.
Cormac McCarthy's least known and surely most undervalued work is his five-act play
The Stonemason
(1994), a remarkable feat of ventriloquism in its intimate depiction of four gen
erations of a close-knit black family, descendants of slaves, in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. With its enormous, commercially impractical cast (thirteen named characters in addition to numerous others) and lengthy, eloquent but undramatic monologues,
The Stonemason
would seem to have been written to be read and not performed.
Where
Blood Meridian
celebrates an unflinching and numbing nihilism,
The Stonemason
celebrates bonds of family love and responsibility. Like the
Border Trilogy
, it celebrates the integrity of work and the sometimes mystical bond between individuals (in McCarthy's work, exclusively men) linked by a common craft or trade: “You can't separate wisdom from the common experience and the common experience is just what the worker has in plenty.” The play's narrator is a thirty-two-year-old black man, Ben Telfair, who'd originally planned to be a teacher but turned stonemason in emulation of his revered 101-year-old grandfather Papaw; it's a memory play, with elaborate stage directions intended to “give distance to events and place them in a completed past.” Its central event is the death of the patriarch stonemason Papaw which seems to precipitate, as in a classic tragedy, the sudden disintegration of the Telfair family: the suicide of Ben's father, a stonemason not content to live within his financial means, and the heroin overdose death of Ben's nineteen-year-old nephew Soldier. Intelligently tender-hearted, realistic in language, characters, and story,
The Stonemason
more resembles a play by August Wilson than anything by Cormac McCarthy; it's a testament to the author's versatility if not his audacity.
Much of the play is comprised of beautifully composed
language turning upon Ben's idealization of Papaw and of the sacred vocation of stonemasonry. The play avoids a dramatic resolution but takes us through a period of mourning and regeneration as Ben, grieving for his losses, has a vision of his deceased grandfather that assures him “[Papaw] would guide me all my days and he would not fail me, not fail me, not ever fail me.” Is this ending meant to be taken at face value, or ironically?
The Stonemason
would seem to be a play lacking a subtext, imagined without irony; its conflicts are open and reiterated. Admirer's of McCarthy's lurid grandiloquence and penchant for minutely described scenes of carnage would very likely be baffled by the naive and unquestioned idealism of
The Stonemason
:
Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?
And,
For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of Godâ¦For we invent nothing but what God has put to hand.
As
The Stonemason
is a rebuke of sorts to the “war god” of
Blood Meridian
, so the closely linked novels of the
Border Trilogy
are a tribute, in their warmly sympathetic depiction
of the lives of young ranch hands in Texas and New Mexico in the 1950s, to such traditional values as friendship, loyalty, compassion, courage, physical endurance and (male) stoicism; though suffused with nostalgia for a way of life rapidly coming to an end in the Southwest in the decade following the end of World War II, for the most part the novels avoid sentimentality. (Why “sentimentality” need be avoided in serious literature, as it's rarely avoided by serious people in actual life, is another issue.) Where the prevailing atmosphere of
Blood Meridian
is apocalyptic and its structure operatic, erupting into arias of esoteric violence and inflated language at regular intervals, the prevailing atmosphere of the
Border Trilogy
is something like the common sense of (male) adult maturity as it collides with (male) adolescent passion and idealism. What erupts as drama, often as tragic drama, in the ballad-like tales of John Grady Cole (of
All the Pretty Horses
and
Cities of the Plain
) and his contemporary Billy Parham (of
The Crossing
and
Cities of the Plain
), is adolescent yearning, beautifully rendered by McCarthy in an infinity of ways through hundreds of pages of prose in homage to the West: