First, allow me to introduce the book for the uninitiated, since I expect to draw on its many archaic words frequently for blog-fodder. Blood Meridian is the most senselessly brutal novel I've ever read, following a posse of mercenaries through Mexico and the American Southwest on a killing spree based on historical events surrounding the Glanton gang - a small regiment of thieves, murderers, rapists and ex-soldiers who earn their commission with the Indian scalps they bring back from the desert. In addition to exterminating the Apaches, they kill and scalp almost everyone who crosses their path, often after taking advantage of their hospitality. There is no remorse among the killers, and no real motivation offered for their almost reflexively violent actions; it is simply "the way things were" in the Wild West, according to McCarthy. He uses the cosmic isolation and natural danger of the desert, along with the unchecked violence of that lawless period, to construct a broader fatalistic outlook of the entire world - one that recognizes no divinity or goodness in the earth or the body, but only (perhaps) in the soul.
For this reason, many literary critics have identified Blood Meridian as a decidedly Gnostic text. Historically, Gnosticism was an early competitor to Christianity during its rise in Hellenistic cultures. It remains one of the most infamous of Christian heresies, for its rejection of the inherent goodness of the body and of creation in general. In Gnosticism, evil is not separated from the goodness in the world; evil is simply everything that "is." Similarly, the violence in the novel is different from violence in most novels, in that it exists as neither a plot device nor a moral teaching point. It's just always there - impersonally, like everything else, without apology or explanation - as an intrinsic quality of the world. Thus, the world of Blood Meridian is inherently cruel, and human history from the beginning is described as a cycle of war and destruction with no real meaning - senselessly violent, nasty, brutish and short. Among all its variables, history's one constant is war: "War is god."
McCarthy's mouthpiece for this doubtful yet compelling discourse is the novel's fascinating figure: Judge Holden. The Glanton gang is goaded and guided by this supreme intellect, described as an enormous, hairless, seven-foot-tall albino man who speaks multiple languages, and who possesses superhuman strength, marksmanship, knowledge of chemistry, geology, botany, history, anthropology, philosophy, scripture, art, law, and even magic tricks. He dances and plays the fiddle marvelously, he never seems to age, and he boasts that he will never die. Adding to his mystique is the fact that every man in the company claims to have seen him earlier in life, prior to riding with him in the Glanton outfit. The judge is evil personified, and he sows evil wherever he goes. Many times, the judge displays an almost supernatural knowledge of mankind and the world. He is based on a supposedly historical person named Holden, but McCarthy lends him a literary air of impossible charm and wisdom that belies a bottomless evil. He is a scholar, a sadist, a pervert and a liar. Throughout the book, he incites mobs, orchestrates massacres, presumably rapes and scalps small children, and kills a litter of puppies after buying them. In his dialogues with men, he is always smiling or laughing, usually in a knowing, sinister manner. One of the most repeated and chilling lines in the book is, "The judge smiled."
Apart from the judge, the story is episodic and repetitive, with long, monotonous stretches of desert travel punctuated by sudden, graphic, and matter-of-fact violence. After countless acts of atrocity, even the violence becomes banal and boring to the reader. And this is the Gnostic point McCarthy is trying to convey throughout the entire novel - that violence in this world holds no moral or special symbolic meaning, outside of the fact that it exists and always will exist, because the world is irredeemably evil. So why celebrate such a dark, difficult book, and why is it widely considered McCarthy's greatest work? There are many answers, but great art speaks for itself. So, I'll present you with the following snippet, in which the judge - the great orator of the novel - expounds his nihilistic views upon the Glanton gang like a perverse Christ to his apostles:
"The truth about the world, he said, 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
analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow
whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is
unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
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 in this world more things exist without
our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is
that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you
shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no
man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
Needless to say, after about 350 pages of such language, the standard for your mind's diet of reading material becomes significantly raised! At least, that's how I feel after finishing the book. Very few writers will ever be able to match McCarthy's prose, which critic Steven Shaviro aptly described as "cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness," much like Herman Melville's detailed descriptions of seafaring life in Moby Dick. It almost feels as if the language has been handed down from on high, as a sort of Gnostic gospel. McCarthy uses precise and archaic words that I've never come across in any other book. He casually tosses around "pluviophile," "siliceous," and "thaumaturge" (all of which I hope to touch upon eventually in this blog). Yet, in the midst of this alphabet soup, he stops and takes the time to define one word for us: the word "suzerain." This signals to the reader that it must be of thematic importance. Naturally, the word is explained by the ever-eloquent Judge Holden, the arch-villain in a novel bepopulate (see what I did there?) with villains. Halfway through the novel, the judge explains to the gang that nature is dangerous to man because it is still unknown and not fully tamed. The judge holds the following dialogue with a gang member:
"[O]nly when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before [man] will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
What's a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. [...]
The judge placed his hands on the ground. [...]This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation."
The relevant definition of "suzerain" from Merriam-Webster's dictionary is "a superior feudal lord to whom fealty is due" (presumably even from other lesser lords). It originates from the Middle French suserain, from sus (meaning "up") and -erain (as in "soverain" or "sovereign"). So, literally an above-reigner; an over-lord. The sus- prefix comes from the Latin sursum, which comes from sub ("up") + versum (the neuter of versus, past participle of vertere ("to turn").
This notion of being a "suzerain" or ultimate ruler over the earth is a Gnostic concept. How so? Well, the ancient Gnostics considered the material universe inherently evil, while the nonmaterial universe beyond it was good. The malevolent creator-god of the material world was known as the "Demiurge." For followers of Gnosticism, the Demiurge was not the same deity as the transcendent God who stood outside space and time, but rather a sort of demigod who only ruled over the material world. The Demiurge and his minions, known as Archons (the Greek word for "ruler" -ἄρχων, pl. ἄρχοντες) jailed and fed on the souls of the dead. "...[T]he soul is the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live, because she is of the dew from above and gives them strength." Gnostics believed their souls could only escape the Archons and other evil powers and reach God through gnosis ("knowing") - an attainment of secret spiritual knowledge and separation from the things of the material world. Interestingly, the Christian Bible makes a couple passing references to evil spiritual forces known vaguely as "principalities and powers." As they've cropped up in church readings, I've often wondered what those titles meant and where they came from. As it turns out, principalities and powers are parallel to, and may actually stem from the Gnostic concepts of the Demiurge and Archons - the malevolent spiritual keepers or jailers of this world. How cool is that?
The judge, therefore, may be seen as an Archon - a demonic keeper-spirit who walks the world collecting souls to himself, devouring and destroying them in the process. As evidenced by his speech about the world, he stands opposed to Creation and the divine spark of free will that animates every creature. He lectures that none of our actions matter, and that our existence is chaotic and predetermined to end in calamity. He resents the autonomy of life on earth and wishes to catalog every single living and nonliving thing in a sketchbook he carries with him throughout the novel. In doing so, he says he will eventually gain control and power over the whole world. In short, he's probably the biggest "control-freak" in literature. But his mission stands incomplete by the end of the novel, giving the reader some hope that not all is yet under the stewardship of evil. Obvious parallels can be drawn to the Devil in Christian literature and scripture, who is called "the prince of darkness" and the "ruler of this world."
Nick Cave (another amazing wordsmith) wrote an unsettling, hypnotic song called "Red Right Hand," which I now interpret as a skin-crawling illustration of this shadowy, charismatically evil figure poised to become the world's overlord. I wonder if Cave has ever read Blood Meridian... his spooky, Western-tinged warning of a tall, sinister man who enlists insecure, vulnerable and weak souls to become "microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan," comes eerily close to describing the judge - a man who appears out of nowhere in the birthplaces of darkness, vice and crime: at the edge of town, in the slums and barrios, in nightmares, and even "in your TV screen," which may be symbolic of the harmful worldly influences we're exposed to and fed by the media today.
As we've seen, the judge is out to win over, and then forcefully dominate, all life. The men in his gang are his followers as well as his unwitting prey. John Joel Glanton, the shrewd captain of the Glanton gang, seems to have made a Faustian pact with the judge, and he frequently benefits from the judge's counsel on the trail. But all his tactics and successful raids are for naught - like the rest of his crew, Glanton meets an unremarkably nasty end by the end of the book. But the judge slips away, conceivably to find a new band of followers to intellectually dazzle and dominate, leading their souls to ruin through war and consuming them through violence. To any churchgoing Christian, such characteristics are reminiscent of the Devil, who is likened by St. Peter to a ravenous beast who roams the world, luring souls away to their destruction: "Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist ye, strong in faith: knowing that the same affliction befalls your brethren who are in the world. But the God of all grace, who hath called us into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you." (1 Peter 5: 8-10.) So the judge is a Gnostic Archon - a Principality - a Christian demon, representative of the "father of lies" - Satan himself. What a frightening, rich literary character!
On a tangential, pop-cultural note, McCarthy's judge is also very similar to Christopher Nolan's incarnation of the Joker in the film, The Dark Knight. A self-described "agent of chaos," the Joker is a charismatic liar with an intimate knowledge of human weakness. He is an orchestrator of destruction who incites his followers to evil, but casually discards them after their roles in his plans run their courses. He exists solely to upend the plans of the film's moral characters, whom he dismisses as "schemers trying to control their little worlds" - trying to show them "how pathetic their attempts to control things really are." He is albino-white and permanently smiling, much like the judge, at humanity's feeble and self-righteous attempts to impose moral order over the cruel world, taunting: "Why so serious?" He is evil without conscience or purpose - he is simply the chaotic evil that always exists.
Do I buy into the thought-provoking worldview of the Joker - the worldview of Blood Meridian? No. In case it's not evident from my previous post about death and loss, I'm a Catholic who recognizes the sin of despair inherent in Gnosticism. It's a needlessly fatalistic worldview that discounts all the concrete goodness to be found in the world. Nonetheless, it's still interesting to ponder and it touches upon the truth that suffering exists and will continue to exist in spite of our attempts to limit it. However, the human mind can never comprehend all the things of the world - and no one ever has been a suzerain over all the earth. Not yet, at least... the book of Revelation speaks of a time when the Devil, or the influence of evil, eventually comes to rule the entire world, culminating in the end times. (But like any good practitioner of exegesis, I would never read a highly symbolic book like Revelation literally like that.)
This wraps up our first official "McCarthy" word for this blog - suzerain. Hope you got something out of my discussion and explanations. Feel free to sound off in the comments section below. And as always, thanks for visiting and reading!
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