Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian

O ne of the many complex relationships Cormac McCarthy explores in Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is between humans, especially Anglo Americans, and the natural world. He does so in part through the manipulation of several archetypal myths closely identified with the European experience in the New World, and most specifically with the border regions of the American Southwest. McCarthy moves Blood Meridian through the dark and disordered spaces of what Lauren Berlant calls the “national symbolic.” Unlike the familiar icons of mythic frontier tales, however, McCarthy’s characters seek no closure, nor do they render order out of the chaos of history and myth. The novel functions on the level of mythmaking and national fantasy as an American origin story, a reimaging upon the palimpsest of the western frontier of the birth of one of our most pervasive national fantasies—the winning of the West and the building of the American character through frontier experiences. Both of these related themes demand a wilderness to be conquered, either literally via ax and plow or metaphorically by defeating the 75 The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian Sara Spurgeon 76 : Sara Spurgeon Indians rhetorically tied to the wild landscape. Annette Kolodny has defined the American obsession with land, especially land-as-woman, as an American pastoral, drawing some images from the European version, yet unique from it. The literary hero within this landscape, she says, is “the lone male in the wilderness” (147) struggling to define a relationship with the female landscape in its troubling metaphorical appearance as both fruitful mother and untouched virgin, one image offering nurturing fertility, the other demanding penetration and conquest. Blood Meridian chronicles the origin of the “lone male in the wilderness,” the modern American Adam—though not the benignly patriarchal John Wayne version. McCarthy’s project here is not simply to retell the familiar myths or dress up the icons of cowboys and Indians in modern, politically correct costumes à la Dances With Wolves; rather, he is using the trope of the historic frontier and the landscape of the Southwest within the genre of the Western to interrogate the consequences of our acceptance of the archetypal Western hero myths. Blood Meridian rewrites and reorders those myths in such a way as to bridge the discontinuity that Patricia Limerick identifies as being perceived by the public to exist between the mythic past of the American West and its modern realities.1 This gap, marked by a feeling of discontinuity and limned by the continued popular obsession with traditional Western and frontier icons that have thus far failed to cover it, is filled in Blood Meridian with a newly structured version of national fantasy, though not one that imposes any kind of hoped-for order or control. Instead, McCarthy presents a countermemory, a sort of antimyth of the West, illuminating especially the roots of the modern relationship between humans and the natural world. In many ways, McCarthy has produced a counterhistory that contradicts the meaning generated from most official histories of the period. It is within the accuracy of historical detail in Blood Meridian that McCarthy finds his mythic history, lurking within the liminal spaces of the familiar rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, the taming of the wilderness, John Wayne’s famous swagger, and other pillars of the national symbolic. The central myth enshrining that relationship and manipulated in Blood Meridian, mainly by the judge, is that of the sacred hunter. 77 : The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist In Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin claims that this ancient form of the archetypal hero quest, twisted and hybridized through the meeting of numerous European and Native American versions, forms the basis of the modern American myth of the frontier, and thus much of the groundwork for our commonly perceived national identity. Kolodny argues that the American pastoral was structured around the yeoman farmer responding to the female landscape, and discusses this figure as he appears in Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, Freneau, and others. However, as Henry Nash Smith noted, the image of the yeoman farmer was simply not romantic enough to sustain popular interest for long. What emerged instead was an American version of a far older figure, the “lone male in the wilderness”—the hunter. In essence, the myth of the sacred hunter is one of regeneration through violence enacted upon the body of the earth. The...