Ian Scuffling's Reviews > Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

If slavery is America’s Original Sin, then Manifest Destiny is our human blasphemy, and perhaps an under acknowledged horror of our history, if only because most of its victims were eradicated from this soil, and so there is no living memory carried on down. In Cormac McCarthy’s pulchritudinous Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, the sanguine saturates the tale of the kid plodding his way westward as he hops along with mercenary scalpers and the effectuators of Manifest Destiny.

Where slavery’s history weaves through today via segregation, lynching, Jim Crow, redlining, and up through police brutality, Manifest Destiny was America’s first experimentation in empire. As we see The Kid join up with the historic Glanton Gang, we see how power, violence, and lawlessness defined American expansion into the west, which McCarthy paints in sick, horrific images, unforgiving in their detail or their grotesquerie. This violence and horror is pitched against a series of characters nearly void of interiority, further expressing the near animal-like cruelty of their behavior. The characters do no moralizing. They give no equivocation.

McCarthy’s portrait then is a kind of perversion or revision of the idyllic images of frontier times in the United States—often illustrated as a time of affable ingenuity, grit and spirit. It’s these themes that we often use to define American-ness today. But Blood Meridian, in its depiction of what these people really did as they expanded the territory, McCarthy executes an inversion of this popular mythology. It is an ironic inversion that gets closer to aspects of what Americanism truly is: bloody, violent, and cruel empire to capture resources and wield unmatched power against hapless and reluctant belligerents.

When reaching Blood Meridian, you’re struck by a number of things. Firstly, the west itself becomes the primary character of the novel, wherein nature is presented as a force against man’s hubris. McCarthy lingers over setting in some of his most mesmerizing and beautiful passages as he describes the landscape rolling past the marauding gang. Secondly, the stark violence feels surreally distant while being presented in the most plainspoken tone of voice. It is as if the violence, presented so frankly pushes the reader away from the realism of them, forcing the reader to a mental state of the characters who were seeing the acts—repression of a kind.

I don’t know what I’m really trying to get at with these thoughts, other than to say that Blood Meridian is raw depiction of the inhumanity of Americanism, a heritage carried forth today with violent conflicts of now sincere value to American lives. This is a devastating book, but so gorgeous in its devastation that one cannot but stare directly into the pooling blood around the bludgeoned bodies painting our collective history.