The Second Horseman

War is divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it, and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.
                                                                   Joseph de Maistre

At the Australian Defence College, I am frequently asked by mid-career combat officers, “What novel can I read that will explain the anatomy rather than the geometry of war to me?” I never hesitate in recommending a haunting work of historical fiction by the American writer Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), the greatest rendering of the elemental fury of war in English-language fiction since James Jones’s The Thin Red Line.

Some students are initially perplexed by my recommendation of what seems, at first glance, to be a western tale full of violence perpetrated by marauding irregulars. Yet the reaction of those military officers who finish the book (and not all manage this feat) is nearly always one of philosophical revelation tempered by psychological revulsion at the relentless bloodshed portrayed on page after page of Blood Meridian. One much decorated Australian Army officer on finishing the novel told me, “This book truly shocked me but now, at last, I understand Afghanistan.” Another, a British officer, with much experience of bloodshed in the Iraqi and Afghan badlands, observed, “It is best to read this terrible book at a Staff College; it is too close to comfort to read on deployment. McCarthy is a genius; he understands war; he gets it.”

Indeed, as this article will seek to demonstrate, when it comes to understanding the human dimension of war, McCarthy does indeed “get it”. He is not just a novelist but a philosopher of war, a writer who penetrates the dark heart of organised human violence with a luminous prose style that eludes the vast majority of today’s military commentators. McCarthy is a writer who would agree wholeheartedly with General George S. Patton’s statement that “despite the years of thought and the oceans of ink which have been devoted to the elucidation of war its secrets still remain shrouded in mystery”. This essay examines three areas: McCarthy’s literary background and the genesis of Blood Meridian; the book’s narrative of armed violence; and finally, the novel’s philosophy of war.

The genesis of Blood Meridian

In the early twenty-first century, Cormac McCarthy is most recognisable in the popular mind as the author of three books that have become successful Hollywood films: the modern western All the Pretty Horses, the Oscar-winning noir thriller No Country for Old Men, and most recently, his post-apocalyptic novel The Road. Commercial success came late to McCarthy, who was born in Rhode Island in 1933, grew up in Tennessee, served in the US Air Force in the 1950s, became a full-time writer from 1965 and finally settled in El Paso, Texas. For the next two decades an often cash-strapped McCarthy pursued only literary art. He was notoriously hostile to book trade commerce and academia and, above all, avoided the public circus of the media. As Vereen M. Bell notes in his 1988 book The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, in America at least, McCarthy became “the best unknown major writer by many measures”. By the 1990s, as he entered his sixties, McCarthy’s oeuvre—for all the shunning of publicity by its creator—had achieved international recognition and renown. But, when he won the National Book Award in 1992, McCarthy remained true to his past. He sent his publisher to receive the prize and turned down an avalanche of lucrative offers to teach in leading American universities.

In order to understand the significance of Blood Meridian as a great work of art on war, it is necessary to examine the influences on McCarthy as a novelist and the evolution of his philosophy, which reflects literary elements from Homer, the Bible, Milton, Melville and Faulkner and philosophical ideas from Hobbes, Maistre and Nietzsche. Blood Meridian, a literary product of McCarthy’s move from Tennessee to Texas, was originally published in 1985 to limited fanfare and sold a mere 1500 copies. The novel is set on the Texas–Mexico border land in 1849-50—on the 98th meridian, the area identified by the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner as marking the boundary between civilisation and wilderness. The book concerns the “blood meridian” of the frontier in the wake of the 1846 Mexican-American War, a time of Texan statehood and of Manifest Destiny—the progress of both being accelerated by the invention of a new industrial-age weapon, the deadly Colt revolver. McCarthy concentrates on historical episodes from the long, bloody irregular war fought between Americans and Mexicans on one side and Comanche, Kiowa and Apache horse warriors on the other side.

On its publication, many literary critics were repelled by the graphic, almost cinematic violence of Blood Meridian, which seemed to be little more than a lurid western novel—reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch but rendered in words—a sort of “spaghetti novel” that recalled the surreal action of a Sergio Leone film. A handful of perceptive critics, however, recognised that McCarthy had written a towering book of original insight. In June 1985, Tom Nolan, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, declared Blood Meridian “a theological purgative, an allegory of the nature of evil as timeless as Goya’s hallucinations on war, monomaniacal in its conception and execution”. Michael Herr, the celebrated author of the 1977 Vietnam War book Dispatches, observed that Blood Meridian was “a classic American novel of regeneration through violence. McCarthy can only be compared with our greatest writers, with Melville and Faulkner, and this is his masterpiece”.

For the most part, however, Blood Meridian’s image and sales suffered from competition with a polar opposite in 1985, namely Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a soulful and elegiac western in the best tradition of the genre whose graceful prose won the Pulitzer Prize and became a world best-seller and subsequently a television series blockbuster. A quarter of a century on, few literary critics would place McMurtry in the same class as McCarthy as a writer. With a National Book Award and National Book Critics Award and with his own Pulitzer Prize under his belt, McCarthy is increasingly recognised as perhaps America’s greatest living writer. Central to his literary reputation is Blood Meridian, which is now seen as a Homeric masterwork—far greater in its lyrical power and grandeur than anything else McCarthy has written—including his Tennessee “Southern Gothic” novels such as The Orchard Keeper and Suttree, the pastoral westerns of the acclaimed Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain) and his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road.

In 2000, the literary critic Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian “the authentic American apocalyptic novel … I think there is no greater work by a living American”. The American war historian Leo Daugherty considers McCarthy America’s “finest living tragedian … the best and most indispensable writer of English-language narrative in the second half of the century”. In 2005, Time magazine chose Blood Meridian as one of the best 100 novels published since 1923; in 2006, the New York Times Book Review ranked the novel third behind Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Don DeLillo’s Underworld in its survey of the “best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years”.

Although Blood Meridian is a western through its setting on the mid-nineteenth-century Texas–Mexico border, at its core it is a philosophical book about the nature of war and represents a meditation on the practice of organised human violence. This is not to suggest that the distinctively American themes of Manifest Destiny and the role of the western frontier that inhabit the novel are unimportant; it is only to note that a particular war is less important to McCarthy than war as a universal phenomenon. What interests McCarthy is the seed of war that lurks inside the human soul, a seed that once aroused and unleashed grows like a fungus to become all-consuming in its destructive power. The Texas–Mexico border may be his canvas, but it is humanity and its relationship to warfare that is the real subject of McCarthy’s artistry.

The book is one of extraordinary violence and features the most terrifying figure in American literature, Judge Holden (of whom, more later). Many readers are deeply affronted by the appalling and continuous descriptions of carnage, and McCarthy provides no ethical comfort as bloody incidences of frontier warfare banish all moral considerations. The sensitive reader faces baroque descriptions of thieving, raping, shooting, slashing, hanging, scalping, burning, bashing, hacking and stabbing, all of which are conveyed by what Peter Josyph, author of Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy (2010) calls “some of the most impressive American prose of this [twentieth] century”. Contemplating the intimidating paradox of the novel’s ugly violence yet hauntingly beautiful prose, Harold Bloom implored readers in his 2000 book, How to Read and Why:

I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and Faulkner’s.

Blood Meridian is powerful because it is utterly authentic to its milieu. It is at once a prose epic and a soaring historical novel written without the slightest concession to the contemporary mythology of indigenous peoples as Rousseau’s “noble savages” ruined by civilisation. The ideology of American guilt and political correctness that has contrived to produce a swathe of revisionist popular histories from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to apologetic Hollywood films such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves has no place in McCarthy’s work. Blood Meridian is a monument to historical accuracy and reflects the observation of the war historian Albert Castel that, “the older image of the frontier [Army] regular typified by John Wayne contains no more truth than the modern cinematic portrayal of Plains Indians as peace-loving sages living in mystic harmony with nature”. The Native Americans portrayed in Blood Meridian are in no way morally distinct from their Anglo-Saxon and Mexican adversaries.

For McCarthy, the Indians of the South-West Plains are—as books firmly grounded in primary sources such as T.R. Fehrenbach’s Comanches: The Destruction of a People (1974) and Thomas Goodrich’s Scalp Dance: Indian Warfare on the High Plains, 1865–1879 (1997) demonstrate—merciless mounted guerrillas addicted to war as a way of life. They are killing machines out of Hobbes, not nature’s men out of Rousseau. As Fehrenbach’s classic work makes clear, the ethos of Native American tribes such as the Comanches was that of the scalp-hunting mounted warrior, a status which only continual killing for booty and status could affirm. The violence portrayed on the pages of Blood Meridian accurately reflects the state of affairs on the lawless and ungoverned Texas–Mexico border plains of the 1840s and 1850s. The American settlement of Texas, as well as the development of the various state governments of Northern Mexico, faced the scourge of regular Comanche and Apache raids. Fehrenbach’s description of Comanche warfare captures the ferocity of mid-nineteenth-century Amerindian conflict:

The shrieking [Comanche] attackers ran amok, sparing no one in the melee … Old men and women too feeble to fight or flee were butchered. Often infants were destroyed ruthlessly, axed, dashed to death against rocks or trees, tossed bloodily on jagged spears. Wounded or captured females were usually raped; if there was no time for that they were dispatched and scalped immediately … There was no real pattern to the slaughter, rape or seizure … The blood-mad warriors were ruled by whim and the completeness of victory …

Faced by frequent Indian raids that killed indiscriminately, the Texans and Mexicans of the borderlands retaliated with punitive expeditions in which fearsome reprisals were often exacted. A cycle of ruthless guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare soon developed, the nature of which is well captured from the Texan perspective by Jeremiah Clemens in his 1858 book Mustang Gray:

No wonder that a [Texan] man whose house had been burned down, his property pillaged, and his fields laid waste, should seek to spill the spoiler in his turn. No wonder that a man whose brother had been murdered, should long to smite the [Indian] murderer. No wonder that a man whose wife had been violated, and then her body mangled with wounds, should be deaf to the cry of mercy when the ravisher is at his feet. To all this, and more, the Texans had been subjected. They felt it like men—like men they avenged it. He who would have done less, can claim little kindred with humanity.

As John Sepich has demonstrated in his masterly analysis, Notes on Blood Meridian (1993), a striking feature of McCarthy’s novel is its deep roots in Texan and Mexican frontier history. Indeed, McCarthy took almost ten years to complete his novel largely because of his practice of undertaking meticulous historical research. During his labours, he is reported to have read over 300 memoirs and histories of the Texas–Mexico frontier of the 1840s and 1850s. He draws powerfully on contemporary eyewitness accounts of American frontier warfare such as Samuel E. Chamberlain’s My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, finally published in full in 1956; John Bourke’s On the Border with Crook (1896) and classic histories such as H.H. Bancroft’s 1890 History of Texas and the North Mexican States, 1801–1889 as well as Fehrenbach’s aforementioned Comanches.

It is no accident, then, that two of the main characters in Blood Meridian, John Joel Glanton, “the Lord of the Scalp Range”, and Judge Holden are based on real historical figures that appear in Chamberlain’s memoir. If McCarthy turns the violence of frontier warfare into aesthetic literary art that assails the senses like Goya, Bosch and Peckinpah mixed on a palate of human ruination, then it must be said that he had a vast amount of historical material from which to fashion his tale.

The narrative of armed violence in Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian features the life and times of a mercenary force of some forty professional Indian fighters in 1849-50, who are employed as a licensed paramilitary by the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Their task is to hunt and kill Apache and Comanche raiders for a $200 bounty for each scalp delivered to the Mexican authorities as “a receipt”. The force is led by a ruthless former Texas Ranger, Captain John Joel Glanton, and the hairless, physically imposing but mysterious Judge Holden, a man of culture and intelligence who relishes inflicting horrific violence including the killing of children.

Taken as a whole, the members of the Glanton gang represent a collection of grotesques out of Hieronymous Bosch. They include an illiterate teenage wanderer referred to only as the Kid in whom “broods already a taste for mindless violence”; Toadvine, an earless killer and branded horse thief described as “a great clay voodoo doll made animate”; Bathcat, a Welsh convict from Van Diemen’s Land who wears a necklace of dried human ears “like a string of dried black figs”; Tobin, an ex-priest who has abandoned the Bible for the revolver; and Black Jackson, a homicidal African-American who kills easily with both knife and gun. Milling around these figures is a supporting cast of hermits, whores, pimps, beggars, human freaks, cretins, vendors and urchins—the wretched of the borderland. In short, the Glanton gang rides through a moral wasteland of violence awash in the blood fetishes and trophies of frontier warfare—from a tree of dead babies hung by their throats, past scalpless skulls, severed heads, crucified mummies and eviscerated bodies—all described in a sumptuous language of lyrical, even Biblical cadence.

The capacity of the Glanton mercenaries to unleash sudden death is enhanced by the fact that each man carries in his twin saddle holsters the very latest in industrial weapons technology: a pair of huge 1847 Walker Colt .44 calibre six-shot, long-barrelled revolvers. At the time, these weapons were revolutionary handguns, capable of firing a ball with the massive impact of a rifle charge. In America, the Walker Colt and its later models became the sub-machine-gun of the mid-nineteenth century, ending reliance upon the cumbersome powder-and-horn Kentucky long rifle and small-bore revolvers that were often difficult to reload at speed against mounted Indians. By the end of the 1840s, the Colt .44 became the decisive weapon of war on the south-western Texan frontier. Against its six-shot firepower the traditional Indian advantage of pitting mounted archers against Americans hampered in fighting on horseback by single-shot weapons was forever nullified. Throughout the pages of Blood Meridian, McCarthy regularly demonstrates the awesome technological revolution in firepower that the Colt revolvers represented in America’s “sea to shining sea” expansion westwards from New England to California. When Captain Glanton shoots a Mexican, the author informs us that “a fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman’s head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over slain in her blood without remedy”. Throughout the book, the massive .44 pistols are invoked as the new tools of frontier warfare, revolvers fired from horseback that spew brains and blow body parts into air and earth.

In its narrative structure, Blood Meridian is deceptively linear. Like many westerns, it is constructed in the form of a post-Homeric quest and, at times, there are echoes of Alan LeMay’s The Searchers, as men pursue implacable enemies across an imposing and often desolate landscape. The novel features two main protagonists, the Kid and Judge Holden, who dominate the story from beginning to end (in the novel the terms Kid and Judge are rendered in lower case—perhaps in order to reduce their human significance—but here for purposes of elucidation and analysis, upper case is employed). The early part of the book concentrates on the origins of the Kid, who drifts from Tennessee to Texas via Louisiana. The Kid emerges as primal First Man, who learns how to fight against drunken sailors in New Orleans. “They fight,” writes McCarthy, “with fists, with feet, with bottles and knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes.” Drifting into Texas, the Kid introduces the reader to the malevolent, seven-foot-tall, albino-like Judge Holden when he witnesses the latter destroy an evangelical prayer meeting by claiming that the preacher is a criminal pervert recently chased out of Arkansas for “having congress with a goat”. The Kid moves on and becomes embroiled in a filibustering expedition into Mexico designed to seize Sonora which is led by the arrogant American soldier, Captain White. In recruiting the Kid, White becomes a spokesman for Manifest Destiny and pronounces sentence on the Mexicans:

What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.

The White expedition’s subsequent foray into Mexico summons up some of McCarthy’s finest prose. The company of filibusters traverses a wilderness littered with evidence of death, a landscape in which “midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains of the sudden skyline stark and black and livid … like some demon kingdom summoned up”. White’s troops ride like a pale ghost army through terrain that is the high road to hell, a place of ancient dust and incandescent bones, blue moonlight sand, silent lightning and black mountains, “a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings … a land whose true geology was not stone but fear”. The atmosphere of war is everywhere from “drops of rain the size of grapeshot” through skeletal human and animal remains to sacked churches with their steps smeared in dry blood and decorated by broken effigies of a dead Christ.

When the expedition encounters a Comanche raiding party, the pompous Captain White anticipates a quick victory, telling his lieutenants, “We may see a little sport here before the day is out.” What occurs next is conveyed in one of McCarthy’s most unforgettable passages:  

There rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. 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 dragoons, 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 and rawhide helmets … and one in the armor of a spanish [sic]conquistador …

The wild Comanches descend on White’s company “like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling to a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian [sic] reckoning”. The Indians strike expertly with bow and lance and destroy swiftly the inexperienced Americans, riding them down and turning them into “unhorsed Saxons” who are then speared and clubbed in an orgy of slaughter. The Indians leap from their mounts with knives and finish off White’s company:

[They moved with a] peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion … passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore that they might have rolled in it like dogs and some fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows …

The Kid and a few others manage to escape from this nightmare of carnage but are soon captured and jailed by the nervous Mexican authorities as filibusters until they are released in order to become recruits in Glanton’s new mercenary force. The overconfident and amateurish Captain White is less fortunate: his recovered head ends up in a macabre Mexican bazaar in “a glass carboy of clear mescal … hair afloat and eyes turned upward”. 

What follows the formation of the Glanton mercenary force is a post-Homeric quest in which the American scalp-hunters become apostles of violence. They ride like “itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague” to rid the borderlands of Apache and Comanche raiders. Each man is armed with a brace of new Walker .44 Colts and they journey “like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote”. Although Glanton is the titular commander of the marauders, the true spiritual force is the monstrous Judge Holden, who reappears in the novel as a cosmopolitan prophet of war. The Judge forms a covenant with Glanton by which the latter’s gunfighters are allied to the former’s scientific education and knowledge of the art of war. Throughout the remainder of the novel, the almost inhuman Judge discusses philosophy and culture with the same ease as he rapes and murders human beings across the borderlands. He intimidates the gang members, mesmerising them with his spirit of unrelenting warfare, preaching a will to power in which the strong live and the weak die. Like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, the Judge dreads insignificance, He thus rejects civilised rules and social order, preferring to reign in the hell of frontier violence rather than serve the cause of Manifest Destiny by settling the land as a New Jerusalem.

Led by the merciless Glanton and the malevolent Judge, the American mercenaries have great success in killing Indians. As they massacre the inhabitants of one Apache village, we are informed that the mercenaries move among the dead, “harvesting the long black locks with their knives and leaving their victims rawskulled and strange in their bloody cauls”. Eventually, when the Glantonites ride into Chihuahua City with bundles of scalps hanging from their saddle pommels and heads on poles, they are feted by the Mexican city grandees led by Angel Trias, the European-educated state Governor with whom the Judge converses about events in Paris and London in five languages. This touch of high culture occurs against the background of a barbaric banquet in which the “bloated and belching mercenaries” ride horses into the dining room, indulge in random pistol fire, fist fighting and lewd drunkenness.

Later, the Glantonites wreck the city’s cantinas and prey like wild animals upon Mexican women, quickly turning the populace against them. When they finally ride out into the desert and its “sandstone cities in the dusk”, they are satiated and sadistic, well on their way to becoming indiscriminate killers, a literal wild bunch, to whom the similarity in appearance between Mexican, mestizo and Indian scalps merely represents an opportunity to claim more “receipts”.

The subsequent depredations of the Glantonites soon alarm authorities in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. The mercenaries confront their employers in the form of Mexican lancers but the latter, archaic echoes of civilised European warfare, are blasted from their saddles by the American pistoleros. “The sulphurous smoke,” writes McCarthy, “hung over the street in a gray shroud and the colorful lancers fell under the horses in that perilous mist like soldiers slaughtered in a dream wide-eyed and wooden and mute.” In their indiscriminate quest to kill, the Americans inevitably become “receipts” themselves, men with large bounties on their heads, and they are pursued by the Mexican general, Elias, and a small army of soldiers. The gang “like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse”, flee across Mexico travelling “infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun”.

Eventually, the Glantonites escape across the border into Arizona where the marauders seize control of a lucrative ferry business on the Gila River until they meet their nemesis in a surprise attack launched by Yuma Indians. Most of the Glantonites perish in the fighting including Glanton himself who, confronted by a hatchet-wielding Yuma warrior, leers defiantly, “Hack away you mean red nigger”, before his skull is split. The Kid, Toadvine and Tobin escape and flee into the desert where they are hunted by fellow survivor, Holden, for their weapons and possessions, escaping death at his hands only by being rescued by friendly Kumeyaay Indians. Later Toadvine is hanged in San Diego; Tobin disappears; and the Kid becomes a wanderer.

The novel then abruptly moves on three decades to 1878 when the Kid/Man, the last of Glanton’s mercenaries, arrives at Fort Griffin, Texas, in the waning days of the old frontier. In the town saloon he meets the ageless Judge, who meditates on fate and war in a universe without apparent meaning. The Kid/Man is condemned by Holden for having been unduly merciful as a warrior, a disappointment in the human “dance of war”. In the end, the Judge kills, and possibly mutilates, his former comrade in the outhouse. The Judge then returns to the saloon to dance and fiddle with the drunks and whores, proclaiming that he alone is immortal—the Second Horseman eternal.

McCarthy’s philosophy of war and counter-Enlightenment thought

The above narrative of armed violence cannot do justice to the cosmic epic that is Blood Meridian in general or to the figure of the Judge in particular. With its multiple themes, layers of meaning and luminous prose, this rich and deeply disturbing novel eludes easy interpretation. For some critics, such as Harold Bloom, the Judge is a baptist of blood, a desert Ahab to the Kid’s unconscious Ishmael; for others such as Leo Daugherty the book represents a blended Gnostic and Homeric tragedy that weaves a tapestry of human evil around the figure of the immortal Judge. As Barcley Owens has written in his 2000 study, The Western Novels of Cormac McCarthy:

he [the Judge] is the mad, murdering god Lucifer, Yaweh, Shiva, a gentleman and a fraud, an eternal form of mankind, well versed in all philosophy, multilingual yet still naked, bestial, crouching, sweating by a campfire. He is Last and First Man. There is no David to stand up to this Goliath.

These interpretations have great merit, but they downplay the novel’s historical purpose as an exegis on war. To fully understand Blood Meridian’s significance, then, it is vital to analyse McCarthy’s philosophy of war, which is rooted in counter-Enlightenment thought. In order to accomplish this task, we must probe the linkages that exist in the novel from the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Joseph de Maistre and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is McCarthy’s philosophy of war that endows Blood Meridian with a timeless quality, for the novel’s rendering of armed violence is both historical and contemporary in resonance. Glanton’s mercenaries are the historical forerunners of diverse murderous irregulars, such as Quantrill’s Raiders on the Kansas–Missouri border during the Civil War and Pancho Villa’s guerrillas who marauded into New Mexico in 1916. At the same time, the Glantonites’ addiction to indiscriminate violence is a metaphor for our contemporary age of irregular warfare—from Somali warlords and Rwandan machete men through Serb and Croatian paramilitaries to Iraqi guerrillas and Afghan mujahideen.

The kind of warfare described in Blood Meridian is not that of Westphalian inter-state regular warfare but of the internal irregular warfare we are now so used to on our television screens—a warfare characterised by both disturbing violence and an utter lack of distinction between combatants and non-combatants. For McCarthy, war is not a social invention but innate to the human species. He is in the camp, not of Rousseau but of Hobbes, the camp that believes in Genesis 8:21, “man’s inclination is evil from his youth”. Accordingly, in Blood Meridian we are hurtled into the bleak and chaotic world of Cain the killer of Abel, of Hobbes’s Leviathan and the “condition of Warre of every one against every one” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Only a social contract agreed between man and the state in which a strong central government can assume a monopoly on the use of organised violence can bring human security. Carl von Clausewitz, in On War, was later to codify the Hobbesian social contract when he described war as an extension of politics defined by a special trinity between “people, government and army”.

On the unsettled mid-nineteenth-century American frontier there is no social contract at work. Glanton’s mercenaries are freebooters, military privateers for ineffectual Mexican state governments. The Americans are deadly exponents of what the Israeli military historian Azar Gat calls, in his 2006 book War and Civilisation, irregular warfare as “asymmetrical first-strike killing”. Throughout Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s descriptions of carnage leave us in little doubt that the author regards war as a human pathology as old as recorded time itself. Indeed, Glanton’s fighters personify Alexander Moseley’s bleak explanation for armed human conflict in A Philosophy of War (2002) that “we [human beings] fight because we believe in fighting … the precepts of reason are not sufficient to extinguish man’s passion for war”.

The influence of Maistre and Nietzsche on McCarthy

It is through the monumental figure of Judge Holden that McCarthy brings his understanding of the philosophy of war fully to bear on the reader. The Judge is a conflation of ideas on war not only from Hobbes but also from Maistre and Nietzsche. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) the Savoyard Catholic royalist diplomat and anti-rationalist counter-Enlightenment prophet, believed in the incurably corrupt nature of humanity and in the divinity of bloodshed and war. Rejecting the anti-war rationalism of Voltaire, Maistre’s writings on the inevitability of war are found in his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg and Correspondance Diplomatique, published posthumously in the 1850s and 1860s. Isaiah Berlin, in his famous work The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, emphasises the influence on nineteenth-century literature of Maistre’s notion of war, observing, “Maistre’s vision of the world is one of savage creatures tearing each other limb from limb, killing for the sake of killing, with violence and blood, which he sees as the normal condition of all animate life.”

Berlin goes on to note that Maistre’s uncompromising vision of armed strife dominates the writings of Stendhal and Tolstoy and contributes to the vivid military realism of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In Maistre’s writings, society is merely a collection of warring men, a vale of tears that can only be regulated from above by the authority of monarchical and religious tradition aided by scaffold and executioner. “All greatness, all power, all social order,” the Savoyard writer tells us, “depends on the executioner; he is the terror of human society, and the tie that holds it together.” Contrary to Rousseau, Maistre rejects the idea of humans as noble savages inclined towards communal peace because man’s basic instinct is inclined towards killing. As Maistre chillingly puts it:

He [man] kills in order to defend himself and he kills in order to instruct himself. He kills to amuse himself and he kills in order to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing can resist him … But who will exterminate the one that exterminates the others? He will himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of men … The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death …

Despite his devout Catholicism, Maistre’s writings are a clear precursor of the next major influence on McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, namely the fiercely anti-Christian Friedrich Nietzsche. As Shane Schimpf points out in A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian (2006), McCarthy’s Judge Holden is a philosopher who meditates on a world where God has died. He embodies Nietzsche’s ideology of human insignificance with its associated beliefs in the cult of the superman and the glorification of war. Through the Judge it is Nietzsche’s spirit of war everlasting that is at work in the Glanton mercenary force. The latter, in their deeds, reflect the cry of Thus Spake Zarathustra: “You say it is the good cause which hallows every war? I say to you: it is the good war which hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.” For Nietzsche war calls not for mere soldiers but for the existentialism of true warriors, Übermensch, who constantly seek out an enemy and who spurn life without armed struggle.

As the Glantonites cut a swathe of blood across the Texas–Mexico border, the Judge becomes a terrifying combination of Maistre’s executioner and Nietzsche’s superman—a killing machine at once irrational, mystic and intellectual. He baptises men into Maistre’s divine war by stating, “If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.” What joins men together, he preaches, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. He echoes Nietzsche as the cosmopolitan ruler of fate when he proclaims, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” When the Judge instructs the Glanton gang in his philosophy of war, he tells its members in a famous passage:

It makes no difference what men think of war … War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

War endures, the Judge proclaims, because it ennobles the human race, validates history and consecrates manhood. It is eternal “because young men love it and old men love it in them”. The struggle of warriors represents the ultimate game in which human lives become the supreme wager, and victory or annihilation the absolute outcome. Echoing Maistre, the Judge explains:

This is the nature of war … Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

Reflecting Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the Judge goes on to deny God’s intervention in what he styles “the degeneracy of mankind”. Holden dismisses moral law as “an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test.” The Judge is a metaphysician of armed violence for whom the resort to arms is the means of making men into gods—gods who then single out “the thread of order from the tapestry” of existence before a higher court in which equity, rectitude and right are rendered null and void. Decisions of life and death eclipse questions of moral, spiritual and natural rights. For the human race there is only the “blood meridian” of the age-old re-enactment of war in which man’s zenith and horizon are merged into a divine unity of existence. As the Judge puts it:

And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of his achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

In this stark universe, the Judge is not simply a war-god seeking philosophical dominion but also a learned, scientific deity capable of physical mastery of his environment. He is, as Harold Bloom puts it, “War-Incarnate”, who carries a rifle mounted in silver inscribed “Et in Arcadia Ego”, a Renaissance proverb and memorial for tombs that means “Even in Arcadia there am I [Death]”. At one point in the novel, Holden’s intimate knowledge of science and geology saves the Glanton gang from an Apache war band when he is able to manufacture gunpowder in the wilderness from a mixture of saltpetre, charcoal, sulphur and urine. As the Apaches threaten, the Judge tells his companions to “piss for your very souls” into a mixture of minerals and powders. As the foul mass ferments and dries it becomes like a deadly gift from a desert Mephistopheles—gunpowder to charge the gang’s firearms and so cut the attacking Apaches down.

Of all the Glantonites, only the Kid remains aloof from the Judge—an uneducated Ishmael to Glanton’s intellectual Ahab—a mutinous soul against the Judge’s absolute will to power who, despite being a deadly fighter, has reserved some “some corner of clemency for the heathen”. Thus, when Holden and the Kid/Man meet at Fort Griffin thirty years later as the last survivors of the Glanton gang, there must be a final reckoning. The Kid/Man is the lone dissenter against the Judge, the one who has called into question the nobility of war. The drifter from Tennessee has failed the dance of war, for “only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance”. The Kid/Man’s soul is thus forfeit and is taken from him in the outhouse by Holden. In the end we are left with the victory of the blood-reddened Second Horseman, of might over right; of war over peace; and of counter-Enlightenment over Enlightenment. As Schimpf puts it:

War is the ultimate human endeavor for McCarthy, and this novel is his paean to it. If Blood Meridian is anything, it is an epic poem of war in the tradition of Homer … without any pretense of moral probity … McCarthy’s gift to us is this novel of war and the men who fight it … Only war thrives. As long as there are men, there will be war. This is McCarthy’s underlying message and one made all the more powerful via his masterful telling.

Some perceptive students at the Australian Defence College recognise that Blood Meridian is a novel so steeped in the philosophy of war that it transcends any soldier’s personal understanding of armed violence on today’s battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am often asked the question: How can McCarthy understand so much? There is, after all, no evidence that he has ever seen armed violence or been in a war zone. My answer is twofold. First, I remind students of McCarthy’s deep immersion in the literature of American frontier warfare. Second, I direct them to Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s famous 1990 essay “How to Tell a True War Story” for further verification of Blood Meridian. Like McCarthy, O’Brien identifies the existence of “a kind of godliness” in the grim trade of war, a spiritual texture that swirls around military activities like a “great, ghostly fog, thick and permanent”. O’Brien observes that “war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly”. What students learn is that McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is true to O’Brien’s dark conclusion that no authentic war story can ever be moral. As O’Brien writes:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing all the things men have always done. If a story seems moral do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.

In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Albert Camus wrote in his Notebooks, “We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realise that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.” For Cormac McCarthy this is the central truth of human existence, the very motive force of history and destiny, and it is a truth that receives literary treatment of extraordinary insight and virtuosity in Blood Meridian. As Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Lucke in their 1999 study Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy suggest, McCarthy “asks us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal”.

It is worth remembering that McCarthy completed his masterpiece during the Cold War when the kind of blood-soaked irregular warfare he describes was often regarded as passé in a bipolar world of ballistic missiles and superpower nuclear deterrence. Today, as failed states and weak governments multiply and so allow insurgency and terrorism to spread across the globe like a bacillus, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian seems more prescient than the books of a hundred academic strategic studies specialists.

Let us conclude this essay by allowing McCarthy to speak. In April 1992, in a rare interview with R.B. Woodward of the New York Times, McCarthy reflected bleakly on the eternal reality that is war and on the reasons why swords will never be transformed into ploughshares:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed … I think that the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Dr Michael Evans is the ADC Fellow at the Australian Defence College in Canberra and is a former Head of the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre at the Royal Military College of Australia, Duntroon.

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