Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

So what is the way of raising a child?
At a young age, said the judge, they should be put in a pit with wild dogs. They should be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that does not harbor wild lions. They should be made to run naked in the desert until...
Hold now, said Tobin. The question was put in all earnestness.
And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

Blood Meridian is the most violent book I have ever read.
The above quotation is not the worst, but merely an example of the norm. McCarthy is has beautiful prose and so I guess with much power comes the ability to much evil as well as much good. McCarthy can write awesomely disturbing prose as well as astoundingly beautiful.
I do not think, however, that McCarthy's bloodlust is a reason to avoid Blood Meridian. Sometimes we need to look reality in the face. More disturbing than the bashing infants heads on stones is the likelihood that this is how it happened. Blood Meridian is based on actual events, although it is anything but a true to life story. A man named Samuel Chamberlain was actually a raider in a group known as the Glanton gang which was not innocent of such atrocities as McCarthy attributes to him. But then again, few of us are.
Humanity, in its insulated and cultured security--at least as we know it here in this wonderful place called the United States of America--this humanity has closed its eyes to the reality that it is standing on. I am envisioning a willful child with eyes that look anywhere but on the the pile of skulls it stands upon. We marvel at the great distance we can see, but we never dare to ask how we came by our convenient stool.
This is not some rant on empire or America or the first world. I'm am just wondering about the reality of things.
It is no coincidence either that the devil figures heavily in McCarthy's work. I am tempted to describe Blood Meridian as yet another Faustus story. But it is only a Faustus story in so much as every time we see Satan in literature is. Satan brokers with a currency of lies a market of power and pain. This was true in Genesis, is true in Goethe's Faust, in Marlowe's, in Paradise Lost, in Perelandra, in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in every story of the Devil.
Steel your stomach if you are going to read Blood Meridian and bring your memories of every book you've ever read for the chances are that McCarthy will allude to them all. You should probably study Latin and Spanish as well, if you really would like to grasp everything going on in the novel, and an understanding of German would not be unhelpful. The Classics feature prominently.
Always remember
Et In Arcadia Ego.