For three years at the beginning of this century, I lived in the capital city of America’s slowly dying empire. It was the era of flip phones and 9/11, before Facebook, before MySpace, when the most socially adept had Friendster accounts and a bookmarked list of liberal blogs on Microsoft Internet Explorer. All of which is to say that people still carried books on the subway. Books that ebbed and flowed like the seasons: middlebrow social commentary, accessible airport novels, the mysticism of Dan Brown and, it being D.C., thick presidential biographies. In the anodyne sameness of the federal milieu I swam in, it became necessary to have a “thing”. Some of these “things” were just mainline Protestant hobbies like running, golfing, or rock climbing. There were indie-music aesthetes, individuals to whom the term “hipster” (recently returned to the lexicon) was increasingly applied. Other “things” were more torturously conjured. Some of my coworkers now described themselves, without a hint of shame, as “foodies.” I was the guy who read difficult books that I would explain to women in crowded, still-smokey bars, and they––with varying levels of forbearance––would listen.
It was an affectation like any other. In a city where even the most casual conversation is drowned in a sea of official jargon, whispered like incantations, one must find some common ground outside of the vaulting ambition of clerical life. And so I scanned the shelves of Kramer’s or Politics and Prose for some work just oblique enough from the tastes of my peers to be accessible and yet mysterious enough to gesture at unseen depths to my character. It was about as successful a dating gambit as it had any right to be. I rarely could interest anyone in the books I proffered. And whatever mystery path I carved out for my audience eventually led directly back to the image of the normie Midwesterner I had so wanted to enshroud.
Much of this literature was ultimately forgettable. Or at any rate, I have chosen to forget it. Yet there is at least one book that remains with me, whose pages still haunt me now as they did when I first saw its spine on the bookstore shelf bearing the stark words Blood Meridian. Even the title felt like an unexpected sound in the night, to which the only response is “Who goes there?” The same question lingered in my mind when its author, Cormac McCarthy, died this past June at the age of 89. I saw myself back in my D.C. apartment or on the train, reading page after page of penetrating, almost cosmic, violence. It was the presidency of George W. Bush, years of rage and quietism, of political ambivalence and meandering moral outrage. Something in the story spoke to those in the orbit of power. Something I had forgotten.
The Judge
Published by Random House in 1985, Blood Meridian is the story of a band of Indian hunters who plied their trade in Mexico and the American Southwest in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican-American war. Unlike the characters in his Tennessee novels, this band, the Glanton gang, is delegated their violence by legitimate authorities. They are “blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote,” sent forth to clear the ground of the indigenous nations standing in the way of the American project, and civilization marches in their wake.
At the center of the story is male protagonist referred to only as “The Kid.” If that sounds like a stock plot device from a dime-store cowboy novel, the book’s true main character, the Judge, is anything but. He is a gargantuan, mythic figure, with almost supernatural powers, and is arguably the most terrifying character in all of American literature. When we meet him for the first time, the Judge is sitting alone on a rock in the desert after which he proceeds to save the marauders from a vengeful troop of Apache by making gunpowder out of ashes, bat shit, and his own urine. He is the obscene prophet of a genocidal mob, a figure of Mephistophelean mirth, and a nimble dancer. He is capable of scientific disquisitions of disturbing specificity and of hefting a piece of artillery under one arm to escape a band of marauding Apache.
The Judge reads as an antagonist, the Satanic made imminent, an embodiment of the malice that drives conquest. Yet, it’s impossible not to see him as yielding up deep truths as McCarthy sees them. His is a humanistic nihilism that yields generative godhood up to mankind. Life is a game which derives its savor from the arbitrary rules by which we establish its stakes, and “all games aspire to the condition of war for there that which is wagered swallows up the game, player, all.”
The figure of the Kid is notable only for his rebellion. If he ultimately rejects the Judge’s vision it is due to cowardice and indecisiveness, not because mercy must in the end be triumphant. He merely turns his back on the frontier and toward civilization, a turn that must fail. Finding the Kid in a California jail, the Judge pronounces his verdict:
If war is not holy, man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not.
To be human, to have agency beyond mere mammalian affectation, is to adhere to one’s commitments, to adhere not to any moral authority, but to the rules established by the games we play, even unto death. To flee this commitment is to succumb to insensibility and confusion. The Judge ultimately murders the Kid in an outhouse, and the book ends with this haunting description: “He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps the Judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
The Meridian
I moved to Washington just nine months after 9/11. The air of panic was almost palpable. Flights into D.C. enforced a 30 mile lockdown perimeter in which no one was to leave their seats. On my initial flight to the capitol, a man attempted to grab his carry-on bag resulting in the flight attendants screaming at the passengers to stay seated as three of them converged on the man and pushed him back into his seat. I found myself hyperventilating and the man next to me gripped his elbow rests so tightly that his fingers turned ash white. A woman across the aisle softly dabbed tears from her eyes as the flight crew walked up and down the aisle scolding us to stay seated.
I arrived only weeks before the so-called D.C. snipers began their reign of terror in the district. The randomness of the attacks adhered to the general pall of anxiety shrouding the beltway. We were all on the lookout for mysterious white vans, and it was common to see veteran bureaucrats walk, hunched over, in haphazard zig-zags as they attempted to make their way from the metro to their workplace without becoming the next victim. I would like to say this didn’t cross my mind, but I’d be lying.
The fear wore at us. The banality of our day-to-day work was bracketed by color coded terror alerts, rumors of snipers on government office buildings, and threats of a dirty bomb going off during the state of the union. During my second Christmas in DC, I was so panicked by a reported increase in terrorist activity that I was unable to take my flight home to Wisconsin for the holidays.
We career bureaucrats were all liberals, but as the Iraq War approached we split into camps. Some supported the war, or at least accepted its coming as a sop to public jingoism. Others like myself impotently opposed it and watched in confused horror as the nation marched steadily towards invasion. Those of us in the latter camp were dubbed unserious, our support for Howard Dean naive and irresponsible. The serious ones shouted their arguments for Lieberman in crowded Capitol Hill bars over Yuenglings and bland queso. My one act of defiance was to punch my television as the missiles started raining down on Baghdad. As the screen faded to black, I could hear the low hum of the cathode ray apparatus. We kept going to work. We hoped for a shift in public opinion. I took up Zazen meditation and practiced radical acceptance as I worked on budgets that slashed entitlements and made it harder for immigrants to get Medicaid.
Bloodlust and fear: there has never been an empire that could subsist without them. If we are born to violence, it still takes the image of the “barbarian at the gate” to unleash collective fury. There are no reasons for it, just excuses. And we were powerless to stop it, could do nothing but take our anger out on minor appliances. McCarthy told stories of perplexed individuals stoically succumbing to forces outside their own control. They took it like adults, they didn’t punch their TVs. His world made sense. If we had any fantasies about the nobility of our work, we would, like McCarthy’s protagonists, recognize the barbarity, accept our fate, but carry on as if our work mattered.
Critics read McCarthy as the prophet of settler colonialism. Greg Grandin called him the “muse of empire,” and Harold Bloom suggested that McCarthy’s work held a “deep implicit warning for our gun crazed country.” Certainly, Blood Meridian lays bare the bones of American institutions. Bones yielded from murder and domination. Yet, while McCarthy’s work is born of this nation, it aims ceaselessly at the universal. Life is heedless of human desires, “but when God made man the devil was at his elbow.” The drive for domination is a feature of all human endeavors, of all social orders. Civilization depends upon exploitation and violence, as can be seen in the encounter with Anasazi art depicted in the novel:
The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his books to take away with him. They were of men and animals and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him. Of these etchings – some bright yet with color – there were hundreds, and yet the judge went among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he required. When he had done and while there was yet light he returned to a certain stone ledge and sate a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scrappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to camp.
Civilizational advance is not just progressive. It depends upon erasure. It is, to use a fashionable metaphor, a palimpsest writing new history over alien script, with only ghostly shadows of what came before haunting the paragraphs written in bright new ink. But it is all built of terror and violence.
McCarthy established his project in the first novel he wrote (the fourth published) Suttree. The book is a dreamlike meditation on the life of a man who has eschewed a privileged background for the company of drunks, petty criminals, and prostitutes on the edges of society. The autobiographical main character of Suttree chooses his exile as an act of monkish self-abnegation, in search of truthful art. But in the remainder of his Tennessee novels, McCarthy’s characters do not choose their exile. They are instead cast out by society. Incest, eviction, and attempted robbery instigate his protagonists into violent struggles ending in murder, rape, and even necrophilia. Set adrift from the constraints of society there is no nobility, there is a violence unleashed by unquenchable thirst and unyielding desire.
If his early novels focus on the spaces between where society shuffles the unwanted consequences of lust and rage, Blood Meridian systematically chisels away the ornamentation and elisions that shaped America’s western mythology to leave bare the naked violence, the systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing that tore the trans-Mississippian United States away from the indigenous peoples who lived there. The full title of the book is Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, which suggests that the “meridian” refers to the position of the sun in the sky. Yet this would be an incomplete interpretation. Meridians are also demarcation of longitude that divide the globe east and west. McCarthy’s title establishes the nature of the frontier as a proving ground, an arena, a catalyst for creation. It is where human essence, set free from constraints, can be distilled and illuminated by the sharp rays of a desert sun. Nothing living stands in the way of confrontation. ”Existence has its own order and it is one that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.” And the tithe required for this harmony is blood.
The Individual
While its themes are universal, Blood Meridian is also very much a novel of the 1980s, what we now refer to as the beginning of the Neoliberal era. Published only a few short years after Margaret Thatcher was voted into office as British Prime Minister under the slogan “There is no alternative,” a nod to her belief that the market economy was the only means of organizing a vibrant free society. “There is no such thing as society,” she later said, “and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.” In the United States it was the era of Ronald Reagan in which the New Deal received its final death blows, and American social democracy was set on the path to dissolution. An era in which organized labor was villainized and greed was good.
Beginning in the late 70s, political elites began to respond to diminishing corporate profit rates, by pursuing policies that would shift wealth away from the broad middle class and towards economic elites. This meant low taxes, corporate subsidies, cuts to social welfare programs, deregulation, and shifts in trade policy that incentivized firms to move jobs overseas where labor was cheaper. Making this shift required creating a political constituency satisfied with these changes. So middle class homeowners were given tax relief and scared into compliance by the racialized menace of inner-city crime and social dissolution. Growing inequality, mass incarceration, and political disillusionment all grew from this series of decisions.
There was no choice, because society did not exist, only individuals. It was the end of history, and the best we could do was to shore up the leaks in the system and hope we made it out the other side alive. The market was the best we could do, the best we could ever hope for. May as well make the best of it and play for the winning side.
It can be no coincidence that McCarthy, who began his career during the malaise in which neoliberalism achieved ascendancy and who achieved his artistic maturity as Reagan reached the height of his popularity, was similarly focused on the individual in isolation. If the individual was all, civilization could exist only to constrain humanity’s full expression. Blood Meridian is a story about human nature in isolation. The individual shorn of all expectations will raze the land and want without ceasing. The social world is a mere levee against the tide, holding back what is vital for the sake of peace. Humanity is its own doom and to submit is the death of all that makes life worth living. We are alone, beset by desire, looking into the face of death with only our illusions as solace.
For the political philosophers who shaped contemporary liberalism, this constraint was violence needlessly impinging on the drives and flows of a fully realized humanity. For McCarthy, this constraint was also the source of discontent. A discontent that drove the most vital among us to the periphery of society, there to manipulate, to exploit, to violate, and to assault. To chase the feral richness of our desires to their apotheosis. Unlike his postmodern contemporaries, there is no romance to this liberation, no convenient utopia to its realization. It offers destructions and satisfactions in equal measure. The social world is a means of establishing rules to constrain human avarice within less destructive parameters. There is no alternative, and commerce is the corruption of the soul which offers vent to our meaner passions.
In Blood Meridian, the Glanton gang enters a Mexican village after a successful Apache killing expedition. Having killed 136 Apache, they are met with a parade of grateful city-dwellers, rewarded with gold and feted at the Governor’s mansion. Most telling is the scene in which the gang descend into the public baths, the dirt and blood caked on their persons washed away as the water turns a muddy brown. As the citizenry watches in fascination the merchants creep into the halls:
By now merchants had spread their wares all along the clay tiles behind them, suits of european cloth and cut and shirts of colored silks and closenapped beaver hats and fine spanish leather boots, silverheaded canes and riding crops and silvermounted saddles and carven pipes and hideout guns and a group of Toledo swords with ivory hilts and nicely chased blades and barbers were setting up charis to receive them, crying out the names of celebrated patrons upon whom they had attended, and all of these entrepreneurs assuring the company of credit on the most generous terms.
Commerce follows the killing. Denuded of enemies the space becomes one of rank avarice. A refined brutality marked by the coin.
The Coin
It is the symbol of the coin that most characterizes McCarthy’s vision of civilization. In Blood Meridian, the Judge engages into a long soliloquy on the inscrutability of the universe, and man’s freedom to construct meaning out its raw material. When his sanity is challenged he responds with a gesture. “The judge smiled. He placed the palms of his hands upon his chest and breathed night air and he stepped closer and squatted and held up one hand. He turned that hand and there was gold coin between his fingers.” The gold is the avatar of an order imposed, of no essential value save that construed by common agreement.
The coin also appears in All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first novel in McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy.” Here, an elderly woman sums up the destruction of her nation in the Mexican Revolution with a parable of the coiner:
My father had a great sense of the connectedness of things. I’m not sure I share it. He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else follows, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes.
The coin is the arbitrary name we place upon an inscrutable destiny. Lacking understanding we resort to the mysticism of naming to order our lives, if only in retrospect. The most famous elaboration of this point comes in No Country for Old Men, when the assassin Anton Chigurh uses a coin flip to determine whether or not to kill a gas station attendant:
Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldn’t even notice. They pass form hand to hand. People don’t pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?
Again, the coin is the arbitrary signifier of an order imposed on the world by human agency.
The coin makes a final appearance in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic parable, The Road. The unnamed father finds a stash of gold while looting the bomb shelter of a dead survivalist:
In the bottom of a big plastic jar of bolts and screws and miscellaneous hardware he found a double handful of gold kugerrands in a cloth sack. He dumped them out and kneaded them in his hand and looked at them and then scooped them back into the jar along with the hardware and put the jar back on the shelf.
The coin, then, works like a totem. To function, to perpetuate itself, society requires a vent for the aggressive will to domination. As the Judge observes, “Men are born for games. Nothing else,” and the coin is the token one’s performance. An attenuated shadow of direct existential confrontation, of nature “red in tooth and claw.” The bulk of McCarthy’s work, stories of men seeking the escape to the frontier, depicts the author’s ambivalence to this totem. And yet it is inescapable. The frontier is no more, and gentility seeps even into the interstices in which his early hermit protagonists hid. Domination and violence. These are the choices.
It informs McCarthy’s deeply conservative views. Social order, if it is in the end laudable, is arbitrary, and its demonstrated functionality makes any reform deeply dangerous and corrosive. Hoary ceremonies and timeworn points of etiquette imbue our perambulations with the promise of meaning. As Sheriff Llewellyn Moss puts it in No Country, “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quite hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.”
The Future
There is another account of the coin that bears scrutiny, namely the one elaborated by Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital. In Marx’s account, the value represented by commodities is ultimately a function of the social relations that create them: wage labor, the free worker, and the market economy. In these conditions “there it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. … This I call the Fetishism … of commodities.” For Marx, commodities, and by extension money, represent the exploitation of the working class through wage labor that gives rise to capital. Money is imbued with value only through this means. Like the kugerrands in The Road, they are disposable tokens outside of the social context in which they are cast.
Nevertheless, the similarities end there. Whereas McCarthy sees the domination symbolized by the coin as a necessary, if regrettable, impediment to human destructiveness, Marx does not see violence as inherent to human nature. The ideological presupposition of humanity’s depravity is as much a function of the system of exploitation in which we live. It is “The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.” A more ideal social order is possible only through the destruction of a class-based society, “one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.” The gamble Marx is willing to make is that this social order is possible, that “in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
Thus in many ways the most important question confronted in McCarthy’s fiction is whether anything like love can grow in such poisoned earth. For him love is true, love is all, but love is ultimately insufficient and unredeemed by death. As the character John Grady Cole reflects in All the Pretty Horses:
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately exacted for the vision of a single flower.
There is no more stunning, true, and soulful evocation of love than that of the father for his son in McCarthy’s late masterpiece The Road. In a post-apocalyptic world where nothing grows, and nothing lives, the remaining humans live like fungus off the leavings of a dead civilization. There is no hope. There are no green shoots. The dry husk of the world can yield up only canned goods and carrion, as the last eddies of terrestrial life become cannibals and prey. The book is a mere succession of days. A father and son staving off death a moment at a time without succumbing to bestial temptation. In the penultimate scene the father lays dying, unable to continue, the last of his vitality dripping away. And he looks at his son:
He watched him come through the grass and kneel with the cup of water he’d fetched. There was light all about him. He took the cup and drank and lay back. They had for food a single tin of peaches but he made the boy eat it and he would not take any. I cant, he said. It’s all right. I’ll save your half. Okay. You save it until tomorrow. He took the cup and moved away and when he moved the light moved with him. He’d wanted to try and make a tent out of the tarp but the man would not let him. He said he didn’t want anything covering him. He lay watching the boy at the fire. He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.
Is love the tragic palliative of a doomed creature, or the wide path to social solidarity and emancipation? The question beckons us all. And in the face of the buffeting winds of violence, appetite, and self-regard it can feel like scant solace. The future is, in other words, “socialism or barbarism.”
Perhaps the judge is dancing still, perhaps the flame has gone out, perhaps the shape of the world is irredeemable by human action. But even as we bend our lives to the Sisyphean task let us take the judge at his word. “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 if we cannot know the path for certain, best to call the flip of the coin and hope it comes up a winner. The American Dream is ebbing away, the planet is in peril, the walls are closing in on us all. We have nothing to lose.
