Sunday, March 1, 2015

Death as Temporal Anchor in Blood Meridian



Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is constantly beset with death.  Death is perhaps the one reliable thing encountered in every chapter of the book.  This phenomenon of death in the narrative is analyzed by Ursula K. Heise in Chronoscisms.  She says, “Benjamin, Kermode, and Brooks all see human time as crucially shaped by mortality” (361).  So this has become a problem of time (which was learned last week, is a very important problem in modern literary theory).  Heise continues, “Narrative time, in their view, is a way of confronting death through the movement toward the ending, understood as a moment of closure that retrospectively bestows meaning on the plot.”  Here is a small sampling of McCarthy from the end of Chapter 4: “The scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds…lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.”[1]  Confronting death and the violence immediately prior to death is something that the reader must constantly do as they read Blood Meridian.  Intuition seems to spark here, and the reader might think that the author had greater intention than a fantastic show of gore in mind.  Though Heise would later go on to overlook and ultimately regard the quotes above as old hat, it is worth considering these statements in light of the omnipresent death in the present novel.  Death is perhaps a way of communicating.  Perhaps it is a way to center the reader in the wanderings of an undetermined narrator.  Certainly there is a greater power afoot here.
Consider how despite the many difficulties that are encountered within this book, especially thirst, only death seems to be so glorified.  Heise completes her explanation of this theory in saying: “Readers live through the one moment in time that they cannot experience in their own lives: the moment just beyond death, which reveals life’s final pattern” (361).  Though there is death all over the place, the reader is still waiting for a particular death – that of the narrator.  This death does not come.  Therefore, despite the constant confrontation with the dead, the reader is not given the satisfaction of the narrator’s demise.  The reader is only teased with it, time and again, as the kid wanders through the desert once more, seemingly about to succumb to the elements.  There are several fights and battles where the kid escapes, always surviving.  Even the confrontation with the judge at the conclusion would seem to mark him for death, or else the death of the judge (being the other reliable character still alive in the story).  Cruel and vulgar as it is, the reader is looking for death.  In particular, the reader is looking for the closure of death and the wisdom that would be expected from the event.  The reader is never given this, only teased with it.  To think of how many times that the kid should have died but managed to survive – it’s absurd!  It must have been a dozen or more different occasions.  And then the ending lines of the Novel read: “He is dancing, dancing.  He says he will never die.”[2]  Goodness.  There is so much more to this, but for brevity’s sake, this harangue must end.


[1] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 54
 
[2] Ibid., 335.