Through a series of fun misadventures, I accidentally became the owner of a ranch and homestead originally owned by a pivotal figure in the history of the Nevada Territory. This event led me down a series of rabbit holes trying to understand the true history of the West, since my interactions with many locals born close to the 19th century who had first-hand knowledge of my property made me realize that I understood nothing about the complex history of the mountain west.
I became obsessed with the history of the Nevada Territory and its surrounding environs. An enormous amount of fascinating historical context in the Mountain West has effectively been erased. The State of Nevada is larger than the Nevada Territory, but some of its historical territory was lost in armed border skirmishes with surrounding States, primarily for the purposes of controlling water supplies. Over the years, I’ve developed a hobby of reconstructing the history of the American Mountain West north of the Mexican border regions.
The history of the American West is being lost in great part because the records and documents only exist on paper in the archives of counties and dying towns. No one is digitizing these records. The people I’ve approached for access to their historical archives are lovely, but they are typically in their 70s, their knowledge is slowly dying with them because no one cares, and their archives are rotting. My inquiries were often the first they’d received by anyone vaguely young (and I am not) for many years.
This is where I will take the McCarthy framing of the American West to task, though in fairness he focused on the border regions. To be clear, the border was a violent and anarchic place, but the former not necessarily being caused by the latter, and the border was worse than many other places in the West. The Nevada Territory was, by my view of the documents I’ve seen, an eminently pragmatic and cooperative environment across factions that didn’t necessarily see eye to eye but had common goals. The Mountain West was a difficult place to live. In the historical record you often see Chinese, black, white (which are often factionalized separately as Confederate and Union sympathizers in records) as equal partners at the negotiating table. You don’t even see a visible Chinese political faction today in places where it was politically powerful in the 19th century. I had no idea this was even a thing but apparently that was the norm in many areas and well-documented in local archives. These ethnic/race factions specialized and it was well-understood that they needed each other to survive at the time. It was a respectful coexistence.
Similarly, the relationships with the Natives were complex, and the modern fashion of treating them as a uniform group with uniform interests is historically misleading. Individual groups of Natives had complex motivations which often aligned them with white people. They had agency and understood the complex political dynamics of what they were involved in. They are not given enough credit for playing a savvy game given the hand they were dealt.
Another thing that is often lost in modern American history is that the American West was deeply affected by the social dynamics of the Civil War even though they largely weren’t involved and did not want to be involved. Soldiers from both sides settled/occupied towns in the American West and tried to influence politics toward their own political ends. The consequences of this history are evident today among States in the Mountain West. Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” was written in part about his time in the Nevada Territory when he lived in a town that was named both “Dixie” and “Unionville” at various times.
One of my ambitions, given time and money, is to systematically preserve and digitize the isolated and dying archives of historical records across the American West. What is there is detailed, rich, and almost none of it is online. Americans have an extremely narrow view of this complex and fascinating time and place in American history. It may not be important but it feels worth doing. In many ways the history of the Nevada Territory shows the positive elements of humanity in the 19th century. You had white, black, Chinese, Native, and other factions willing and able to work together for their common betterment with little evidence of animus across these groups in that time and place. In a way, it reinvigorated my faith in humanity.
Beautiful project! Even if that didn't have a big direct impact, it matters that the records exist so that historians with a deep, genuine interest can access them.
Even on subjects that are more recent than that, reading documents from their time offer crucial insights and unheard perspectives.
Such a wealth of data can change things, even if it happens decades down the line.
I think that is one McCarthy’s points; that violence does not care for nuance. The Blood Meridian in part represents the violent arc of human history connected in place and deed throughout time.
You should totally do this project! Maybe it’s too hard to start going in person to every archive, but organizing them to just take scans with their phone. Then if that’s interesting maybe you get a grant to go on tour and digitize the west.
This is such an amazing book. I found it a profoundly moving and horrifying experience to read. It's amazing to know how accurate it seems from this source to be in many ways.
For those of you who don't know, in a 1999 piece for Salon entitled "Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels > 1960" by David Foster Wallace, there is a memorable review of "Blood Meridian" which reads (in its entirety) "Don't even ask."[1] After his death, DFW's personal copy of "Blood Meridian", complete with all sorts of marginalia and scribbled annotations was sold at auction, and it showed that he had indeed studied it in great depth.
> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world.
This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.
But, in the novel's defense, I grew up after the myth of the west was dead. I have only ever thought the frontier was a miserable, lawless place full of bandits. So perhaps if the novel's goal was to 'bust the western myth', that's why it failed to engage me in any way except utter disgust.
My biggest complaint about Blood Meridian is it throws all this graphic violence in your face and then has typical American squeamishness about sex. It felt like the inability to depict sex undermined whatever point it was trying to make with graphic depictions of violence. Compare, here is the single sex scene in the book which is "fade to black" blink and you missed it:
I seen you right away, she said. I always pick the one I want.
She led him through a door where an old Mexican woman was handing out towels and candles and they ascended like refugees of some sordid disaster the darkened plankboard stairwell to the upper rooms.
Lying in the little cubicle with his trousers about his knees he watched her. He watched her take up her clothes and don them and he watched her hold the candle to the mirror and study her face there. She turned and looked at him.
That doesn't seem squeamish. I think many writers of that era viewed violence as bad, and sex as private. You may disagree with them on that point, of course.
The text is painfully awkward, not McCarthy at his best.
1985 isn't usually considered a locus of Victorian attitudes toward sex, at least in the United States. The Hayes code was abolished in 1968. The Miller test was established in the late seventies, reducing publisher risk for content that would have been considered pornographic a decade or two earlier.
Anxiety about sex—and particularly homosexual sex—didn't significantly rise again until the early 2000s, around the time Lawrence v. Texas was decided. The Puritans have been loudly agitating for blanket censorship ever since.
I'm not talking about Victorian attitudes in particular. Sex is often considered private, even today. I'm pointing to a resolution of the apparently irony of describing violence but not sex.
There is a strong philosophical message in the works of McCarthy, but it's not explicit, you have to synthesize it. If you read his best works being totally oblivious to what he's really saying, then they'll feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty.
Blood Meridian is perhaps the easiest of his works to understand in that regard, since he's as far from deliberate occultation as he can possibly be. The philosophy in that book reaches out and punches you in the face.
One theme seems like it's not that hard to distill. That aimless young men with no prospects and no philosophy are more inclined to participate in destruction, and end up destructed.
We have English literature classes for the very purpose of finding and discussing these and other themes. The point of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Orwell aren't always immediately understood to some readers, even if they sense that there's something to be taken from what they're reading.
Being told something makes less of an impression than figuring it out. When an author explicitly states the theme of their work, there is nothing to think about or consider. Personally, I much prefer stuff that makes me do some of the legwork myself.
Yeah, this is a huge difference in, for example, 2 of Ayn Rand's books. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The first is a simpler story with fewer characters, and though their dialogue obviously matters, much of the message happens through their actions. The same is true for Atlas Shrugged, but it contains many more monologues that are really the author expressing her philosophy explicitly in words, and the story around them is much more just providing context. Both great (or terrible, if you hate her) books, but The Fountainhead is much more poetic for this reason.
> If you have to be briefed on what an author is "really saying" outside of the story conveying it, what's the point?
It's not about having it explained to the reader in a briefing. A sophisticated reader comes to a book with the cultural, literary, and historical understanding in which the themes of the book are in play. Understanding of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at age 12-14, where it's commonly taught in the US, is pretty superficial. Studying it as an adult sheds light on subtle threads woven through story. What exactly are Friar Laurence's motivations in helping Romeo and Juliet? At the end, after he confesses his role, why does Prince Escalus say, "We have still known thee for a holy man"?
> If you have to be briefed on what an author is "really saying" outside of the story conveying it, what's the point?
What armitron said was, "it's not explicit, you have to synthesize it." The verb 'synthesize' implies the exact opposite of what you've construed them as saying.
Also now “The Passenger”, it strikes me as a lot like Suttree and is a surreal experience to read.
If you’re crazy, you can also try “Stela Maris”. just be warned it’s not a story, it’s a philosophy book that doesn’t even try to pretend it’s a story. I enjoyed it but wouldn’t recommend it to most people I know.
I once read someone's dissertation on that very theme (maybe we're both referring to the same source). Even though there are some bits that one can make fit, it is laughable to think that a Gnostic fable is THE interpretation of a book that proclaims "War is God" and screams determinism every chance it gets.
Every territory wanted to become a US state as soon as possible.
I really don't understand how this idea formed that everyone in the wild west was an anarchist.
In fact I think people back then were just like people today: they wanted to lead orderly peaceful lives under the rule of law. But that would make for incredibly boring books.
>This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.
I think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men are like this, and The Road to a lesser extent (the evil is mortal men, it's just there's a lot of them). As others have mentioned, not all his books are like that. Suttree is downright funny at times.
I've always thought Cormac McCarthy has a great fear of evil and war and those bleak stories are his expression of it. Humans are in a downward spiraling race of shedding their humanity to be capable of greater acts violence so that no violence could be done against them. And those that don't engage in that are eventually overcome, like Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men - someone capable of handling themselves, but was never able or willing to be so ruthless. It's why ironically The Road, grim and miserable, is one of his most hopeful books - the boy lives and they remain "the good guys". Blood Meridian certainly the most hopeless, and possibly a reflection how he was feeling about these fears at the time.
I'm not a literature person but that's my take on those.
Consider the Border Trilogy if you ever want to give him another chance. Blood Meridian is an anti-western, but the Border Trilogy looks at the frontier lifestyle from a more humanist perspective and deeply mourns the loss of it.
It’s an excellent book and movie. It’s not a horror film - but a subtle and post apocalyptic draining you of hope to the very end, in the most beautiful way possible in the ugliest of places. It’s a film for experiencing the stoicism and pain of futile fatherhood.
Just picked this book up a month ago so serendipity to see this post show up.
Maybe I’m a bit desensitized to violence, but I didn’t find the book to be difficult to read for its violence. Just the sheer cognitive load it puts on the reader. Much of the language is period correct slang and a simple exchange between two men becomes a half hour long decrypting session of figuring who which “he” is saying something.
Love Cormack McCarthy for this challenging kind of literature, but know before reading it’s more of a homework assignment than something you can passively sit and engage in.
> ... a Texas Mennonite, who begs the soldiers not to march on to Mexico, saying ominously: “The wrath of God lies sleeping. […] Hell ain’t half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.”
The "disordered Mennonite" further tells the irregulars "If ye cross yon river ye'll not cross it back".
This prophecy is delivered in a barroom at the border, one of three auguries of doom delivered by various elders the Kid happens upon. With these McCarthy repeatedly points the reader back to a long heritage of epic tragedy: Moby Dick, Macbeth, and The Iliad.
Any other obsessive re-reader out there care to recall the other two such episodes?
The disordered Mennonite recalls Elijah's prophecy in Moby Dick
Macbeth - I'm guessing you mean the Tarot divination scene where we hear an obscured version of Glanton's fate (echoes of the three witches)?
The Iliad - It's been a while since I read this one so I'm having trouble figuring it out. There's the hermit in chapter 2 but I don't recall him making any specific prophecies other than talking about man's capacity for evil ("Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine."), nor can I make a connection to the Iliad. One vague Iliad connection I can think of is that the wind saves Tobin and the kid when they're hiding from the judge, which vaguely recalls Calchas's prophecy of a favorable wind (although that required sacrificing Iphigenia which I don't think has any parallels in the novel)
Great article. Thanks for sharing. I can stomach stories of what happened between Germany and Russia in lands between them in WW2, so I can probably handle the violence in this. It does sound gruesome.
I'm not surprised his fiction is history because he really didn't have to embellish anything, just see it accurately.
This is part of the draw for me (in addition to the prose). It is at least partially influenced by history [0], including the character of the Judge. Sometimes if it's easier to understand a certain place and time when it's wrapped up in a fictitious story, that can have value. We do it plenty for WW2, for example.
Everybody talks about the violence in BM but that's not its point. It's not an exploitation story designed to shock for the sheer fun of shocking.
To me it's a beautifully-written poetic exploration of a world without evil. For evil to exist there must be something else to compare it to. And there's nothing else in BM. It's just a mundane world of unceasing animal violence reduced to the quotidian. I imagine the inhabitants of WW II concentration camps might recognize such a world.
A world without evil is a much scarier place than one where the concept of evil needs to exist in order to contrast it with something else.
I appreciate what you’re saying but I thought McCarthy was not suggesting this is a world without good and evil. But rather the forces at work are beyond our ability to control or even understand. Termites never know why pesticide is being sprayed. At least that was my take from Blood Meridian, the Road and No Country. For instance, the scalp hunters are often horrified but in awe of the judge, subconsciously aware their souls have been signed away. And that part at the end where the kid falls before the dying woman and almost begs for some explanation for what is happening. As McKenna said, trying to use our reason and science is like “throwing an ice cube into a blast furnace.”
And I should say McCarthy is not fixated on just evil, but equally on the goodness that miraculously finds us. Only time I’ve ever openly sobbed from a book was the end of The Road.
I expect the downvotes are because having you glory in the fact that you have decided not to read this book doesn't add anything of value to the conversation.
perhaps the downvotes are because you aren't adding to the discussion. you haven't read the book, you don't say why, and you have no comment on the linked essay.
I thought the YT you linked was great, thanks. I don’t have the stomach for violence but have been curious about BM for ages so this was a great way to get a sense for what all the fuss was about. No substitute for reading it, I’m sure. But great on its own.
I became obsessed with the history of the Nevada Territory and its surrounding environs. An enormous amount of fascinating historical context in the Mountain West has effectively been erased. The State of Nevada is larger than the Nevada Territory, but some of its historical territory was lost in armed border skirmishes with surrounding States, primarily for the purposes of controlling water supplies. Over the years, I’ve developed a hobby of reconstructing the history of the American Mountain West north of the Mexican border regions.
The history of the American West is being lost in great part because the records and documents only exist on paper in the archives of counties and dying towns. No one is digitizing these records. The people I’ve approached for access to their historical archives are lovely, but they are typically in their 70s, their knowledge is slowly dying with them because no one cares, and their archives are rotting. My inquiries were often the first they’d received by anyone vaguely young (and I am not) for many years.
This is where I will take the McCarthy framing of the American West to task, though in fairness he focused on the border regions. To be clear, the border was a violent and anarchic place, but the former not necessarily being caused by the latter, and the border was worse than many other places in the West. The Nevada Territory was, by my view of the documents I’ve seen, an eminently pragmatic and cooperative environment across factions that didn’t necessarily see eye to eye but had common goals. The Mountain West was a difficult place to live. In the historical record you often see Chinese, black, white (which are often factionalized separately as Confederate and Union sympathizers in records) as equal partners at the negotiating table. You don’t even see a visible Chinese political faction today in places where it was politically powerful in the 19th century. I had no idea this was even a thing but apparently that was the norm in many areas and well-documented in local archives. These ethnic/race factions specialized and it was well-understood that they needed each other to survive at the time. It was a respectful coexistence.
Similarly, the relationships with the Natives were complex, and the modern fashion of treating them as a uniform group with uniform interests is historically misleading. Individual groups of Natives had complex motivations which often aligned them with white people. They had agency and understood the complex political dynamics of what they were involved in. They are not given enough credit for playing a savvy game given the hand they were dealt.
Another thing that is often lost in modern American history is that the American West was deeply affected by the social dynamics of the Civil War even though they largely weren’t involved and did not want to be involved. Soldiers from both sides settled/occupied towns in the American West and tried to influence politics toward their own political ends. The consequences of this history are evident today among States in the Mountain West. Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” was written in part about his time in the Nevada Territory when he lived in a town that was named both “Dixie” and “Unionville” at various times.
One of my ambitions, given time and money, is to systematically preserve and digitize the isolated and dying archives of historical records across the American West. What is there is detailed, rich, and almost none of it is online. Americans have an extremely narrow view of this complex and fascinating time and place in American history. It may not be important but it feels worth doing. In many ways the history of the Nevada Territory shows the positive elements of humanity in the 19th century. You had white, black, Chinese, Native, and other factions willing and able to work together for their common betterment with little evidence of animus across these groups in that time and place. In a way, it reinvigorated my faith in humanity.