17- At one time there had been two moons in the sky
Manifest Destiny, the Comanche Empire, Cavalry Landscape Painters, and the Affective Realism of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
Coda: A Horse, a Colt, Whales
Following the Yuma massacre and the deaths of all but a few members of the Glanton gang, the kid escapes into the desert, survives a standoff with the judge, and pursued by him, is saved by Diegueño Indians who live on stews of lizards and pocketmice and ground grasshoppers. Wounded, he arrives in San Diego with the expriest. The judge is somewhere behind them on the continent, stalking them. The kid finds momentary repose staring at the ocean at sunset:
Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Downshore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back. (303-4)
Here is a rare scene of meditation in the novel, unaccompanied by the specter of violence. McCarthy’s slurred, compound words and alliterative ‘s’ and ‘d’ sounds onomatopoeically resound the rhythmic surf and ocean noise. This is linguistic work that is, by degrees, free of the narrative pessimism and tonalities that characterize so much of the text. McCarthy surrenders to the rhythms and murmurs of Joycean wordsounds and aimless language. Other landscapes are not characterized by the humanism of McCarthy’s narrator, these passages are almost anti-humanist in their portrayal of base atavism, but they are mitigated by a scanning, observing eye. Here, that gaze is relaxed. We remain in this scene and the seasounds continue, complicated by the setting sun and austere horse: “He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea's black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach” (304). Then the apprehending narrator, following the kid’s gaze, refocuses, leaves, and returns to the sea:
He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tide-pools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. (304)
In this rolling, quiet we are not assaulted by McCarthy’s frequently ‘howling’ void or reminded of the caustic imprint of humanity on the world. The deep, natal ocean is undisturbed.
In her work ‘Landscapes as Narrative Commentary,’ Diane Luce identifies a series of well-known paintings and in pointed analysis, connects them to scenes in Blood Meridian that contain invitingly similar visual iconographies. The passage entitled ‘Night scene with moon, blossoms, judge,’ she connects to Ansel Adam’s Joshua Trees, Rocks, Moon. This seascape, Luce proposes, is “partly suggested” Bierstadt’s Sunset on the Coast (1866)” or White Horse in the Sunset (1863), though the exact painting is immaterial (Luce, 18).[1] Read as a collection of static, visually inspired scenes, Luce contends that Blood Meridian, given McCarthy’s innate sense of the visual arts, provides a series of “tableaus,” which:
are far richer than conventional novelistic passages of setting or scenery: in their complex arrangements of iconography, their deployment of light, shadow and color, the narrator’s allusions to the traditions and compositional techniques of landscapists and other painters, including painterly allusiveness to myth and literature through iconography, and their conjunction with the poetic resources of language, they express the narrator’s deeply troubled apprehension of the unregenerate violence of human nature. (Luce, 20)
This mode of visually segmented reading, Luce argues, allows us to approach “McCarthy’s titled landscapes” not only as “complex prose poems” but also as “the narrator’s sober meditations on the violence of war and Manifest Destiny” (Luce, 19). The scene with the Mare and Colt, specifically, is a moment in which the human narrator is substituted; the “vital, observant mare is the narrator’s and our proxy, through whom we ponder the Pacific at sunset and the enterprise which has led the kid and the American nation to this point” (Luce, 19).[2] Luce’s reading suggests a reprieve within the novel, but it is short lived, a momentary glimpse of a world undisturbed by the atavism of men. Within the fixedly fatal arc of the novel however, this stillness is passing. The immortal judge is never lost.
Before he is murdered in an outhouse by the judge in 1878, the kid is free of the judge for some years. He wanders through California and witnesses the continuing strangeness of the world. The violence of the West goes on: “He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw ships from the land of China chained in the small harbors and bales of tea and silks and spices broken open with swords by small yellow men with speech like cats” (312-3). In a final seascape, the kid watches the immolation of San Francisco “he was twice in the city of San Francisco and twice saw it burn and never went back, riding out on horseback along the road to the south where all night the shape of the city burned against the sky and burned again in the black waters of the sea where dolphins rolled through the flames, fire in the lake, through the fall of burning timbers and the cries of the lost” (313). In these epic miniatures, McCarthy speeds us through western history. The kid, like the buffalo hunter, is lost in a daze. The nation moves on without him. The nation burns, rebuilds itself, pauses, and continues its expansion. Luce’s static captures of McCarthy’s influence are poignant, but the narrative regeneration of American identity is at work in the background. The images she invokes, from Bierstadt, from Adams, from Picasso—they are from a new culture.
—
In the 1953 film Hondo, John Wayne plays a half white half Apache army scout. The Apache are threatening war after their treaties have been broken. Wayne’s Hondo urges a homesteader and her son to flee their ranch, subsequently shoots and kills the homesteader’s absentee husband, and is captured by a band of Apache. They let Hondo escape but tell him and the settlers they must vacate their lands. In the climactic battle between the remaining cavalry and settlers and the Apache, the new Apache chief is killed, and the Apache flee. John Wayne sits tall in his saddle, dressed in fringe as the Apache ride away into the brush.
“General Crook will be here within a month, with a large force,” says a young, wounded cavalry lieutenant.
A rugged settler stares off into the blue skies after them. “That’ll be the end of the Apache,” he says.
“Yeah.” John Wayne says, “End of a way life,” and he shakes his head. “Too bad, it’s a good way.”
“Wagons forward,” he yells, and the end credits run.
In an at once tragic, but romantic language, our films and landscape paintings and literature have developed an iconography and a subsequent mode of storytelling that, so often, lament the destruction wrought within Manifest Destiny and then look, in a single sweeping gaze, as John Wayne does, to the horizon and to our unimpeded progress. The space between “too bad” and “wagons forward” is often imperceptible.
This is a history of a people who saw a wild and beautiful continent for the first time and, as they arrived in that moment, they ensured its destruction. The “strange impressionistic diagrams” of the 1820s and 1830s produced by Western painters quickly transformed into stunning visions of our continent, “with exquisite use of line, color, light,” with a new mythology and a new romantic language (Gotezmann and Goetzmann, 51). In successive generations and successive art forms, visual mediums have long told the story of the westward sweep of the American consciousness and they have spun a mythology of simultaneous romanticism and nostalgia, of the noble savage, of the intrepid settler. René Girard writes that we have successfully removed ourselves from the violence of our own past. He writes:
We have managed to extricate ourselves from the sacred somewhat more successfully than other societies have done, to the point of losing all memory of the generative violence; but we are now about rediscover it. The essential violence returns to us in a spectacular manner— not only in the form of a violent history but also in the form of subversive knowledge. This crisis invites us, for the very first time, to violate the taboo that neither Heraclitus nor Euripides could ever quite manage to violate, and to expose to the light of reason the role played by violence in human society (Girard, 318).
Blood Meridian returns us to the place of this disorder. Before the myth making could resume its unstoppable engines of progress and conquest, there were brief moments of chaos, of dissonance, of experience that defied any known form of representation or language. There is failure; of aesthetics, of morals, of military superiority, of mythic perpetuity. In an intense and demanding experience, the reader is confronted by these failures.
The unrelenting violence and conjunctive syntax and fatal landscapes and devolved characters and confused, miraged, mirrored representations of a universe engaged in perpetual war and death return us to the affective reality of these grand collisions. In McCarthy’s aesthetic project, so intimately woven into the panoramas and scenery of the West, we may reapproach this history, see it still in its horrible conversion. Americans changed in this process; these are the years in which America became an imperial power, the years in which our wars of perpetual foreign intervention first began. The horizons of blood-soaked ground, buffalo bones, wrecked wagons, slaughtered plains warriors, they are all preserved for us in this novel, part of the soil and sand and rocks and trees and sky and sea we live within.
Works Cited
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[1] Luce contends here that “The planar organization of the seascape suggests the strategies of the American luminist painters of the nineteenth century, who rendered foreground in realistic detail and through their handling of light suggested the transcendental in the distance. But McCarthy’s rendering of the scene, while no less meditative than the luminists’ Atlantic seascapes, is far less tranquil” (Luce, 18).
[2] In a skillful, balanced analysis, Luce suggests that the sea marks the limit of man’s dominion, but also forebodingly invite further allusion to Moby Dick, where, like the buffalo, whales are slaughtered in a vast expanse. She writes:
the whales exist in a realm unknown to the Anglo-American men like Glanton’s gang who pursue suzerainty to the western limits of the land, to the ultimate barrier of the ocean. In the narrator’s construction, the whales ferry not merely their corporeal beings but their souls, suggesting that their agency is more spiritually attuned than that of the men whose fates he has delineated throughout the novel. (Luce, 19)
She continues this balanced reading:
they are the most affirmative figures in this novel, conveying the narrator’s sense of alternatives to blood and conflict. The mare’s steady gaze is neither predatory nor imperial but suggests an openness to the whale’s otherness—its vast soul. Yet the seascape also carries the narrator’s melancholy recognition that the whale itself is hunted and the ocean is the stage for another form of manifest destiny, where nineteenth-century American whalers slaughtered right and sperm whales for their oil, just as Anglo- American hunters made vast bonefields of the Great Plains where once the buffalo roamed. The sea is a barrier that turns back both Brown and the kid. It marks a limit to their suzerainty. It is the realm of mystery. Yet it too is a contested realm, a killing field Americans have sought to dominate. (Luce, 19)