The Unreckonable Narrator

Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian.” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Ed. James D. Lilley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. 18-46.

Because McCarthy’s statement that “books are made out of books” is his only comment on the placement of Blood Meridian in the continuum of literary history, Phillips proposes that the critical reader must examine what books Blood Meridian is made out of as well as the novel’s form and point of view in order to discern its vision and effect. Phillips finds that an examination of sources (such as Mexican-American history, or the history of John Joel Glanton, as well as Moby Dick) reveals that Blood Meridian is not “a pastiche of sources” (21), and he uses Georg Lukács’ theories on “philosophy of composition” to properly “historicize” the novel (21). Phillips seeks to identify the relationship between the implied philosophy of history that Blood Meridian proposes and its philosophy of composition (22), proposing that through the “optical democracy” (as taken from the “optical democracy” passage in the novel as well as several other instances in which Phillips sees humans described with equal or less significance than their surroundings) of the narration in which knowledge accrues instead of developing (28) and the landscape is represented as more potent or at least as “putatively factual” as the characters, McCarthy presents a vision of the world as dominated by natural history and geological forces connected to vast time and space which preclude the significance of the individual and the human in general, including all attempts at meaning-making (37). Phillips proposes that the narrative is “nonhuman” rather than “inhuman” (37), “alien, but not alienated” (37) in its virtuous “equanimity of tone” which is authoritative, final, and shows “psychology, morality, and politics” as “mere languages” and figurative language as merely a means of magnifying intensity rather than suggesting symbolic or hidden meanings (36). Phillips supports this interpretation by emphasizing Blood Meridian’s powerful narrative despite its disregard for Lukács’ emphasis on character and plot and engagement with history which are the traditional terms of literary effectiveness: he claims that it is self-evident that the narrator has no insight into the psyche of the characters, that none of the characters possess “a sense of himself” (30), and that the similarities between Moby Dick and Blood Meridian highlight the way in which McCarthy reconfigures character by avoiding the self-consciousness of Ishmael and instead constructing characters “as language, as suggestive artifact or trace of the human” (25). Finally, the absence of Lukácsian narration combined with the narrator’s epic resonance via preoccupation with natural/geological history presents a worldview that whatever values exist are on a large and unknowable scale and that even the present is, as Phillips borrows from Blood Meridian, “a time before nomenclature” (39).

Phillips’ focus on the un-preferential tone of the narrator and the lack of relevance of character to the overall “philosophy of history” that he finds central to Blood Meridian aligns the reader with the kid as an individual faced with an impersonal and unconscious but nonetheless incredibly powerful universe. Though Phillips does not conceive of the narrator as a conscious entity or knower, the voice of the narrator (which Philips often characterizes as McCarthy’s voice) interacts authoritatively with the reader by challenging the reader’s expectations of plot and character and by confronting the reader with violence and death as the “more or less objective truths of all human experience” (24) rather than offering any kind of redemptive vision, or even a world in which personal vision or transcendence matters (because it is impossible). The refusal of the possibility of transcendence with which the narrator confronts the reader is similar to the overwhelming nature of the judge’s declaration that a man’s destiny “is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well” (Blood Meridian 330). But even the voice of the judge, which as Phillips acknowledges “seems to be in implicit dialogue with the impersonal, highly detailed, and verbally ingenious narration” (26), does not reveal the judge’s inner life or character, an assertion that Phillips supports by emphasizing the theatrical nature of the judge’s “ventilations” (27). Because the judge is not a traditional character, his speeches cannot be conflated with the voice of the author or narrator and are thus not granted the expansive authority of vision which the narrator possesses. The absence of any real examination of character reveals that the narrator is not in fact a knower or “meta-character” but rather a body of knowledge that guides the reader in an exploration of “liminal concerns” such as the impossibility of the privilege of humans in relation to the rest of the world (28). Although Phillips conception of the “optical democracy” of the entire narrative only addresses one aspect of the narrative’s disturbing power and vision, it does draw attention the ways in which the judge is not necessarily more powerful than the kid, that the judge’s rhetoric does not necessarily convey truth in the same way that the more negative and impersonal narrator does.