"A legion of horribles:" On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Problem of Evil

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats slain of dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse's ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than that brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god said the sergeant.
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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Cormac McCarthy is lauded by some as the best living author for his work, such as Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and No Country for Old Men. He is known for his ability to weave both sparsity and intense detail into his books, but far more importantly McCarthy's ideas should somehow provoke the reader to think.

I know a lot of you guys were mad about the ending of No Country because Anton sort of got away; the only way he was hurt was by the freak chance that a car side-swiped him running a red light. It was clear all through the movie that Anton had absolutely no tempering influence and would even spit in the face of God were he able, but the fact that such evil could happen in our world raises questions.

What does this passage above say? Well, to put the whole thing in context, Blood Meridian takes place out in the lawless West theatre of the Mexican War. 'The kid' (BM's main character) has just been involuntarily placed in the service of a small irregular regiment on the American side, submerged in the hostile environment near the border.

There are basically no rules to speak of--they've all been thrown out the window. Violence is spurred by the subtlest acts, and spirals out of control ex nihilo. The Indians the band encounters are described best as barbaric and, to say the least, illiterate to the customs of polite civilization.

They kill without discrimination and do not generally know who they kill. In one scene, all of the cavalry receive their fates, given to them in Spanish from unidentified riders via Tarot cards. The combination of these two traits bases life on one thing simply: chance.

When one experiences a world like this, justice isn't really possible. That's why people usually get a little wary talking about things like Calvinist predestination (ie, how did people actually BELIEVE in this?!). Well, the thing is, piety depends on a just God who dispenses his will to the world. But religion gets a little bit tougher when surrounded by "vaporous beings from regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."

The irregulars are quaking with fear. They know a white flag doesn't stop their skin from being separated by a metal tool from their head. Providence to these people becomes a hilarious idea, which, if personally expressed, would probably result with the speaker mortally wounded (cf. the priest of Blood Meridian run out of town and murdered because he was an 'alleged' pedophile [which he wasn't]).

Therefore, any attempt to sanction the people of Blood Meridian with law or God becomes an impossibility; chaos is the only law, and it is as binding as gravity. Modern political science sort of labels this as the 'State of Nature,' but there is one problem with it: 'reason' is the law of the State of Nature. Therefore, this 'State' naturally ends because people will opt for the better idea of civility.

Yet Blood Meridian happens all the time: look at any odious regional mufti in the Middle East! By fiat the people are subject to terrible things and shared wisdom does not exist. People grow up around blood and guts as a way of life and think of each other as one man's chattel. How does Locke explain when people don't abandon this for something better? Is it as if small-time dictators have the resources or man-flesh the Brits did in 1776?

We like to think that these people's only grievance is the fact that they are depraved--that some money or food or comfort would remove the instinct to kill for the plain fact that they can kill. This is soothing because it makes them more 'normal' kinds of people, but they have already been pretty screwed up to the point that this becomes impossible: if God was gone then, what's he think he's doing coming back all of a sudden? How is that just? The evil springs from the brutal appetites of man that are as old as the Greeks themselves--and it makes life just that much more contemptible. Solving the problem becomes a contemporary version of Alexander the Great's Gordian Knot: you can't figure out how to logically untie everything, you just have to hack through it.