Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

Reading Blood Meridian…

…as a Western…as an 80s novel…as an anti-narrative…as a global genealogy

“some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?”(p.111)

They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All

races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting

of apes. (p. 4)

...the tiny limbs and toothless paper skulls of infants like the ossature of small apes at their

place of murder... (p. 90)

...the company sat among the rocks without fire or bread or

camaraderie any more than banded apes. They crouched in

silence eating raw meat... (p. 148)

“Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise. Only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage…. To resort to violence when confronted with outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of its inherent immediacy and swiftness.”

Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970)