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.

The Conscious Complexity of the Narrator-Reader Relationship

Schopen, Bernard A. “‘They Rode On’: Blood Meridian and the Art of Narrative.’” Western American Literature 33.3 (1995): 179-194.

Bernard Schopen considers the captivating and profoundly disturbing effects of Blood Meridian in terms of its formal elements, and the “manifold but integrated artistry” (188) of the narrative in particular. Though he sees the narrator as exploring “the mystery of evil in human hearts” (191), Schopen is interested not so much in the themes of Blood Meridian as the way in which those themes are constructed and conveyed, and how the construction is in itself central to the meaning of the novel. The “literariness” of the narrator, his direct addresses, his acknowledgements of uncertainty, and his alienation from the world that he describes (the rarity of internal glimpses) create a sense that the narrator is “a consciousness in search of meaning” (181-182). “Far from formless” (184), Schopen finds that the narrative, this search for meaning, is embedded in the complex structure of the story which is in fact imposed by the narrator (186). This control is exemplified by textual and structural patterns such as repeated images and phrases, recurring shifts in tense and tone, and nesting and echoing dramatic frames. Through “repetition-within-variation” (188), the narrator poses his troubling vision and questions from many angles. Thus the narrative, the great art of Blood Meridian, has such a powerful effect because its language and composition have multidirectional force, ensuring that the reader feels the “recognition” that Schopen asserts is “effected by all great literature” (191), and that this recognition is the awareness of a shared uncertainty rather than some absolute truth.

Schopen’s reading of Blood Meridian offers insights into the power that the narrative exerts over the reader, as well as the effort required by the reader to understand the complexities of the narrative. By stating that “recognition” on the part of the reader is one of the greatest achievements of powerful literature (191), Schopen identifies the reader-narrator relationship as difficult to forge but essential. “Carefully controlled,” the language employed by the narrator “carefully controls the reader’s response, producing contextually appropriate effects ranging from the horrific to the humorous” (181). But if the form of Blood Meridian “nearly becomes” its meaning (183), the reader must not just be controlled but also attend to intricate detail and be comfortable with a large degree of uncertainty in order to understand the narrator’s preoccupations. To think outside of the facts of the story to the method of its telling, the reader must be aware of but avoid intoxication with the language, just as the kid (to some extent) sees through Judge Holden by maintaining a wariness of the judge’s rhetoric. Although Schopen does not discuss the rhetorical power of the judge, dismissing him (or the kid) as a protagonist because of his "lack of agency in the narrated events" (185), Schopen's exclusion of the judge’s worldview from the complexities of the narrator’s voice, and especially his evaluation of the narrator as an authoritative seeker, establish the narrator as distinct and even in opposition to the judge. Schopen asserts that the narrator poses fundamental questions and rejects traditional answer systems (191), but in the “inexorable onwardness” of his inquiry does not try to replace such systems. The judge lacks the negative capability of the narrator, maintaining an uncompromising philosophy of war and destiny (Blood Meridian 248-249) and using his breadth of knowledge and command of language to convert his listeners to submission rather than to convince and confront them into questioning. Schopen’s positing of the narrator as “an atemporal observer of a world gone horribly wrong, a world populated by a species grown so alien to him that their inner existence he cannot assess and so does not access” (182) emphasizes that the relationship between the narrator and reader may be more ethically significant than any existing between characters or between the reader and a character.