A Book “Made Out of Books”: The Humanizing Violence of Style in Blood Meridian

If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

—Misattributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Crafts, Schneirla, and Robinson 396)

Few novels question so persistently the relation between words and phenomena, interpretive style and physical presence, as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: or, the Evening Redness in the West (1985). Start with the fact that much of this grotesque account is verifiable, as close to history as novels generally get, drawn in sometimes verbatim tones from memoirs, chronicles, eyewitness testimony, all ably documented by John Sepich. Then acknowledge how little it is driven by plot, accompanying two central characters (the kid, Judge Holden) but otherwise offered as mere peregrinations stitched together by the phrase “they rode on”—as if “plot” were less pressing for McCarthy than isolated events and the language describing them. Finally, consider quicksilver vacillations in that language itself, swerving between rudimentary realist prose and an otherwise ostentatious voice that revels in strange arabesques. The novel everywhere seems self-conscious about its stylistic bona fides, especially at indelible moments when symbolic constructs might seem irrelevant alongside the grim history they represent.

It comes as little surprise, then, that critics so often focus on the schism between the novel’s gruesome subject matter and its often visionary style—a style that tests assumptions by leveling the human to the minimally animate, and animate life to no greater moment than inert rocks and insensate shrubs. Readings of Blood Meridian regularly celebrate this apparent challenge to anthropomorphism, which seems most vivid in its scenes of ghastly violence. Yet however singular McCarthy’s vision, it emerges from a distinguished tradition in which physical violence is transmuted by rhetorical style—indeed, in which depictions seem as violent in their formal solicitations as in the physical realm they invoke. McCarthy may exceed his predecessors in the abandon with which characters destroy one another, but he no less than they creates a verbal realm in which the humanizing discriminations quashed by his characters are restored by his narrative—a narrative whose violent rhythmic displacements confirm paradoxically the prospect of seeing anew, the very basis for ethical and aesthetic discernment. The disruptions of his prose, alternately lavish and tight-lipped, induce in readers capacities for judgment and valuation (tinged by astonishment and woe) that otherwise seem drained away by the scenes he describes.

In short, the triumph of McCarthy’s novel emerges from its formal maneuvers, in the tension sustained by prose whose shape-shifting construction alerts us to its self-transforming capacity. “The language of Blood Meridian,” Steven Shaviro observes, “is rather continually outside itself, in intimate contact with the world in a powerfully nonrepresentational way” (153). That paradox (of “intimate contact” yet in a “nonrepresentational way”) testifies to the novel’s uncanny power, achieving a verisimilitude that seems to value everything equally, in photographic impartiality, even as it celebrates the craft behind that illusion of verisimilitude. McCarthy here confirms a need for renewed attention to formal features rather than simply accepting scenes as readily paraphrasable. In fact, Blood Meridian appeared in 1985, just when deconstruction (the heir to formalism) was folding its cards to new historicism and cultural studies. If the novel seemed implicitly to defy this critical turn, that defiance was expressed even more forcefully by McCarthy himself when reminded of his ostensible debt to Faulkner: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written” (Woodward). Acerbic as this acknowledgment sounds, it testifies to his novel’s claim on our attention as part of an inimitable literary tradition, which (especially for someone so committed to history) need not represent a retreat to sterile aesthetic considerations. But the fact that fictional “books are made out of books” only seems “ugly” because it reminds us that whatever larger social meanings ensue from a novel are dictated first by luminous details and evocative narrative configurations. That understanding constitutes perhaps the chief conclusion drawn by Marjorie Levinson in her recent survey of “the new...