This summer, I’m teaching an introductory reading course at UC Santa Cruz. One of the first assignments asks students to reflect on the last time a book fucked them up (not the actual assignment wording). The question is really three: when did a book move you to wonder by its aesthetics, or when did it expand your consciousness on the human condition? And which is more important?
xOne of the last, for me, that fulfilled both the first two questions, and prompted this essay via the third, was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The novel is loosely based on the memoir My Confession, by Samuel Chamberlain. It follows an unnamed protagonist, “the kid” who in 1848, joins a group of American mercenaries led by John Joel Glanton. They’re paid by the governor of Chihuahua to fight the Apache, and take their scalps for proof of payment. Glanton and his Satanesque second-in-command, “Judge Holden” soon lead the group on a bacchanal of violence against all people they encounter: native, Mexican, and white, before (almost all) of the gang are killed themselves. My reaction to Blood Meridian was similar to Harold Bloom’s: I also found the book “worthy of Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick.” And similarly, my “first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed . . .” due to “the overwhelming carnage.”
xThe first time I read the book I was 26. I distinctly remember the moment of being overwhelmed by the text. It was a hot July day, and I was reading under a linden tree in the backyard of my then-girlfriend’s mom’s house. I had just finished chapter XIII, where the gang slaughters a platoon of Mexican soldiers, and after a few escape, pursues and kills them just outside of Chihuahua City:
x“The bodies of the dead were stripped and their uniforms and weapons burned along with the saddles and other gear and the Americans dug a pit in the road and buried them in a common grave, the naked bodies with their wounds like the victims of surgical experimentation lying in the pit gaping sightlessly at the desert sky as the dirt was pushed over them . . . They [the gang] entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted” (185).
xAfter that, I was too shaken to keep reading, and put the book away for a month, at least. Why? Even at that age, I had knowledge of the tragedy of American history. I’d taken Native American history classes, read extensively about the Civil War, and had at least general knowledge of the Mexican-American war. Not only that, I’d read books depicting the horrors of war: Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front, With the Old Breed. I’d watched Full Metal Jacket at 15 (not recommended). The difference in horror was that McCarthy’s tone implied that no one remembered, or even had evidence, of these murdered Mexican soldiers. Further, his book made clear that manifest destiny was not just carried out by white cavalry confronting native cavalry in a pitched battle. Just as often, it was scenes of unprovoked murder, with no witnesses besides victims and perpetrators. This was brought home in another disturbing passage in the same chapter, where, shortly before killing the Mexican platoon, the gang murders a band of “peaceful Tiguas” instead of the Apache. After the gang slaughters everyone in the band (men, women, and children) and departs, a group of Tigua women return from drying fish upriver to discover the massacre:
x“All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon. In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of a few suns all traces of the destruction of these people would be erased . . . There would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died” (174).
xFor me, the tragedy of being forgotten in that way compounded the disturbing nature of the violence itself. And I recognized that such events were multiplied all across the American continent, perhaps even on the very soil on which I was reading. For all the tragedy of WWI or WII, or the conflict in Vietnam, there are innumerable memorials, art objects, and testimonies. Where are they for the victims of manifest destiny?
x I did not realize, until later, that my own privilege had shielded me from knowledge of this erasure that so many BIPOC folks have been living with for generations. On top of that, McCarthy’s motivations in writing Blood Meridian might have been to be the “scribe” who recorded the tragedies, and so contributed a tiny bit of undoing of that loss. And that’s one major reason I would like to see his book be made into a film, and reach a mass audience. xWhy has it not?
xAs some folks may be aware, screenplays for the film have already been written, and various directors have attempted to get it past pre-production (Tommy Lee Jones, Ridley Scott, and James Franco) but all have been dropped by studios due to the film’s violence. In James Franco’s post, he describes Tommy Lee Jones’ experience:
x“When I asked him about his attempts to make Blood Meridian, Tommy said that ultimately he couldn’t make the movie because it was too violent. ‘I was going to make it just like the book,’ he said, ‘but studios get a little scared when a black guy cuts off a white guy’s head and the shooting jets of blood douse the fire. I wasn’t going to cut it back.’”
xAnd it may be that this will be insurmountable, as films are a product for the masses, and a horror/western may not have wide appeal. But I find it unlikely that it is the violence itself that holds the film back from production. Did that hold back Django Unchained (or any of Tarantino’s films?) It is more likely that it is the racist or ideological elements of the violence that prevent it from becoming a film, much more than the violence itself. The question is: who would it upset them most, and why?
xThe American left may find it difficult to stomach the unfortunate truth present in the book that native, Latinx, and black people were co-opted into the violence that accompanied Western colonization. McCarthy doesn’t shy away from this, and his inclusion in the gang of a group of “Delawares” who carry out some of the worst atrocities in the book underscores this fact. Add onto this is the black character of Jackson, who wears a “necklace of human ears” and on two occasions murders whites who are innocent besides their ubiquitous racism (87, 107, 235-236). Finally, though McCarthy shows native peoples in a plethora of shades: kind, resourceful, and wise, the moments that are aesthetically embellished are when they are violently and cruelly defending their way of life: the Apache charge against the filibusters, “the tree of babies,” the slaughter of the gang by the Yumas (53-54, 57, 273-275). The point may be lost that it is white imperialism that is driving all of these peoples to such levels of violence. Or that though inter-tribal warfare existed, and could be brutal, it led to changes of territory and status, not the genocide of tribes. And it may be that not reinforcing these negative stereotypes is a good thing, and one that BIPOC people would support. Or it may be that a rough dose of history would be useful in acknowledging how these wrongs are still not yet addressed.
xOn top of these issues of reinforcing negative stereotypes, is the issue of comprehension. Today, we are so immersed in civilization it is hard to understand how without it the American West was in the 19th century. For example, in Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he talks about the insane levels of violence in frontier towns:
x“In the American Wild West, annual homicide rates were fifty to several hundred times higher than those of eastern cities and midwestern farming regions: 50 per 100,000 [a year] in Abilene, Kansas, 100 in Dodge City, 229 in Fort Griffin, Texas, and 1500 in Ellsworth Kansas” (103).
xThe lowest of those rates (Abilene) is about 10 times as high as the average U.S. murder rate today, mass shootings and all. It’s also interesting to note that Blood Meridian’s famous ending takes place in Fort Griffin, Texas. And this data is only tracking conflicts amongst primarily white cowboys, not including those committed against Native Americans or other people of color. Going to the border in 1848 is like being transported to an unbelievable fiction of endless violence, where a quarter (or more) of all deaths happen from murder. Today, violence is an aberration that we are outraged by, not the sea we swim in. But that lesson, or reminder, is probably easier for the left than the right, which leads to other possibilities of why it hasn’t yet become a film.
xOne of the biggest problems the American right is engaged in is a purposeful removal of the insights of history into the formulation of policies. Not that this is anything new. But it is especially depressing when books or topics that show true American history are banned from public education. Those on the left would argue that this is intentional; part of a strategy to preserve white supremacy. This may well be true, and one reason the right would be appalled at a Blood Meridian film, or want it banned (like Django Unchained). However, it seems like the feeling is more complex: conservative folks feel victimized by having to feel any guilt at all. I would argue this is due to a number of factors, but in part because many of their ancestors died or were murdered as part of acquiring the territory of the U.S., and they feel owed for that. This feeling is referenced in another of McCarthy’s books, No Country for Old Men. One of the protagonists, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, explains this feeling to those who’ve left rural Texas after WWII and gotten a college education: “I used to tell em that havin your wife and children killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable but they didn’t seem to know what I was talkin about” (195). It might be that Blood Meridian would show how both true and misplaced his assertion is, and teach vital lessons on who suffered the majority of violence during U.S. colonization, which are still today are being purposely ignored or suppressed.
xIt could also have another affect, counterintuitive to the one the left might like. One point of Blood Meridian is that all of the (mostly white) gang are all killed by the end of the book, and they commit atrocities against everyone they meet. They are not people anyone would want to meet in person, nor are many of our ancestors. Though conservative whites of today may have benefited, the Glanton gang and their ilk did not, and their descendants shouldn’t want to make the same mistake. And more: violence is cyclical, and the horrific actions of past white colonizers have only spiraled on into our own time in the form of mass protests by the left, and crippling guilt white conservatives are trying so hard to ignore. The film may actually motivate a kind of detente with the left and native people in general, simply due to fear. So instead of trying to use violence to settle these ancient scores, perhaps they can learn to avoid the same mistakes of the past.
xBecause the fact remains that America is a boneyard and its history apocalypse. At least two million people were killed in the Atlantic slave trade, and probably four million killed during the 250-year existence of slavery in the Americas. The arrival of Europeans brought on plagues that were worse than the black death in the European Middle Ages. 10 to 20 million native people, or something like 95% of native peoples, died from disease. And after, it was an endless tide of colonization by violence. Estimates of natives peope killed by war range from 50,000 to twice as much and about half that many for white Europeans. And this is one lesson that I would hope the film would impart: not only is this morally something we don’t want to celebrate, this isn’t something we want to repeat, and that we have a moral obligation to undue. Because another point of Blood Meridian is that when you murder, when you enslave, you become bonded to those people. White people have to stop pretending the worst didn’t happen, and focus on how to heal. It is our history, and a wound on the body of our nation. What are native people demanding to begin that healing process? What do black folks need to heal? Latinx people? Asian people?
xIf a film version of Blood Meridian pushed any of those demands, I would be satisfied.
xI’ll end by saying that hoping for a film to improve our knowledge of history or to push demands for reparations for slavery or the return of tribal lands is foolish. Films, after all, like fictional books, are art objects, means to engage our aesthetic senses, not necessarily influence our political thinking. Harold Bloom, naturally, made this point when asked if it was correct to read the book as a critique of American imperialism: “I think that’s too simplistic an understanding of McCarthy . . . I don’t think McCarthy was interested, at least at that point in his career, in moral judgments . . .” But as others have pointed out—for better or worse—Bloom lost the debate between valuing aesthetics over diversifying literature. As someone who values both, I can’t ignore that Blood Meridian helped expand my own consciousness on the inequalities in our society due to our violent history, and that such awareness is important for our collective future. And this only compliments all the aesthetic beauty of the book itself.
Leonard Crosby 