US Southern-Gothic novellist, Cormac McCarthy, who recently passed away, left in his wake a heap of excellent books. The Border Trilogy, Suttree, The Road and No Country for Old Men count among them. Yet none has proven so enduring as his 1985 novel, Blood Meridian.
Set mid-nineteenth century on the Mexican-American border, the novel charts the life of its protagonist, known mostly as “The Kid,” and especially the time of his involvement with the Glanton gang, a group of murderous cut-throats occasionally employed by the Mexicans to kill native Americans.
The questions that the book raises are both trivial and deep, often at the same time, and they have taxed a whole generation of commentators. Who really is Judge Holden? Is he an archetype of the American warlike spirit made flesh? Is he capitalism? What really happened to the Kid, at the end of the novel? How has the Judge murdered him? And is this why he now claims that he will live forever? What does the bizarre epilogue really mean?
Leaving these questions aside for a moment, one of revelations that the work’s numerous commentators have uncovered is the novel’s curious narrative symmetry. In 2008, Christopher Forbis listed more than sixty incidences of narrative mirroring in the novel’s text. The early editions of the novel had 337 pages. Forbis selected the middle page - p168 - and counted back from there, in both directions, looking for instances where the narrative at specific distances from this meridian matched.
An initial example of this, the one which first drew his attention, concerned the Judge in the bar at Nacogdoches after his demolition of Reverend Green. He places two hats on the bar counter, one of which seems to be filled with Green’s collection plate money. This event takes place in the first chapter.
Equidistant from the meridian, we find the Judge once again in a bar, in the novel’s final chapter, where a man with a hat is collecting coins for his dancing bear’s performance.
Whilst many of Forbis’s examples of mirroring may be driven by a desire to find a symmetry, where one may not exist, as John Sepich and others have claimed, nevertheless there are so many of them, that commentators seem to agree that Cormac was most definitely up to something.
To my mind, the most obvious indication that McCarthy was consciously using a mirror technique is to be found on the meridian page itself. Turning to page 168, we find the scene where the Glanton gang, having killed a heap of “injins,” have returned to their Mexican patrons for a grand celebration. On this page, and the one following, are two passages that to my mind put the question of mirroring beyond doubt.
Firstly, there is a description of what the Mexicans have done with the severed Indian heads that the Glantons have brought to them as trophies.
The severed heads had been raised on poles above the lampstandards where they now contemplated with their caved and pagan eyes the dry hides of their kinsmen and forebears strung across the stone facade of the cathedral and clacking lightly in the wind.
In the paragraph which immediately follows, we find the Judge walking into the celebration wearing a bizarre hat, described by McCarthy thus.
His feet were encased in nicely polished gray kid boots and in his hand he held a panama hat that had been spliced together from two such lesser hats by such painstaking work that the joinery did scarcely show at all.
The joinery did scarcely show at all - indeed! Apparently, McCarthy was so concerned that his readers might miss the novel’s symmetry, on account of the subtlety with which it had in been woven into the text, that he felt it judicious to place a more direct pointer in the middle of the text itself.
I am not sure just what the “dry hides of their kinsmen and forebears” refers to, either physically or symbolically. Though it does appear to refer to two phases of time. But the idea of the severed heads, placed bang centre in the novel’s actual meridian, to me provides an image of ancestors from another plane looking both backwards and forwards in time at all that has happened thus far, and how it will mirror all that is to come.
To me, the novel thus resembles one of those collapsible rulers, popular back in the day.
Page 168 - the meridian - is the hinge. The pages leading up to it comprise the first half of the novel. The pages subsequent to it comprise the second half. This ruler has then been jointed together - rivetted in place - by the elements of narrative symmetry that various commentators have found, a technique also evident in the biblical Book of Daniel.
With this insight, we can reconsider the novel as being composed of two halves. In the first half, the journey of the Kid and the Glantons can still be regarded as a civilising influence. Yes, they are barbaric, taking heads and scalps from all whom they come across. But they are also agents of civilisation, within the context of Western culture, with its notion, at the time, of manifest destiny. They are rendering the unsafe wilds of the West safe, for civilised folk.
Yet, as the second half of the novel begins, with the feast that the Mexicans have prepared for the Glantons, a new page is being turned. The Glantons’ bloodlust has now been stirred up to the point where they cannot go back. They drink and feast with such a wanton destructiveness that the locals soon realise that “mejor los indios” - they were better of with the savages.
From this point on, the Glantons are no longer interested in civilising anything. The notion of manifest destiny has become merely an excuse to experiment with hedonistic destruction. And, once started out upon this path, civilisation held no more interest for them. They brutalise, degrade, kill and rape all whom they meet, until Glanton himself is finally killed by the chief of a local Yuma tribe he has betrayed. Killed by having his head split in two, all the way to the throat, another act of division.
Thus we see a path out, where brute destruction could be validated by the context of the time and place. Then, as it hit a certain point - the blood meridian - the Glantons become taken over by chthonic forces and begin to bring Hell unto earth. McCarthy has rivetted the two sides of this tale together, presumably to emphasize their relationship to one another, to map out the path to Hell that civilised society can easily be detoured onto.
Now let’s take a look at the mysterious epilogue.
In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.
This epilogue has most definitely inspired vast levels of both lay and academic interpretation over the decades.
One thing he is doing here is zooming in and back out, integrating multiple grain sizes of perspective in single sentences, with scant concern for whether such activity can be understood in a linear fashion. But it still seems to me clear what McCarthy is trying to convey.
The “man progressing over the plain by means of holes” is the true hero of the tale. That this plain is not simply a stretch of land, but instead has a metaphysical significance, is indicated by the fact that man does not need to make holes in order to cross a plain. He could simply walk.
So this plain is not physical. It is the terrain of his own inner darkness. The holes that he creates serve a purpose. As his two-handled implement strikes the rocks in the ground, their destructive power is defused - some pressure is let off - whilst the sparks thus generated also serve to render the terrain visible. He begins to lighten the darkness that envelopes the core of the human soul by slowly and methodically walking into it.
Meanwhile, the gatherers of bones, along with those who do not gather, follow this man. Those who gather are those who dig into the remnants of human existence, seeking causal patterns and believing that they have found them. Those who do not gather are those who are simply content with sensory existence. But both appear on the surface to have inner awareness and to be cognisant of what they do. They seem to be responding to their environment. But, in actuality, their behaviour is purely mechanical, and their belief in causality arises from their inability to access a higher vantage point and thus witness the man punching holes, who is the true instigator.
The holes that this man punches in the ground are also somehow the holes through which the two halves of McCarthy’s novel will be bound together. And whilst we may not be consciously aware of the way in which this work has been bound, on some deeper level, we do recognise this act, and that it represents a journey into our own inner darkness.