Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

“See the Child”: The Melancholy Subtext of Blood Meridian

A mong the many melancholy moments in the Old Testament, we find the Israelites’ mourning of their forced exile by the rivers of Babylon in Psalm 137. Strangely, it ends with an image at odds with the woeful tone of the preceding verses: O daughter Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. (8–9) The children whose murder the Hebrew expatriates are advocating are to them the offspring of heathen. Homicidal expatriates, too, are the desperadoes of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, taking unwarranted revenge on the “heathen” (as they sometimes label Native Americans) in a manner not unlike what the psalmist may have had in mind: and one of the Delawares [in the gang] emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a “See the Child” The Melancholy Subtext of Blood Meridian George Guillemin 239 240 : George Guillemin ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew. . . . (156) The two textual images are comparable because both are excerpted from melancholy contexts, and because in both texts the melancholy sense is conveyed by the complete indifference of the speaking voice to the agony thus reported. What further legitimizes the parallel are the constant references in McCarthy’s fiction to biblical iconography and rhetoric, among them many involving the death of children. Let us introduce a third analogy, this time a critical assessment of the role that scenes like Herod’s infanticide play in baroque drama: “Gryphius’ early work in Latin, the Herod epics, show most plainly what captured the interest of those people: the seventeenth century sovereign, the paramount of creation, erupting into rage like a volcano and annihilating himself along with the entire court around him. Paintings reveled in the picture of how he, holding two infants in his hands in order to smash them, succumbs to madness” (Benjamin 52).1 McCarthy’s novel, it seems, draws on a traditional motif that subsumes melancholia, rage, and infanticide. Here I want to inquire into the nature of this motif and to try to determine why images of slain children keep haunting the pages of Blood Meridian. In interpreting these images, I will show that nowhere in the novel does the narrative voice devote itself to the question of ethics, not even by pointing out the conspicuous absence of moral positions. In order to define the causality underlying the novel’s morally indifferent narration of epidemic destruction, I will focus in this reading on the patent melancholia permeating the text of Blood Meridian in the form of a discursive meta-narrative. The reason this “melancholy subtext”— which will take some time to define—seems to ignore ethical standards is simply that its motivation and essence draw on a posthumanist ethics. The gist of the argument to follow is that at times McCarthy seems to adopt an almost baroque mode of narration grounded in weltschmerz.2 By transporting melancholy meaning via allegoresis, the structural device of the “melancholy subtext” constitutes something of a quasi-baroque strain that weaves its way through the text. The 241 : “See the Child” terms melancholia and allegory represent the woof and the warp of this discursive web, “melancholia” connoting here a form of aesthetic conditioning rather than depression in the clinical sense; “allegory” implying a rhetorical mode diametrically opposite to, rather than complementary to, that of the symbol; and “baroque” defining a stylistic category combining the elements of allegory, melancholia, and an egalitarian view of nature rather than an epochally defined aesthetics. In short, allegoresis functions as the structural mode used to convey a baroque discursivity steeped in death and melancholia. A good way to start is by looking into the textual evidence on victimized children (who figure prominently in the proposed “melancholy subtext”), such as the instance of a Mexican boy who is dropped with a rock off the wall from which he and his friends have been urinating onto sleeping prisoners. The “kid,”—the novel’s nameless teenage protagonist—who has pitched the rock at the boy hears “no sound other than the muted thud of its landing on the far side” (71). The child has probably...