Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystification of the Martial Code

I n his essay “Blood Music,” Peter Josyph notes the generic (if not genetic) relationship between Blood Meridian and Beowulf. There is much substance to this observation, and not only because the novel, like the poem, which Josyph calls one of its “grandfathers” (179), depicts an escalating process of violence. The two texts are really most alike in their detailed depiction of martial codes, by which I mean structured social systems that justify and promulgate conflict, represent violence as craft, and conventionalize destructive activity in a craftsmanly way. Despite the outlandish violence of Cormac McCarthy’s epic antiwestern, this sanguine narrative cannot be considered nihilistic, even though some critics argue that its pervasive mayhem represents not much more than amoral naturalism. As Vereen M. Bell puts it, “the whole experience of McCarthy’s work . . . is that nothing can be taken to stand as the truth. Anything that stands in this sense by definition cannot be true” (135). For Steven Shaviro, the gist of Blood Meridian “is only war, there is only the dance. Exile is not deprivation or loss, but our primordial and positive condition” (145). Novelist and 199 From Beowulf to Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy’s Demystification of the Martial Code Rick Wallach 200 : Rick Wallach surgeon Richard Selzer, for whom the application of benign violence is a matter of craft, remarks that McCarthy’s violence “is there for its own sake” (Josyph 176). Yet, despite the claim by Blood Meridian’s narrator that the child in whom “broods a taste for mindless violence” is father to the man (3), the novel evolves beyond the Old English epic, because it exposes the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind the martial code instead of merely chronicling the code’s effects. In reality, Blood Meridian possesses a precise moral compass whose poles are the narrative voice and the voice of the monstrous Judge Holden, who, as Harold Bloom has observed, “has no ideology except blood, violence, war for its own sake. And that is what makes him so astonishing a figure, so frightening and foreboding” (Josyph and Bloom 11). However, Holden’s voice is not the narrator’s, and much of the narrative’s aleatory value results from an implicit dialogue with its Anglo-Saxon antecedent. The anonymous narrator of Beowulf foreshadows the carnage of its hero’s battles by recounting the violent origins of Scyld Scefing’s dynasty. The poem then deploys a series of conflicts initiated by Beowulf’s friendly contest with Breca, intensified in the hero’s verbal duel with Unferth, which finally breaks into physical violence with Grendel. In a struggle more furious yet, Beowulf battles Grendel’s mother, and his climactic fight with the dragon is the most vicious of all. Stitched among these battles, soldierly braggadocio reprises yet other battles like subterranean percolations between eruptions. Even the denouement averts resolution, as Wiglaf predicts the disintegration of the entire world of the poem into another cataclysm of war. Beyond the litter of shattered bodies and kingdoms, only the martial code itself prevails. Critics have traditionally accused Beowulf of hubris for choosing to battle the dragon for mere riches when the welfare of his kingdom is at stake. Such criticism begs the issue. The welfare of Beowulf’s kingdom is irrelevant. Under the terms of the code he serves, he may not refuse to give battle and still continue to legitimize his sovereignty. The code of martial honor consumes imperatives of nationhood, blood relations, and friendship. Because everything is ultimately sanctified by and sacrificed to that code, the conflicts 201 : From Beowulf to Blood Meridian related by the poem belong to the order of sacrificial rituals. As Girard (1977) observes: “As the sacrificial conflict increases in intensity , so too does the violence. It is no longer the intrinsic value of the object that inspires the struggle; rather, it is the violence itself that bestows value on the objects, which are only pretexts for a conflict. From this point on it is violence that calls the tune. Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends up using everyone for its own” (144). Blood Meridian exposes this contagion of systematized violence by invoking Beowulf in its representation of another culture whose vitality derived from obedience to the martial code, the mid-nineteenth century American “Wild West.” In some cases the invocation is explicit, as when Captain White’s fallen...