The powerful prose of Cormac McCarthy

Most people who have heard of Cormac McCarthy know him either for his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Road, or as the author of No Country For Old Men in 2005. Twenty years before those notable achievements, he wrote Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. I just finished reading it, and was thoroughly impressed. I agree with the reviewers and critics who have described McCarthy's writings as being similar to Faulkner or Melville, and I note that the New York Times Magazine lists Blood Meridian third on a list of the greatest novels of the last quarter century.

Below I have transcribed two samples of his prose. These particular sentences are long, but of course nowhere near the gargantuan sentences of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the final sentence in The Autumn of the Patriarch is 53 pages long – by my estimate over 17,000 words.) The selections are graphic, and will certainly not be to everyone's taste, but they do illustrate the power of his writing.

“…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 of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or 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 horses’ 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 hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where they eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. “

“Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.”

Apart from the prose styling, the uber-violent content forces one to consider that sometimes this is the way the world has been. When Genghis Khan swept across Asia, or the Roman legions through Europe, or the Aztecs through Mexico, scenes like those depicted above were probably unexceptional. Was such behavior prevalent along the American/Mexican border in the 1850s and have we Bowlderized it for our mass media and literature, or are the events in Blood Meridian just products of the fevered imagination of a skilled fiction writer? I don't know, but the book does cause one to pause for reflection.