Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

That is the way it was and will be. That way and
not some other way (…) All other trades are
contained in that of war (…) It endures because
young men love it and old men love it in them”
(249). Toward the end of the novel, the judge
declares that “If war is not holy man is nothing
but antic clay” (307). Dan Moos, in “Lacking
the Article Itself: Representation and History in
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” has
observed that “War is the marketplace in Blood
Meridian.”
3
Not only do the author, narrator, and characters
tell us “how it was that people had lived in this
place and in this place died,” but the story of
Blood Meridian has of course been retold by
reviewers, critics, and translators, all of whom,
especially the latter, provide this work of
literature with an afterlife (Walter Benjamin).
This writing and rewriting are the novel’s record
of what occurred, a fictionalized voice against
historical silence and oblivion. This same irony
is at work again on pp. 184–185, when the
words in print emphasize that the reader is a
witness to the murder and mayhem and utter
depravity that has occurred:
The bodies of the dead were stripped and
their uniforms and weapons burned along
with the saddles and other gear and the
Americans dug a pit in the road and buried
them in a common grave, the naked bodies
with their wounds like the victims of
surgical experimentation laying in the pit
gaping sightlessly at the desert sky as the
dirt was pushed over them. They trampled
the spot with their horses until it looked
much like the road again and the smoking
gunlocks and sabreblades and girthrings
were dragged from the ashes of the fire and
carried away and buried in a separate place
and the riderless horses were hazed off into
the desert.”
Despite the efforts of Glanton’s filibusters to
conceal the massacre that has occurred, the
reader already knows and will remember “the
spot” in the road.
4 The novel covers the time period from 1833,
when “the kid” from Tennessee is born, in
whom by age fourteen “broods already a taste
for mindless violence” (3), to 1878 when he
disappears into the judge’s “immense and
terrible flesh” (333) in the jakes in Griffin,
North Texas. Most of the actual plot occurs in
1849 and 1850.
5 Blood is an image that flows from beginning to
end of this novel commanded by historical yet
“fairybook beasts” (190), with reinforcing
descriptions such as “the Evening Redness in
the West” (the novel’s subtitle), “the western
sky was the color of blood” (152), “that
immense and bloodslaked waste” (177). In his
1992 interview with Richard B. Woodward
(Official Web Site of the Cormac McCarthy
Society, www.CormacMcCarthy.com),
McCarthy stated that “There’s no such thing as
life without bloodshed.” Because of this, “His
list of those whom he calls the ‘good writers’ —
Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner — precludes
anyone who doesn’t ‘deal with issues of life and
death.’” Further, in response to the observation
that “Might does not make right,” the judge in
Blood Meridian responds that “Decisions of life
and death, of what shall be and what shall not,
beggar all questions of right. In elections of
these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed,
moral, spiritual, natural” (250).
6 The essential setting, which begins with the
kid’s birth in Tennessee (the setting of
McCarthy’s first four novels, which take place
in Appalachian East Tennessee: The Orchard
Keeper [1965], Outer Dark [1968], Child of
God [1974], and Suttree [1979]) and quickly
follows his movement west to St. Louis, New
Orleans, Fredonia, and Nacogdoches, is the
length of the permeable Texas-Mexico border
and west through the desert across the State of
Sonora to Yuma, San Diego, Los Angeles, north
to San Francisco, and back to Texas. For more,
see Schimpf.
7 Glanton orders a member of his company of
nineteen marauders to “get that receipt for us”:
“A Mexican (…) took a shining knife from his
belt and stepped to where the old woman lay
and took up her hair and twisted it about his
wrist and passed the blade of the knife about her
skull and ripped away the scalp” (98). Later in
the novel, in a cantina, it is Mexicans
60 Translation Review