It is no secret that Americans enjoy violence. What Raymond Chandler called “the simple art of murder” remains a constant source of fascination for us, so much so that it cannot be relegated to a single genre: police procedurals, shoot-’em-ups, noirs, spy thrillers, gangster stories, and others form a whole panoply of action and horror. The great exception lately is the Western, which has—Kevin Costner’s efforts aside—largely faded from view. A quintessential American genre, once dominant in popular culture across film, television, books, children’s toys, and even music, simply no longer speaks to people as it once did.
Within the past half century, however, two novels have managed to buck this trend: Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both were coincidentally published in the same year, 1985—well after the peak of the Western within the American cultural consciousness. Meanwhile, their reputations have since undergone inverse trajectories. Lonesome Dove was initially a great critical and commercial success, earning a Pulitzer and becoming both a bestseller in its own right and the basis for a highly acclaimed television miniseries. Blood Meridian was neither at the time of its release, but has since received a remarkable critical reconsideration, now frequently shortlisted as one of the all-time Great American Novels.
Yet, despite their different receptions, the two share much else in common. Both were self-consciously composed in the shadow of the Western genre’s decline. Both were well-researched works featuring a combination of invented and historical figures. Both novels offer a deliberately unromantic portrait of the American West, involving graphic displays of frontier violence. And in different ways, both novels are concerned with how the frontier exposes people for what they truly are.
A Strange and Spare Western
Blood Meridian follows the adventures of its nameless protagonist (or anti-hero), referred to throughout only as “the Kid,” as he lights out from Tennessee and makes his way across the American West in the 1850s. He is recruited into a disastrous attempt at Mexican conquest before joining up with the (historically real) Glanton Gang of scalp-hunters, who participate in increasingly savage acts of predation against whomever they encounter. The gang’s Judge Holden, a hairless albino giant capable of improbable feats of strength and intellect and possessed of remarkable impulses of sadism and cruelty, emerges as the true driver of the gang’s activities, both rescuing the other characters in dire moments and leading them deeper into corruption and barbarism. He dominates the novel’s sparse dialogue with his gnomic pronouncements; his philosophy, if it can be called that, is that of Heraclitus, who proclaimed “war is the father and king of all things.”
The gang, along with Glanton himself, is largely destroyed by a band of Yuma Indians they attempt to betray, and one by one its surviving members—with the exception of the Kid and the Judge—meet dismal fates. The final sections of the novel recount the subsequent years of the Kid’s life, during which he and the Judge periodically meet for inconclusive conversation largely concerning their shared history. In the book’s terrifyingly elliptical climax, the Kid (now no longer a kid) encounters the Judge one last time, in the outhouse of a bar, where he is seemingly killed or worse. The Judge dances naked and fiddles amid the crowd inside the bar, declaring—in the novel’s famous final lines—that “he will never die.”
In most Westerns, scenes of action alternate with quieter, more reflective moments; the violence in Blood Meridian is unrelenting. Take, for example, a scene in which young militia recruits visit a cantina on the eve of their expedition to Mexico. This might ordinarily be a place to juxtapose the simple pleasures of peaceful civilian existence against the struggles of military life. Here is what McCarthy does with it:
They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom.
It is not just the explicit quality of the description here but the suggestion of its pervasiveness—the way that horrific death seems to intrude on ordinary life in otherwise domestic or pastoral settings—that especially distinguishes McCarthy’s approach to depicting violence. This passage also demonstrates McCarthy’s particular contribution to American prose, which is to supercharge the laconic directness and polysyndeton of his predecessors with the graphic intensity we associate with post-Vietnam cinema. “They spoke his name but he never spoke back” could have come from Hemingway, but the “skull broken in a pool of blood” is purely his.
Blood Meridian is a profoundly spare and strange book; it occupies the same blasted landscape as the binding of Isaac. But it also complicates attempts to read it as a narrative of distinctively American violence. Despite the period details and extensive references to real historical individuals, the novel continually rises to the level of the cosmos. McCarthy’s hallucinatory landscapes (“the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning”) evoke an alien world beyond the actual settings, and even the landscapes pale beside the psychic territory mapped by his book. Humanity’s true frontier, the novel seems to say, is interior and is perpetually recreated by our inherent capacity for slaughter.
The novel's epigraph—a news item noting the discovery of fossil skulls in Ethiopia hundreds of thousands of years old that show evidence of having been scalped—makes this point obliquely. Not just human violence itself but the specific practice of scalping, so heavily featured in the narrative, is far older than civilization. Insofar as man’s capacity for violence is universal, the crimes of the Glanton Gang are part of a larger, unbroken tradition leading back to Cain or at least to our own earliest historical ancestors. This is who we really are, the novel seems to insist, and not just in any particular time and place. Not for nothing does the Judge’s silver-chased rifle bear the inscription: ET IN ARCADIO EGO.
Nonetheless, this ethos exerts a queer flattening effect on the narrative’s otherwise specifically American and Western topography. Similarly, all the action seems to take place independently of the larger processes of settlement and westward expansion. The Judge and the Kid are primarily linked by their association with the Glanton Gang; neither is really concerned with the process of settling the West. The Judge in particular displays no interest whatsoever in the conventional motives that would have led men to commit such violence—not the acquisition of land or gold or other resources, nor a desiret to establish political authority over a vast and barely governed territory, nor even personal motivations such as revenge. He is a figure of free-floating malevolence who found his purpose in this lawless terrain. By contrast, even Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, the classic Western paradigm of murderousness, ultimately serves the purposes of the farmers who otherwise hold him at arm’s length.
Though Blood Meridian draws on the harshness of revisionist Westerns, its aim is not really to demystify or expose the inherent violence of Western conquest. Its depiction of death, graphic as it is, is hardly realistic. Passages like the famous “legion of horribles” sequence (a sort of Grand Guignol version of a Comanche raid) or the “tree of dead babies” (exactly what it sounds like) are closer to Dante’s Inferno than than to a debunking history. It is likely that many, perhaps most, readers engage with Blood Meridian less as a Western than as a phantasmagoric reflection on the history of violence that happens to be set in the American West.
A Western Ulysses
With McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, we seem to return more fully to the particular time and place of the Old West. For all its epic sweep, the plot is relatively simple: two aging, retired Texas Rangers—the epicurean Gus McCrae and the stoic Woodrow Call—embark on a cattle drive bound for Montana Territory. Carried along on the journey with them are cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, prostitutes, and a host of others. Although they are notionally seeking to settle unclaimed land, it is evident that their real purpose is to find some adventure in a disappearing wilderness that they themselves had a hand in taming. As Gus, the more loquacious of the pair, puts it: “Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.”
Less relentlessly than in Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove is filled with scenes of violence and death—to a surprising degree for a novel with such popular appeal. Lorena, a young prostitute who ends up making camp with the cattle drive is kidnapped by the ruthless half-Comanche raider Blue Duck and sold to a gang of bandits. Her own treatment at the hands of her captors is horrific to contemplate, and through her eyes we witness graphic scenes of torture and murder. Blue Duck also butchers the companions of July Johnson, an inexperienced Arkansas sheriff who falls in with Gus while searching for his wayward wife, who herself will be slaughtered on the Nebraska plains by a roving Sioux party.
On reaching Montana, Gus is surprised by hostile Native Americans of the Blood tribe and suffers a gangrenous wound that he allows to kill him rather than live out his life as a cripple. Before dying, he charges Call with returning his body to Texas, there to be buried. Even the novel’s less vivid passages are shadowed by death. Much of the plot concerns Clara Allen, an old flame of Gus’s who has made her life as rancher in Nebraska. When we first encounter her, she is still grieving the loss of her three young sons while her husband lays dying after being kicked by a horse.
It is important to note, and McMurtry doesn’t let us forget, that the northbound cattle drive that forms the spine of the book’s narrative has no larger significance within the events of the time; it has a curious “end of history” quality to it, of which its own principals seem aware. The pacification of the West is at that point a fait accompli, and the primary characters are well into middle age, too old to worry about seeking their fortunes. Their primary hope is to see some of the untamed continent of their youth before it disappears forever. In their grand 3,000-mile journey, they are more like Ulysses’ comrades in Tennyson’s poem rather than the voyagers in the original Odyssey.
We are given a clue to the untimeliness of their endeavour early on in the narrative, when the protagonists arrange to acquire their herd by stealing thousands of cattle from an old rival in a cross-border raid into Mexico. What purports to be a dramatic set-piece passes virtually without incident, as it emerges that their longtime rival had recently passed away. As with Blood Meridian, in which the Kid enlists under Captain White’s command to raid Mexico only after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the most important events seem to take place offstage.
At the same time, Lonesome Dove is a more conventional Western novel, in a way that Blood Meridian is not, and it cannot avoid reproducing some of its genre’s tropes—taciturn cowboys, skilled marksmen, spirited women—in spite of itself. This likely contributed to the book’s widespread popularity, a development that rather bemused its author. As McMurtry told critic David Ulin a few years ago,
I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.
But as with most revisionist Westerns, the harsh violence contributes to the appeal. It draws us in more than it repels, and the proximity of death makes the actions of its dramatis personae only more vivid and compelling. Yet, in being more clearly a Western, it has—perhaps unfairly—since been relegated to the shelves of genre fiction in a way that McCarthy’s works have managed to avoid.
Eclipse of the Western
In onestriking passage, Judge Holden declares that war endures “because young men love it and old men love it in them.” Something like this serves as a meta-commentary on these books and their readers.
The eclipse of the Western genre in the popular imagination has less to do with its intrinsic violence and more with the fact that its particular mode of violence no longer engages that imagination as it once did. Its formerly remote landscapes have been American soil for too long now, and the great and terrible deeds of reclaiming them grown too distant from us. It is not incidental, then, that these two novels, which appeared late in the day for their genre, have enjoyed the success they have because, in different ways, they make us apprehend that violence once more.
One might say that in Lonesome Dove, violence is revealing of character—and its primary characters would not be who they are without it. Many of them prove deficient in the testing—whether from a want of skill or luck or character. Though neither of the novel’s two protagonists evince much interest in violence for its own sake, they prove lethally proficient in dealing it when necessity requires and are defined by it in crucial ways. As Gus reflects on Call: “Call had destruction in him and would go on killing when there was no need.” Call, meanwhile, is somewhat bewildered by the way that Gus’s studied nonchalance conceals a true zest for battle. It is only through such dangers that they become themselves, and the book’s narrative is largely set in motion by their inchoate desire to regain that part of them that was lost during their years of peace.
If violence reveals the underlying nature of Lonesome Dove’s characters, violence becomes their nature in Blood Meridian. Violence is not so much an activity one performs as a kind of force that works through them. As David Foster Wallace notes of the villains in filmmaker David Lynch’s work, “Evil wears them.” Perhaps inevitably, it wears them out, as each character—Captain White, David Brown, Glanton, Toadvine—is discarded and replaced by others. The Judge, who is both more and less than human, is the sole exception. He remains—as he calls himself in that final, fateful meeting with the Kid—the last “true dancer,” the only one who consciously embraces his status as an agent of violence: “Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.”
In a sense, then, the sustained violence throughout Blood Meridian serves no larger purpose, while in Lonesome Dove it reveals rather than effaces the heroism of its principal characters. Indeed, many of its most memorable scenes of violence are in some way redemptive: Gus’s incredible one-man assault against the Kiowa and buffalo hunters who are holding Lorena captive; Call’s savage beating of a man who harmed the son he could never otherwise acknowledge; both men’s capture and righteous hanging of a gang of murderers and horse-thieves their erstwhile comrade, Jake Spoon, fell in with.
By contrast, there is really no heroism in Blood Meridian. McCarthy is fascinated by our propensity for violence in a way that links him back to the tradition of literary epics—think of the terrible slaughter on the plains of Troy or Beowulf’s grisly dismemberment of Grendel—but while many of McCarthy's characters are able and willing fighters, they take to it so instinctively that one couldn’t quite call it courage. One could even say there are no real characters in Blood Meridian, with the partial exception of Judge Holden who is not exactly human anyway.
The absence of romantic heroism confers a sense of realism on the novel. Yet Blood Meridian also its own form of unrealism, not only historical but moral. The Judge is not only triumphant in the book’s final scene—he tells us he will never die. But though we are denied the morally satisfying scene of Gus or Call confronting the vicious Blue Duck, we do see him die, after being taken down by a hapless deputy sheriff’s lucky bullet. What kills him in the end is time and inevitability and the same progress that has largely made Gus and Call themselves irrelevant.
McCarthy’s strange cosmology, however, requires the Judge not just to survive but to triumph somehow, in an inversion of Christian redemption. His story is in this sense one of stasis. The violence and slaughter the Judge represents is perennial—as it was in the beginning so shall it be world without end. This may be true in some vast sense, but the story of the American West, violent as it is, is ultimately one of change. And it is the apprehension of that change that impels Lonesome Dove’s northbound cattle drive, that induces Gus to choose death over disability, and that produces the book’s prevailing elegiac tone. This tone has to do less with nostalgia than with the ways that the heroism of its protagonists necessarily results in the elimination of the conditions for that same heroism. It is in this way not unlike Lampedusa’s Leopard—because what are the old Texas Rangers but members of an aristocratic warrior class made obsolete by the encroachment of modernity?
Its considerable bleakness is thus due not to the impossibility of change or progress but to the fact that such progress does not much avail those who had to suffer and endure the harsh life of the frontier. Some, like Clara with her three dead children, will not live to enjoy the benefits of progress; others, like Gus and Call, simply have no use for it. This may be in the end a truer, if less lurid, portrait of the American West’s violent legacy than McCarthy’s song of war. Whether the consensus will swing back again to grant it the acclaim that the latter currently enjoys, I cannot say.