A Book "Made Out of Books": The Humanizing Violence of Style in "Blood Meridian"

Blood Meridian is a strange historical novel in relying so thoroughly on authentic records of actual events even as it transforms them through a narrative that everywhere disrupts conventional assumptions. The appalling violence of the documented past would seem to silence any account, and yet that violence is matched by a different kind of narrative and stylistic disorder that has paradoxically the opposite effect. For far from confirming through its peripatetic subject matter some radical dehumanization, some flattening out of ethical discernment into optical democracy, Cormac McCarthy instead suggests via skewed prose registers the possibility of ever greater moral discriminations, ever more humanly distinctive modes of sympathy and appreciation. If that lesson can never be fully learned, it always presents itself, as Judge Holden suggests in responding to a rider's question as to whether there were on Mars or other planets in the void men or creatures like them.