Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The Desert (of the) Real and the Writing of the “Hallucinatory Void”

Abstract

A violent, fable-like, yet historically conscientious metaphysical Western that unsettles such generic labels through its stylistic and textual excess, perhaps McCarthy’s most critically renowned novel, explores the desert spaces of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, site of imperialist expansion and warfare in the mid-nineteenth century, in ways both descriptive, allegorical, naturalistic and historical. Not just an inert setting for his debunking depiction of the frontier violence that creates the American space, the desert as space functions as both empty site of political fantasy and as the void that threatens to swallow that fantasy whole. But how does one represent in these terms the supposedly empty space of the desert? McCarthy has admitted, as a writer of savagely demythologizing novels and grotesquely comic fables of existentialist and naturalist despair, that despite the literary prowess of his fictional (re)creations, alas, “books are made out of books.” Without denying the clearly sought ethical and ontological impact his work makes, the real desert of a novel such as Blood Meridian is also necessarily a textual desert, a text not only about the desert but a text which is a desert. As such, it unavoidably but also quite intentionally weaves intertextual “inversions without end” (121) in order to body forth its own vision of, to borrow a Baudrillardian slogan, “the desert of the real.” Indeed, such a near-postmodern vision of reality’s simulacral nature is one of the novel’s proffered visions, notably in the figure of its demiurgic arch-villain, the Judge, a legendary figure who turns out to be based on historical precedent. But this perhaps facile undercutting of the novel’s quite amazing descriptive realism is countered by the novel’s own gloomy naturalist despair that returns us to the real desert and its human exactions. In this light, McCarthy’s “desert absolute” does not absolve us of the need to return to the real the text intimates, whether the real of contextualized history or the Other real that very history might banish. At the same time, this text of the desert requires no desertion of the text in order to reaffirm the “real desert.” Rather, it forces us to pay attention to the “strange equanimity” (301) of the real that our textual mediations, historical and representational, ambivalently ravage and respect. The desert in his novel becomes this strange intertextual but also almost trans-textual site in which textual traces meet, texts meet texts, but where texts also empty the world and fill it, in politically and literarily ambivalent ways, as they reach out for that very world.