Article 1
The Pandemonium of the Sun:
Description in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
A.V. Ashok
Rising in disturbing grandeur out of a dark intuition that "someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch
the other" (130)*, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) is self-reflexively about the wisdom of language and narrative
that is available to us to take us in a quaking terror of self-knowledge to the perilous pit of evil in our heart and history
"where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell"(130).
Blood Meridian generates a profound experience of metafiction without deploying a single overt metafictional device.
Continuously intrigued by the puzzling equation between the magniloquence of its language that is like "phantasmagoria
in a fever land"(163) and the horrors of its action, the reader experiences Blood Meridian as uniquely recoiling on itself
as the use of language in narrative representation. No reader of Blood Meridian can avoid wondering if evil deserves the discrepancy
of a language that is immaculate literary grace. Beyond a point, the hallucinatory textuality of narrative diegesis of Blood
Meridian begins to impress the reader as not exclusively about a picaresque spree of repugnant atrocities of a posse of "sootysouled
rascals"(124). Even as it is a dizzy "telling"; of massacres and murders beyond words, the descriptive and
narrative prose of Blood Meridian carries a haunting intrusive insistence that what is really told in Blood Meridian is the
"telling" itself. While it is customary for novels to be metafictional through strategies of form, Blood Meridian
is uniquely metafictional at the level of its language. Blood Meridian is metafictionally about its own triumphant language
as a counterforce of moral creativity to the unspeakable evil that it narrates and describes. Blood Meridian is a path breaking
fictional self-definition of the language of the narrative imagination as a surpassing structure of truth, form of beauty,
discourse of wisdom and moral agency in human meaning. A thing of lofty wonder, the language of Blood Meridian seems to belong
to the moral order of the cosmos along with "the Pleiades"(61),"the Dipper"(46),"the Great Bear";(212)
and "Orion";(46) as a celestial witness "in the very roof of the vault"(212) of "the itinerant degenerates
bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague"(78) and of "the cries of souls"(109) in "the world below"(109).
Blood Meridian is a metafiction of narrative language as a noetic blessing. The breathtaking metafictional aesthetics of language
of Blood Meridian makes it one of the classics of twentieth-century literature and undoubtedly the greatest achievement in
the use of English in contemporary narrative fiction.
Language outweighs form as the essential organizing and aesthetic principle of Blood Meridian and within its language
description outweighs narration. For readers who are sensitive to the place, proportion and role of description in narration,
Blood Meridian is an unusual text that offers an experience of description outclassing narration in a novel.
At its uppermost surface, Blood Meridian is a sanguinary and revisionary historical novel about the savage massacres of
Indians and the flourishing market for Indian scalps in the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Holding
the picaresque saga of massacres of Blood Meridian together is the pitiless landscape that the murdering mercenaries cross
to hunt for their "grisly trophies"(167) on "horses festooned with . . . reeking scalps"(174). Though
the massacres of the Comanche, the Gilenos and the Tiguas are stunning pieces of narration, Blood Meridian is essentially
written in the language of landscape. The meaning of Blood Meridian is that its language of landscape is the landscape of
language. Blood Meridian is not just an unforgettable canvas in words of a haunting landscape but more importantly is a metafictional
self-portrait of the English language. Adamic vocabulary, hypnotic syntax and a preternatural voice of visionary splendour
unify into a defamiliarizing locutionary/textual atmosphere that is nothing less than a breathless experience of being at
the summit of the English language. McCarthy's empyrean description of landscape magnificently establishes itself in the novel
as some transcendent scale of value to calibrate the horrors of history committed by deranged men like his mindless murderers.
An informed reader of contemporary fiction cannot miss wondering if the language of any novel in recent years has been so
imaginatively configured to carry such a profound moral burden and has performed this metafictional mission with soaring excellence
like McCarthy's language of description in Blood Meridian.
The reader of Blood Meridian is made to see the Texan-Mexican landscape of the killers from an inner eye with a surreal
way of seeing. A prominent feature of the "immensity of that landscape"(50) that carries manifold signs of "eons
out of the ancient night"(116) is the "dark mountain ranges at the rim of the world"(163) rising out of the
"plain"(313) with an other-worldly strangeness and often disclosed in supernatural snapshots of menace by fierce
lightning and thunder:
That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the
horses' trappings and the wagon wheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears
of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads,
making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some
other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit
the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom
summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling
dream (47).
With "rain and hail and rain again"(186), the "flooded plain"(186) at twilight is like a Barnett Newman
colour-field Abstract Expressionist canvas :"... in the long red sun set the sheets of water on the plain below them
lay like tidepools of primal blood"(187). Though the route of the murderers resembles "the high road to hell"(45),
McCarthy also offers an ironic chiaroscuro of the infernal darkness of the posse and a floral splash of paradise in "that
ancient and naked land"(138):
They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple
gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to
the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in
a devonian dawn (187).
McCarthy excels not only in panoramic description (that with a postmodern intermedia intertextuality conjures in the mind
of the reader the spectacular landscape cinematography of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns [with Ennio Morricone's background
score included!] only to confirm that his "symbolic"/verbal aesthetics of description surpasses Hollywood's "iconic"/visual
aesthetics) but also in rare filigree tracery of exquisite particulars of the landscape that are manifestations of a disquieting
ontology :
They crossed a vast dry lake with rows of dead volcanoes ranged beyond it like the works of enormous insects. To the
south lay broken shapes of scoria in a lava bed as far as the eye could see. Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster
sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again,
resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained
yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even
to the uttermost granulation of reality...They rode on. The horses trudged suddenly the alien ground and the round earth
rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain
all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth
claim to precedence (247).
Blood Meridian is constantly dotted with description of the posse of "ragged and bloody" killers as it trots
and trudges through "the bloodlands of the west" (138). The diabolism of the riders renders them "auguries"
(50) of something baffling and unknowable wrapped in a foundational mystery "before man was or any living thing"
(50):
They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of
an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing
that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps
where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds (152).
Spectre horseman, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture,
primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from
their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time
before nomenclature was and each was all (172).
Blood Meridian palpably invokes human history as an evolutionary paradox of a regressive epic of monstrosity that truly
seems to belong to "the meridians of chaos and old night"(163) of prehistory. In its entirety, Blood Meridian is
McCarthy's language game of giving a name in 335 pages of English prose "that never was, on sea or land" to a syndrome
belonging to "a time before nomenclature was." "Men of another time"(138), the killers are inseparable
from the landscape of their journey especially "the evening redness in the west" of the postmodern alternative title
of the novel. The cosmic apocalypse of red one "long twilight"(187), in conjunction with the inebriated violence
of these "wardens of some dim sect set forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land" (187) produces a
frame of "the proliferation of lunacy on this earth"(244) : "... they rode infatuate and half fond toward the
red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun"(185).
The riders not only journey through a formidable and ancient "wilderness" (138) but also always beneath the
company of a witnessing cosmos of "the night sky so sprent with stars"(15), of awesome constellations, meteors and
the moon :
They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the mountains. . . . Tethered to the
polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite(46).
The rind of a moon that had been in the sky all day was gone and they followed the trail through the desert by starlight,
the Pleiades straight overhead and very small and the Great Bear walking the mountains to the north (61).
To see the riders who are "clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night"(46) is always also to see "the
galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders' heads" (154). The night sky above the riders is always an awesome "roof"
of celestial happenings of peace and benediction that offset the terrestrial terrors and nightmare of history on earth:
The stars swung counter clockwise in their course and the Great Bear turned and the Pleiades winked in the very roof of
the vault (212) . . . . and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed . . . constantly on their chartless reckonings(213).
Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their
destinies in dust and nothingness (333).
One of the most memorable passages of description in Blood Meridian is the sketch of the Comanche in a long itemizing
sentence running to 24 lines. This passage is a definitive sample of McCarthy's description as the primary aesthetic pole
and epistemological site of Blood Meridian and typically like countless passages of exemplary description in the novel there
is more pleasure here from how the description is ingeniously made (with strokes of sheer verbal impasto) than what the description
splendidly shows (in stupefying split details):
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 silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats
of slain dragons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings
and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo
and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre
done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts
until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose
horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of
mounted clowns, 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 smoke like those vaporous
beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wonders and the lip jerks and drools (52-53).
In another hushed passage of description, massacre and metafiction meet memorably in a moment of the bliss and wisdom
of narrative:
An old woman knelt at the blackened stones before her door and poked brush into the coals and blew back a flame from the
ashes and began to right the overturned pots. All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or
luminescent melons cooling on some mesa on 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 few suns all trace of destruction of these people would be erased. The desert winds would salt
their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people
had lived in this place and in this place died(174).
Upon a work like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, in which the narrative imagination unusually allots a major fictional
task for description and unbelievably uses the language of description to self-reflexively describe language itself and morally
elevates the reader into the rapture of realization that literary language is the supreme form of truth, goodness and beauty
in human discourse, "the gods themselves throw incense."
*McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: The Modern Library,
2001.
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A.V.Ashok is Professor and Head, Centre for English Literature, School of Critical Humanities,
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad 500 007. India.
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